Friend of My Youth

look like the last show on earth! Is that incision bothering you? Should I see if I can get you back on the pills?”
    “I hate it here,” Anita said.
    “Do you? Well, you only have one more day till you can go home.”
    “I don’t mean the hospital,” Anita said. “I mean here. I want to go and live somewhere else.”
    The nurse did not seem to be surprised. “You got your grade twelve?” she said. “O.K. You can go in training. Be a nurse. All it costs is to buy your stuff. Because they can work you for nothing while you’re training. Then you can go and get a job anyplace. You can go all over the world.”
    That was what Margot had said. And now Anita was the one who would become a nurse, not Margot. She made up her mind that day. But she felt that it was second best. She would rather have been chosen. She would rather have been pinned down by a man and his desire and the destiny that he arranged for her. She would rather have been the subject of scandal.
    “Do you want to know?” said Margot. “Do you want to know really how I got this house? I mean, I didn’t go after it till we could afford it. But you know with men—something else can always come first? I put in my time living in dumps. We lived one place, there was just that stuff, you know that under-carpeting stuff, on the floor? That brown hairy stuff looks like the skin off some beast? Just look at it and you can feel things crawling on you. I was sick all the time anyway. I was pregnant with Joe. This was in behind the Toyota place, only it wasn’t the Toyota then. Reuel knew the landlord. Of course. We got it cheap.”
    But there came a day, Margot said. There came a day aboutfive years ago. Debbie wasn’t going to school yet. It was in June. Reuel was going away for the weekend, on a fishing trip up to northern Ontario. Up to the French River, in northern Ontario. Margot had got a phone call that she didn’t tell anybody about.
    “Is that Mrs. Gault?”
    Margot said yes.
    “Is it Mrs. Reuel Gault?”
    Yes, said Margot, and the voice—it was a woman’s or maybe a young girl’s voice, muffled and giggling—asked her if she wanted to know where her husband might be found next weekend.
    “You tell me,” said Margot.
    “Why don’t you check out the Georgian Pines?”
    “Fine,” said Margot. “Where is that?”
    “Oh, it’s a campground,” the voice said. “It’s a real nice place. Don’t you know it? It’s up on Wasaga Beach. You just check it out.”
    That was about a hundred miles to drive. Margot made arrangements for Sunday. She had to get a sitter for Debbie. She couldn’t get her regular sitter, Lana, because Lana was going to Toronto on a weekend jaunt with members of the high-school band. She was able to get a friend of Lana’s who wasn’t in the band. She was just as glad that it turned out that way, because it was Lana’s mother, Dorothy Slote, that she was afraid she might find with Reuel. Dorothy Slote did Reuel’s bookkeeping. She was divorced, and so well known in Walley for her numerous affairs that high-school boys would call to her from their cars, on the street, “Dorothy Slot, she’s hot to trot!” Sometimes she was referred to as Dorothy Slut. Margot felt sorry for Lana—that was why she had started hiring her to take care of Debbie. Lana was not going to be as good-looking as her mother, and she was shy and not too bright. Margot always got her a little present at Christmastime.
    On Saturday afternoon Margot drove to Kincardine. She was gone only a couple of hours, so she let Joe and his girlfriendtake Debbie to the beach. In Kincardine she rented another car—a van, as it happened, an old blue crock pot of a thing like what the hippies drove. She also bought a few cheap clothes and a rather expensive, real-looking wig. She left them in the van, parked in a lot behind a supermarket. On Sunday morning she drove her car that far, parked it in the lot, got into the van, and changed her clothes and donned the wig, as well as some extra makeup. Then she continued driving north.
    The wig was a nice light-brown color, ruffled up on top and long and straight in the back. The clothes were tight pink denim pants and a pink-and-white striped top. Margot was thinner then, though not thin. Also, buffalo sandals, dangly earrings, big pink sunglasses. The works.
    “I didn’t miss a trick,” said Margot. “I did my eyes up kind of Cleopatra-ish. I don’t believe my own kids could’ve recognized me.