The Progress of Love

advice and have your babies while you’re young,” she said. “Go out and get pregnant immediately, if possible. Ithought I was above all this. Ha-ha!” She did have a little sense, because she said, “Don’t ever tell your aunt the way I talk to you!”
    When Mrs. Cryderman was Evangeline Steuer, she didn’t live in this house, only visited it from time to time, often with friends. Her appearances in town were brief and noteworthy. I had seen her driving her car with the top down, an orange scarf over her dark page-boy hair. I had seen her in the drugstore, wearing shorts and a halter, her legs and midriff sleek and tanned as if bound in brown silk. She was laughing that time, and loudly admitting to a hangover. I had seen her in church wearing a gauzy black hat with pink silk roses, a party hat. She didn’t belong here; she belonged in the world we saw in magazines and movies—a world of glossy triviality, of hard-faced wisecracking comedians, music in public ballrooms, pink neon cocktail glasses tipped over bar doors. She was our link with that world, our proof that it existed, and we existed with it, that its frittering vice and cruel luxury were not entirely unconnected with us. As long as she stayed there, making her whirlwind visits home, she was forgiven, perhaps distantly admired. Even my Aunt Ena, who had to deal with the broken glass in the fireplace, the fried chicken trodden into the rug, the shoe polish on the rim of the bathtub, was able to grant Evangeline Steuer some unholy privilege—though perhaps it was only the privilege of being an example of how money made you shameless, leisure made you useless, self-indulgence marked you out for some showy disaster.
    But now what had Evangeline Steuer done? She had become a Mrs., like anybody else. She had bought the local newspaper for her husband to run. She was expecting a baby. She had lost her function, mixed things up. It was one thing to be a smoking, drinking, profane, and glamorous bachelor girl, and quite another thing to be a smoking, drinking, profane, and no longer glamorous expectant mother.
    “Don’t pay any attention to me, Jessie. I never had to lie around like this before. I was always in the action before. All that brute of a doctor does is tell me I’ll be worse before I’m better. ‘Whatever goes in has to come out. Five minutes’ pleasure, nine months’ misery.’ I said to him, ‘What do you mean, five minutes?’ ”I did pay attention. I had never got such an earful or eyeful before. I told MaryBeth everything. I described the living room, Mrs. Cryderman’s outfits, the bottles in the buffet with their gold and green and ruby-colored contents, the tins of unfamiliar eatables in the kitchen cupboards—smoked oysters, anchovies, pureed chestnuts, artichokes, as well as the big tinned hams and fruit puddings. I told about the veins, the bandages and blotches—making these things sound even worse than they were—and about Mrs. Cryderman’s long-distance conversations with her friends. Her friends’ names were Bunt, Pookie, Pug, and Spitty, so you could not tell if they were men or women. Her own name, among them, was Jelly. After she finished talking to them on the phone, she told me about money they had lost or accidents they had had or practical jokes they had played, or very complicated and unusual romances they were having.
    Aunt Ena noticed that I was not getting much ironing done. I said that it was not my fault—Mrs. Cryderman kept me in the living room, talking. Aunt Ena said there was nothing to stop me setting up the ironing board in the living room if Mrs. Cryderman insisted on conversation.
    “Let her talk,” Aunt Ena said. “You iron. That’s what you’re paid for.”
    “I don’t mind you ironing in here, but you’ll have to scram out the minute Mr. Cryderman gets home,” Mrs. Cryderman said. “He hates that—any kind of domestic stuff going on where he’s around.”
    She told me that Mr. Cryderman had been born and brought up in Brisbane, Australia, in a big house with banana trees all around, and that his mother had colored maids. I thought this sounded a little mixed up, as if Gone With the Wind had got into Australia, but I thought it might be true. She said that Mr. Cryderman had left Australia and become a journalist in Singapore, and then he was with the British Army in Burma when they were defeated by the Japanese. Mr. Cryderman had walked from Burma into India.
    “With a little