The Love of a Good Woman (29 page)

Then they got married. They went to a minister’s house; the minister’s son was a friend of Ted’s. Their parents didn’t know what they were going to do. And right after the ceremony Rosemary started her period and the first thing Ted had to do as a married man was go out and buy a box of Kotex.

“Does your mother know you tell me these things, Karin?”

“She wouldn’t mind. And then
her
mother had to go to bed when she found out, she felt so awful that they’d got married. If her parents had known she was going to marry an infidel they would have shut her up in this church school in Toronto.”

“Infidel?” said Ann. “Really? What a pity.”

Maybe she meant that it was a pity, after all this trouble, that the marriage hadn’t lasted.

K
ARIN
scrunched down in the seat. Her head bumped Rosemary’s shoulder.

“Does this bother you?” she said.

“No,” said Rosemary.

Karin said, “I’m not really going to sleep. I want to be awake when we turn up into the valley.”

Rosemary started to sing.

“Wake up, wake up, Darlin Cory—”

She sang in a slow, deep voice, imitating Pete Seeger on the record, and the next thing Karin knew the car had stopped; they had climbed the short, rutted bit of road to the trailer and were sitting under the trees outside it. The light was on over the door. No Derek inside, though. None of Derek’s stuff. Karin didn’t want to move. She squirmed and protested in delicious crankiness, as she could not have done if anybody except Rosemary had been there.

“Out, out,” Rosemary said. “You’ll be in bed in a minute, come on,” she said, tugging and laughing. “You think I can carry you?” When she had pulled Karin out, and got her stumbling towards the door, she said, “Look at the stars. Look at the stars. They’re wonderful.” Karin kept her head down, grumbling.

“Bed, bed,” said Rosemary. They were inside. A faint smell of Derek—marijuana, coffee beans, lumber. And the smell of the closed-up trailer, its carpets and cooking. Karin flopped fully dressed on her narrow bed, and Rosemary flung her last-year’s pajamas at her. “Get undressed or you’ll feel awful when you wake up,” she said. “We’ll get your suitcase in the morning.”

Karin made what seemed to her the greatest effort that could be required in her life, heaved herself to a sitting position, and dragged off her clothes, then pulled on her pajamas. Rosemary was going around opening windows. The last thing Karin heard her say was “That lipstick—what was the idea of that lipstick?” and the last thing she felt was a washcloth’s motherly, ungentle attack on her face. She spat its taste out, revelling in this childishness and in the cool field of the bed beneath her, and her greed for sleep.

•    •    •

T
HAT
was on Saturday night. Saturday night and early Sunday morning. On Monday morning Karin said, “Okay if I go up the road and visit Ann?” and Rosemary said, “Sure, go ahead.”

They had slept late on Sunday and had not left the trailer all day. Rosemary was dismayed that it was raining. “The stars were out last night, the stars were out when we got home,” she said. “Raining on the first day of your summer.” Karin had to tell her that it was okay, she felt so lazy she didn’t want to go out anyway. Rosemary made her cafe au lait and cut up a melon, which wasn’t quite ripe (Ann would have noticed, but Rosemary didn’t). Then at four o’clock in the afternoon they made a big meal of bacon and waffles and strawberries and fake whipped cream. The sun came out around six, but they were still in their pajamas; the day was destroyed. “At least we didn’t watch television,” Rosemary said. “We’ve got that to congratulate ourselves on.”

“Up till now,” said Karin, and switched it on.

They were sitting amid piles of old magazines that Rosemary had hauled out of the cupboard. These had been in the trailer when she moved in, and she said she was finally going to throw them out—after she had sorted through them to see if there was anything worth keeping. Not much sorting got done because she kept finding things to read aloud. Karin was bored at first but allowed herself to be drawn into this old time, with its quaint advertisements and unbecoming hairstyles.

She noticed the blanket folded and placed on top of the telephone. She said, “Don’t you know how to turn the phone off?”

Rosemary said, “I don’t really want it off. I want to hear it ring and not answer it. To be able to ignore it. I don’t want it too loud, is all.”

But it didn’t ring, all day.

Monday morning the blanket was still over the phone and the magazines were back in the closet, because Rosemary couldn’t
decide to throw them out after all. The sky was cloudy, but it wasn’t raining. They got up very late again because they had watched a movie till two in the morning.

Rosemary spread some typed pages out over the kitchen table. Not Derek’s manuscript—that big stack was gone. “Was Derek’s book really interesting?” Karin said.

She had never thought to talk to Rosemary about it before. The manuscript had been just like a big tangled roll of barbed wire that sat all the time on the table, with Derek and Rosemary trying to untangle it.

“Well, he kept changing it,” Rosemary said. “It was interesting but it was confused. First La Salle was all that interested him and then he got onto Pontiac and he wanted to cover too much and he was never satisfied.”

“So you’re glad that you’re rid of it,” said Karin.

“Enormously glad. It was just unending complications.”

“But don’t you miss Derek?”

“The friendship is played out,” said Rosemary in a preoccupied way, bending over a sheet of paper and making a mark on it.

“What about Ann?”

“That friendship, I guess it’s played out too. In fact I’ve been thinking.” She put her pen down. “I’ve been thinking of getting out of here. But I thought I’d wait for you. I didn’t want you to come back and find everything dislocated. But the reason for being here was Derek’s book. Well, it was Derek. You know that.”

Karin said, “Derek and Ann.”

“Derek and Ann. Yes. And now that reason is gone.”

That was when Karin said, “Okay if I go up the road and visit Ann?” And Rosemary said, “Sure, go ahead. We don’t have to make up our minds in a hurry, you know. It’s just an idea I had.”

•    •    •

K
ARIN
walked up the gravel road and wondered what was different. Aside from the clouds, which were never there in her memories of the valley. Then she knew. There were no cattle pasturing in the fields, and because of this the grass had grown up, the juniper bushes had spread out, you could no longer see the water in the creek.

The valley was long and narrow, with Ann and Derek’s white house at the far end of it. The valley floor was pasture that had been flat and tidy last year with the creek winding cleanly through it. (Ann had rented the land to a man who had Black Angus cattle.) The wooded ridges rose steeply on either side and closed in at the far end, behind the house. The trailer Rosemary rented had originally been put in place for Ann’s parents, who moved down there when the valley filled up with snow in the winter. They had wanted to be nearer to the store, which stood then at the corner of the township road. Now there was nothing but the cement platform with two holes in it where the gas tanks had been and an old bus with flags over the windows, where some hippies were living. They sometimes sat on the platform and waved back solemnly and elaborately to Rosemary as she drove past.

Derek said they had weed growing in the bushes. But he wouldn’t buy from them, not trusting their security.

Rosemary refused to smoke with Derek.

“I’m too turbulent around you,” she said. “I don’t think it would be good.”

“Suit yourself,” said Derek. “It might help.”

Neither would Ann smoke. She said she would feel silly. She had never smoked anything; she didn’t even know how to inhale.

They didn’t know that Derek had let Karin try once. She didn’t know how to inhale either, and he had to teach her. She tried too hard; she inhaled too deeply and had to fight to keep from throwing up. They were out in the barn, where Derek kept all the rock
samples he had collected up on the ridges. Derek tried to steady her by telling her to look at the rocks.

“Just look at them,” he said. “Look into them. See the colors. Don’t try too hard. Just look and wait.”

But what calmed her down eventually was the lettering on a cardboard box. There was a pile of cardboard boxes which Ann had packed things in when she and Derek had moved back here from Toronto, a couple of years ago. One of them had a silhouette of a toy battleship on the side, and the word D
READNOUGHT
. The first part of the word—D
READ
—was in red lettering. The letters shimmered as if written in neon tubing, and issued a command to Karin that had to do with more than the word’s meaning. She had to dismember it and find the words inside.

“What are you laughing at?” Derek said, and she told him what she was doing. The words came tumbling out miraculously.

Read. Red. Dead. Dare. Era. Ear. Are. Add. Adder. “Adder” was the best. It used up all the letters.

“Amazing,” said Derek. “Amazing Karin. Dread the Red Adder.”

He never had to tell her not to mention any of this to her mother or to Ann. When Rosemary kissed her that night she sniffed her hair and laughed and said, “God, the smell of it’s everywhere, Derek’s such a dedicated old pothead.”

This was one of the times when Rosemary was happy. They had been to Derek and Ann’s house to eat supper on the closed-in sun porch. Ann had said, “Come with me, Karin, see if you can help me get the mousse out of the mold.” Karin had followed her, but came back—pretending it was to get the mint sauce.

Rosemary and Derek were leaning across the table teasing each other, making kissing faces. They never saw her.

Maybe it was that same night, leaving, that Rosemary laughed at the two chairs set outside the back door. Two old dark-red
metal-tube chairs, with cushions. They faced west, towards the last remnants of the sunset.

“Those old chairs,” said Ann. “I know they’re a sight. They belonged to my parents.”

“They’re not even all that comfortable,” said Derek.

“No, no,” said Rosemary. “They’re beautiful, they’re you. I love them. They just say Derek and Ann. Derek and Ann. Derek and Ann watching the sunset at the end of the day’s labors.”

“If they can see it through the pea vines,” Derek said.

The next time Karin went out to pick vegetables for Ann, she noticed the chairs were gone. She didn’t ask Ann what had become of them.

A
NN’S
kitchen was in the basement of the house, just partly underground. You had to go down four steps. Karin did that, and pressed her face against the screen door. The kitchen was a dark room, with bushes growing against its high windows—Karin had never been there when the light was not on. But it wasn’t on now, and at first she thought the room was empty. Then she saw somebody sitting at the table, and it was Ann, but her head was a different shape. She had her back to the door.

She had cut her hair. It was cut short and fluffed out like any gray-haired matron’s. And she was doing something—her elbows moved. She was working in the dim light, but Karin couldn’t see what the work was.

She tried the trick of making Ann turn around by staring at the back of her head. But it didn’t work. She tried running her fingers lightly down the screen. Finally she made a noise.

“Woo-oo-ooo-woo.”

Ann got up and turned around so reluctantly that Karin had the swift unreasonable suspicion that she might have known who was
there all the time—might have seen Karin coming, in fact, and arranged herself in this guarded position.

“It’s me, it’s me. It’s your lost child,” said Karin.

“Why so it is,” said Ann, unhooking the door. She didn’t greet Karin by hugging her—but then she and Derek never did that.

She had got fatter—or the short hair made her look that way—and her face had red blotches on it, as if bugs had been biting her. Her eyes looked sore.

“Do your eyes hurt?” Karin said. “Is that why you’re working in the dark?”

Ann said, “Oh, I hadn’t noticed. I hadn’t noticed the light wasn’t on, I was just cleaning some silver and I thought I could see fine.” Then she seemed to make an effort to brighten up, speaking as if Karin was some much younger child. “Cleaning silver is such a boring job, it must have put me in a trance. What a good thing you came along to help me.”

As a temporary tactic, Karin became this much younger child. She sprawled in a chair beside the table and said boisterously, “So—where’s old Derek?” She was thinking that this strange behavior of Ann’s might mean that Derek had gone off on one of his expeditions over the ridges and not come back, leaving both Ann and Rosemary. Or that he was sick. Or depressed. Ann had once said, “Derek wasn’t depressed half so often once we left the city.” Karin had wondered if “depressed” was the right word. Derek seemed to her critical, and sometimes fed up. Was that depression?

“I’m sure he’s around somewhere,” Ann said.

“He and Rosemary had a big split-up, did you know that?”

“Oh yes, Karin. I knew that.”

“Do you feel sorry about it?”

Ann said, “This is a new way I’ve got of cleaning silver. I’ll show you. You just take a fork or spoon or whatever and you dip
it in this solution here in the basin and leave it just a moment and then you take it out and dip it in the rinse water and wipe it dry. See? It shines just as well as ever it did when I used to do all that rubbing and polishing. I think so. I think it’s just as good a shine. I’ll get us some fresh rinse water.”

Karin dipped a fork. She said, “Yesterday Rosemary and I did what we wanted all day. We never even got dressed. We made waffles and we read stuff in these old magazines. Old
Ladies’ Home Journals”

“Those were my mother’s,” said Ann with a slight stiffness.

“She’s lovely,” said Karin. “She’s engaged. She uses Pond’s.”

Ann smiled—that was a relief—and said, “I remember.”

“Can this marriage be saved?” said Karin, taking on a deep ominous tone. Then she changed to wheedling and whining.