Too Much Happiness

gone to work and try to be back before she got home. She worked as a receptionist and bookkeeper for one of the dentists in town. It was a good job for her, because she enjoyed talking to people, and good for the dentist because she came from a large and loyal family who would never think of having their teeth tended to by anybody but the man who was her boss.
    These relatives of hers, the Boles and the Jetters and the Pooles, used to be around the house a lot, or else Lea wanted to be at one of their houses. It was a clan that didn’t always enjoy one another’s company but who made sure they got plenty of it. Twenty or thirty would be crammed into one place for Christmas or Thanksgiving, and they could manage a dozen on an ordinary Sunday-watching television, talking, cooking, and eating. Roy likes to watch television and he likes to talk and he likes to eat, but not any two at the same time and certainly not all three. So when they chose to gather in his house on a Sunday, he got into the habit of getting up and going out to the she’d and building up a fire of ironwood or applewood-either of those but particularly the apple has a sweet comforting smell. Right out in the open, on the shelf with the stains and oils, he always kept a bottle of rye. He had rye in the house as well, and he was not stingy about offering it to his company, but the drink he poured when he was alone in the she’d tasted better, just as the smoke smelled better when there was nobody around to say, Oh, isn’t that lovely? He never drank when he was working on the furniture, or going into the bush-just on these Sundays full of visitors.
    His going off on his own like that didn’t cause trouble. The relatives didn’t feel slighted-they had a limited interest in people like Roy who had just married into the family, and not even contributed any children to it, and who were not like themselves. They were large, expansive, talkative. He was short, compact, quiet. His wife was an easygoing woman generally and she liked Roy the way he was, so she didn’t reproach or apologize for him.
    They both felt that they meant more to each other, somehow, than couples who were overrun with children.
    Last winter Lea had been sick with almost steady flu and bronchitis. She thought that she was catching all the germs people brought into the dentist’s office. So she quit her job-she said that she was getting a bit tired of it anyway and she wanted more time to do things she had always wanted to do.
    But Roy never found out what those things were. Her strength had taken a slump that she could not recover from. And that seemed to bring about a profound change in her personality. Visitors made her nervous-her family more than anybody. She felt too tired for conversation. She didn’t want to go out. She kept up the house adequately, but she rested between chores so that simple routines took her all day. She lost most of her interest in television, though she would watch it when Roy turned it on, and she lost also her rounded, jolly figure, becoming thin and shapeless. The warmth, the glow-whatever had made her nice looking-were drained out of her face and her brown eyes.
    The doctor gave her some pills but she couldn’t tell whether they did her any good or not. One of her sisters took her to a practitioner of holistic medicine, and the consultation cost three hundred dollars. She could not tell if that did her any good either.
    Roy misses the wife he was used to, with her jokes and energy. He wants her back, but there’s nothing he can do, except be patient with this grave, listless woman who sometimes waves her hand in front of her face as if she is bothered by cobwebs or has got stuck in a nest of brambles. Questioned about her eyesight, however, she claims that it is fine.
    She no longer drives her car. She no longer says anything about Roy going to the bush.
    She may snap out of it, Diane says. (Diane is about the only person who still comes to the house.) Or she may not.
    That is pretty well what the doctor said, in a lot more careful words. He says that the pills he’s got her on will keep her from sinking too low. How low is too low, Roy thinks, and when can you tell?
    Sometimes he finds a bush that the sawmill people have logged out, leaving the tops on the ground. And sometimes he finds one where the forest management people have gone in and girdled the trees they think should come out because they are diseased or crooked or no good for