Too Much Happiness

“I’ve just let it go,” she said. “It’s surprising how easy it is, just to let things go.”

To get back to the building-how I circle and dither around this subject-there was a time, before it became just a storage shed, when people lived in it. There was a couple named the Bells, who were cook-housekeeper and gardener-chauffeur to my grandparents. My grandfather owned a Packard which he never learned to drive. Both the Bells and the Packard were gone in my time, but the place was still referred to as Bells’ Cottage.

For a few years in my childhood Bells’ Cottage was rented to a woman named Sharon Suttles. She lived there with her daughter, Nancy. She had come to town with her husband, a doctor who was setting up his first practice, and within a year or so he died, of blood poisoning. She remained in town with her baby, having no money and, as was said, no people. This must have meant no people who could help her or who had offered to take her in. At some time she got a job in my father’s insurance office, and came to live in Bells’ Cottage. I am not certain about when all this happened. I have no memory of them moving in, or of the cottage when it was empty. It was painted, at that time, a dusty pink, and I always thought of that as Mrs. Suttles’s choice, as if she could not have lived in a house of any other color.

I called her Mrs. Suttles, of course. But I was aware of her first name, as I seldom was of any other grown-up woman’s. Sharon was an unusual name in those days. And it had a co

By cool Siloam’s shady rill

How sweet the lily grows.

How sweet the breath, beneath the hill,

Of Sharon’s dewy rose.

I can’t believe that there was actually a rose in a corner of the screen and yet I saw one, I see one, of a faded pink, whose aura was transferred to the name Sharon.

I don’t mean to say that I fell in love with Sharon Suttles. I had been in love, when barely out of my infancy, with a tomboyish young maid named Bessie, who took me out on jaunts in my stroller and swung me so high on the park swings that I nearly went over the top. And some time later with a friend of my mother’s, who had a velvet collar on her coat and a voice that seemed somehow to be related to it. Sharon Suttles was not for falling in love with in that way. She was not velvet voiced and she had no interest in showing me a good time. She was tall and very thin to be anybody’s mother-there were no slopes on her. Her hair was the color of toffee, brown with golden edges, and in the time of the Second World War she was still wearing it bobbed. Her lipstick was bright red and thick looking, like the mouths of movie stars I had seen on posters, and around her house she usually wore a kimono, on which I believe there were some pale birds-storks?-whose legs reminded me of hers. She spent a lot of her time lying on the couch, smoking, and sometimes, to amuse us or herself, she would kick those legs straight up in the air, one after the other, and send a feathery slipper flying. When she was not mad at us her voice would be throaty and exasperated, not unfriendly, but in no way wise or tender or reproving, with the full tones, the suggestion of sadness, that I expected in a mother.

You dumb twerps, she called us.

“Get out of here and let me have some peace, you dumb twerps.”

She would already be lying on the couch with an ashtray on her stomach while we scooted Nancy’s toy cars across the floor. How much peace did she want?

She and Nancy ate peculiar foods at irregular hours, and when she went into the kitchen to fix herself a snack, she never came back with cocoa or graham crackers for us. On the other hand, Nancy was never forbidden to spoon vegetable soup, thick as pudding, out of the can, or to grab handfuls of Rice Krispies straight from the box.

Was Sharon Suttles my father’s mistress? Her job provided for her, and the pink cottage rent free?

My mother spoke of her kindly, not infrequently mentioning the tragedy that had befallen her, with the death of the young husband. Whatever maid we had at the time would be sent over with presents of raspberries or new potatoes or shelled fresh peas from our garden. I remember the peas particularly. I remember Sharon Suttles-still lying on the couch-flipping them into the air with her forefinger, saying, “What am I supposed to do with these?”

“You cook them on the stove with water,” I said helpfully.

“No kidding?”

As for my father, I never saw him with her. He left for work rather late and knocked off early, to keep up with his various sporting activities. There were weekends when Sharon caught the train to Toronto, but she always had Nancy with her. And Nancy would come back full of the adventures she had had and the spectacles she had seen, such as the Santa Claus Parade.

There were certainly times when Nancy’s mother was not at home, not in her kimono on the couch, and it could be presumed that at those times she was not smoking or relaxing but doing regular work in my father’s office, that legendary place that I had never seen and where I would certainly not be welcome.

At such times-when Nancy’s mother had to be at work and Nancy had to be at home-a grouchy person named Mrs. Codd sat listening to radio soap operas, ready to chase us out of the kitchen where she herself was eating anything on hand. It never occurred to me that since we usually spent all our time together, my mother could have offered to keep an eye on Nancy as well as me, or ask our maid to do so, to save the hiring of Mrs. Codd.

It does seem to me now that we played together all our waking hours. This would be from the time I was about five years old until I was around eight and a half, Nancy being half a year younger. We played mostly outdoors-those must have been rainy days, because of my memory of us in Nancy’s cottage a

There was actually a training base to the north of our town, and real planes were constantly flying over us. Once there was a crash, but to our disappointment the plane that was out of control went into the lake. And because of all this reference to the war we were able to make of Pete not just a local enemy but a Nazi, and of his lawn mower a tank. Sometimes we lobbed apples at him from the crab-apple tree that sheltered our bivouac. Once he complained to my mother and it cost us a trip to the beach.

She often took Nancy along on trips to the beach. Not to the one with the water slide, just down the cliff from our house, but to a smaller one you had to drive to, where there were no rowdy swimmers. In fact she taught us both to swim. Nancy was more fearless and reckless than I was, which a

“Nancy is a little girl,” my mother scolded. “She is a little girl and you should treat her like a little sister.”

Which was exactly what I was doing. I did not think of her as weaker than me. Smaller, yes, but sometimes that was an advantage. When we climbed trees she could hang like a monkey from branches that would not support me. And once in a fight-I can’t recall what any of our fights were about-she bit me on my restraining arm and drew blood. That time we were separated, supposedly for a week, but our glowering from windows soon turned to longing and pleading, so the ban was lifted.