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piano so we could play a duet. Was that meant for Cardinal Wolsey, and what was a
wilde, a
dance? Put that down, Hugo.
Recorder player
. That would be quite all right, quite in fashion now; as I understand things, recorder playing and such fey activities are not out of favor now, quite the contrary. Indeed, they may be more acceptable than all that lumberjacking and beer-slinging. Look at you, Hugo, your image is not only fake but out-of-date. You should have said you’d meditated for a year in the mountains of Uttar Pradesh; you should have said you’d taught Creative Drama to autistic children; you should have shaved your head, shaved your beard, put on a monk’s cowl; you should have shut up, Hugo.
    When I was pregnant with Clea we lived in a house on Argyle Street in Vancouver. It was such a sad gray stucco house on the outside, in the rainy winter, that we painted the inside, all the rooms, vivid ill-chosen colors. Three walls of the bedrooms were Wedgwood blue, one was magenta. We said it was an experiment to see if color could drive anybody mad. The bathroom was a deep orange-yellow. “It’s like being inside a cheese,” Hugo said when we finished it. “That’s right, it is,” I said. “That’s very good, phrase-maker.” He was pleased but not as pleased as if he’d written it. After that he said, every time he showed anybody the bathroom, “See the color? It’s like being inside a cheese.” Or, “It’s like peeing inside a cheese.” Not that I didn’t do the same thing, save things up and say them over and over. Maybe I said that about peeing inside a cheese. We had many phrases in common. We both called the landlady the Green Hornet, because she had worn, the only time we had seen her, a poison-green outfit with bits of rat fur and a clutch of violets, and had given off a venomous sort of buzz. She was over seventy and she ran a downtown boardinghouse for men. Her daughter Dotty we called the harlot-in-residence. I wonder why we chose to say
harlot;
that was not, is not, a word in general use. I suppose it had a classy sound, a classy depraved sound, contrasting ironically—we were strong on irony—with Dotty herself.
    She lived in a two-room apartment in the basement ofthe house. She was supposed to pay her mother forty-five dollars monthly rent and she told me she meant to try to make the money baby-sitting.
    “I can’t go out to work,” she said, “on account of my nerves. My last husband, I had him six months dying down at Mother’s, dying with his kidney disease, and I owe her three hundred dollars board still on that. She made me make him his eggnog with skim milk. I’m broke every day of my life. They say it’s all right not having wealth if you got health, but what if you never had either one? Bronchial pneumonia from the time I was three years old. Rheumatic fever at twelve. Sixteen I married my first husband, he was killed in a logging accident. Three miscarriages. My womb is in shreds. I use up three packs of Kotex every month. I married a dairy farmer out in the Valley and his herd got the fever. Wiped us out. That was the one who died with his kidneys. No wonder. No wonder my nerves are shot.”
    I am condensing. This came out at greater length and by no means dolefully, indeed with some amazement and pride, at Dotty’s table. She asked me down for cups of tea, then for beer. This is life, I thought, fresh from books, classes, essays, discussions. Unlike her mother, Dotty was flat-faced, soft, doughy, fashioned for defeat, the kind of colorless puzzled woman you see carrying a shopping bag, waiting for the bus. In fact, I had seen her once on a bus downtown, and not recognized her at first in her dull blue winter coat. Her rooms were full of heavy furniture salvaged from her marriage—an upright piano, overstuffed chesterfield and chairs, walnut veneer china cabinet and dining room table, where we sat. In the middle of the table was a tremendous lamp, with a painted china