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cooling her heels.” They’re in the habit of speaking of me in the third person, as if I’m a child or pet.
    Walter handed my arm over into Myra’s custody and we went up the front steps together like a three-legged race. I felt what Myra’s hand must have felt: a brittle radius covered slackly with porridge and string. I should have brought my cane, but I couldn’t see carting it out onto the stage with me. Someone would be bound to trip over it.
    Myra took me backstage and asked me if I’d like to use the Ladies’—she’s good about remembering that—then sat me down in the dressing room. “You just stay put now,” she said. Then she hurried off, bum lolloping, to make sure all was in order.
    The lights around the dressing-room mirror were small round bulbs, as in theatres; they cast a flattering light, but I was not flattered: I looked sick, my skin leached of blood, like meat soaked in water. Was it fear, or true illness? Certainly I did not feel a hundred percent.
    I found my comb, made a perfunctory stab at the top of my head. Myra keeps threatening to take me to “her girl,” at what she still refers to as the Beauty Parlour—The Hair Port is its official name, with Unisex as an added incentive—but I keep resisting. At least I can still call my hair my own, though it frizzes upwards as if I’ve been electrocuted. Beneath it there are glimpses of scalp, the greyish pink of mice feet. If I ever get caught in a high wind my hair will all blow off like dandelion fluff, leaving only a tiny pockmarked nubbin of bald head.
    Myra had left me one of her special brownies, whipped up for the Alumni Tea—a slab of putty, covered in chocolate sludge—and a plastic screw-top jug of her very own battery-acid coffee. I could neither drink nor eat, but why did God make toilets? I left a few brown crumbs, for authenticity.
    Then Myra bustled in and scooped me up and led me forth, and I was having my hand shaken by the principal, and told how good it was of me to have come; then I was passed on to the vice-principal, the president of the Alumni Association, the head of the English department—a woman in a trouser suit—the representative from the Junior Chamber of Commerce, and finally the local member of Parliament, loath as such are to miss a trick. I hadn’t seen so many polished teeth on display since Richard’s political days.
    Myra accompanied me as far as my chair, then whispered, “I’ll be right in the wings.” The school orchestra struck up with squeaks and flats, and we sang “O Canada!,” the words to which I can never remember because they keep changing them. Nowadays they do some of it in French, which once would have been unheard of. We sat down, having affirmed our collective pride in something we can’t pronounce.
    Then the school chaplain offered a prayer, lecturing God on the many unprecedented challenges that face today’s young people. God must have heard this sort of thing before, he’s probably as bored with it as the rest of us. The others gave voice in turn: end of the twentieth century, toss out the old, ring in the new, citizens of the future, to you from failing hands and so forth. I allowed my mind to drift; I knew enough to know that the only thing expected of me was that I not disgrace myself. I could have been back again beside the podium, or at some interminable dinner, sitting next to Richard, keeping my mouth shut. If asked, which was seldom, I used to say that my hobby was gardening. A half-truth at best, though tedious enough to pass muster.
    Next it was time for the graduates to receive their diplomas. Up they trooped, solemn and radiant, in many sizes, all beautiful as only the young can be beautiful. Even the ugly ones were beautiful, even the surly ones, the fat ones, even the spotty ones. None of them understands this—how beautiful they are. But nevertheless they’re irritating, the young. Their posture is appalling as a rule, and judging from their songs they