The View from Castle Rock

also been a worry of mine, at least intermittently. What was wrong with me? It wasn’t a matter of looks. Something else. Something else, clear as a warning bell, scattered the possible boyfriends and potential husbands out of my path. I did have faith, though, that whatever it was would die down, once I got away from home, and from this town.
    And that had happened. Suddenly, overwhelmingly. Michael had fallen in love with me and was set on marrying me. A tall, good-looking, strong, black-haired, intelligent, ambitious young man had pinned his hopes on me. He had bought me a diamond ring. He had found a job in Vancouver that was certain to lead to better things, and had bound himself to support me and our children, for the rest of his life. Nothing would make him happier.
    He said so, and I believed it was true.
    Most of the time I could hardly credit my luck. He wrote that he loved me, and I wrote back that I loved him. I thought about how handsome he was, and smart and trustworthy. Just before he left we had slept together-no, had sex together, on the bumpy ground under a willow tree by a river’s edge-and we believed that this was as serious as a marriage ceremony, because we could not possibly, now, do the same thing with anybody else.

    This was the first fall since I was five years old in which I was not spending my weekdays at school. I stayed at home and did housework. I was very much needed there. My mother was no longer able to grasp the handle of a broom or pull the covers up on a bed. There would have to be somebody found to help, after I went away, but for now I took it all on myself.
    The routine enveloped me, and soon it was hard to believe that a year ago I had sat at a library table on Monday mornings, instead of getting up early to heat water on the stove to fill the washing machine and later on feeding the wet clothes through the wringer and finally hanging them on the line. Or that I had eaten my supper at drugstore counters, a sandwich prepared by somebody else.
    I waxed the worn linoleum. I ironed the dishtowels and pyjamas as well as the shirts and blouses, I scoured the battered pots and pans and took steel wool to the blackened metal shelves behind the stove. These were the things that counted then, in the homes of the poor. Nobody thought of replacing what was there, just of keeping everything decent, for as long as possible, and then some. Such efforts kept a line in place, between respectable striving and raggedy defeat. And 1 cared the more for this the closer I came to being a deserter.
    Reports of housekeeping found their way into letters to Michael and he was irritated. During the brief visit he had made to my home he had seen much that surprised him in an unpleasant way and that made him all the more resolute about rescuing me. And now because 1 had nothing else to write about and because 1 wanted to explain why my letters had to be short, he was forced to read about how I was immersing myself in daily chores in the very place, the very life, that I ought to be hastening to leave.
    To his way of thinking, 1 ought to be longing to scrape the home-dirt off my shoes. Concentrating on the life, the home, that we would make together.
    1 did take a couple of hours off some afternoons, but what I did then, if I had written about it, would not have satisfied him much better. 1 would tuck my mother in for her second nap of the day and give the kitchen counters their final wipe and walk from our house on the far edge of town to the main street, where I did a bit of shopping and went to the library to return one book and take out another. 1 had not given up reading, though it seemed that the books 1 read now were not so harsh or demanding as the books I had been reading a year before. 1 read the short stories of A. E. Coppard-one of them had a title I found permanently seductive, though I can’t remember anything else about it. “Dusky Ruth.” And I read a short novel by John Galsworthy, which had a line on the title page that beguiled me.
    The apple tree, the singing and the gold…
    My business on the main street finished, I went to visit my grandmother and Aunt Charlie. Sometimes-most times-I would rather have walked around alone, but I felt I could not neglect them, when they were doing so much to help me. I could not walk around here in a reverie, anyway, as I could have done in the city where I went to college. In those days nobody in town went for walks, except for some proprietary