The Progress of Love

she had to offer. But there was moreto it than that. Her puffy eyes, her stricken looks satisfied something in me. I felt the better for wounding her. No doubt about it. I got back a little of whatever I had lost in the Crydermans’ summerhouse.
    A few years after this—not a long time to me now, but a long time then—I was walking down the main street of that town where I had gone to high school. I was a graduate student by then. I had won scholarships and no longer mispronounced Dostoyevsky. Aunt Ena was dead. She sat down and died, just after waxing a floor. Floris was married. It seemed that she had been courted for years, in secret, by the druggist who had the shop next door to the shoe store, but Aunt Ena objected to him: he drank (that is, he drank a little), and was a Catholic. Floris had two baby boys, one right after the other, and she put an auburn rinse on her hair and drank beer with her husband in the evenings. George lived with them. He drank beer, too, and helped look after the babies. Floris was not shy or irritable anymore. She wanted to be friends now; she gave me flowered scarves and costume jewellery which I could not wear, and lotions and lipstick from the drugstore that I was glad of. She asked me to come and visit whenever I liked. Sometimes I did, and the hectic domesticity, the baby-centered chores and pleasures, soon drove me out to walk.
    I was walking down the main street and I heard a rap on a window. It was the window of the insurance agent’s office, and the person rapping was MaryBeth, who worked there. During her last year in high school, she had taken the typing and bookkeeping course. She lived with Beatrice and Beatrice’s husband, who soon had a barbershop of his own. She didn’t try to be friends with me during that year. We would cross the street or look into a store window when we saw each other coming—though that was from awkwardness more than real enmity. Then she got the job in the insurance agent’s office.
    The Crydermans were gone before that. They shut up the house and went away to Toronto before the baby was born. It was a boy—quite normal, as far as anybody knew. Aunt Ena was disgusted with them for not closing the house down properly. She said there wouldbe rats in it. But they sold it. They sold the newspaper They were completely gone.
    MaryBeth motioned for me to come inside.
    “It’s been ages since I saw you,” she said, as if we had parted most amicably. She plugged the electric kettle in, to make us instant coffee. The insurance agent was out.
    She was fatter than she used to be, but still pretty, with her look of a bruised nestling. Dressed as nicely as ever, a flattering soft blue sweater, brushed wool over the tender breasts. She kept chocolates in a desk drawer and jam tarts in a tin. She offered me marzipan fruit wrapped in foil. She asked me if I was still going to school and what courses I was taking. I told her a little bit about my studies and ambitions.
    “That’s wonderful,” she said, without malice. “I always knew you were smart.” Then she said she had been sorry to hear about my Aunt Ena and she thought it was nice about Floris. She had heard that Floris’s little fellows were really cute.
    Beatrice had girls. They were cute, too, but rather spoiled.
    We both said how lucky it was that she had spotted me, and we vowed to get together sometime for a real visit—something I knew she did not intend any more than I did. She admired my angora scarf and tarn, asked if I had got them in the city.
    I said yes, and the only problem was they shed terribly.
    “Keep them in the fridge overnight,” she said. “I don’t know why, but it works.”
    I opened the door, and the wind blew in from the street.
    “Remember how crazy we used to be?” said MaryBeth, in a voice full of plaintive surprise. She had to turn this way and that, grabbing papers.
    I thought of Mr. Cryderman and all my lies, and my abysmal confusion in the summerhouse.
    “Those days will never come again,” said MaryBeth, flinging herself across the desk to hold things down.
    I laughed and said just as well, and quickly shut the door. I waved from outside.
    I felt such changes then—from fifteen to seventeen, from seventeento nineteen—that it didn’t occur to me how much I had been myself, all along. I saw MaryBeth shut in, with her treats and her typewriter, growing sweeter and fatter, and the Crydermans fixed, far away, in their everlasting negotiations, but