The Love of a Good Woman

upstairs, torn away from my book or the paragraph I was writing. We sat at her dining-room table. There was a lace cloth on it, and an octagonal mirror reflecting a ceramic swan. We drank coffee out of china cups and ate off small matching plates (more of those cookies, or gluey raisin tarts or heavy scones) and touched tiny embroidered napkins to our lips to wipe away the crumbs. I sat facing the china cabinet in which were ranged all the good glasses, and the cream-and-sugar sets, the salt-and-peppers too dinky or ingenious for daily use, as well as bud vases, a teapot shaped like a thatched cottage, and candlesticks shaped like lilies. Once every month Mrs. Gorrie went through the china cabinet and washed everything. She told me so. She told me things that had to do with my future, the house and the future she assumed I would have, and the more she talked the more I felt an iron weight on my limbs, the more I wanted to yawn and yawn in the middle of the morning, to crawl away and hide and sleep. But out loud I admired everything. The contents of the china cabinet, the housekeeping routines of Mrs. Gorrie’s life, thematching outfits that she put on every morning. Skirts and sweaters in shades of mauve or coral, harmonizing scarves of artificial silk.
    “Always get dressed first thing, just as if you’re going out to work, and do your hair and get your makeup on”—she had caught me more than once in my dressing gown—”and then you can always put an apron on if you have to do the washing or some baking. It’s good for your morale.”
    And always have some baking on hand for when people might drop in. (As far as I knew, she never had any visitors but me, and you could hardly say that I had dropped in.) And never serve coffee in mugs.
    It wasn’t put quite so baldly. It was “I always—” or “I always like to—” or “I think it’s nicer to—”
    “Even when I lived away off in the wilds, I always liked to—” My need to yawn or scream subsided for a moment. Where had she lived in the wilds? And when?
    “Oh, away up the coast,” she said. “I was a bride, too, once upon a time. I lived up there for years. Union Bay. But that wasn’t too wild. Cortes Island.”
    I asked where that was, and she said, “Oh, away up there.”
    “That must have been interesting,” I said.
    “Oh, interesting,” she said. “If you call bears interesting. If you call cougars interesting. I’d rather have a little civilization myself.”
    The dining room was separated from the living room by sliding oak doors. They were always open a little way so that Mrs. Gorrie, sitting at the end of the table, could keep an eye on Mr. Gorrie, sitting in his recliner in front of the living-room window. She spoke of him as “my husband in the wheelchair,” but in fact he was only in the wheelchair when she took him out for his walk. They didn’t have a television set—television was stillalmost a novelty at that time. Mr. Gorrie sat and watched the street, and Kitsilano Park across the street and Burrard Inlet beyond that. He made his own way to the bathroom, with a cane in one hand and the other hand gripping chair backs or battering against the walls. Once inside he managed by himself, though it took him a long time. And Mrs. Gorrie said that there was sometimes a bit of mopping up.
    All I could usually see of Mr. Gorrie was a trouser leg stretched out on the bright-green recliner. Once or twice he had to make this drag and lurch along to the bathroom when I was there. A large man—large head, wide shoulders, heavy bones.
    I didn’t look at his face. People who had been crippled by strokes or disease were bad omens to me, rude reminders. It wasn’t the sight of useless limbs or the other physical marks of their horrid luck I had to avoid—it was their human eyes.
    I don’t believe he looked at me, either, though Mrs. Gorrie called out to him that here I was visiting from downstairs. He made a grunting noise that could have been the best he could do by way of a greeting, or dismissal.
    T HERE were two and a half rooms in our apartment. It was rented furnished, and in the way of such places it was half furnished, with things that would otherwise have been thrown away. I remember the floor of the living room, which was covered with leftover squares and rectangles of linoleum—all the different colors and patterns fitted together and stitched like a crazy quilt with strips of metal. And the gas stove in the kitchen,