The Progress of Love

stubborn, it must have seemed they had forever.

L ICHEN
    Stella’s father built the place as a summer house, on the clay bluffs overlooking Lake Huron. Her family always called it “the summer cottage.” David was surprised when he first saw it, because it had none of the knotty-pine charm, the battened-down coziness, that those words suggested. A city boy, from what Stella’s family called “a different background,” he had no experience of summer places. It was and is a high, bare wooden house, painted gray—a copy of the old farmhouses nearby, though perhaps less substantial. In front of it are the steep bluffs—they are not so substantial, either, but have held so far—and a long flight of steps down to the beach. Behind it is a small fenced garden, where Stella grows vegetables with considerable skill and coaxing, a short sandy lane, and a jungle of wild blackberry bushes.
    As David turns the car into the lane, Stella steps out of these bushes, holding a colander full of berries. She is a short, fat, white-haired woman, wearing jeans and a dirty T-shirt. There is nothing underneath these clothes, as far as he can see, to support or restrain any part of her.
    “Look what’s happened to Stella,” says David, fuming. “She’s turned into a troll.”
    Catherine, who has never met Stella before, says decently, “Well. She’s older.”
    “Older than what, Catherine? Older than the house? Older than Lake Huron? Older than the cat?”
    There is a cat asleep on the path beside the vegetable garden. A large ginger torn with ears mutilated in battle, and one grayed-over eye. His name is Hercules and he dates from David’s time.
    “She’s an older woman,” says Catherine in a flutter of defiance. Even defiant, she’s meek. “You know what I mean.”
    David thinks that Stella has done this on purpose. It isn’t just an acceptance of natural deterioration—oh, no, it’s much more. Stella would always dramatize. But it isn’t just Stella. There’s the sort of woman who has to come bursting out of the female envelope at this age, flaunting fat or an indecent scrawniness, sprouting warts and facial hair, refusing to cover pasty veined legs, almost gleeful about it, as if this was what she’d wanted to do all along. Man-haters, from the start. You can’t say a thing like that out loud nowadays.
    He has parked too close to the berry bushes—too close for Catherine, who slides out of the car on the passenger side and is immediately in trouble. Catherine is slim enough, but her dress has a full skirt and long, billowy sleeves. It’s a dress of cobwebby cotton, shading from pink to rose, with scores of tiny, irregular pleats that look like wrinkles. A pretty dress but hardly a good choice for Stella’s domain. The blackberry bushes catch it everywhere, and Catherine has to keep picking herself loose.
    “David, really, you could have left her some room,” says Stella.
    Catherine laughs at her predicament. “I’m all right, I’m okay, really.”
    “Stella, Catherine,” says David, introducing.
    “Have some berries, Catherine,” says Stella sympathetically. “David?”
    David shakes his head, but Catherine takes a couple. “Lovely,” she says. “Warm from the sun.”
    “I’m sick of the sight of them,” says Stella.
    Close up, Stella looks a bit better—with her smooth, tanned skin, childishly cropped hair, wide brown eyes. Catherine, drooping over her, is a tall, frail, bony woman with fair hair and sensitiveskin. Her skin is so sensitive it won’t stand any makeup at all, and is easily inflamed by colds, foods, emotions. Lately she has taken to wearing blue eye shadow and black mascara, which David thinks is a mistake. Blackening those sparse wisps of lashes emphasizes the watery blue of her eyes, which look as if they couldn’t stand daylight, and the dryness of the skin underneath. When David first met Catherine, about eighteen months ago, he thought she was a little over thirty. He saw many remnants of girlishness; he loved her fairness and tall fragility. She has aged since then. And she was older than he thought to start with—she is nearing forty.
    “But what will you do with them?” Catherine says to Stella. “Make jam?”
    “I’ve made about five million jars of jam already,” Stella says. “I put them in little jars with those artsy-fartsy gingham tops on them and I give them away to all my neighbors who are too lazy or too smart to pick their own. Sometimes I