The View from Castle Rock

was the cheapest fuel you could buy. But when it was first loaded into the hopper it created clouds of very fine dust which settled everywhere, even on the bedclothes. And however you tried not to, you couldn’t help tracking it into the house on your shoes. It had taken a lot of sweeping and shaking to get rid of it.
    “So I gathered,” he said-though I hadn’t yet written him anything about the sawdust problem. “Why are you doing all the work? Why don’t they get a housekeeper? Won’t they have to once you’re gone?”
    “Fine,” I said. “I hope you like my dress. I told you Aunt Charlie was making my wedding dress?”
    “Can you not talk?”
    “Not really.”
    “Well okay. Just write me.”
    “I will. Today.”
    “I’m painting the kitchen.”
    He had been living in an attic room with a hot plate, but had recently found a one-bedroom apartment where we could begin our life together.
    “Aren’t you even interested what color? I’ll tell you anyway.

    Yellow with white woodwork. White cupboards. To get as much light in it as I can.”
    “That sounds really nice,” I said.
    When I hung up the phone my father said, “Not a lovers’ spat, I trust?” He spoke in an affected, teasing way just to break the silence in the room. Nevertheless I was embarrassed.
    Again, a silence.
    I knew what they thought about Michael. They thought he was too brightly smiling, too nicely shaved and shiny-shoed, too well brought up and heartily polite. Unlikely to have ever mucked out a stable or mended a fence. They had a habit of poor people-perhaps especially of poor people burdened with more intelligence than their status gets them credit for-a habit or necessity of turning their betters, or those whom they suspect of thinking themselves their betters, into such caricatures.
    My mother was not like that. She approved of Michael. And he was polite to her, though uneasy around her, because of her thickened desperate speech and shaky limbs and the way her eyes might go out of control and roll upwards. He wasn’t used to sick people. Or poor people. But he had done his best, during a visit that must have seemed to him appalling, a dreary captivity.
    From which he longed to rescue me.
    These people at the table-except my mother-thought me to some extent a traitor for not staying where I belonged, in this life. Though they really didn’t want me to, either. They were relieved that someone would want me. Maybe sorry or a little ashamed that it was not one of the boys around home, yet understanding how that couldn’t be and this would be better for me, all round. They wanted to tease me sharply about Michael (they would have said it was only teasing), but on the whole, they were of the opinion that I should hang on to him.

    I meant to hang on to him. I wished they could understand that he did have a sense of humor, he wasn’t as pompous as they thought, and that he was not afraid of work. Just as I wanted him to understand that my life here was not so sad or squalid as it seemed to him.
    I meant to hang on to him and to my family as well. I thought that I would be bound up with them always, as long as I lived, and that he could not shame or argue me away from them.
    And I thought I loved him. Love and marriage. That was a lighted and agreeable room you went into, where you were safe. The lovers I had imagined, the bold-plumed predators, had not appeared, perhaps did not exist, and I could hardly think myself a match for them anyway.
    He deserved better than me, Michael did. He deserved a whole heart.

    That afternoon, I went into town, as usual. The trunks were nearly full. My grandmother, free now of her phlebitis, was just finishing the embroidery on a pillow slip, one of a pair that she meant to add to my collection. Aunt Charlie was now devoting herself to my wedding dress. She had set up the sewing machine in the front half of the living room, which was divided by sliding oak doors from the back half where the trunks were. Dressmaking was the thing she knew about-my grandmother could never equal or interfere with her there.
    I was to be married in a knee-length dress of burgundy velvet, with a gathered skirt and tight waist and what was called a sweetheart neckline, and puffed sleeves. I realize now that it looked homemade-not because of any fault in Aunt Charlie’s dressmaking but just because of the pattern, which was quite flattering in its way, but had an artlessness about it, a soft droop, a lack of