The Progress of Love

when all of them had let the grandmother squash their cool hands between her warm, swollen, freckled ones, they lined up again, in a straggling sort of way, and began to go past the coffin. Many were crying now, shivering. What could you expect? Young girls.
    But they began to sing as they went past. With difficulty at first, shyly, but with growing confidence in their sad, sweet voices, they sang:
“Now, while the blossom still clings to the vine ,
I’ll taste your strawberries, I’II drink your sweet wine—”
    They had planned the whole thing, of course, beforehand; they had got that song off a record. They believed that it was an old hymn.
    So they filed past, singing, looking down at Tracy Lee, and it was noticed that they were dropping things into the coffin. They were slipping the rings off their fingers and the bracelets from their arms, and taking the earrings out of their ears. They were undoing necklaces, and bowing to pull chains and long strands of beads over their heads. Everybody gave something. All this jewellery went flashing and sparkling down on the dead girl, to lie beside her in her coffin. One girl pulled the bright combs out of her hair, let those go.
    And nobody made a move to stop it. How could anyone interrupt? It was like a religious ceremony. The girls behaved as if they’d been told what to do, as if this was what was always done on such occasions. They sang, they wept, they dropped their jewellery. The sense of ritual made every one of them graceful.
    The family wouldn’t stop it. They thought it was beautiful.
    “It was like church,” Tracy Lee’s mother said, and her grandmother said, “All those lovely young girls loved Tracy Lee. If they wanted to give their jewellery to show how they loved her, that’s their business. It’s not anybody else’s business. I thought it was beautiful.”
    Tracy Lee’s sister broke down and cried. It was the first time she had done so.
    Dan said, “This is a test of love.”
    Of Trudy’s love, he meant. Trudy started singing, “Please release me, let me go—”
    She clapped a hand to her chest, danced in swoops around the room, singing. Dan was near laughing, near crying. He couldn’t help it; he came and hugged her and they danced together, staggering. They were fairly drunk. All that June (it was two years ago), they were drinking gin, in between and during their scenes. They were drinking, weeping, arguing, explaining, and Trudy had to keep running to the liquor store. Yet she can’t remember ever feeling really drunk or having a hangover. Except that she felt so tired all the time, as if she had logs chained to her ankles.
    She kept joking. She called Genevieve “Jenny the Feeb.”
    “This is just like wanting to give up the business and become a potter,” she said. “Maybe you should have done that. I wasn’t really against it. You gave up on it. And when you wanted to go to Peru. We could still do that.”
    “All those things were just straws in the wind,” Dan said.
    “I should have known when you started watching the Ombudsman on TV,” Trudy said. “It was the legal angle, wasn’t it? You were never so interested in that kind of thing before.”
    “This will open life up for you, too,” Dan said. “You can be more than just my wife.”
    “Sure. I think I’ll be a brain surgeon.”
    “You’re very smart. You’re a wonderful woman. You’re brave.”
    “Sure you’re not talking about Jenny the Feeb?”
    “No, you. You, Trudy. I still love you. You can’t understand that I still love you.”
    Not for years had he had so much to say about how he loved her. He loved her skinny bones, her curly hair, her roughening skin, her way of coming into a room with a stride that shook the windows, her jokes, her clowning, her tough talk. He loved her mind and her soul. He always would. But the part of his life that had been bound up with hers was over.
    “That is just talk. That is talking like an idiot!” Trudy said. “Robin, go back to bed!” For Robin in her skimpy nightgown was standing at the top of the steps.
    “I can hear you yelling and screaming,” Robin said.
    “We weren’t yelling and screaming,” Trudy said. “We’re trying to talk about something private.”
    “What?”
    “I told you, it’s something private.”
    When Robin sulked off to bed, Dan said, “I think we should tell her. It’s better for kids to know. Genevieve doesn’t have any secrets from her kids. Josie’s only five, and she