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When Karin was telling this story she remembered her parents telling it, laughing and interrupting each other in their practiced way. Ted always mentioned the price of the car and its make and year (Studebaker, 1947) and Rosemary mentioned the fact that the passenger door would not open and Ted had to get out and let her climb in over the driver’s seat. And he would tell how soon he took her to her first movie-in the afternoon-and the name of the movie was Some Like It Hot, and he came out in broad daylight with lipstick all over his face, because whatever it was that other girls did with lipstick, blot it or powder it or whatever, Rosemary had not learned to do. “She was very enthusiastic,” he always said.
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 A
Maybe she meant that it was a pity, after all this trouble, that the marriage hadn’t lasted.
Karin 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.
That was on Saturday night. Saturday night and early Sunday morning. On Monday morning Karin said, “Okay if I go up the road and visit A
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 (A
“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 A
“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 A
“Derek and A
That was when Karin said, “Okay if I go up the road and visit A
Karin 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 A