Too Much Happiness

nevertheless to have a special weight inside it, a destiny fulfilled and dragging it down. Though there was nothing special inside it at all, maybe just a car that didn’t belong there parked at the curb, showing that some relatives or a minister had come to sit with the bereaved family.
    One of the camp counsellors had lost her fiancé in the war and wore his watch-we believed it was his watch-pinned to her blouse. We would like to have felt for her a mournful interest and concern, but she was sharp voiced and bossy, and she even had an unpleasant name. Arva.
    The other backdrop of our lives, which was supposed to be emphasized at camp, was religion. But since the United Church of Canada was officially in charge there was not so much harping on that subject as there would have been with the Baptists or the Bible Christians, or so much formal acknowledgment as the Roman Catholics or even the Anglicans would have provided. Most of us had parents who belonged to the United Church (though some of the girls who were having their way paid for them might not have belonged to any church at all), and being used to its hearty secular style, we did not even realize that we were getting off easy with just evening prayers and grace sung at meals and the half-hour special talk-it was called a Chat-after breakfast. Even the Chat was relatively free of references to God or Jesus and was more about honesty and loving-kindness and clean thoughts in our daily lives, and promising never to drink or smoke when we grew up. Nobody had any objection to this sort of thing or tried to get out of attending, because it was what we were used to and because it was pleasant to sit on the beach in the warming sun and a little too cold yet for us to long to jump into the water.
    Grown-up women do the same sort of thing that Charlene and I did. Not counting the moles on each other’s backs and comparing toe lengths, maybe. But when they meet and feel a particular sympathy with each other they also feel a need to set out the important information, the big events whether public or secret, and then go ahead to fill in all the blanks between. If they feel this warmth and eagerness it is quite impossible for them to bore each other. They will laugh at the very triviality and silliness of what they’re telling, or at the revelation of some appalling selfishness, deception, meanness, sheer badness.
    There has to be great trust, of course, but that trust can be established at once, in an instant.
    I’ve observed this. It’s supposed to have begun in those long periods of sitting around the campfire stirring the manioc porridge or whatever while the men were out in the bush deprived of conversation because it would warn off the wild animals. (I am an anthropologist by training though a rather slack one.) I’ve observed but never taken part in these female exchanges. Not truly. Sometimes I’ve pretended because it seemed to be required, but the woman I was supposed to be making friends with always got wind of my pretense and became confused and cautious.
    As a rule, I’ve felt less wary with men. They don’t expect such transactions and are seldom really interested.
    This intimacy I’m talking about-with women-is not erotic, or pre-erotic. I’ve experienced that as well, before puberty. Then too there would be confidences, probably lies, maybe leading to games. A certain hot temporary excitement, with or without genital teasing. Followed by ill feeling, denial, disgust.
    Charlene did tell me about her brother, but with true repugnance. This was the brother now in the Navy. She went into his room looking for her cat and there he was doing it to his girlfriend. They never knew she saw them.
    She said they slapped as he went up and down.
    You mean they slapped on the bed, I said.
    No, she said. It was his thing slapped when it was going in and out. It was gross. Sickening.
    And his bare white bum had pimples on it. Sickening.
    I told her about Verna.
    Up until the time I was seven years old my parents had lived in what was called a double house. The word “duplex” was perhaps not in use at that time, and anyway the house was not evenly divided. Verna’s grandmother rented the rooms at the back and we rented the rooms at the front. The house was tall and bare and ugly, painted yellow. The town we lived in was too small to have residential divisions that amounted to anything, but I suppose that as far as there were divisions, that house was right on