Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (24 page)

Dorothy was sitting in a straight-backed chair on the side porch, eating nuts. She had taken to buying nuts from the machine in the drugstore. She ate them from the white paper bag with the picture of a squirrel on it. At the age of seventy she had been forced to give up cigarettes, because of chest pains. The school board had never been able to get her to do that. A one-time petition, signed by parents, had failed. Gordie Lomax—dead now himself—brought her the petition which had been sent first to the school board. She looked over it critically as if it had been a spelling test. “Tell them it's my only vice,” she said firmly, and Gordie went back and told them.

“She says it's her only vice.”

Viola predicted that Dorothy would get fat, switching to nuts, but nothing could make Dorothy fat and never had. Viola was put out because she could not do the same, could not eat nuts and apples. Viola had a plate.

Dorothy was by herself at present. Viola had gone to the cemetery, taking Jeanette. Early in the morning, before breakfast, she had stripped the flower border of delphiniums, which were at their peak now, blooming in every shade of blue and purple. She wanted a bouquet for her husband's grave, one for Dorothy's husband's grave (she had taken him over, because Dorothy seldom went near the cemetery) and one for their parents'.

“I thought you might like to take a drive out to Last Lookout,” she said to Jeanette at breakfast. That was her
husband's name for it, his joke. Naturally Jeanette did not know what she was talking about. Viola had spoken confidentially, coquettishly. She could not help it. To the cashier at the grocery store, the mechanic at the garage, the teenager who mowed the lawn, she bent her silver, smoothly waved head in this mystifying way, she murmured deprecatingly some words that half the time they did not bother to pick up. Dorothy was embarrassed. To offset Viola's silliness she had to be more brusque and to the point than she might have been otherwise.

“She means the cemetery,” Dorothy said.

“Oh, I love the cemetery,” said Jeanette, with her tender, charming smile.

“What is there to love?” said Dorothy, looking down into her cup of black coffee as if it were a well.

“Well I love the view,” said Jeanette gamely. “And the old tombstones. I love reading the inscriptions on the old tombstones.”

“Dorothy thinks I'm morbid,” said Viola slyly.

“I don't think anything,” said Dorothy, and brightened up, remembering something. “Glass jars are prohibited in the cemetery.” She looked at the bouquets which Viola had put in preserving jars. “You'll have to take them out and put them in those plastic ice-cream things.”

“Prohibited?” Viola said. “Whyever is that?”

“Vandalism,” replied Dorothy with satisfaction. “I heard it on the radio.”

Jeanette was Dorothy's granddaughter. People here in town, seeing her with the two old ladies—and seeing her with Viola, who still drove her car, more frequently than with Dorothy—were not usually aware of this. They thought her some distant young relative. Though Dorothy had lived in and around this town all her life it was not well remembered that she had been left a widow with a young boy to raise, that his name had been Bobby, that he had gone to high school four years here, before he left to look for work
out west in the final years before the War. From the time she was widowed until the time of her retirement Dorothy had taught Grade Seven in the public school, and because of this people were apt to forget that she had had any life that might be called private. She had become a fixed star in many, many, shifting, changing, ongoing lives. Seeing her on the street, truck drivers, storekeepers, mothers pushing baby carriages—now, as a matter of fact, even grandmothers pushing baby carriages—would be reminded of maps, percentages, spelling bees, the serious but not oppressive, well-run, sensible, atmosphere of her class. She herself seldom thought of the classroom where she had spent most of her life, and could not have gone back to visit it if she had wanted to, because they had torn down the building five years ago and put up a new, low, unimpressive, pastel school; but as far as those people were concerned, she carried it around with her, forever, and they never looked at her for anything beyond that. The Mrs. in front of her name was as empty as a courtesy title.

Bobby, her son, had died before the War, killed in a car accident in the interior of British Columbia. He had found time to get married first and father a baby girl. That was Jeanette. Jeanette's mother, whom Dorothy had never met to this day, had moved to Vancouver and in a couple of years had married again and started in on what was to be a large family. When Jeanette was fourteen years old she had come east for the first time, on the train, to spend a month of the summer with her grandmother. For a few years after that she came every summer, Dorothy and the stepfather splitting the cost. Dorothy's correspondence was with the stepfather who explained that there was some natural friction between the girl and her mother and her mother's many children; it was a good thing to give them a holiday from each other. He seemed a sensible man. Now he was dead too. Jeanette seemed to see hardly anything nowadays of her mother and her step-family.

But she continued to visit Dorothy and, after Viola
had moved in, Dorothy and Viola. She had won scholarships which had taken her to college. She remained to get her M.A. Then her Ph.D. She stayed at college for good, teaching. She traveled. Her visits never lasted longer than a week, and sometimes only three or four days. She had friends to see, she had made arrangements. Dorothy supposed that she was bored.

When she first came to visit, as a young girl, Jeanette's hair had been short and brown. Later on it was blonde. One year she appeared with it puffed up in what looked like a heap of bubbles on top of her head. In those days she would color her eyelids blue up to the eyebrows, she wore sheath dresses in patterns of orange and purple, yellow and scarlet. Her stylish, provocative air, after her thoughtful drabness as a young girl, came as a surprise. But the way she looked now was even more surprising. She had led her hair grow long and wore it either in a single braid down her back or loose, pale, and frizzy. She wore jeans and a peasant blouse and a collection of beads and metal jewelry. Most of the time no shoes. She also wore little childish print dresses, short as playsuits which bared her back and revealed that she was wearing no brassiere. Not that there was any need. She was a thirtyish woman with the figure of an eleven-year-old child.

“Is she trying to be a hippie, do you think?” said Viola mildly. “They must think it funny when she's teaching.” Viola was a great one for the smile to the face and the knife in the back. It was her social life as a banker's wife that had trained her. She was getting at Dorothy, really, because Jeanette was Dorothy's granddaughter. Both Dorothy and Viola were well-enough satisfied with the arrangement of living together. It was economical and provided company, as well as help in case of accident or illness. They drew comfort from each other's presence in the way young quarrelsome children do, or long-married apparently uncongenial couples, the comfort being so inexplicable and largely unrecognized
that what showed on the surface—what they thought they felt—was mostly wariness, irritation, concern for strategy.

“That's the way the majority of them dress around the college nowadays,” Dorothy said.

“Teachers too?”

“It makes no difference.”

“I wonder will she ever get married?” remarked Viola, not at random.

Dorothy had seen pictures in magazines of this new type of adult who appeared to have discarded adulthood. Jeanette was the first one she had seen close up and in the flesh. It used to be that young boys and girls would try to look like grown men and women, often with ridiculous results. Now there were grown men and women who would try to look like teen-agers until, presumably, they woke up on the brink of old age. It was a strange thing to see the child already meeting the old woman in Jeanette's face. One moment she looked younger than she had done ten years ago, her face pale without make-up, her mouth wide and secretive. She looked fresh, clean, dreamy and self-absorbed. Then with a change of light or mood or body chemistry this same face showed itself bruised, bluish, sharp, skin more than a little shriveled under the eyes. A great deal had been simply skipped out.

From where Dorothy sat on the porch the street looked hotter and shabbier than it had looked any other summer. This was because the trees were gone. Last fall the men who worked for the municipality had come along and cut down all the elm trees, those tall, old, deeply shading trees whose branches used to darken and brush against the upstairs windows of many of the houses, and in October bury the lawns in leaves. The trees were all diseased, some already half-dead, and they had to be taken down before the winter storms made them dangerous. During the winter it was not obvious how much this had changed the street, since the
trees were not the main thing about the street then; the snowbanks were. But now Dorothy noticed a great difference. The overhanging trees had isolated the houses and made the yards seem bigger; they had kept the patched narrow pavement flowing with light and shade, like a river.

Jeanette had raised a lament at once.

“The trees!” she said, as soon as she stepped out of her little cream-colored foreign car. “The beautiful trees! Who cut them down?”

“The municipality,” Dorothy said.

“They would.”

“They had no choice,” said Dorothy, exchanging with her granddaughter a dry kiss, a token embrace. “It was Dutch elm disease.”

“The same thing that's happening everywhere,” Jeanette cut in on her, hardly listening. “It's all part of the same destruction. The whole country is turning into a junkyard.”

Dorothy could not agree. She could not speak for the country but this town was hardly turning into a junkyard. In fact the Kinsmen had recently drained and cleared a waste area by the river and turned it into a very nice park, something the town had been lacking in its entire hundred years. She understood that Dutch elm disease had wiped out all the elm trees in Europe during the last century and had been making headway across this continent for fifty years. God knows the scientists had worked hard enough looking for a cure. She felt compelled to point all this out. Jeanette smiled wanly, yes, but you don't know what's happening, it's everywhere, technology and progress are destroying the quality of life.

Well
, thought Dorothy; she had forgotten what a black view Jeanette always took and how it always annoyed her and drove her to defending things she supposed she knew nothing about and had no business defending. Quality of life. She did not think in those terms or talk to people who did. Jeanette was a problem to understand.

“She has that lovely car,” Viola had said, “and she has her education and her job and nobody to spend her money on but herself, and she has been all over—wouldn't it have seemed like a dream to you or me—and yet she isn't happy.” Viola of course thought that Jeanette was unhappy and embittered because she had failed to get some man to marry her. Dorothy did not think that, and she was not sure that embittered or even unhappy was the word to describe what Jeanette was. Adolescent was the word that came to her mind, but that did not explain enough.

Dorothy herself as a young girl—she remembered this clearly—had flung herself down in the grass beside the lane of the father's farm, howling and weeping, and why? Because her father and her brothers were replacing a fence, a crooked old mossy rail fence, with barbed wire! Of course no one paid any attention to her protests and in time she got up and washed her face and got used to the barbed wire. How she hated change, then, and clung to old things, old mossy rotten
picturesque things
. Now she had changed, herself. She saw what beauty was, all right; she acknowledged the dappling shadows on the grass, the gray sidewalk, but she saw that it was, in a way, something to get round. It did not matter greatly to her. Nor did familiarity. Those houses across the street had been across from her for forty years, and long before that, she supposed, they must have been casually familiar to her, for this town had been Town to her when she was a child, and she had often driven along this street with her family, coming in from the country, on the way to put the horse in the Methodist Church shed. But if those houses were all pulled down, their hedges and vines and vegetable plots and apple trees and whatnot obliterated, and a shopping center put up in their place, she would not turn her back. No, she would sit just as now, looking out, looking not emptily but with strong curiosity at the cars and pavement and flashing signs and flat-roofed stores and the immense, curved, dominating shape of the supermarket. Anything
would do for her to look at; beautiful or ugly had ceased to matter, because there was in everything something to be discovered. This was a feeling that had come on her as she got older, and it was not at all a peaceful, letting-go sort of feeling, such as old people were supposed to get; it was the very opposite, pinning her where she was in irritable, baffled concentration.

“You don't look as if you're thinking very pleasant thoughts,” Viola had more than once said to her. “Pleasant thoughts keep you young.”

“Is that so?” said Dorothy. “Well. I've been young.”

With the trees gone it was possible to see as far as the corner of Mayo and Harper Streets. Dorothy saw Blair King coming around the corner, walking home from work. He worked at the radio station, which was only a couple of blocks away. Like most of the people who worked at the radio station he was not a native of this town and in a few years would probably move on. He and his wife rented the house next to Dorothy's, but his wife was not there now. For several weeks she had been in the hospital.

Blair King paused to look at the out-of-province license plates on Jeanette's car.