Too Much Happiness

“With Ernie?” I said. “With Ernie?”

“Well, why not? Ernie’s nice,” she said. “And anyway I’m calling him Ernest.” She hugged the bathrobe around herself.

“What about Mr. Purvis?”

“What about him?”

“Well, if it’s something happening already, couldn’t it be his?”

Everything changed about Nina. Her face turned mean and sour. “Him,” she said with contempt. “What do you want to talk about him for? He never had it in him.”

“Oh?” I said, and was going to ask what about Gemma, but she interrupted.

“What do you want to talk about the past for? Don’t make me sick. That’s all dead and gone. It doesn’t matter to me and Ernest. We’re together now. We’re in love now.”

In love. With Ernie. Ernest. Now.

“Okay,” I said.

“Sorry I yelled at you. Did I yell? I’m sorry. You’re our friend and you brought me my things and I appreciate it. You’re Ernest’s cousin and you’re our family.”

She slipped behind me and her fingers darted into my armpits and she began to tickle me, at first lazily and then furiously, saying, “Aren’t you? Aren’t you?”

I tried to get free, but I couldn’t. I went into spasms of suffering laughter and wriggled and cried out and begged her to stop. Which she did, when she had me quite helpless, and both of us were out of breath.

“You’re the ticklishest person I ever met.”

I had to wait a long time for the bus, stamping my feet on the pavement. When I got to the college I had missed my second as well as my first class, and I was late for my work in the cafeteria. I changed into my green cotton uniform in the broom closet and pushed my mop of black hair (the worst hair in the world for showing up in food, as the manager had warned me) under a cotton snood.

I was supposed to get the sandwiches and salads out on the shelves before the doors opened for lunch, but now I had to do it with an impatient lineup watching me, and that made me feel clumsy. I was so much more noticeable now than when I pushed the cart among the tables to collect the dirty dishes. People were concentrating then on their food and conversation. Now they were just looking at me.

I thought of what Beverly and Kay had said about spoiling my chances, marking myself off in the wrong way. It seemed now it could be right.

After I finished cleaning up the cafeteria tables, I changed back into my ordinary clothes and went to the college library to work on my essay. It was my afternoon free of classes.

An underground tu

On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble

I would never think of those lines again without feeling the prickles of the upholstery on my bare haunches. The sticky prickly shame. A far greater shame it seemed now, than at the time. He had done something to me, after all.

From far, from eve and morning

And yon twelve-winded sky,

The stuff of life to knit me

Blew hither-here am I.

No.

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

No, never.

White in the moon the long road lies

That leads me from my love.

No. No. No.

I would always be reminded of what I had agreed to do. Not been forced, not ordered, not even persuaded. Agreed to do.

Nina would know. She had been too preoccupied with Ernie to say anything that morning, but there would come a time when she would laugh about it. Not cruelly, but just the way she laughed at so many things. And she might even tease me about it. Her teasing would have in it something like her tickling, something insistent, obscene.

Nina and Ernie. In my life from now on.

The college library was a high beautiful space, designed and built and paid for by people who believed that those who sat at the long tables before open books-even those who were hung-over, sleepy, resentful, and uncomprehending-should have space above them, panels of dark gleaming wood around them, high windows bordered with Latin admonitions, through which to look at the sky. For a few years before they went into schoolteaching or business or began to rear children, they should have that. And now it was my turn and I should have it too.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

I was writing a good essay. I would probably get an A. I would go on writing essays and getting A’s because that was what I could do. The people who awarded scholarships, who built universities and libraries, would continue to dribble out money so that I could do it.

But that was not what mattered. That was not going to keep you from damage.

Nina did not stay with Ernie even for one week. One day very soon he would come home and find her gone. Gone her coat and boots, her lovely clothes and the kimono that I had brought over. Gone her taffy hair and her tickling habits and the extra warmth of her skin and the little un-unhs as she moved. All gone with no explanation, not a word on paper. Not a word.

Ernie was not one, however, to shut himself up and mourn. He said so, when he phoned to tell me the news and check on my availability for Sunday di

No. The source was revealed when he passed something to me. Something like a large handkerchief.

“Just put it in your coat pocket,” he said.

Not a handkerchief. The texture was sturdier, with a slight ribbing. An undershirt.

“I don’t want it around,” he said, and by his voice you might have thought that it was just underwear itself he did not want around, never mind that it was Nina’s and smelled of Nina.

He ordered the roast beef, and cut and chewed it with his normal efficiency and polite appetite. I gave him the news from home, which as usual at this time of year consisted of the size of snowdrifts, the number of blocked roads, the winter havoc which gave us distinction.

After some time Ernie said, “I went round to his house. There was nobody in it.”

Whose house?

Her uncle’s, he said. He knew which house because he and Nina had driven past it, after dark. There was nobody there now, he said, they had packed up and gone. Her choice, after all.

“It’s a woman’s privilege,” he said. “Like they say, it’s a woman’s privilege to change her mind.”

His eyes, now that I looked into them, had a dry famished look, and the skin around them was dark and wrinkled. He pursed his mouth, controlling a tremor, then talked on, with an air of trying to see all sides, trying to understand.

“She couldn’t leave her old uncle,” he said. “She didn’t have the heart to run out on him. I said we could take him in with us, because I was used to old people, but she said she would sooner make a break. Then I guess she didn’t have the heart to after all.”

“Better not to expect too much. Some things I guess you’re just not meant to have.”

When I went past the coats on my way to the washroom I got the shirt out of my pocket. I stuffed it in with the used towels.

That day in the library I had been unable to go on with Sir Gawain. I had torn a page from my notebook and picked up my pen and walked out. On the landing outside the library doors there was a pay phone, and beside that hung a phone book. I looked through the phone book and on the piece of paper I had brought I wrote two numbers. They were not phone numbers but addresses.