Too Much Happiness

He would tell Roxa

It was not ridiculous, however, to think of Old Mrs. Crozier giving orders, and I thought she might do so now that Roxa

But she did not even rattle the knob. She just stood at the locked door and said one thing.

“Stronger than you’d think,” she muttered.

Then made her way downstairs. The usual punishing noises with her steady stick.

I waited awhile and then I went out to the kitchen. Old Mrs. Crozier wasn’t there. She wasn’t in either parlor or in the dining room or the sunroom. I got up my nerve and knocked on the toilet door, then opened it, and she was not there either. Then I looked out the window over the kitchen sink and I saw her straw hat moving along slowly above the cedar hedge. She was out in the garden in the heat, stumping along between her flower beds.

I was not worried by the thought that had troubled Roxa

All the same, I was nervous. I ate two of the macaroons that were still sitting on the kitchen table. I ate them hoping that pleasure would bring back normalcy, but I barely tasted them. Then I shoved the box into the refrigerator so I would not hope to turn the trick by eating more.

Old Mrs. Crozier was still outside when Sylvia got home. And she didn’t come in then.

I got the key from between the pages of the book as soon as I heard the car and I gave it to Sylvia as soon as she was in the house. I just told her quickly what had happened, leaving out most of the fuss. She would not have waited to listen to that, anyway. She went ru

I stood at the bottom of the stairs to hear what I could hear.

Nothing. Nothing.

Then Sylvia’s voice, surprised and upset but in no way desperate, and too low for me to make out what she was saying. Within about five minutes she was downstairs, saying it was time to get me home. She was flushed as if the spots in her cheeks had spread all over her face, and she looked shocked but unable to resist her happiness.

Then, “Oh. Where is Mother Crozier?”

“In the flower garden, I think.”

“Well, I suppose I better speak to her, just for a moment.”

After she had done that, she no longer looked quite so happy.

“I suppose you know,” she said as she backed out the car, “I suppose you can imagine Mother Crozier is upset. Not that I am blaming you. It was very good and loyal of you. Doing what Mr. Crozier asked you to do. You weren’t scared of anything happening? With Mr. Crozier? Were you?”

I said no.

Then I said, “I think Roxa

“Mrs. Hoy? Yes. That’s too bad.”

As we were driving down what was known as Croziers’ Hill she said, “I don’t think he wanted to be mean and frighten them. You know when you’re sick, sick for a long time, you can get not to appreciate other people’s feelings. You can get turned against people even when they’re so good and doing what they can to help you. Mrs. Crozier and Mrs. Hoy were certainly trying their best, but Mr. Crozier just didn’t feel that he wanted them around anymore. He’d just had enough of them. You understand?”

She did not seem to know she was smiling when she said this.

Mrs. Hoy.

Had I ever heard that name before?

And spoken so gently and respectfully, yet with light-years’ condescension.

Did I believe what Sylvia had said?

I believed it was what he had told her.

I did see Roxa

She-Roxa

Of course Sylvia would not know whose car that was. She wouldn’t know that Roxa

Roxa

She didn’t turn the corner and drive back up the hill to the Croziers’ house. Oh no. She drove across the street-I watched in the rearview mirror-towards the east part of town where the wartime houses had been put up. That was where she lived.

“Feel the breeze,” said Sylvia. “Maybe those clouds are going to bring us rain.”

The clouds were high and white, glaring; they looked nothing like rain clouds; and the breeze was because we were in a moving car with the windows rolled down.

I understood pretty well the wi

Sylvia took Mr. Crozier away to a rented cottage on the lake, where he died sometime before the leaves were off.

The Hoy family moved on, as mechanics’ families often did.

My mother struggled with a crippling disease, which put an end to all her moneymaking dreams.

Dorothy Crozier had a stroke, but recovered, and famously bought Halloween candy for the children whose older brothers and sisters she had ordered from her door.

I grew up, and old.

Child’s Play

I suppose there was talk in our house, afterwards.

How sad, how awful. (My mother.)

There should have been supervision. Where were the counsellors? (My father.)

It is possible that if we ever passed the yellow house my mother said, “Remember? Remember you used to be so scared of her? The poor thing.”

My mother had a habit of hanging on to-even treasuring-the foibles of my distant infantile state.

Every year, when you’re a child, you become a different person. Generally it’s in the fall, when you reenter school, take your place in a higher grade, leave behind the muddle and lethargy of the summer vacation. That’s when you register the change most sharply. Afterwards you are not sure of the month or year but the changes go on, just the same. For a long while the past drops away from you easily and it would seem automatically, properly. Its scenes don’t vanish so much as become irrelevant. And then there’s a switchback, what’s been all over and done with sprouting up fresh, wanting attention, even wanting you to do something about it, though it’s plain there is not on this earth a thing to be done.

Marlene and Charlene. People thought we must be twins. There was a fashion in those days for naming twins in rhyme. Bo

It was possible at that time-I mean the time when Charlene and I were at camp-to say coolie, without a thought of offense. Or darkie, or to talk about jewing a price down. I was in my teens, I think, before I ever related that verb to the noun.