Too Much Happiness

hand, Nancy was never forbidden to spoon vegetable soup, thick as pudding, out of the can, or to grab handfuls of Rice Krispies straight from the box.
    Was Sharon Suttles my father’s mistress? Her job provided for her, and the pink cottage rent free?
    My mother spoke of her kindly, not infrequently mentioning the tragedy that had befallen her, with the death of the young husband. Whatever maid we had at the time would be sent over with presents of raspberries or new potatoes or shelled fresh peas from our garden. I remember the peas particularly. I remember Sharon Suttles-still lying on the couch-flipping them into the air with her forefinger, saying, “What am I supposed to do with these?”
    “You cook them on the stove with water,” I said helpfully.
    “No kidding?”
    As for my father, I never saw him with her. He left for work rather late and knocked off early, to keep up with his various sporting activities. There were weekends when Sharon caught the train to Toronto, but she always had Nancy with her. And Nancy would come back full of the adventures she had had and the spectacles she had seen, such as the Santa Claus Parade.
    There were certainly times when Nancy’s mother was not at home, not in her kimono on the couch, and it could be presumed that at those times she was not smoking or relaxing but doing regular work in my father’s office, that legendary place that I had never seen and where I would certainly not be welcome.
    At such times-when Nancy’s mother had to be at work and Nancy had to be at home-a grouchy person named Mrs. Codd sat listening to radio soap operas, ready to chase us out of the kitchen where she herself was eating anything on hand. It never occurred to me that since we usually spent all our time together, my mother could have offered to keep an eye on Nancy as well as me, or ask our maid to do so, to save the hiring of Mrs. Codd.
    It does seem to me now that we played together all our waking hours. This would be from the time I was about five years old until I was around eight and a half, Nancy being half a year younger. We played mostly outdoors-those must have been rainy days, because of my memory of us in Nancy’s cottage annoying Nancy’s mother. We had to keep out of the vegetable garden and try not to knock down the flowers, but we were constantly in and out of the berry patches and under the apple trees and in the absolutely wild trashy area beyond the cottage, which was where we constructed our air-raid shelters and hideouts from the Germans.
    There was actually a training base to the north of our town, and real planes were constantly flying over us. Once there was a crash, but to our disappointment the plane that was out of control went into the lake. And because of all this reference to the war we were able to make of Pete not just a local enemy but a Nazi, and of his lawn mower a tank. Sometimes we lobbed apples at him from the crab-apple tree that sheltered our bivouac. Once he complained to my mother and it cost us a trip to the beach.
    She often took Nancy along on trips to the beach. Not to the one with the water slide, just down the cliff from our house, but to a smaller one you had to drive to, where there were no rowdy swimmers. In fact she taught us both to swim. Nancy was more fearless and reckless than I was, which annoyed me, so once I pulled her under an incoming wave and sat on her head. She kicked and held her breath and fought her way free.
    “Nancy is a little girl,” my mother scolded. “She is a little girl and you should treat her like a little sister.”
    Which was exactly what I was doing. I did not think of her as weaker than me. Smaller, yes, but sometimes that was an advantage. When we climbed trees she could hang like a monkey from branches that would not support me. And once in a fight-I can’t recall what any of our fights were about-she bit me on my restraining arm and drew blood. That time we were separated, supposedly for a week, but our glowering from windows soon turned to longing and pleading, so the ban was lifted.
    In winter we were allowed the whole property, where we built snow forts furnished with sticks of firewood and provided with arsenals of snowballs to fling at anyone who came along. Which few did, this being a dead-end street. We had to make a snowman, so that we could pummel him.
    If a major storm kept us inside, at my house, my mother presided. We had to be kept quiet if my father was home in bed with a