Too Much Happiness

as Croziers’ Hill she said, “I don’t think he wanted to be mean and frighten them. You know when you’re sick, sick for a long time, you can get not to appreciate other people’s feelings. You can get turned against people even when they’re so good and doing what they can to help you. Mrs. Crozier and Mrs. Hoy were certainly trying their best, but Mr. Crozier just didn’t feel that he wanted them around anymore. He’d just had enough of them. You understand?”
    She did not seem to know she was smiling when she said this.
    Mrs. Hoy.
    Had I ever heard that name before?
    And spoken so gently and respectfully, yet with light-years’ condescension.
    Did I believe what Sylvia had said?
    I believed it was what he had told her.
    I did see Roxanne again that day. I saw her at the very time that Sylvia was talking to me and introducing to me this new name. Mrs. Hoy.
    She-Roxanne-was in her car and she had stopped at the first cross street at the bottom of Croziers’ Hill to watch us drive by. I didn’t turn to look at her because it was all too confusing, with Sylvia talking to me.
    Of course Sylvia would not know whose car that was. She wouldn’t know that Roxanne must have come back to get an idea of what was going on. Or that maybe she had kept driving around the block-could she have done that?-all the time since she had left the Croziers’ house.
    Roxanne would recognize Sylvia’s car, probably. She would notice me. She would know that things must be all right, from the kindly, serious, faintly smiling way that Sylvia was talking to me.
    She didn’t turn the corner and drive back up the hill to the Croziers’ house. Oh no. She drove across the street-I watched in the rearview mirror-towards the east part of town where the wartime houses had been put up. That was where she lived.
    “Feel the breeze,” said Sylvia. “Maybe those clouds are going to bring us rain.”
    The clouds were high and white, glaring; they looked nothing like rain clouds; and the breeze was because we were in a moving car with the windows rolled down.

· · ·

    I understood pretty well the winning and losing that had taken place, between Sylvia and Roxanne, but it was strange to think of the almost obliterated prize, Mr. Crozier-and to think that he could have had the will to make a decision, even to deprive himself, so late in his life. The carnality at death’s door-or the true love, for that matter-were things I had to shake off with shivers down my spine.
    Sylvia took Mr. Crozier away to a rented cottage on the lake, where he died sometime before the leaves were off.
    The Hoy family moved on, as mechanics’ families often did.
    My mother struggled with a crippling disease, which put an end to all her moneymaking dreams.
    Dorothy Crozier had a stroke, but recovered, and famously bought Halloween candy for the children whose older brothers and sisters she had ordered from her door.
    I grew up, and old.

Child’s Play
    I suppose there was talk in our house, afterwards.
    How sad, how
awful
. (My mother.)
    There should have been supervision. Where were the counsellors? (My father.)
    It is possible that if we ever passed the yellow house my mother said, “Remember? Remember you used to be so scared of her? The poor thing.”
    My mother had a habit of hanging on to-even treasuring-the foibles of my distant infantile state.
    Every year, when you’re a child, you become a different person. Generally it’s in the fall, when you reenter school, take your place in a higher grade, leave behind the muddle and lethargy of the summer vacation. That’s when you register the change most sharply. Afterwards you are not sure of the month or year but the changes go on, just the same. For a long while the past drops away from you easily and it would seem automatically, properly. Its scenes don’t vanish so much as become irrelevant. And then there’s a switchback, what’s been all over and done with sprouting up fresh, wanting attention, even wanting you to do something about it, though it’s plain there is not on this earth a thing to be done.
    Marlene and Charlene. People thought we must be twins. There was a fashion in those days for naming twins in rhyme. Bonnie and Connie. Ronald and Donald. And then of course we-Charlene and I-had matching hats. Coolie hats, they were called, wide shallow cones of woven straw with some sort of tie or elastic under the chin. They became familiar later on in the century, from television shots of