The Progress of Love

through tribulations and bound up in romantic complications they and the audience have now forgotten all about. That’s what’s so hilarious, Janet says; it’s so unbelievable it’s wonderful. All that happens and they just forget about it and go on. But to Trudy it doesn’t seem so unbelievable that the characters would go from one thing to the next thing—forgetful, hopeful, photogenic, foreverchanging their clothes. That it’s not so unbelievable is the thing she really can’t stand.
    Robin, the next morning, said, “Oh, probably. All those people she hung around with drink. They party all the time. They’re self-destructive. It’s her own fault. Even if her sister told her to go , she didn’t have to go. She didn’t have to be so stupid.”
    “What was her name?” Trudy said.
    “Tracy Lee,” said Robin with distaste. She stepped on the pedal of the garbage tin, lifted rather than lowered the container of yogurt she had just emptied, and dropped it in. She was wearing bikini underpants and a T-shirt that said “If I Want to Listen to an Asshole, I’ll Fart.”
    “That shirt still bothers me,” Trudy said. “Some things are disgusting but funny, and some things are more disgusting than funny.”
    “What’s the problem?” said Robin. “I sleep alone.”
    Trudy sat outside, in her wrapper, drinking coffee while the day got hot. There is a little brick-paved space by the side door that she and Dan always called the patio. She sat there. This is a solar-heated house, with big panels of glass in the south-sloping roof—the oddest-looking house in town. It’s odd inside, too, with the open shelves in the kitchen instead of cupboards, and the living room up some stairs, looking out over the fields at the back. She and Dan, for a joke, gave parts of it the most conventional, suburban-sounding names—the patio, the powder room, the master bedroom. Dan always had to joke about the way he was living. He built the house himself—Trudy did a lot of the painting and staining—and it was a success. Rain didn’t leak in around the panels, and part of the house’s heat really did come from the sun. Most people who have the ideas, or ideals, that Dan has aren’t very practical. They can’t fix things or make things; they don’t understand wiring or carpentry, or whatever it is they need to understand. Dan is good at everything—at gardening, cutting wood, building a house. He is especially good at repairing motors. He used to travel aroundgetting jobs as an auto mechanic, a small-engines repairman. That’s how he ended up here. He came here to visit Marlene, got a job as a mechanic, became a working partner in an auto-repair business, and before he knew it—married to Trudy, not Marlene—he was a small-town businessman, a member of the Kinsmen. All without shaving off his nineteen-sixties beard or trimming his hair any more than he wanted to. The town was too small and Dan was too smart for that to be necessary.
    Now Dan lives in a townhouse in Richmond Hill with a girl named Genevieve. She is studying law. She was married when she was very young, and has three little children. Dan met her three years ago when her camper broke down a few miles outside of town. He told Trudy about her that night. The rented camper, the three little children hardly more than babies, the lively little divorced mother with her hair in pigtails. Her bravery, her poverty, her plans to enter law school. If the camper hadn’t been easily fixed, he was going to invite her and her children to spend the night. She was on her way to her parents’ summer place at Pointe au Baril.
    “Then she can’t be all that poor,” Trudy said.
    “You can be poor and have rich parents,” Dan said.
    “No, you can’t.”
    Last summer, Robin went to Richmond Hill for a month’s visit. She came home early. She said it was a madhouse. The oldest child has to go to a special reading clinic, the middle one wets the bed. Genevieve spends all her time in the law library, studying. No wonder. Dan shops for bargains, cooks, looks after the childrern, grows vegetables, drives a taxi on Saturdays and Sundays. He wants to set up a motorcycle-repair business in the garage, but he can’t get a permit; the neighbors are against it.
    He told Robin he was happy. Never happier, he said. Robin came home firmly grownup—severe, sarcastic, determined. She had some slight, steady grudge she hadn’t had before. Trudy couldn’t worm it out of her,