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brightened by swooping dark-blue birds and huge pink flowers. You have not seen these napkins, they are new. I wrote in my journal, I dressed, I went out to the beach and walked, I pulled my skirts up like a peasant or a queen and stepped about in the waves. The water was very cold; fall is coming. I sat for a while leaning up against a driftwood log, letting sand fall through my fingers onto my bare toes, or rubbing a smooth rock between my third finger and thumb. People passed by—people are always strolling along the beach, poking about in the sand, walking just on the edge of the water—and some of them smiled at me and said hello, and one elderly woman said to me, ‘You look so perfect sitting there in that blue dress, you look as if you have just swum up from the sea, as if you are a mermaid who has just now come up to live on the land.’ She was probably just a dotty old lady, but I can’t remember when anyone has said anything that pleased me more. I think she
knew
about me, that old woman, like a witch knows, I think she sensed that I had been through a change as dramatic as that of a mermaid coming to live on the land. Although in my case, I feel more like a mermaid who finally found the sea, that is, I feel I have found my real element, found my
home
. I
belong
here. And how I love it, that the old woman spoke to me that way. Can you imagine anyone in Liberty, Iowa, saying such a thing? I can’t imagine them
thinking
it in the first place, let alone speaking so intimately to a stranger. Liberty, Iowa. My God. Now
there
is irony for you.
    “The only thing that can depress me now is the thought of how many years I lived there, mindlessly doing all the right things, the things that the wife of Harry Wallace, G.P., should do. Remember Arnold Baker, the minister the First Methodist Church had for just about a month before he went crazy and they took him away to the state mental asylum? He said to me, at the welcoming tea Gladys Fletcher had: ‘Harry Wallace, G.P., eh? I guess that means he’s a general practitioner. And that must mean you have to be
Mrs
. Harry Wallace, G.P., but in your case the G.P. has to stand for Good and Proper.’ I could only stand there with my mouth hanging open, feeling both vaguely insulted and terribly threatened—this was years ago, when you and Dale were small and I still thought that being good and proper in Liberty, Iowa, was the only way possible to live. I’ve often thought about Reverend Baker since then. I wonder if he is still in an asylum. I wonder whether he might have changed my life if he had stayed a few more weeks in Liberty, if he had kept chipping at me that way. Now I think he should not be in an asylum at all; on the contrary, he should be paid money to go around to small towns all across the United States to say unsettling things to good and proper housewives.
    “I fret sometimes because I am so old. Forty-eight years old. I don’t have that much time left, and I hate myself for having wasted it, living out all that time like a thoughtless automaton, in Liberty, Iowa. If only Arnold Baker had stayed around longer, been sharper with me, would I have come to my senses sooner? Would I have left sooner? But then I think, no, you girls did have a good and happy childhood in Liberty, and that is important. It would not have suited either one of your personalities to be brought up away from your father. No, my time was not wasted, because it resulted in the serenity and completion of you two girls. And now I have made the change, when it can’t harm either of you, and I have made it on my own, without anyone haggling me into it, which is worth some kind of point on some kind of scale of values, and I
am
here.
    “
I am here
. I am here, an independent woman, a free woman, a woman who owes nothing to anyone, I am here in Vancouver, the most beautiful city in the world, in a small pure house that is mine and only mine. I have no plans. Perhaps I’ll start taking