Chapter One

1

ANGLICAN COWGIRLS

“So, a group of us change our clothes and get together to drink cocktails and look at a picture in a bank lobby. A social plateau, certainly. Not every plateau’s above sea level. Still, the Medici were nice rich people, so who’s going to admit this’s silly? Not me. This is a roomful of believers.”

KATHERINE

Katherine woke with hair on her mind. What should she do with it? Wash it right now? Beat it to its knees before it has the chance to get ornery, and then expect it to behave until tonight? Not likely. Ordinary, more or less brown, neither quite straight, nor curly, if anything in particular, rather thin, Katherine’s hair, in her worst moods, reminded her of an old hen squatted on the long oval egg of her head. She blamed professional beehives of the past for its present condition, so there was no hope for a hairdresser, perfect and pitying. Maybe she could just wrap it in a scarf for lunch. It had to be decent, though nothing special, since lunch was only going to be Fran’s restaurant. Trust her mother to pick safe, cheap and boring. The only men in Fran’s were grey or gay, she could wear a bag and beat the competition. And then she could do something with it later? When? There mightn’t be time, or it mightn’t come out right, and it had to be right. It had to be spectacular for tonight. She’d better do it now. Maybe David would… Oh God!

David wasn’t snarled in the sheets beside her and her feet, cold at the ends of the pajama pants, knew that he hadn’t been there. Katherine tried a loud whimper, listened to the unresponsive silence, and burst into wet sobs. She flopped on her belly and blubbered, pounded the mattress and flailed at the mountain of little satin pillows that decorated the head of the wide bed until she gagged on a backward flow of phlegm and stopped. Then, swiping up her glasses, cigarettes and lighter from the floor, she tottered, dripping tears and mucus, out of the bedroom and down the stairs, feeling bereft, brave and full of vengeance.

There was no sign of David in the hall, no jacket dropped on the rug, no blanket rumpled on the livingroom couch, no briefcase dumped on the diningroom table. Not a trace, not a hair. Katherine ran her fingers over her head, filled a saucepan at the kitchen tap and put it on the stove. She kicked the door of the empty bathroom. The ashtray on the toilet tank had a couple of David’s filterless butts mashed into it, but they were yellowed with old damp. Still. She wandered back through each room stirring overflowing ashtrays with a half-hopeful finger. Nothing new. In the hall again, with a last-ditch trust in magic, lips tentative with surprise, she yanked open the closet door… Of course not, you stupid fool! He means it. She buried her head among the hanging coats and bawled.

The water ought to be boiling by now. Katherine pulled her head out of the coats, a hinge of her glasses had snagged hairs of her monkey fur jacket, they slipped sideways scraping her nose and the other hinge pinched a strand of her own hair. When she had finished screaming and cursing, punching hangers and kicking boots, and had slammed the closet door again, she was amazed to find that her glasses had survived intact. And pleased, she felt quite a bit better. Pausing at a doorway on the other side of the hall, she stared into her workroom, at the black canvas on the easel. I’ll be better off without him.

She scooped coffee into the boiling water and watched it foam up. Pouring it through the strainer, she noticed for the first time that the saucepan was stained with dirty brown ridges of scum. Why have I never seen that before? The stovetop was filthy with dried puddles and overlaid with a grit of dead grounds. There was grit under her toes, on the garbage can, in the sink – Him and his goddamned cowboy coffee! Shit, no more! I’ll get one of those filter things. Maybe a machine like Martin’s got, press a bunch of buttons and you get coffee in bed. Yah. Fuck David!

She ran a bath, dosing it with body oil from the classy line of cosmetics her grandmother was expected to supply in the way of gifts. Fortunately, Christmas and Katherine’s birthday were roughly equidistant in the year and Tillie was sufficiently generous towards her granddaughter, that there was no need to be parsimonious with the oils and creams which Katherine trowelled into her gaping pores. She might protest the spew of a Sudbury smokestack, but what harm in a few little chemicals to smooth the skin? All very well to save a lake, but if you couldn’t look good in a bathing suit…

Trailing her fingers in the tub, she thought about what she would wear to lunch. Anything would do, frumpier the better. And she thought about her mother insisting on lunch today of all days. Her way of getting out of tonight! She’s made it a tradition whenever I’ve an opening. She drives down and stays over at Gran’s and drags her out for protection and we all have lunch in some greasy-spoon she still thinks is smart because it’s got tablecloths and a hostess and she whines about what I’m wearing and then she has to take Gran home and it’s so far and everybody’s tired and she just can’t see how she could possibly manage… Bitch! I wish to hell I had chains and motorcycle leathers. I’d dress for lunch!

Katherine was considerate with a second shampoo and a conditioner, put her hair up in a clean towel and promised it a new ribbon, a wisp of silk velvet, if it would behave. She collected clothes and set the ironing board up in the middle of the kitchen, working naked to catch the gleam of her skin in the mirror over the sink. Cursing the ruffles on her blouse, the iron in her right hand, coffee cup in the left, she felt the towel slip. Reaching up with the iron, she felt the heat in time and used the other hand. Watching coffee ooze brown up one ruffle and down another, she realized that she would have to tell her mother over lunch that David was leaving. If I don’t, she won’t notice for months. I guess I wear a sweater after all. I have to tell her. I’m damned if I’m wearing heels just to suit her! She’ll say it’s my fault.

Polishing the toes of a pair of boots, she discovered a loose heel – damned Italians! Charge the earth and the wheels fall off – smacking the heel tight with the meat hammer, she got blacking under her nails. Painting over the nails, she remembered how she used to march them in a scarlet line down the ripple of David’s flat belly to… and burst into tears. She swiped at the tears and had to redo her nails, scrub the red varnish from her cheeks andmake up her face all over again. She needed Martin. She dialled, but of course he wouldn’t be home and she was damned if she’d talk to his answering machine, when the receiver was lifted on the fourth ring and a woman said hello. A woman?

Oh, the cleaning lady. No, Mr Knight had been gone when she arrived, and a good thing, too, or he’d have heard a word or two! The place like a pig sty, you should see the bathroom! And the laundry, she was sure it wouldn’t all go in one cart load and the machines were fourteen floors down and she didn’t see why… No, she hadn’t the faintest notion where he’d gone. The sheets need a whole machine to themselves. Yah, there’s a note somewhere, yah, can’t make out the name. Katherine? Maybe. Says, “Out hanging your masterpiece. Not to worry. See you at fabulous Fran’s for lunch with the girls. Drinks on me.” That make sense to you? Lucky you. Could use a drink myself. He never leaves enough silver for the machines and that bastard in the…

When she finally unwrapped the towel, her hair refused to stand. Resisting brushes, gels, combs, prayer, slack brown hanks hung to her nose, a slipped crown of thorns. Treachery. Katherine caught her lip between her teeth and took a number of deep breaths. Going to the diningroom, she chose a large tumbler from the hutch shelf. In the kitchen she broke ice cubes out of the freezer and dropped them into the glass. In the diningroom again, she picked a bottle of vodka from the shelf in the back of an old pulpit that served as a bar. She poured, and poured again, opened a can and added tonic. She raised the glass in front of her face. To an important day. She sipped and winced as the liquor cut. Perhaps the most important day of my life. She took a long drink that didn’t hurt. And nobody is going to screw it up for me.

KATYA

Katya stooped for the last pear, laid it gently atop the others in the plastic grocery bag, and straightened up with a sigh. It was real work, hard labour, this gathering of fruit in the cool mornings, but she was comfortable. She wore a bright cotton print cut from a square pattern that she could, and often did, run up on her machine in a matter of minutes. Indifferent to these body bags except as colour attracted her, she treated them as disposable if her eye changed, or remakeable if she saw a need for new cushion covers. Her sweater coat of hard wool, tightly stitched on an unmistakably European pattern, was somewhat more permanent, it took a few evenings to make one of those. Her shoes were expensive and homely, laced leather uppers and thick corrugated rubber soles, German, but she liked them anyway. And just in case the air grew fat with the smell of rain, she carried a kerchief and an old blue canvas anorak balled up in the bottom of her string bag.

She glared at the yard, it badly needed cutting. There was no excuse now that she had picked up all the pears. No love lost here – had they expected the fruit to blow away like leaves into the street? Purple petunias wilted in a patch of clay beside the porch steps. Who teaches this ugliness? They could’ve watered them, the hose there by the side door wound up on its drum and forgotten. What do they care about their little snatch of land, it came with the house. Behave and stay out of the dirt. They’ll pave it soon.

Nothing moved in the street, the heavy brick houses sucked at the silence. Katya looked again at the hose on its drum. She wanted to unravel it, to drag it rattling over the gravel of the drive, to slap wet coils across the porch floor, to throw wide the front door and wash the hall carpet the length of the house. Would anything happen? Katya wondered who lived in the house.

She stepped back to inspect the tree once more, standing beneath to spy out the pears hiding in the leaves. Perhaps another bagful, and they’d be down in about three days. She’d be back.

The October sky was wide and clean, enough blue pants for the whole Dutch navy, Katya thought, and with a deep cold breath she was a girl again in a Helsinki street, a basket of new pears in one hand, schoolbag in the other, skipping her red boots home to a steaming kitchen, to a treat of hot puula noisy with cinnamon and dripping with butter. She blew out her cheeks and crossed her eyes to see her breath. A belch of exhaust, a flurry of grit, and she was middle-aged in Toronto, stocky and bag-laden, grizzled curls, practical shoes and all.

Poking her bags along Davisville and into the subway crowd on the Yonge Street corner, Katya managed a goodmorning to the old Sikh flower seller rocking in a squat behind his wire cart. She’d heard a couple of boys screaming ‘Towelhead’ up and down the subway platform one empty Sunday morning. Dressed in jackets and ties, hair slicked, where could they be going at that hour except Sunday School? Their cracking voices ricochetting off the polished tiles had chilled her scalp and roused her to vengeance. She had caught one of the brats a wallop with her string bag, mashing some early cherries into her anorak, and ran them galloping up the down escalator.

The bearded, turbaned head made toward Katya an imperceptible bow, and the old man went on chanting to his roses in the wind. How often had she wrapped her own wet washed hair in a towel, made faces in the mirror and grinned when it all fell around her ears? Maybe it’s not the names, maybe it’s the calling that’s cruel. She said as much to Bena.

“Achh, Katya! You want to call people names? You are a fat lady in a loud dress who carries bags, you should be careful.”

Bena had caught her waiting to cross the corner, had swooped from the opposite curb in an unavoidable billow of capes and scarves, hair and knees; a brass gypsy so bejewelled with rings and chains and bangles that Katya was sure she heard her clang over the noise of the traffic. Katya was swept into a hug that shoved a disgusted grey gentleman into the road too soon stalling two buses and a cement truck. Bena’s rasp of a voice scraping through horns insisted that Katya come along into the charming restaurant just there so handy to drink some good coffee away from this terrible noise. Katya’s protest, that she had work to do, stumbled and fell over the sweeping dismissal of an armload of bracelets.

“This work, Katya, it has two legs? No? It will not run away. Come, the coffee is like home. And you are badly dressed. For this cold morning. You will turn blue and that is a colour for skies, and sailors, of course.” Bena’s odd gait had carried her to the restaurant door, “They are Swiss, but we will be nice, Katya.”

Katya hated the place, the stingy crocheted decorations, the tiny formica tables and plastic chairs, the starched blond women who beamed plump satisfaction behind a counter breastworks of potato salad and marzipan pigs. The other customers all appeared to be dim and elderly and eating cabbage rolls from paper plates; mothballs struggled with dank closets in the thread of rusty cloth. But Katya had settled and wanted for the moment to drink coffee and rest her feet. She wished she had let turbans lie.

“Katya, my Katya,” Bena’s pencilled brows bunched with concern, “You would be a bigot, I think, if people should hear you. It is true that I am the blood of Magyar kings, and you yourself are not from peasants and are at least a Christian lady, although not of the True Church, and it is true also that we have learned to speak the English language with its too many words beautifully, but you should not… Sssst! There is a man looking very hard at me. Don’t turn, Katya!”

Bena tried an elegant shrug to free the cape from her shoulders, but the intricacy of chains on her chest trapped a button and the shrug became a twitch which she turned to account with a luxurious adjustment of her hair, a thick coarse mane worn to her shoulders and peroxided to glittering brass. Who would have a wig this colour? Expensive ladies, my age, older even, they have hair like Swedish babies, a hundred dollars in a shop. Hair like a horse’s tail, a good horse, like silk, but who believes? Achh, they say, her age. Must be a wig. Me, they know. The offending button bounced across the table into Katya’s lap and the cape slid back to reveal a thin, high-breasted body in tight red wool hemmed above the knee. The knees, Katya thought, which were never explained, for Bena in motion had an odd mechanical, stalling gait, she appeared forever on her way downhill. Bena sat up like a cat to a bird.

“He is certainly looking. No, Katya! I will tell you. He is of course very handsome and has moustaches and wears a hat very straight on his head. He is smiling. He wishes to meet me. Sssst! He lifts his hat, Katya! He wishes to take me to dinner, perhaps. Free passes I can get for… He puts his hat on the table…”

The soldiers had come when Bena was fourteen and kneading bread in her grandmother’s kitchen. Bena gave them beer. They drank and put their hats on the table. A rifle butt broke her knees, cracked the bone at her temple, her right hip was forced popping from the socket, her thighs bled and she was left for dead. She stood up the back of a kitchen chair, drank a cup of water and poked up the fire. The lump of dough she had been working lay in the smashed crockery with her grandmother. Bena kneaded it slowly and into it went blood and hair. She shaped it and baked it.

“…yes, on the table. His teeth will be false. It will have shrivelled in his pants. He leaves his mouth open between spoonfuls. He is old, Katya. I will not acknowledge him.”

“You expect him to throw his hat in the air, Bena? Maybe his hair’s hot. Maybe it’s the custom where he comes from to share your cabbage roll with your hat. I think your blood of kings is overheated.”

Bena smiled tolerantly, “Ah, my Katya, it is better when you are a funny lady, better than this too much thinking of names to call people.” She rewrapped herself in the cape and scarves, stood, reached a hand for her button and patted her friend on the shoulder, “It is good to be generous, Katya. I will telephone. Go with God.” And she went, without paying for her coffee. Katya sighed, leaned back in the chair cradling her empty cup to warm her fingers and thought about words and insults.

She and Saami had spent their first winter in Toronto in a rented flat poring over an English translation of Peter and the Wolf with illustrations which matched reasonably well with the Finnish book she had brought. Arne had installed them, handed her a key to the door and a thick package of paper money tied with elastic string, and disappeared to a place called Upnorth, or maybe Chapleau, she wasn’t sure which, a place Arne had said wasn’t fit for women and children, which mystified Katya who didn’t mind the cold. Partly because she didn’t want to believe that this was now her home, she had resisted the welcome of the Finnish community in the city. Partly, her pride told her, if it were going to be her home then she didn’t intend to waste her future locked in a language warp complaining about the fish in the shops.

The wife of the Lutheran pastor had come once a week to drive Katya and the baby to a supermarket to buy groceries, but she had been a Swedish war-bride, her Finnish mostly limited to words for food, and although that made for a large vocabulary, there was little the woman had been able to do except point names at packages and cans and count out Katya’s money. Conversation had been all but impossible, and after an incident in which a confused explanation about peanut butter, which Katya had never seen, led to a terrified Saami with his mouth gummed shut, distrust had silenced the excursions. The stone-eyed landlady who occupied the second floor flat spoke no Finnish whatsoever and clearly intended to keep it that way. It had been a depressing winter.

As the snow began melting, Arne had returned from Upnorth, or Chapleau, or both, and although he called it coming home, which confirmed her worst fear, and though he laughed at her questions about the reindeer people she had come to imagine must live in Upnorth, Katya had been happy. She discovered a lilac hedge bordering the scruffy patch of backyard and had begun to tend it carefully, clearing leaves and rubbish, pruning and encouraging. The first leaves filled her with tears. She had asked Arne to teach her English with the baby in his highchair pulled up to the table. Green buds swelled. She learned. If lilac could bloom in this place, so could she. She would go to the store alone. The stone-eyed woman had cut the hedge down to a foot of stems. Katya was heart-broken, enraged, frightened by the hard black stare. Why, was an English word. Why? Indians could hide in there, the woman said.

That summer Katya had gobbled the language in a fury, had found a house for Arne to buy, had told the landlady in unbroken English exactly what she thought of her, and had started planting trees in her own new yard.

Katya shook her head at the memory, placed her cold coffee cup back in its saucer, grateful, as she had not been when served, that it wasn’t styrofoam, which it could’ve been considering the paper plates, shifted her feet solidly in her shoes and gathered up her bags. She gave money to the Swiss and went back to work.

MAUDE

Maude’s day was on the wrong foot before she touched one of her own bed-socked feet to the floor. Even before she opened her eyes, she knew she didn’t want to get up. The morning sun on her cheek, which was almost all of her that was exposed between a red felt tam tugged down to her ears and a red Hudson Bay blanket tucked up to her nose, that late morning sun beaming through the east window full on her right cheek was cold. And she knew beyond doubt that it had no intention of getting any warmer. For all that it was only October, early October at that, it might as well be February and be done with it. Weather was either hot, which Maude loved, or it was cold, which she hated so desperately that its advent forced her seriously to consider whether life was worth living.

The winter mornings of her childhood were at the bottom of it. Those frozen mornings: her sister Elizabeth too young for responsibility, too spoiled to leave her eiderdown; her father already long gone to the barn, to the warmth of work in cow heat and manure; herself gripped tight in flannel, Maude would stumble shivering down to the coalbin pleading God and the furnace to have vouchsafed her enough glowing coals to catch at her carefully fed tinder and roar a shovelful of black coal into flame. Those mornings when she was offered nothing but dead white ash taught Maude her first lessons in hatred and despair; hatred for the furnace and for the cold, despair with God and with living. She had also learned to kick and swear.

The telephone rang. Bugger off, Lizzie! Maude kicked off sheets, quilt, the red blanket, swung her thick, flannel-wrapped body to the edge of the bed, toed into furry slippers and dragged a monstrous old brown Jaeger dressing gown onto her shoulders from a chair by the door. In the hall, she peered at the thermostat, unconvinced, she gave it a rap. She glared at the ringing phone on its table and headed for the kitchen at the back of the house.

Where in hell is the tea kettle? It wasn’t on its regular burner on the stove, or in the sink expecting to be filled, or anywhere else that Maude could see on the empty white tiled counters, the bare yellow and green enamel table, the grey linoleum floor. Where in hell? How am I supposed to make coffee without the damned kettle?

There was, however, a milk carton standing in the centre of the stovetop. Why? Empty. Something about a scarf crossed Maude’s mind. If the milk’s on the stove, then the kettle’s in the… Maude swallowed a half-moment of panic. Hell, people do it all the time, transference, or something, absentminded, no problem. She opened the refrigerator, reached for the tea kettle and her heart did a cartwheel. A red wool scarf was draped about the shoulders of the kettle and precisely tied in a plump knot over the adam’s apple of the spout.

The telephone began again. It was too early for carpet-cleaners begging business, it could only be Elizabeth wanting to make one of her wire-crossed visits. …Did you sleep well, Maude? You’d feel better if you wouldn’t lie in bed. How are you really, Maude? You should eat, coffee and cigarettes aren’t breakfast. I’m into a size nine again, grapefruit and boiled eggs. Been out yet? You wouldn’t be lonely if you’d belong to something, a garden club, maybe, you’ve a yard, you could grow things, some nice flowers, it’s never too late to… Maude elbowed the double hinged door to the hall and after a half-hearted swing it muffled the sound of the ringing phone. If there must be a visit, she much preferred Elizabeth in the flesh. She liked to watch her nose flare.

Maude never charged her sister with killing her mother (Elizabeth’s too, of course, but barely) by her early and backward arrival on a freezing March morning, fire out, father at the barn. Elizabeth was quick to recognize the potential accusation for herself, perhaps mistaking her sister’s reserve for judgment, but Maude was, in fact, solitary by inheritance (their father spent the greater part of his life in the barn) and if Elizabeth was in any way made cautious by her silence, well, so be it.

…If you’d come back to the church, there’s the Auxiliary, Maude, they’d have you, or the Altar Committee, especially if you had flowers. You used to belong to the Institute, why don’t… Maude! You weren’t forced! Wives have a duty…

A solitary nature, particularly one indifferent to styles in hair, clothes, or dance steps, makes courting problematic; Maude’s nose firmly stuck in a book made it worse. Old Cousin Alice, sensible and generous, had seen the difficulty; had found a widow to keep house on the farm; had shipped Elizabeth off to boarding school, and had baited Maude with half of her preferred shares in Gooderham-Worts. …You’d come into them soon enough. Lizzie gets Havergal and a new hat. Yours we’ll leave lying around till somebody notices… The new accountant at the bank in the village, Harold ‘Harry’ Matthew, saw the certificates transferred into Maude’s newly acquired deposit box and proposed. Maude accepted, disgusted with the way the widow kept trailing down to the barn.

The next thirty years Maude referred to as the ‘Translation’, with its gradual loss of sense. She remained solitary. Childless, and thankful enough to allow that to be believed her fault, she followed her sterile husband, a man of affairs, of committees and councils, Rotary sings and Masonic aprons, through a succession of Ontario towns; everything from swans to turnips on her notepaper. She cut her own hair, actually using the domed lid of a vegetable dish to get an even length. She cultivated a fondness for reading into an eccentricity and was suspected of spending her clothing allowance on books instead of joining a library.

But Harry came to know enough curling doctors and golfing lawyers willing to sign commitment papers, so that Maude was forced to compromise and allowed herself to be enrolled in the lists of the Women’s Institute. She accepted Secretary-Treasurerships as her due in respect for her books and her husband’s job, but she was known to keep a private notebook among the stacks of minutes and account books, and whenever the assembled conversation left off foreign missions to take a narrower view of local behaviour, she could be seen busily scribbling down… Well, who knows just what she puts in that book? It’s not nice!… Over the years the message gradually got through and at last, while she was unpacking in Deep River (unable to imagine what the hasty-notes would be decorated with this time) the local Membership Committee decided to forget to welcome her. Finally, Maude could throw away the notebook full of the endless repetitions of a tea biscuit recipe.

…Well, I know you haven’t the taste for my committees, Maude, dear, but maybe the i.o.d.e. would suit you. I hear they’re not pushy about meetings, and they do potluck suppers and a nice little wine-and-cheese now and then. They aren’t dressy, they’d have you… Now really! They aren’t fascist old ladies, Maude!…

Elizabeth had smarmed, cliqued and bossed her way through boarding school and returned home virginal, bored and cruel. Within the year she netted a hard-playing, hard-drinking lawyer named George Preston from a reasonably respectable Toronto family on a wet weekend in the Muskokas. She confined George to a single round of Sunday golf, his scotch to a crystal decanter, and eventually managed him up and into the Chair of Imperial Trust. (The ‘Ascension’, as Maude called it.)

With the exception of occasional telephone calls from her childhood cronies, the Lettie sisters, and of course her ‘visits’ with Maude, Elizabeth resisted remembering where she came from. Even when the Lettie girls ventured down on their annual expeditions to the city’s hats and handbags, Elizabeth managed to be away ‘touring’, as she called it. Maude had once tried a first cure for social aggression by shutting up a four-year-old Elizabeth in the feed-box, but the wailing had so upset the pigs that they upset the chop-box and licked her way to freedom. Maude had been made to clean the slop pail for a month and learned to keep her hands off her little sister. Elizabeth got a whole hot johnnycake with maple syrup to herself and an aversion to pigskin gloves.

She continued her climb with vacations to places where the right people go, little discoveries with cocktails, places with chairs. She bothered with the ‘Arts’, liked to dominate her clubs, and ordered groceries from Holt Renfrew. Maude thought her to be practical (she had to admit that a pretentious table is best served with a twenty dollar pot of mustard), affected, undeniably ambitious, usually over-dressed, and about as deep as a ham-glaze.

…What about a Senior Citizens’ group, then? They’re all over, they get together and do things, they… I wish you wouldn’t use that kind of language! They dance and sing, you see their pictures in the papers, they’ve a rhythm band… Maude! Nobody says that anymore, they’re Blacks, now, and that’s no way… Well, if that’s your attitude…

The muffled ringing of the telephone had stopped, but Maude knew it would begin again in another hour, and another hour after that. Then the ambulance would arrive clanging with Elizabeth hot on its wheels with the spare key, having whipped her imagination to a stiff peak. It had happened once before, just after Maude packed up her interest in Gooderham-Worts and drove away from Harry to the city.

She had floated away one morning with coffee and cigarettes at the enamel table, trying to imagine what might be the hobbies of a God who went to the trouble of inventing furnaces, and then let them get cold. Were pestilence and famine just something tacked together in the basement workshop of a heavenly evening? Maude thought of Greeks imagining their fire god lame; his best friend a thief. Was that mortal revenge for crippling cold floors and the criminal price of stove-wood? If she had heard the phone at all that first morning, it must have been God trying to sell her fire insurance.

When Maude had failed to answer, Elizabeth panicked, mistakenly thinking life without Harry a reason for suicide, and dialled emergency… Maude, don’t you ever do this to me again!… Her humiliation before the disgusted ambulance attendants was wonderful to see, but Elizabeth’s relief at the sight of a still-living sister unexpectedly caused Maude to feel uncomfortably guilty. She ought not to let it happen again. Should she?

Maude opened the refrigerator door again. She remembered now, and removed the red scarf from the kettle. She had noticed the cold the night before and gone to the hall closet to sort through winter things, check on moths. A tam was easy, just tug, but somehow she had forgotten how to knot a scarf, her hands were backwards. She had needed something to practise on.

The kettle, she could see down the spout, was half full of milk. That was to be expected, she supposed, a white pretense to snow, perhaps, something to authenticate practice. For a moment she was undecided. Would it gum up and ruin the bottom of the kettle? Should she… Oh, what the hell! Might as well live a little. Maude sat the kettle on a burner, turned the switch on low and reached a jar of Ovaltine down from a cupboard. She stood the swing door open to the hall, cranked up the thermostat, patted the telephone and went to find her cigarettes.