Who Do You Think You Are

worked thirty or forty miles away, in factories, in the Provincial Mental Hospital, or they didn’t work at all, they lived a mysterious life on the borders of criminality or a life of orderly craziness in the shade of the Holiness Center. People’s lives were surely more desperate than they used to be, and what could be more desperate than a woman of Rose’s age, sitting up all night in her dark kitchen waiting for her lover? And this was a situation she had created, she had done it all herself, it seemed she never learned any lessons at all. She had turned Simon into the peg on which her hopes were hung and she could never manage now to turn him back into himself.
    The mistake was in buying the wine, she thought, and the sheets and the cheese and the cherries. Preparations court disaster. She hadn’t realized that till she opened the door and the commotion of her heart turned from merriment to dismay, like the sound of a tower full of bells turned comically (but not for Rose) into a rusty foghorn.
    Hour after hour in the dark and the rain she foresaw what could happen. She could wait through the weekend, fortifying herself with excuses and sickening with doubt, never leaving the house in case the phone might ring. Back at work on Monday, dazed but slightly comforted by the real world, she would get up the courage to write him a note, in care of the classics department.
    “I was thinking we might plant the garden next weekend. I have bought a great array of seeds (a lie, but she would buy them, if she heard from him). Do let me know if you’re coming, but don’t worry if you’ve made other plans.”
    Then she would worry: did it sound too off-hand, with that mention of other plans? Wouldn’t it be too pushy, if she hadn’t tacked that on? All her confidence, her lightness of heart, would have leaked away, but she would try to counterfeit it.
    “If it’s too wet to work in the garden we could always go for a drive. Maybe we could shoot some groundhogs. Best, Rose.”
    Then a further time of waiting, for which the weekend would have been only a casual trial run, a haphazard introduction to the serious, commonplace, miserable ritual. Putting her hand into the mailbox and drawing the mail out without looking at it, refusing to leave the college until five o’clock, putting a cushion against the telephone to block her view of it; pretending inattention. Watch-pot thinking. Sitting up late at night, drinking, never getting quite sick enough of this foolishness to give up on it because the waiting would be interspersed with such green and springlike reveries, such convincing arguments as to his intentions. These would be enough, at some point, to make her decide that he must have been taken ill, he would never have deserted her otherwise. She would phone the Kingston Hospital, ask about his condition, be told that he was not a patient. After that would come the day she went into the college library, picked up back copies of the Kingston paper, searched the obituaries to discover if he had by any chance dropped dead. Then, giving in utterly, cold and shaking, she would call him at the University. The girl in his office would say he was gone. Gone to Europe, gone to California; he had only been teaching there for a single term. Gone on a camping trip, gone to get married.
    Or she might say, “Just a minute, please,” and turn Rose over to him, just like that.
    “Yes?”
    “Simon?”
    “Yes.”
    “It’s Rose.”
    “Rose?” It wouldn’t be as drastic as that. It would be worse.
    “I’ve been meaning to call you,” he would say, or, “Rose, how are you?” or even, “How is that garden?”
    Better lose him now. But going by the phone she put her hand on it, to see if it was warm, maybe, or to encourage it.
    Before it began to get light Monday morning she packed what she thought she would need into the back of the car, and locked the house, with the Camembert still weeping on the kitchen counter; she drove off in a westerly direction. She meant to be gone a couple of days, until she came to her senses and could face the sheets and the patch of readied earth and the place behind the bed where she had put her hand to feel the draft. (Why did she bring her boots and her winter coat, if this was the case?) She wrote a letter to the college— she could lie beautifully in letters, though not on the phone—in which she said that she had been called to Toronto by the terminal illness of a dear friend.