The Love of a Good Woman

between her teeth at the right moment. The beret and the cigarette holder had been filched from the Irma la Douce outfit her stepmother had worn to a costume party, and the lipstick was something she had bought for herself.
    She knew that she could hardly manage to look like a grown-up tart. But she would not look like the ten-year-old who had got on the plane at the end of last summer, either.
    Nobody in the crowd looked at her twice, even when she stuck the cigarette holder in her mouth and put on a sullen leer. Everybody was too anxious, distraught, delighted, or bewildered. Lots of them seemed to be in costume themselves. Black menswished along in bright robes and little embroidered hats, and old women sat bowed on suitcases with shawls over their heads. Hippies were all in beads and tatters, and she found herself hedged in for a few moments by a group of somber-looking men who wore black hats and had little ringlets dangling down their cheeks.
    People waiting to meet passengers were not supposed to get in here, but they did anyway, slipping through the automatic doors. In the crowd on the other side of the baggage carousel Karin spotted her mother, Rosemary, who had not yet seen her. Rosemary was wearing a long dark-blue dress with gold and orange moons on it and had her hair freshly dyed, very black, piled up in a toppling bird’s nest on top of her head. She looked older than she did in Karin’s memory, and a little forlorn. Karin’s glance swept past her—looking for Derek. Derek was easy to find in a crowd because of his height and his shining forehead and his pale, wavy, shoulder-length hair. Also because of his bright steady eyes and satirical mouth, and his ability to stay still. Not like Rosemary, who was twitching and stretching and staring about now in a dazed, discouraged way.
    Derek wasn’t standing behind Rosemary, and he wasn’t anywhere nearby. Unless he had gone to the men’s room, he wasn’t there.
    Karin removed the cigarette holder and pushed the beret back on her head. If Derek wasn’t there, the joke lost its point. Playing a joke like that on Rosemary would just turn into confusion—when Rosemary looked confused enough, bereft enough, already.
    “Y OU’RE wearing lip-stick,” Rosemary said, wet eyed and dazzled. She wrapped Karin in her winglike sleeves and her smell of cocoa butter. “Don’t tell me your father lets you wear lipstick.”
    “I was going to fool you,” Karin said. “Where’s Derek?”
    “Not here,” said Rosemary.
    Karin spotted her suitcase on the carousel; she ducked and eeled her way between bodies and dragged it off. Rosemary tried to help her carry it, but Karin said, “Okay. Okay.” They pushed through to the exit doors and past all the waiting people who had not had the nerve or the patience to push inside. They did not speak until they were out in the hot night air and moving towards the parking lot. Then Karin said, “What’s the matter—you two having one of your squalls?”
    “Squall” was the name Rosemary and Derek themselves used to describe their fights, which were blamed on the difficulties of working together on Derek’s book.
    Rosemary said with dire serenity, “We aren’t seeing each other anymore. We aren’t working together.”
    “Really?” said Karin. “You mean you’ve broken up?”
    “If people like us can break up,” Rosemary said.
    T HE lights of cars were still pouring down every road into the city, and at the same time pouring out of it, around the big curving overpasses and in streams underneath them. There was no air-conditioning in Rosemary’s car—not because she couldn’t afford it, but because she did not believe in it—and so the windows had to be open, letting the traffic noise rush in like a river on the gassy air. Rosemary hated driving around Toronto. When she came to the city once a week to see the publisher she worked for, she made the trip on a bus, and at other times she usually had Derek drive her. Karin kept quiet while they got off the airport highway and drove east on 401, and turned, after eighty or so miles of her mother’s jumpy concentration, onto the secondary highway that would take them nearly to where Rosemary lived.
    “So has Derek gone away?” Karin said, then “Has he gone off on a trip?”
    “Not that I know of,” Rosemary said. “But then I wouldn’t know.”
    “How about Ann? Is she still there?”
    “Probably,” said Rosemary. “She never goes