The Progress of Love

couldn’t tease it out of her; the time when she could do that was over.
    Robin came home at noon and changed her clothes. She put on a light, flowered cotton blouse and ironed a pale-blue cotton skirt.She said that some of the girls from the class might be going around to the funeral home after school.
    “I forgot you had that skirt,” said Trudy. If she thought that was going to start a conversation, she was mistaken.
    The first time Trudy met Dan, she was drunk. She was nineteen years old, tall and skinny (she still is), with a wild head of curly black hair (it is cropped short now and showing the gray as black hair does). She was very tanned, wearing jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt. No brassiere and no need. This was in Muskoka in August, at a hotel bar where they had a band. She was camping with girlfriends. He was there with his fiancée, Marlene. He had taken Marlene home to meet his mother, who lived in Muskoka on an island in an empty hotel. When Trudy was nineteen, he was twenty-eight. She danced around by herself, giddy and drunk, in front of the table where he sat with Marlene, a meek-looking blonde with a big pink shelf of bosom all embroidered in little fake pearls. Trudy just danced in front of him until he got up and joined her. At the end of the dance, he asked her name, and took her back and introduced her to Marlene.
    “This is Judy,” he said. Trudy collapsed, laughing, into the chair beside Marlene’s. Dan took Marlene up to dance. Trudy finished off Marlene’s beer and went looking for her friends. “How do you do?” she said to them. “I’m Judy!”He caught up with her at the door of the bar. He had ditched Marlene when he saw Trudy leaving. A man who could change course quickly, see the possibilities, flare up with new enthusiasm. He told people later that he was in love with Trudy before he even knew her real name. But he told Trudy that he cried when he and Marlene were parting.
    “I have feelings,” he said. “I’m not ashamed to show them.”Trudy had no feelings for Marlene at all. Marlene was over thirty—what could she expect? Marlene still lives in town, works at the Hydro office, is not married. When Trudy and Dan were having one of their conversations about Genevieve, Trudy said, “Marlene must be thinking I got what’s coming to me.”
    Dan said he had heard that Marlene had joined the Fellowshipof Bible Christians. The women weren’t allowed makeup and had to wear a kind of bonnet to church on Sundays.
    “She won’t be able to have a thought in her head but forgiving,” Dan said.
    Trudy said, “I bet.”
    This is what happened at the funeral home, as Trudy got the story from both Kelvin and Janet.
    The girls from Tracy Lee’s class all showed up together after school. This was during what was called the visitation, when the family waited beside Tracy Lee’s open casket to receive friends. Her parents were there, her married brother and his wife, her sister, and even her sister’s boyfriend who owned the truck. They stood in a row and people lined up to say a few words to them. A lot of people came. They always do, in a case like this. Tracy Lee’s grandmother was at the end of the row in a brocade-covered chair. She wasn’t able to stand up for very long.
    All the chairs at the funeral home are upholstered in this white-and-gold brocade. The curtains are the same, the wallpaper almost matches. There are little wall-bracket lights behind heavy pink glass. Trudy has been there several times and knows what it’s like. But Robin and most of these girls had never been inside the place before. They didn’t know what to expect. Some of them began to cry as soon as they got inside the door.
    The curtains were closed. Soft music was playing—not exactly church music but it sounded like it. Tracy Lee’s coffin was white with gold trim, matching all the brocade and the wallpaper. It had a lining of pleated pink satin. A pink satin pillow. Tracy Lee had not a mark on her face. She was not made up quite as usual, because the undertaker had done it. But she was wearing her favorite earrings, turquoise-colored triangles and yellow crescents, two to each ear. (Some people thought that was in bad taste.) On the part of the coffin that covered her from the waist down, there was a big heart-shaped pillow of pink roses.
    The girls lined up to speak to the family. They shook hands, they said sorry-for-your-loss, just the way everybody else did. Whenthey got through that,