So she’d given up on us, she’d given us over. For years she’d done what she could, and now she had no more power.

Back in Toronto, I waited for Laura to arrive. The heat wave continued. Sultry weather, damp foreheads, a shower before gin and tonics on the back verandah, overlooking the sere garden. The air like wet fire; everything limp or yellow. There was a fan in the bedroom that sounded like an old man with a wooden foot climbing the stairs: a breathless wheezing, a clunk, a wheezing. In the heavy, starless nights I stared up at the ceiling while Richard went on with what he was doing.

He was besotted with me, he said. Besotted —as if he were drunk. As if he would never feel the way he did about me if he were sober and in his right mind.

I looked at myself in the mirror, wondering, What is it about me? What is it that is so besotting? The mirror was full-length: in it I tried to catch the back view of myself, but of course you never can. You can never see yourself the way you are to someone else—to a man looking at you, from behind, when you don’t know—because in a mirror your own head is always cranked around over your shoulder. A coy, inviting pose. You can hold up another mirror to see the back view, but then what you see is what so many painters have loved to paint—Woman Looking In Mirror, said to be an allegory of vanity. Though it is unlikely to be vanity, but the reverse: a search for flaws. What is it about me? can so easily be construed as What is wrong with me?

Richard said women could be divided into apples and pears, according to the shapes of their bottoms. I was a pear, he said, but an unripe one. That was what he liked about me—my greenness, my hardness. In the bottom department, I think he meant, but possibly all the way through.

After my showers, my removal of bristles, my brushings and combings, I was now careful to remove any hairs from the floor. I would lift the little wads of hair from the drains of tub or sink and flush them down the toilet, because Richard had casually remarked that women were always leaving hair around. Like shedding animals, was the implication.

How did he know? How did he know, about the pears and the apples and the shed hair? Who were these women, these other women? Aside from a surface curiosity, I did not much care.

I tried to avoid thinking about Father, and the way he had died, and what he might have been up to before that event, and about how he must have felt, and about everything Richard had not seen fit to tell me.

Winifred was a very busy bee. Despite the heat she looked cool, swathed in light and airy draperies like some parody of a fairy godmother. Richard kept saying how marvellous she was and how much work and bother she was sparing me, but she made me increasingly nervous. She was in and out of the house constantly; I never knew when she might appear, popping her head around the door with a brisk smile. My only refuge was the bathroom, because there I could turn the lock without seeming unduly rude. She was overseeing the rest of the decoration, ordering the furniture for Laura’s room. (A dressing table with a frilled skirt, in a pink floral print, with curtains and bedspread to match. A mirror with a white curlicue frame, picked out in gold. It was just the thing for Laura, didn’t I agree? I didn’t, but there was no point in saying so.)

She was also planning the garden; she’d already sketched out several designs—just a few little ideas, she said, thrusting the pieces of paper at me, then withdrawing them, replacing them carefully in the folder already bulging with her other little ideas. A fountain would be lovely, she said—something French, but it would have to be authentic. Didn’t I think?

I wished Laura would come. The date of her arrival had been postponed three times now—she wasn’t packed yet, she’d had a cold, she’d lost the ticket. I talked to her on the white phone; her voice was restrained, remote.

The two servants had been installed, a grouchy cook-housekeeper and a large jowly man who was passed off as the gardener/chauffeur. Their name was Murgatroyd, and they were said to be husband and wife, but they looked like brother and sister. They regarded me with distrust, which I reciprocated. During the days, when Richard was at his office and Winifred was ubiquitous, I tried to get away from the house as much as I could. I would say I was going downtown—shopping, I’d say, which was an acceptable version of how I should be spending my time. I would have myself dropped off at Simpsons department store by the chauffeur, telling him I would take a taxi home. Then I would go inside, make a quick purchase: stockings and gloves were always convincing as evidence of my zeal. Then I would walk the length of the store and exit by the opposite door.

I resumed my former habits—the aimless wandering, the examination of display windows, of theatre posters. I even went to the movies, by myself; I was no longer susceptible to groping men, who had lost their aura of demonic magic, now that I knew what they had in mind. I wasn’t interested in more of the same—the same obsessive clutching and fumbling. Keep your hands to yourself or I’ll scream worked well enough as long as you were prepared to follow it up. They seemed to know I was. Joan Crawford was my favourite movie star at that time. Wounded eyes, lethal mouth.

Sometimes I went to the Royal Ontario Museum. I looked at suits of armour, stuffed animals, antique musical instruments. This did not take me very far. Or I would go to Diana Sweets for a soda or a cup of coffee: it was a genteel tea room across from the department stores, much patronized by ladies, and I was unlikely to be bothered by stray men there. Or I would walk through Queen’s Park, quickly and with purpose. If too slowly, a man was bound to appear. Flypaper, Reenie used to call some young woman or other. She has to scrape them off. Once, a man exposed himself, right in front of me, at eye level. (I’d made the mistake of sitting on a secluded bench, on the grounds of the university.) He wasn’t a tramp either, he was quite well dressed. “I’m sorry,” I said to him. “I’m just not interested.” He looked so disappointed. Most likely he’d wanted me to faint.

In theory I could go wherever I liked, in practice, there were invisible barriers. I kept to the main streets, the more prosperous areas: even within those confines, there were not really very many places where I felt unconstrained. I watched other people—not the men so much, the women. Were they married? Where were they going? Did they have jobs? I couldn’t tell much from looking at them, except the price of their shoes.

I felt as if I’d been picked up and set down in a foreign country, where everyone spoke a different language.

Sometimes there would be couples, arm in arm—laughing, happy, amorous. Victims of an enormous fraud, and at the same time its perpetrators, or so I felt. I stared at them with rancour.

Then one day—it was a Thursday—I saw Alex Thomas. He was on the other side of the street, waiting for the light to change. It was Queen Street, at Yonge. He was the worse for wear—he had on a blue shirt, like a worker, and a battered hat—but it was him all right. He looked illuminated, as if a shaft of light were falling on him from some invisible source, rendering him frighteningly visible. Surely everyone else on the street was looking at him too—surely they all knew who he was! Any minute now they would recognize him, they’d shout, they’d give chase.

My first impulse was to warn him. But then I knew that the warning must be for both of us, because whatever trouble he was involved in, I was suddenly involved in it as well.

I could have paid no attention. I could have turned away. That would have been wise. But such wisdom was not available to me then.