Something Ive Been Meaning to Tell You

dishes in sight. The kitchen, at a quarter past nine in the morning, was shining like the kitchen in an ad. The dishes were all in the dishwasher, that was where they were. Eileen had forgotten about the dishwasher. She herself lived in an old house, a rented house in another city; she lived alone because she was divorced and her only child, her daughter, was wandering around Europe. She did not know how to operate a dishwasher.
    She had left the crusts of her toast but now she ate them, because it was too difficult to figure out which garbage they should go into. It would take her a day here, at least, to get things straight. She had learned last night there was a new and complicated system of garbage division, to do with recycling. “I will have to get around to doing that too,” Eileen had said, and June said, “But
don’t you?
”
    Compared to June, she did live irresponsibly. Eileenhad to see this, she had to admit it. Her lazy garbage all thrown together, her cupboards under their surface tidiness bursting with chaos. Once she and June had had a confrontation about brown paper bags. Eileen, saving paper bags, stuffed them into a drawer. June folded them and smoothed them flat and was able to file them tightly against each other so that the drawer’s capacity was greatly increased and the bags were easier to remove. Both sisters laughed angrily.
    “I mean it’s
easier
,” said June. “It’s always easier. Actually in the end you save yourself time.”
    “You’re compulsive,” said Eileen, who would try when desperate to turn June’s own language against her, using it flippantly and highhandedly. “Order is an anal perversion. I’m surprised at you.”
    But she did try. In June’s kitchen she tried all the time to remember the order, the always logical, though unexpected, classifications. She always made a mistake. When Ewart discovered one of her mistakes, something out of place, he would tap her on the arm with a look of apology and complicity, no words, shift whatever it was with a furtive flourish to wherever it ought to be. It was from this pantomime of his, this kindness and anxiety on her behalf, that Eileen understood how far all this was from being a joke, how deep and true June’s outrage must be. In June’s and Ewart’s house she felt all the time the weight of the world of objects, their serious demands, the distinctions she had disregarded. There was a morality here of buying and use, a morality of consumerism. Eileen had never had any money, so she was able to be spendthrift, slipshod, content. June and Ewart, having such a great deal of money, bought and used each thing with a sense of responsibility which was not just a responsibility to themselves to own the best, the most efficient, durable, honest, things that were to be had, but a responsibility, as they would have said, to society. People who did not read
Consumer Reports
probably seemed the same to them as people who did not bother to vote.
    The things they had the most difficulty buying were the things which serve no purpose but which are necessary to any house—pictures, ornaments. They had solved this finally by choosing Eskimo prints and carvings, Indian wall hangings, ash trays, and bowls, and some gray porous-looking pots made by a former convict now being sponsored as a potter by the Unitarian Church. All these things had an edge of moral value, and were decoratively acceptable besides. A pair of Kwakiutl masks—heavy stylized threat, dead ferocity—hung on the fireplace wall, receiving a good deal of admiration. What are such things doing in a living room, Eileen wanted to ask. She discovered in herself these days an unattractive finickiness about some things, about clothes, for instance, and decoration. A wish to avoid fraud, not to appropriate serious things for trivial uses, not to mock things by making them into fashions. A doomed wish. She herself offended. And Ewart and June did not mean to mock, they truly admired Indian art, they said, “Isn’t that fierce? Isn’t it fantastic?” In Eileen’s own living room were some dim watercolors of flowers, an accidental collection of secondhand furniture, and who was to say that this shabbiness, this avoidance of style, was not in its way quite as bad an affectation as a display of Kwakiutl masks, pocked fertility goddesses?
    Ewart came in from the garage, wearing work pants and shirt. His hair had grown down to his earlobes. “Would you like to see my