The Progress of Love

have some idea. They have some idea about doing a play.”
    “What do they know about plays?”
    “Didn’t I tell you they’ve acted in plays? They’ve made up their own plays and acted in them, in this women’s theater.”
    “What sort of play are they going to make up?”“I don’t know. I don’t know if they’ll do it. They’re just interested in what it was like in the old days.”
    “That’s all the style now,” Dane said. “To be interested in that.”
    “They’re not just letting on to be, Dane. They really are.”
    But he thought that she didn’t sound so buoyant this time.
    “You know they change all the names,” she said. “When they do make up a play, they change all the names and places. But I think they just like finding out about things, and talking. They’re not all that young, but they seem young, they’re so curious. And lighthearted.”
    “Your face looks different,” said Dane to Violet when he finally got to visit her again. “Have you lost weight?”
    Violet said, “I wouldn’t think so.”
    Dane had lost twelve pounds himself but she did not notice. She seemed cheerful but agitated. She kept getting up and sitting down, looking out the window, moving things around on the kitchen counter for no reason.
    The girls had gone.
    “They’re not coming back?” said Dane.
    Yes, they were. Violet thought they were coming back. She didn’t know just when.
    “They’re off to find their island, I guess,” said Dane. “Their island ruled by women.”
    “I don’t know,” said Violet. “I think they’ve gone to Montreal.”
    Dane didn’t like to think that he could be made to feel so irritable and suspicious by two girls he hadn’t even met. He was almost ready to blame it on the medication he still had to take for his tooth. There was a sense he had of something concealed from him—all around him, but concealed—a tiresome, silly, malicious sort of secret.
    “You’ve cut your hair,” he said. That was why her face looked different.
    “They cut it. They said it was a Joan of Arc style.” Violetsmiled ironically, much as she used to, and touched her hair. “I told them I hoped I wouldn’t end up burned at the stake.”
    She held her head in her hands, and rocked back and forth.
    “They’ve tired you,” Dane said. “They’ve tired you, Aunt Violet.”
    “It’s going through all that,” said Violet. She jerked her head toward the back bedroom. “It’s what I have to get to work on in there.”
    In Violet’s back bedroom there were boxes of papers, and an old humpbacked trunk that had belonged to her mother. Dane thought that it was full of papers, too. Old high-school notes, normal-school notes, report cards, records and correspondence from her years with the phone company, minutes of meetings, letters, postcards. Anything that had writing on it, she had probably kept.
    She said that all these papers had to be sorted out. It had to be done before the girls got back. There were things she had promised them.
    “What things?”
    “Just things.”
    Were they coming back soon?
    Violet said yes. She expected so, yes. As she thought of this, her hands were patting and rubbing at the tabletop. She took a bite of a cookie, and crumbled what was left of it. Dane saw her sweep the crumbs into her hand and put them in her coffee.
    “That’s what they sent,” she said, and pushed in front of him a card he had noticed that was propped against her sugar bowl. It was a homemade card with childishly crayoned violets on it, and red hearts. She seemed to intend that he should read it, so he did.
Thank you a million, million times for your help and openness. You have given us a wonderful story. It is a classic story of anti-patriarchal rage. Your gift to us, can we give it to others? What is called Female Craziness is nothing but centuries of Frustration and Oppression. The part about the creek is wonderful just by itself and how many women can identify!
    Across the bottom, in capitals, had been written: LONGING TO SEE DOCUMENTS. PLEASE NEXT TIME. LOVE AND GRATITUDE .
    “What is all this about?” said Dane. “Why do you have to sort things out for them? Why can’t they just go through the whole mess and find what they want for themselves?”
    “Because I am so ashamed!” said Violet vehemently. “I don’t want anybody to see.”
    He told her there was nothing, nothing, to be ashamed of.
    “I shouldn’t have used the word ‘mess.’ It’s just that