The Progress of Love

Nancy. She started laughing, and Eddy joined in. For some unstated reason—with him it would have to be unstated—he admired Nancy and all she did. Sylvia, bewildered but good-humored, with her face as pink as a tissue-paper rose starting to look pretty crumpled round the edges, said, “I don’t see what’s funny. What did I say?”
    “Go on,” said Ross.
    “Go on what?”
    “Go on and tell about the anniversary party.”
    “Oh, Ross,” said Glenna. She got up and turned on the lights in the colored plastic lanterns that were strung along the wall of the house. “I should have made Colin get up and put some in the cherry tree,” she said.
    “Well, Colin was thirteen at the time and Ross was twelve,” Sylvia said. “Oh, everybody knows this backwards and forwards except you, Nancy. So, twenty-five years married and my oldest kid is thirteen? You could say that was the problem. Such a long time without kids, we were just counting on never having any. First counting on having them and then being disappointed and then getting used to it, and being used to it so long, over ten years married, and I’m pregnant! That was Colin. And not even twelve months later, eleven months and three days later, another one! That was Ross!”
    “Whoopee!” said Ross.
    “The poor man, I guess he got scared from then on I would just be dropping babies every time he turned around, so he took off.”
    “He was transferred,” Colin said. “He worked for the railway, and when they took off the passenger train through here they transferred him to Peterborough.”
    He had not many memories of his father. Once, walking down the street, his father had offered him a stick of gum. There was a kindly, official air about this gesture—his father was wearing hisuniform at the time—rather than a paternal intimacy. Colin had the impression that Sylvia couldn’t manage sons and a husband, somehow—that she had mislaid her marriage without exactly meaning to.
    “He didn’t just work for the railway,” said Sylvia. “He was a conductor on it. After he first was transferred, he used to come back sometimes on the bus, but he hated travelling on the bus and he couldn’t drive a car. He just gradually quit visiting and he died just before he would’ve retired. So maybe he would’ve come back then, who knows?”
    (It was Glenna’s idea, relayed to Colin, that all this easygoing talk about throwing her own anniversary party was just Sylvia’s bluff—that she had asked or told her husband to come, and he hadn’t.)
    “Well, never mind him, it was a party,” Sylvia said. “I asked a lot of people. I would’ve asked Eddy but I didn’t know him then so well as I do now. I thought he was too high class.” She jabbed Eddy’s arm with her elbow. Everybody knew it was his second wife who had been too high class. “It was August, the weather was good, we were able to be outside, like we are here. I had trestle tables set up and I had a washtub full of potato salad. I had spareribs and fried chicken and desserts and pies and an anniversary cake I got iced by the bakery. And two fruit punches, one with and one without. The one with got a lot more with as the evening wore on and people kept pouring in vodka and brandy and whatever they had and I didn’t know it!”
    Ross said, “Everybody thought Colin got into the punch!”
    “Well, he didn’t,” said Sylvia. “That was a lie.”
    Earlier, Colin and Nancy had cleared the table together, and when they were alone in the kitchen Nancy said, “Did you say anything to Ross?”
    “Not yet.”
    “You will, though? Colin? It’s serious.”
    Glenna coming in with a platter of chicken bones heard that, though she didn’t say anything.
    Colin said, “Nancy thinks Ross is making a mistake with his car.”
    “A fatal mistake,” said Nancy. Colin went back outside, leaving her talking in a lowered, urgent voice to Glenna.
    “And we had music,” Sylvia said. “We were dancing on the sidewalk round the front, as well as partying at the back. We had records playing in my front room and the windows open. The night constable came down and he was dancing along with us! It was just after they put the pink streetlights up on that street, so I said, ‘Look at the lights they put up for my party!’ Where are you going?” she said to Colin, who had stood up.
    “I want to show Eddy something.”
    Eddy stood up, looking pleased, and padded around the table. He was wearing