The Love of a Good Woman

Ann watching the sunset at the end of the day’s labors.”
    “If they can see it through the pea vines,” Derek said.
    The next time Karin went out to pick vegetables for Ann, she noticed the chairs were gone. She didn’t ask Ann what had become of them.
    A NN’S kitchen was in the basement of the house, just partly underground. You had to go down four steps. Karin did that, and pressed her face against the screen door. The kitchen was a dark room, with bushes growing against its high windows—Karin had never been there when the light was not on. But it wasn’t on now, and at first she thought the room was empty. Then she saw somebody sitting at the table, and it was Ann, but her head was a different shape. She had her back to the door.
    She had cut her hair. It was cut short and fluffed out like any gray-haired matron’s. And she was doing something—her elbows moved. She was working in the dim light, but Karin couldn’t see what the work was.
    She tried the trick of making Ann turn around by staring at the back of her head. But it didn’t work. She tried running her fingers lightly down the screen. Finally she made a noise.
    “Woo-oo-ooo-woo.”
    Ann got up and turned around so reluctantly that Karin had the swift unreasonable suspicion that she might have known who wasthere all the time—might have seen Karin coming, in fact, and arranged herself in this guarded position.
    “It’s me, it’s me. It’s your lost child,” said Karin.
    “Why so it is,” said Ann, unhooking the door. She didn’t greet Karin by hugging her—but then she and Derek never did that.
    She had got fatter—or the short hair made her look that way—and her face had red blotches on it, as if bugs had been biting her. Her eyes looked sore.
    “Do your eyes hurt?” Karin said. “Is that why you’re working in the dark?”
    Ann said, “Oh, I hadn’t noticed. I hadn’t noticed the light wasn’t on, I was just cleaning some silver and I thought I could see fine.” Then she seemed to make an effort to brighten up, speaking as if Karin was some much younger child. “Cleaning silver is such a boring job, it must have put me in a trance. What a good thing you came along to help me.”
    As a temporary tactic, Karin became this much younger child. She sprawled in a chair beside the table and said boisterously, “So—where’s old Derek?” She was thinking that this strange behavior of Ann’s might mean that Derek had gone off on one of his expeditions over the ridges and not come back, leaving both Ann and Rosemary. Or that he was sick. Or depressed. Ann had once said, “Derek wasn’t depressed half so often once we left the city.” Karin had wondered if “depressed” was the right word. Derek seemed to her critical, and sometimes fed up. Was that depression?
    “I’m sure he’s around somewhere,” Ann said.
    “He and Rosemary had a big split-up, did you know that?”
    “Oh yes, Karin. I knew that.”
    “Do you feel sorry about it?”
    Ann said, “This is a new way I’ve got of cleaning silver. I’ll show you. You just take a fork or spoon or whatever and you dipit in this solution here in the basin and leave it just a moment and then you take it out and dip it in the rinse water and wipe it dry. See? It shines just as well as ever it did when I used to do all that rubbing and polishing. I think so. I think it’s just as good a shine. I’ll get us some fresh rinse water.”
    Karin dipped a fork. She said, “Yesterday Rosemary and I did what we wanted all day. We never even got dressed. We made waffles and we read stuff in these old magazines. Old
Ladies’ Home Journals”
    “Those were my mother’s,” said Ann with a slight stiffness.
    “She’s lovely,” said Karin. “She’s engaged. She uses Pond’s.”
    Ann smiled—that was a relief—and said, “I remember.”
    “Can this marriage be saved?” said Karin, taking on a deep ominous tone. Then she changed to wheedling and whining.
    “The problem is that my husband is really mean and I just don’t know what to do about him. For one thing he has gone and eaten up all our children. It’s not because I don’t give him good meals to eat either because I do. I slave all day over a hot stove and make him a delicious dinner and then he comes home and the first thing he does is pull a leg off the baby—”
    “Now stop,” said Ann, not smiling anymore. “Just stop, Karin.”
    “But I really want to know,” said Karin, in a subdued but