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mean…
    But she’s not seriously going to marry him, is she?
    She is.
    And did she think I would never find out? I mean, was she ever going to tell me or anything? Was she going to wait until I walked into her one day when she had a brood of children by the hand?
    What do you mean, that’s what she said?
    She said she wouldn’t be likely to run into me because I never suggested any meetings! That is
so
unfair! That’s
so
Maggie for you.
    No, Angela, don’t take her side.
    Didn’t I go along to that excruciating thing at the hotel and the movie and pizza in that place with plastic tables? You say nothing because there’s nothing you
can
say.
    I wouldn’t want to go to her wedding anyway, even if she did ask me. It’s all so petty, isn’t it?
    When you think what friends we all used to be. If I were getting married I would have asked Maggie. Probably…
    And where are they having it anyway?
    In a registry office. I see.
    And you’re going to be a witness. Oh, I see.
    And are they having a reception?
    Oh really?
Really?
That’s rather a nice restaurant. What made them choose that one? Won’t they feel a bit out of place?
    Oh, they both work there. I see.
    And will he have anyone there, coming over from Algeria?
    Oh, France. I see. Thirty of them. Good heavens! Well, well, well.
    And does she know you’re telling me about this or is it to be forever a secret?
    She
asked
you to! Maggie asked you to tell me?
    She said what?
    She said: “Someone’s got to tell her!”
    Those were her actual words?

The Foul-Weather Friend

    Whenever I look at my telephone answering machine winking at me as I come in, I think of my friend. I bought the answering machine once because of a friend. A good friend indeed, but a foul-weather friend.
    She stood by the bus stop the day that I met her first, so thin, so frail, that I thought a strong gust of wind coming around that corner might brush her and make her hit her head against the shelter. Her head seemed very large—a lot of very frizzy brown hair, not an Afro cut, but as if someone had gone around it shaving little bits off like those pom-pom tassels we used to make at school. I looked at her hair for a long time, not realizing I was staring.
    Probably a lot of people stand at that bus stop not realizing they are staring. It’s just outside the hospital. I wanted to think of anything except the face of my friend Maria, who wouldn’t see me, who sat in her room—they won’t call it a cell—dealing and redealing those cards. Not ordinary playing cards, but Tarot cards with swords and cups and pentacles. Hour after hour she sits there, laying them out in the shape of a cross and mumbling to them.
    John didn’t know I had been. He had begged me not to go. “We made her this way,” he had said so often. “This is our punishment.” I had tried to laugh him out of it. I am the Irish Catholic, I told him; if there is a sense of Sin, I should have it.
    He was brought up in a house where nobody talked conversationally about Hell like we all did. Yet he was the one with the huge guilt that ended our love. We had betrayed Maria, he her husband, I her best friend. I stood staring at the big fuzzy head of the pale woman who hugged her arms around her thin waist as if she were trying to hold the top half of her trunk in some unsatisfactory way to the rest of her body.
    She spoke to me without smiling.
    “My name is Fenella,” she said.
    “I only read that kind of name in school stories.” It was true; Fenella was always the plucky one, or the tomboy even. Nobody back home was called Fenella.
    “You’re very upset, aren’t you?” she asked.
    She had so much compassion in her voice I could have reached out and touched her, helped her to hold that thin body together for fear of its breaking and one half being swept away. She hadn’t made a bus stop remark about there never being any kind of transport when you needed it. She hadn’t made a hospital remark about having to be