Too Much Happiness

she had got an education.
    Another thing they said was that she could have stayed home and looked after him now, as promised in the marriage ceremony, instead of going out to teach. My mother again defended her, saying it was only two afternoons a week and she had to keep up her profession, seeing she would be on her own soon enough. And if she didn’t get out of the old lady’s way once in a while, wouldn’t you think she’d go crazy? My mother always defended women who were working on their own, and my grandmother always got after her for it.
    One day I tried a conversation with Young Mrs. Crozier, or Sylvia. She was the only college graduate I knew, let alone being a teacher. Except for her husband, of course, and he had stopped counting.
    “Did Toynbee write history books?”
    “Beg pardon? Oh. Yes.”
    None of us mattered to her, not me, or her critics or defenders. No more than bugs on a lampshade.
    What Old Mrs. Crozier cared about really was her flower garden. She had a man who came and helped her, someone about as old but more limber than she was. He lived on our street and in fact it was through him that she heard about me as a possible employee. At home he only gossiped and grew weeds, but here he plucked and mulched and fussed, while she followed him around, leaning on her stick and shaded by her big straw hat. Sometimes she sat on her bench, still commenting and giving orders, and smoking a cigarette. Early on, I dared to go between the perfect hedges to ask if she or her helper would like a glass of water, and she cried out, “Mind my borders,” before saying no.
    There were no flowers brought into the house. Some poppies had escaped and were growing wild beyond the hedge, almost on the road, so I asked if I could pick a bouquet to brighten the sickroom.
    “They’d only die,” she said, not seeming to realize that this remark had a double edge to it, in the circumstances.
    Certain suggestions, or notions, would make the muscles of her lean spotty face quiver, her eyes go sharp and black, and her mouth work as if there was a despicable taste in it. She could stop you in your tracks then, like a savage thornbush.
    The two days I worked were not consecutive. Let us say they were Tuesdays and Thursdays. The first day I was alone with the sick man and Old Mrs. Crozier. The second day somebody arrived whom I had not been told about. I heard the car in the driveway, and some brisk running up the back steps and a person entering the kitchen without knocking. Then somebody called “Dorothy,” which I had not known was Old Mrs. Crozier’s name. The voice was a woman’s or girl’s, and it was bold and teasing all at once, so that you could almost feel this person was tickling you.
    I ran down the back stairs saying, “I think she’s in the sunroom.”
    “Holy Toledo. Who are you?”
    I told her who I was and what I was doing there, and this young woman said her name was Roxanne.
    “I’m the masseuse.”
    I didn’t like being caught by a word I didn’t know. I didn’t say anything but she saw how things were.
    “Got you stumped, eh? I give massages. You ever heard of that?”
    Now she was unpacking the bag she had with her. Various pads and cloths and flat velour-covered brushes appeared.
    “I’ll need some hot water to warm these up,” she said. “You can heat me some in the kettle.”
    This was a grand house, but there was only cold water on tap, as in my house.
    She had sized me up, apparently, as somebody who was willing to take orders-especially, perhaps, orders given in such a coaxing voice. And she was right, though maybe she didn’t guess that my willingness had more to do with my own curiosity than her charm.
    She was tanned this early in the summer, and her pageboy hair had a copper sheen-something you could get easily nowadays from a bottle, but that was unusual and enviable then. Brown eyes, a dimple in one cheek, such smiling and teasing that you never got a good-enough look at her to say whether she was really pretty, or how old she was.
    Her rump curved out handsomely to the back instead of spreading to the sides.
    I learned right away that she was new in town, married to the mechanic at the Esso station, and that she had two little boys, one four years old and one three. “It took me a while to find out what was causing them,” she said with one of her conspiratorial twinkles.
    She had trained to be a masseuse in Hamilton where they used to live and it turned out to