“Still,” Dots pleaded.
“Still, what?”
“It is in your place to make the first move.”
“I am guilty o’ that already. I brought up Estelle. I should have brought up Lonnie, or some other man to help make my bed more comfortable at night, in the winter especially. I already made the first move, a damn bad one too, and I not making a second bad move, Dots.”
After all the desolation and the beauty of the fleeting country of the northern Ontario, which she had seen through the window of the train, Estelle was stunned by the liveliness and the big-city spirit of North Bay. It was similar to what she had heard tourists in Trinidad say about the Trinidadians, and their life and their gaiety, in contrast to the drab British dullness of her own little island of Barbados. North Bay, which was halfway to behind-God’s-back on her trip north, was like a new pleasant world. She liked North Bay. If she wasn’t in her present predicament, she thought, she would consider settling in North Bay, instead of in Toronto. In Toronto were the causes of her problems, and she was woman enough to know she had to face them; in Toronto was Bernice who would be furious with her; in Toronto was Sam Burrmann who would be hating her now; in Toronto was Agatha, who was her only female friend, and who would want to know. Agatha had visited her once (which was more than Dots did, or Boysie, or Henry had done), and had insisted on coming for her the day she was to be discharged. But Estelle was so obsessed by the religion of Mrs. Macmillan’s promises and by the nearness of Mrs. Macmillan every minute of the day that she forgot to telephone Agatha. It was this mesmerization, she thought now, which was responsible for her presence at this time of night (or was it morning already? She didn’t have a watch) in North Bay, in a taxicab, going to the nearest and cheapest hotel where she would spend the rest of the night.
“Here we are, miss!” The taxi driver seemed glad to end this short journey from the train station. He came round, opened the door, let her out, and then leaned over the seat and took up her valise. “Straight up those steps.” He did not even surmise that she was lonely, alone, lost, a strange woman in a strange town, a fit prey for preying men. “Sam, this lady want a room. A cheap one. But a good one. With a bath, and …”
She looked at Sam, expecting to find some resemblance to the Sam she knew, wanting there to be this resemblance, but feeling deep down the disappointment that the resemblance had to stop at the similarity of names. This Sam was a jolly, red-faced man. The man Sam was just telling her where to sign when a woman came rollicking through the door behind the desk. She was alone. She saw Estelle. She stood erect. She watched Estelle, from head to toe. Estelle was waiting for the comments: she knew what they always said. The woman was beginning to remember something; but before she could remember it, a smile was changing the haggard expression into a pleasanter face. Estelle tensed herself, waiting for the abuse, the exclamation, the challenge to her presence. The woman was smiling, and remembering. Sam was watching, but he could have been watching a fly or a carnival, it made no difference to him. Estelle tried to divert the woman’s scrutiny by going closer to the desk to sign the register.
But the woman had remembered by this time. She walked right up, close, very close to Estelle, arms outstretched in the first arc of an embrace, or of attack. And when she got close enough to trap Estelle into the jowl-hanging arms of her two-hundred-pounds weight, she exclaimed, with the whiffing perfume of beer in her scream, “Oh my God, Estelle! Estelle! Estelle. Jesus God, Sam, this is her!” It was Mrs. Macmillan. In the hospital she had been a redhead. Now, her hair was blonde.
2
TO THE VERY QUALITY OF FRIENDS
Bernice was so very happy to receive the letter. She switched off the electric vacuum cleaner, dropped the handle where it was, and ran upstairs, taking the stairs two steps at a time right into her quarters. She locked the door behind her. She untied the apron strings and flung the apron on the floor. She walked on it, by mistake; but when she realized that it was her apron, she walked on it again, and trampled it. The letter was from Lonnie. She had thought of writing him so long ago. And now he had written her, without being asked to do so. She lay on her bed, always tidy, always made up
