The Progress of Love

lunacy.”
    I remember that that had been Beryl’s opinion, exactly.
    I went into the front room and stared at the butterfly, with its pink-and-orange wings. Then I went into the front bedroom and found two human figures painted on the wall. A man and a woman holding hands and facing straight ahead. They were naked, and larger than life size.
    “It reminds me of that John Lennon and Yoko Ono picture,”I said to Bob Marks, who had come in behind me. “That record cover, wasn’t it?” I didn’t want him to think that anything he had said in the kitchen had upset me.
    Bob Marks said, “Different color hair.”
    That was true. Both figures had yellow hair painted in a solid mass, the way they do it in the comic strips. Horsetails of yellow hair curling over their shoulders and little pigs’ tails of yellow hair decorating their not so private parts. Their skin was a flat beige pink and their eyes a staring blue, the same blue that was on the kitchen wall.
    I noticed that they hadn’t quite finished peeling the wallpaper away before making this painting. In the corner, there was some paper left that matched the paper on the other walls—a modernistic design of intersecting pink and gray and mauve bubbles. The man from Toronto must have put that on. The paper underneath hadn’t been stripped off when this new paper went on. I could see an edge of it, the cornflowers on a white ground.
    “I guess this was where they carried on their sexual shenanigans,” Bob Marks said, in a tone familiar to me. That thickened, sad, uneasy, but determined tone. The not particularly friendly lust of middle-aged respectable men.
    I didn’t say anything. I worked away some of the bubble paper to see more of the cornflowers. Suddenly I hit a loose spot, and ripped away a big swatch of it. But the cornflower paper came, too, and a little shower of dried plaster.
    “Why is it?” I said. “Just tell me, why is it that no man can mention a place like this without getting around to the subject of sex in about two seconds flat? Just say the words ‘hippie’ or ‘commune’ and all you guys can think about is screwing! As if there wasn’t anything at all behind it but orgies and fancy combinations and non-stop screwing! I get so sick of that—it’s all so stupid it just makes me sick!”
    In the car, on the way home from the hotel, we sat as before—the men in the front seat, the women in the back. I was in the middle, Beryl and my mother on either side of me. Their heated bodiespressed against me, through cloth; their smells crowded out the smells of the cedar bush we passed through, and the pockets of bog, where Beryl exclaimed at the water lilies. Beryl smelled of all those things in pots and bottles. My mother smelled of flour and hard soap and the warm crêpe of her good dress and the kerosene she had used to take the spots off.
    “A lovely meal,” my mother said. “Thank you, Beryl. Thank you, Mr. Florence.”
    “I don’t know who is going to be fit to do the milking,” my father said. “Now that we’ve all ate in such style.”
    “Speaking of money,” said Beryl—though nobody actually had been—“do you mind my asking what you did with yours? I put mine in real estate. Real estate in California—you can’t lose. I was thinking you could get an electric stove, so you wouldn’t have to bother with a fire in summer or fool with that coal-oil thing, either one.”
    All the other people in the car laughed, even Mr. Florence.
    “That’s a good idea, Beryl,” said my father. “We could use it to set things on till we get the electricity.”
    “Oh, Lord,” said Beryl. “How stupid can I get ?”
    “And we don’t actually have the money, either,” my mother said cheerfully, as if she was continuing the joke.
    But Beryl spoke sharply. “You wrote me you got it. You got the same as me.”
    My father half turned in his seat. “What money are you talking about?” he said. “What’s this money?”
    “From Daddy’s will,” Beryl said. “That you got last year. Look, maybe I shouldn’t have asked. If you had to pay something off, that’s still a good use, isn’t it? It doesn’t matter. We’re all family here. Practically.”
    “We didn’t have to use it to pay anything off,” my mother said. “I burned it.”
    Then she told how she went into town in the truck, one day almost a year ago, and got them to give her the money in a box she had brought along for the purpose. She took it home, and