At the counter-where you were not supposed to sit for more than twenty minutes, according to the sign-were two very fat women with massive curly hairdos, and between them a thin boyish-looking but wrinkled man, who was talking fast and seemed to be telling them jokes. While the women were shaking their heads and laughing, and Rosemary was picking out her almond croissant, he gave Karin a wink that was lewd and conspiratorial. It made her realize that she was still wearing lipstick. “Can’t resist, eh?” he said to Rosemary, and she laughed, taking this for country friendliness.
“Never can,” she said. “You’re sure?” she said to Karin. “Not a thing? “
“Little girl watching her figure?” that wrinkled man said.
There was hardly any traffic north of this town. The air had turned cooler and smelled swampy. The frogs were making such a loud noise in some places that you could hear them over the noise of the car. This two-lane highway wound past stands of black evergreens and the softer darkness of small juniper-spotted fields, farms going back to the bush. Then on a curve the headlights lit up the first jumble of rocks, some of them glittery pink and gray and some a dried-blood red. Soon this was happening more and more often, and in places the rocks, instead of being jumbled and jammed together, were laid as if by hand in thick or thin layers, and these were gray or greenish white. Limestone, Karin remembered. Limestone bedrock, alternating here with the rocks of the Precambrian Shield. Derek had taught her about that. Derek said that he wished he had been a geologist because he loved rocks. But he wouldn’t have loved making money for mining companies. And history drew him too-it was an odd combination. History for the indoor man, geology for the outdoor man, he said, with a solemnity that told her he was making a joke of himself.
What Karin wanted to get rid of now-she wished it would just flow out of the car windows on the rush of midnight air-was her feeling of squeamishness and superiority. About the almond croissant, the bad coffee that Rosemary was sipping almost surreptitiously, and the man at the counter, and even about Rosemary’s youthful hippielike dress and the messy heap of hair. Also she’d like to get rid of her own missing of Derek, the sense that there was space to fill, and a thinning out of possibility. She said out loud, “I’m glad, I’m glad he’s gone.”
Rosemary said, “Are you really?”
“You’ll be happier,” Karin said.
“Yes,” said Rosemary. “I’m getting my self-respect back. You know you don’t realize how much you’ve lost of your self-respect and how much you miss it till you start getting it back. I want you and me to have a really good summer. We could go on little trips, even. I don’t mind driving where it isn’t hairy. We could go hiking back in the bush where Derek took you. I’d like to do that.”
Karin said, “Yeah,” though she wasn’t at all sure that without Derek they wouldn’t get lost. Her thoughts were not really on hiking but on a scene last summer. Rosemary on the bed, rolled up in a quilt, weeping, stuffing handfuls of the quilt and the pillow into her mouth, biting on them in a rage of grief, and Derek sitting at the table where they worked, reading a page of the manuscript. “Can you do anything to quiet your mother?” he said.
Karin said, “She wants you.”
“I can’t cope with her when she’s like this,” said Derek. He laid down the page he’d finished and picked up another. Between pages he looked up at Karin, with a long-suffering grimace. He looked worn out, old and haggard. He said, “I can’t stand it. I’m sorry.”
So Karin went into the bedroom and stroked Rosemary’s back, and Rosemary too said that she was sorry.
“What’s Derek doing?” she said.
“Sitting in the kitchen,” said Karin. She didn’t like to say “reading.”
“What did he say?”
“He said I should go in and talk to you.”
“Oh, Karin. I’m so ashamed.”
What had happened to start such a row? Calmed down and cleaned up, Rosemary always said it was the work, disagreements they had about the work. “Then why don’t you quit working on his book?” Karin said. “You’ve got all your other stuff to do.” Rosemary edited manuscripts-that was how she had met Derek. Not because he had submitted his book to the publisher she worked for-he hadn’t done so yet-but because she knew a friend of his and the friend had said, “I know a woman who could be a help to you.” And in a little while Rosemary had moved to the country and into the trailer that was not far from his house, so that she could be closer to him to do this work. At first she kept her apartment in Toronto, but then she let it go, because she was spending more and more time in the trailer. She still did other work but not so much of it, and she managed her one workday a week in Toronto by leaving at six o’clock in the morning and getting home after eleven at night.
“What’s this book about?” Ted had said to Karin.
Karin said, “It’s sort of about the explorer La Salle and the Indians.”
“Is this guy a historian? Does he teach at a university?”
Karin didn’t know. Derek had done a lot of things-he had worked as a photographer; he had worked in a mine and as a surveyor; but as far as his teaching went she thought it had been in a high school. Ann spoke of his work as being “outside the system.”
Ted himself taught at a university. He was an economist.
She didn’t, of course, tell Ted or Grace about the grief brought on, apparently, by disagreements about the book. Rosemary blamed herself. It’s the tension, she said. Sometimes she said it was the menopause. Karin had heard her say to Derek, “Forgive me,” and Derek had said, “Nothing to forgive,” in a voice of cool satisfaction.
At this Rosemary had left the room. They did not hear her start to weep again, but they kept waiting for it. Derek looked hard into Karin’s eyes-he made a comical face of distress and bewilderment.
So what did I do this time?
“She’s very sensitive,” said Karin. Her voice was full of shame. Was this because of Rosemary’s behavior? Or because Derek seemed to be including her-Karin-in some feeling of satisfaction, of despising, that went far beyond this moment. And because she could not help but feel honored.
Sometimes she just got out. She went up the road to see Ann, and Ann always seemed glad that she had come. She never asked Karin why, but if Karin said, “They’re having a stupid fight,” or- later on, when they’d come up with the special word-“They’re having one of their squalls,” she never seemed surprised or displeased. “Derek is very exacting,” she might say, or “Well, I expect they’ll work it out.” But if Karin tried to go further, saying “Rosemary’s crying,” Ann would say, “There’s some things I just think it’s better not to talk about, don’t you?”
But there were other things she would listen to, though sometimes with a smile of reservation. Ann was a sweet-looking, rounded woman with light-gray hair cut in bangs and falling loose over her shoulders. When she talked she often blinked, and didn’t quite meet your eyes (Rosemary said that this was nerves). Also her lips-Ann’s lips-were so thin they almost disappeared when she smiled, always with her mouth closed, in a way of holding something back.
“You know how Rosemary met Ted?” said Karin. “It was at the bus stop in the rain and she was putting on lipstick.” Then she had to backtrack and explain that Rosemary had to put on her lipstick at the bus stop because her parents didn’t know she wore it-lipstick being forbidden by their religion, as well as movies, high heels, dancing, sugar, coffee, and alcohol and cigarettes, it goes without saying. Rosemary was in her first year of college and did not want to look like a religious geek. Ted was a teaching assistant.
“But they already knew who each other were,” Karin said, and explained about their living on the same street. Ted in the gatehouse of the biggest of the rich houses, his father being the chauffeur-gardener and his mother the housekeeper, and Rosemary in one of the more ordinary-rich houses across the street (though the life her parents led in it was not ordinary-rich at all, since they played no games and never went to parties or took a trip and for some reason used an icebox instead of a refrigerator, until the ice company went out of business).