Rosemary at this moment doesn’t know what to do, but thinks she doesn’t yet have to do anything. Look at her spinning around in her cage of rosy colors. Her cage of spun sugar. Look at Rosemary twittering and beguiling.

Rich as stink, he said.

Ann comes out of the bathroom, her gray hair dark and damp, pushed flat to her head, her face glowing from the shower. “Karin. What are you doing here?” “Watching.” “Watching what?”

“A pair of lover-do vers.”

“Oh now Karin,” says Ann, going on down the stairs.

And soon come happy cries from the front door (special occasion) and from the hallway, “What is that marvellous smell?” (Rosemary). “Just some old bones Ann’s simmering” (Derek).

“And that-it’s beautiful,” says Rosemary as the sociable flurry moves into the living room. Speaking of the bunch of green leaves and June grass and early orange lilies Ann has stuck in the cream jug by the living-room door.

“Just some old weeds Ann hauled in,” says Derek, and Ann says, “Oh well, I thought they looked nice,” and Rosemary says again, “Beautiful.”

Rosemary said after lunch that she wanted to get Karin a present. Not for a birthday and not for Christmas-just a wonderful present.

They went to a department store. Every time Karin slowed down to look at something, Rosemary showed immediate enthusiasm and willingness to buy it. She would have bought a velvet coat with a fur collar and cuffs, an antique-style painted rocking horse, a pink plush elephant that looked about a quarter life-size. To put an end to this miserable wandering, Karin picked out a cheap ornament-the figure of a ballerina poised on a mirror. The ballerina did not twirl around, there was no music played for her-nothing that could justify the choice. You would think that Rosemary would understand that. She should have understood what such a choice said-that Karin was not to be made happy, amends were not possible, forgiveness was out of the question. But she didn’t see that. Or she chose not to. She said, “Yes. I like that. She’s so graceful. She’ll look pretty on your dresser. Oh, yes.”

Karin put the ballerina away in a drawer. When Grace found it, she explained that a friend at school had given it to her and that she couldn’t hurt the friend’s feelings by saying it wasn’t the kind of thing she liked.

Grace wasn’t so used to children then, or she might have questioned such a story.

“I can understand that,” she said. “I’ll just give it to the hospital sale-it’s not likely she’ll ever see it there. Anyway they must have made hundreds like it.”

Ice cubes cracked downstairs, as Derek dropped them into the drinks. Ann said, “Karin’s around somewhere, I’m sure she’ll pop up in a minute.”

Karin went softly, softly up the remaining stairs and into Ann’s room. There were the tumbled clothes on the bed, and the wedding dress, again wrapped up in its sheet, lying on top of them. She took off her shorts and her shirt and her shoes and began the desperate, difficult process of getting into this dress. Instead of trying to put it on over her head, she wriggled her way up into it, through the crackling skirt and lace bodice. She got her arms into the sleeves, being careful not to snag the lace with a fingernail. Her fingernails were mostly too short to be a problem, but she was careful anyway. She pulled the lace points over her hands. Then she did up all the hooks at the waist. The hardest thing was to do the hooks at the back of the neck. She bent her head and hunched her shoulders, trying to make those hooks easier to get at. Even so, she had a disaster-the lace ripping a little under one arm. That shocked her and even made her stop for a second. But it seemed she had gone too far to give up now, and she got the rest of the hooks fastened without mishap. She could sew up that tear when she got the dress off. Or she could lie, and claim she had noticed it before she had put the dress on. Ann might not see it anyway.

Now the veil. She had to be very careful with the veil. Any tear would show. She shook it all out and tried to secure it with the branch of apple blossoms, just as Ann had done. But she couldn’t get the branch to bend properly or the slippery pins to hold it. She thought it might be better to tie the whole thing on with a ribbon or a sash. She went to Ann’s closet to see if she could find something. And there hung a man’s tie rack, a man’s ties. Derek’s ties, though she had never seen him wearing a tie.

She pulled a striped tie off the rack and tied it around her forehead, tying it at the back of her head, holding the veil firmly in place. She did this in front of the mirror and when it was done she saw that she had created a gypsy effect, a flaunting comic effect. An idea came to her which forced her to undo with strenuous effort all those hooks and eyes, then pad the front of the dress with tightly wadded-up clothing from Ann’s bed. She filled and overfilled the lace that had hung limp, being fashioned for Ann’s breasts. Better this way, better to make them laugh. She could not then get all the hooks done up afterwards, but she got enough to hold the clownish cloth bosom in place. She got the neck band fastened as well. She was sweating all over when she finished.

Ann didn’t wear lipstick or eye makeup, but on the top of the dresser there was, surprisingly, a pot of hardened rouge. Karin spat in it and rubbed round splotches on her cheeks.

The front door led into the hall at the bottom of the stairs, and from this hall a side door led into the sunporch, and another door (on the same side) led into the living room. You could also go directly from the porch into the living room, through a door at the far end. The house was oddly planned or not planned at all, Ann said. Things had been altered or added on just as people thought of them. The long narrow glassed-in porch was no good for catching the sun, since it was on the east side of the house and shaded, in any case, by a stand of poplar saplings that had got out of hand and grown up quickly, as poplars do. In Ann’s childhood the porch’s main use was for storing apples, though she and her sister had loved the roundabout route provided by the three doors. And she liked the room now, for serving supper in during the summertime. When the table was pulled out there was hardly room to walk between the chairs and the inner wall. But if you seated people along one side, facing the windows, and at either end-that was the way the table was set tonight-there was room for a thin person, and certainly for Karin, to pass.

Karin came downstairs barefoot. Nobody could see her from the living room. And she chose not to go into that room by the usual door, but to enter the porch and go alongside the table and then appear, or burst in on them, from the porch where they would never have expected her to be.

The porch was already shadowy. Ann had lit the two tall yellow candles, though not the little white ones that were clustered round them. The yellow ones had a scent of lemons, which she was probably counting on to dispel any stuffiness in the room. Also she had opened the window at one end of the table. On the stillest evening you could always get a breeze from the poplars.

Karin used both hands to hold her skirt as she went past the table. She had to hold it up slightly so that she could walk. And she did not want the taffeta to make a noise. She meant to start singing “Here comes the bride” just as she appeared in the doorway.

Here comes the bride

Fair, fat, and wide.

See how she wobbles

From side to side-

The breeze came towards her with a little gust of energy and pulled her veil. But it was held to her head so tightly that she had no worries about losing it.