Something Ive Been Meaning to Tell You

not been, romantic enough to see himself as the rebel, the skeptic, in this orthodoxy.
    His father squatted down to touch the shrubs, showing her the different kinds of needles, speaking of their complicated requirements, of soil analysis, water, nourishment. He gave his attention. He was not a sexually attractive man. Why not? His large sad butt, his vulnerable priggish look from the rear? Once June had told Eileen that she and Ewart had gone to some pornographic movies, with other couples from what was called a Growth Group, in the Unitarian Church. They were interested in exploring new stimuli. Eileen had told this to people, about her sister, she had made an example and a joke about it. Now she thought that her laughter had been beside the point. Not because it was unkind, as she had guiltily thought at the time, but because it was uncomprehending. This earnestness was no joke. Here was a system of digestion which found everything to its purposes. It stuck at nothing. Japanese gardens, pornographic movies, accidental death. All of them accepted, chewed and altered, assimilated, destroyed.

    After the Memorial Service the house was full of June’s and Ewart’s friends and neighbors and the friends of their teenaged children. The teenagers were downstairs in the recreation room, in front of the floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace. Many of them claimed to be friends of Douglas. Perhaps they were. They came with guitars, recorders, candles. One girl came wrapped in a quilt. “Is this where they’re having the Memorial Party?” she asked at the door, in hersoft radiance. Others wore fringed shawls, flimsy trailing dresses. They looked not so different from their elders as they might have wished. Downstairs they lit the candles; they had only that light, and the fire. They burned incense. They sang and played their instruments. The incense odor, rising, had an edge of marijuana.
    “Their way of saying good-bye to Douglas,” said a long-haired, ravaged-looking woman, also shawl-wrapped, leaning over the bannister. “It’s very lovely, really, it’s very moving.”
    But would Douglas have cared for it, for the Memorial Party? He would not have said. He would have stayed with it a while, anyway, out of politeness; then he might have gone to his room with the market section of the paper.
    “They’ve got a joint or two down there, smells like,” said a man coming up behind this woman, and Eileen knew from the way the woman did not answer, from the closing of her face and her whole self, that it must be her husband. Unlike his wife, he had come conservatively dressed, he looked as men used to look at funerals. Such couples were common nowadays—husband responsible, respectable, vulnerable, only slightly longer hair and timid sideburns, tie and clean cuffs, a faintly apologetic or ridiculous air of real, though deplorable, money and power; wife careless, make-up-less, anything but matronly, trailing the garments of exotic poverty. Occasionally there was a couple who were the mirror-opposite of these—wife coifed and pastel-suited and button-earringed, husband in an embroidered velvet vest, amulets and crosses twinkling among the hairs of his chest.
    This husband and Eileen moved into the living room, which was full of just such people. Shawls and caftans, printed cotton from India, jeans, expensive tailoring. It would not have been difficult, even two or three years ago, to tell the rich friends of Ewart and June, their neighbors, from the Unitarians, the Growth Group friends. Now it was impossible. Some of these people were probably both.
    Ewart moved among them offering drinks. June was in the dining room, beside the table with the coffee and sandwiches. Sausage rolls, asparagus rolls. She had found some time to make those. Her clothing was lovely—a long hand-woven orange and gold dress and matching stole, thick and rough, Mexican or Spanish. Her silver-green eyelids were a surprise and a mistake, the only hint of something hectic, unsure.
    “Are you all right?” she said to her sister. “I haven’t been able to take you round and introduce you to people, I’m just letting you fend for yourself.”
    “I’m all right,” Eileen said. “I’m drinking.”
    She had given up asking what she could do to help. She had given up looking for things to do. The kitchen, the dining room, were full of women who knew where everything was kept, but they had hardly any more luck than she. June had forestalled all of