The View from Castle Rock

assertive style. I was so used to homemade clothes as to be quite unaware of this.
    After I had tried on the dress and was putting on my ordinary clothes again my grandmother called to us to come into the kitchen and have coffee. If she and Aunt Charlie had been by themselves they would have been drinking tea, but for my sake they had taken to buying Nescafe. It was Aunt Charlie who had started this, when my grandmother was in bed.
    Aunt Charlie told me that she would join us in a moment-she was pulling out some basting.
    While I was alone with my grandmother, I asked her how she had felt before her wedding.
    “This is too strong,” she said, referring to the Nescafe, and she got to her feet with the dutiful slight grunt that now accompanied any sudden movement. She put on the kettle for more hot water. I thought she wasn’t going to answer me, but she said, “I don’t remember feeling any way at all. I remember not eating, because I had to get my waist down to fit in that dress. So I expect I was feeling hungry.”
    “Didn’t you ever feel scared of-” I wanted to say
of living your life with that one person.
But before I could say anything more she answered briskly, “That business will sort itself out in time, never mind.”
    She thought I was talking about sex, the one matter on which I believed I was in no need of instruction or reassurance.
    And her tone suggested to me that perhaps there was something distasteful in my having brought the subject up and that she had no intention of providing any fuller answer.
    Aunt Charlie’s joining us as she did at that moment would have made further comment unlikely anyway.

    “I am still concerned about the sleeves,” Aunt Charlie said. “I’m wondering should I shorten them a quarter of an inch?”
    After she had her coffee she went back and did so, basting just one sleeve to see how it would look. She called me to come and try the dress on again and when I had done so she surprised me, looking intently into my face instead of at my arm. She had something in her fist, that she was wanting to give to me. I put out my hand and she whispered, “Here.”
    Four fifty-dollar bills.
    “If you change your mind,” she said, still in a shaky urgent whisper. “If you don’t want to get married, you’ll need some money to get away.”
    When she’d said
change your mind,
I had thought she was teasing me, but when she got to
you
’
ll need some money,
I knew she was in earnest. I stood transfixed in my velvet dress, with an ache in my temples, as if I had got a mouthful of something far too cold or too sweet.
    Aunt Charlie’s eyes had gone pale with alarm at what she’d just said. And at what she still had to say, with more emphasis, though her lips were trembling.
    “It might not be just the right ticket for you.”
    I had never heard her use the word
ticket
in that way before-it seemed as if she was trying to speak the way a younger woman would. The way she thought I would, but not to her.
    We could hear my grandmother’s heavy oxfords in the hall.
    I shook my head and slipped the money under a piece of the wedding cloth lying on the sewing machine. It didn’t even look real to me-I wasn’t used to the sight of fifty-dollar bills.
    I couldn’t let a soul see into me, let alone a person as simple as Aunt Charlie.

    The ache and the clarity in the room and within my temples receded. The moment of danger passed like an attack of hiccoughs.
    “Well then,” Aunt Charlie said in a cheering-up sort of voice, hastily clutching at the sleeve. “Maybe they’d look better just the way they were.”
    That was for my grandmother’s ears. For mine, a broken whisper.
    “Then you must be-you must promise-
you must be a good wife.
”
    “Naturally,” I said, as if there was no need to whisper. And my grandmother, coming into the room, put a hand on my arm.
    “Get her out of that dress before she ruins it,” she said. “She’s all broke out in a sweat.”

Home
    I come home as I have done several times in the past year, travelling on three buses. The first bus is large, air-conditioned, fast, and comfortable. People on it pay little attention to each other. They look out at the highway traffic, which the bus negotiates with superior ease. We travel west then north from the city, and after fifty miles or so reach a large, prosperous market-and-manufacturing town. Here with those passengers who are going in my direction, I switch to a smaller bus. It is already