The Love of a Good Woman

she has to look after them. How can you do that if your mind is waving around under the surface of the sea?”
    “That’s taking it very literally,” says Sonje in a slightly superior tone.
    “You can either have thoughts and make decisions or you can’t,” says Kath. “For instance—the baby is going to pick up a razor blade. What do you do? Do you just say, Oh, I think I’ll justfloat around here till my husband comes home and he can make up his mind, that is our mind, about whether this is a good idea?”
    Sonje said, “That’s taking it to extremes.”
    Each of their voices has hardened. Kath is brisk and scornful, Sonje grave and stubborn.
    “Lawrence didn’t want to have children,” Kath says. “He was jealous of the ones Frieda had from being married before.”
    Sonje is looking down between her knees, letting sand fall through her fingers.
    “I just think it would be beautiful,” she says. “I think it would be beautiful, if a woman could.”
    Kath knows that something has gone wrong. Something is wrong with her own argument. Why is she so angry and excited? And why did she shift over to talking about babies, about children? Because she has a baby and Sonje doesn’t? Did she say that about Lawrence and Frieda because she suspects that it is partly the same story with Cottar and Sonje?
    When you make the argument on the basis of the children, about the woman having to look after the children, you’re in the clear. You can’t be blamed. But when Kath does that she is covering up. She can’t stand that part about the reeds and the water, she feels bloated and suffocated with incoherent protest. So it is herself she is thinking of, not of any children. She herself is the very woman that Lawrence is railing about. And she can’t reveal that straight out because it might make Sonje suspect—it might make Kath herself suspect—an impoverishment in Kath’s life.
    Sonje who has said, during another alarming conversation, “My happiness depends on Cottar.”
    My happiness depends on Cottar.
    That statement shook Kath. She would never have said it about Kent. She didn’t want it to be true of herself.
    But she didn’t want Sonje to think that she was a woman whohad missed out on love. Who had not considered, who had not been offered, the prostration of love.
II
    K ENT remembered the name of the town in Oregon to which Cottar and Sonje had moved. Or to which Sonje had moved, at the end of the summer. She had gone there to look after Cottar’s mother while Cottar took off on another journalistic junket to the Far East. There was some problem real or imagined about Cottar’s getting back into the United States after his trip to China. When he came back the next time he and Sonje planned to meet in Canada, maybe move the mother up there too.
    There wasn’t much chance that Sonje would be living in the town now. There was just a slight chance that the mother might be. Kent said that it wasn’t worth stopping for, but Deborah said, Why not, wouldn’t it be interesting to find out? And an inquiry at the Post Office brought directions.
    Kent and Deborah drove out of town through the sand dunes—Deborah doing the driving as she had done for most of this long leisurely trip. They had visited Kent’s daughter Noelle, who was living in Toronto, and his two sons by his second wife, Pat—one of them in Montreal and the other in Maryland. They had stayed with some old friends of Kent’s and Pat’s who now lived in a gated community in Arizona, and with Deborah’s parents—who were around Kent’s age—in Santa Barbara. Now they were headed up the West Coast, home to Vancouver, but taking it easy every day, so as not to tire Kent out.
    The dunes were covered with grass. They looked like ordinary hills, except where a naked sandy shoulder was revealed, to make the landscape look playful. A child’s construction, swollen out of scale.
    The road ended at the house they’d been told to look for. It couldn’t be mistaken. There was the sign—P ACIFIC S CHOOL OF D ANCE . And Sonje’s name, and a F OR S ALE sign underneath. There was an old woman using shears on one of the bushes in the garden.
    So Cottar’s mother was still alive. But Kent remembered now that Cottar’s mother was blind. That was why somebody had to go and live with her, after Cottar’s father died.
    What was she doing hacking away with those shears if she was blind?
    He had made the usual mistake, of not realizing how many