The Love of a Good Woman

with vitamin E.
    She offered the front part to Rupert. “I’m going to look at the crossword,” she said. “I like to do the crossword—it relaxes me at the end of the day.”
    Rupert sat down and began to read the paper, and she asked him if he would like a cup of tea. Of course he said not to bother, and she went ahead and made it anyway, understanding that this reply might as well be yes in country speech.
    “It’s a South American theme,” she said, looking at the crossword. “Latin American theme. First across is a musical …
garment.
A musical garment? Garment. A lot of letters. Oh. Oh. I’m lucky tonight. Cape Horn!
    “You see how silly they are, these things,” she said, and rose and poured the tea.
    If he did remember, did he hold anything against her? Maybe her blithe friendliness in their senior year had been as unwelcome, as superior-seeming to him, as that early taunting?
    When she first saw him in this house, she thought that he had not changed much. He had been a tall, solid, round-faced boy, and he was a tall, heavy, round-faced man. He had worn his hair cut so short, always, that it didn’t make much difference that there was less of it now and that it had turned from light brown to gray-brown. A permanent sunburn had taken the place of his blushes. And whatever troubled him and showed in his face mighthave been just the same old trouble—the problem of occupying space in the world and having a name that people could call you by, being somebody they thought they could know.
    She thought of them sitting in the senior class. A small class, by that time—in five years the unstudious, the carefree, and the indifferent had been weeded out, leaving these overgrown, grave, and docile children learning trigonometry, learning Latin. What kind of life did they think they were preparing for? What kind of people did they think they were going to be?
    She could see the dark-green, softened cover of a book called
History of the Renaissance and Reformation.
It was secondhand, or tenthhand—nobody ever bought a new textbook. Inside were written all the names of the previous owners, some of whom were middle-aged housewives or merchants around the town. You could not imagine them learning these things, or underlining “Edict of Nantes” with red ink and writing “N.B.” in the margin.
    Edict of Nantes.
The very uselessness, the exotic nature, of the things in those books and in those students’ heads, in her own head then and Rupert’s, made Enid feel a tenderness and wonder. It wasn’t that they had meant to be something that they hadn’t become. Nothing like that. Rupert couldn’t have imagined anything but farming this farm. It was a good farm, and he was an only son. And she herself had ended up doing exactly what she must have wanted to do. You couldn’t say that they had chosen the wrong lives or chosen against their will or not understood their choices. Just that they had not understood how time would pass and leave them not more but maybe a little less than what they used to be.
    “‘Bread of the Amazon,’” she said. “‘Bread of the Amazon’?”
    Rupert said, “Manioc?”
    Enid counted. “Seven letters,” she said. “Seven.”
    He said, “Cassava?”
    “Cassava? That’s a double
s?
Cassava.”
    • • •
    M RS . Q UINN became more capricious daily about her food. Sometimes she said she wanted toast, or bananas with milk on them. One day she said peanut-butter cookies. Enid prepared all these things—the children could eat them anyway—and when they were ready Mrs. Quinn could not stand the look or the smell of them. Even Jell-O had a smell she could not stand.
    Some days she hated all noise; she would not even have the fan going. Other days she wanted the radio on, she wanted the station that played requests for birthdays and anniversaries and called people up to ask them questions. If you got the answer right you won a trip to Niagara Falls, a tankful of gas, or a load of groceries or tickets to a movie.
    “It’s all fixed,” Mrs. Quinn said. “They just pretend to call somebody up—they’re in the next room and already got the answer told to them. I used to know somebody that worked for a radio, that’s the truth.”
    On these days her pulse was rapid. She talked very fast in a light, breathless voice. “What kind of car is that your mother’s got?” she said.
    “It’s a maroon-colored car,” said Enid.
    “What
make?”
said Mrs. Quinn.
    Enid said