Too Much Happiness

should not be hurried. She told Doree that she was doing fine, that she was gradually discovering her own strength.
    “I know those words have been done to death,” she said. “But they’re still true.”
    She blushed at what she heard herself say-“death”-but did not make it worse by apologizing.
    When Doree was sixteen-that was seven years ago-she’d gone to visit her mother in the hospital every day after school. Her mother was recovering from an operation on her back, which was said to be serious but not dangerous. Lloyd was an orderly. He and Doree’s mother had in common the fact that they both were old hippies-though Lloyd was actually a few years the younger-and whenever he had time he’d come in and chat with her about the concerts and protest marches they’d both attended, the outrageous people they’d known, drug trips that had knocked them out, that sort of thing.
    Lloyd was popular with the patients because of his jokes and his sure, strong touch. He was stocky and broad shouldered and authoritative enough to be sometimes taken for a doctor. (Not that he was pleased by that-he held the opinion that a lot of medicine was a fraud and a lot of doctors were jerks.) He had sensitive reddish skin and light hair and bold eyes.
    He kissed Doree in the elevator and told her she was a flower in the desert. Then he laughed at himself and said, “How original can you get?”
    “You’re a poet and don’t know it,” she said, to be kind.
    One night her mother died suddenly, of an embolism. Doree’s mother had a lot of women friends who would have taken Doree in-and she stayed with one of them for a time-but the new friend Lloyd was the one Doree preferred. By her next birthday she was pregnant, then married. Lloyd had never been married before, though he had at least two children whose whereabouts he was not certain of. They would have been grown up by then, anyway. His philosophy of life had changed as he got older-he believed now in marriage, constancy, and no birth control. And he found the Sechelt Peninsula, where he and Doree lived, too full of people these days-old friends, old ways of life, old lovers. Soon he and Doree moved across the country to a town they picked from a name on the map: Mildmay. They didn’t live in town; they rented a place in the country. Lloyd got a job in an ice-cream factory. They planted a garden. Lloyd knew a lot about gardening, just as he did about house carpentry, managing a woodstove, and keeping an old car running.
    Sasha was born.

· · ·

    “Perfectly natural,” Mrs. Sands said.
    Doree said, “Is it?”
    Doree always sat on a straight-backed chair in front of a desk, not on the sofa, which had a flowery pattern and cushions. Mrs. Sands moved her own chair to the side of the desk, so they could talk without any kind of barrier between them.
    “I’ve sort’ve been expecting you would,” she said. “I think it’s what I might have done in your place.”
    Mrs. Sands would not have said that in the beginning. A year ago, even, she’d have been more cautious, knowing how Doree would have revolted, then, at the idea that anybody, any living soul, could be in her place. Now she knew that Doree would just take it as a way, even a humble way, of trying to understand.
    Mrs. Sands was not like some of them. She was not brisk, not thin, not pretty. Not too old either. She was about the age that Doree’s mother would have been, though she did not look as if she’d ever been a hippie. Her graying hair was cut short and she had a mole riding on one cheekbone. She wore flat shoes and loose pants and flowered tops. Even when they were of a raspberry or turquoise color these tops did not make her look as if she really cared what she put on-it was more as if somebody had told her she needed to smarten herself up and she had obediently gone shopping for something she thought might do that. Her large, kind, impersonal sobriety drained all assaulting cheerfulness, all insult, out of those clothes.
    “Well the first two times I never saw him,” Doree said. “He wouldn’t come out.”
    “But this time he did? He did come out?”
    “Yes, he did. But I wouldn’t hardly have known him.”
    “He’d aged?”
    “I guess so. I guess he’s lost some weight. And those clothes. Uniforms. I never saw him in anything like that.”
    “He looked to you like a different person?”
    “No.” Doree caught at her upper lip, trying to think what the difference was. He’d