Free The Romantic by Barbara Gowdy

still have those heavy accents. Dora could hardly understand a word the woman said. Greta, that’s her name. That’s the woman’s name. He’s Karl. Greta and Karl Richter. I suppose that sounds German, although I know a Greta from Strathroy, where I grew up, and there’s a Karl at church, Karl Stock, he’s an elder, and neither of them are German. I never met a Richter that I can recall. I said to Bill, I said, how do we know they’re not Nazis? and he says, how do we know they didn’t fight in the Resistance? Bill always looks on thebright side. They’ve only got the one boy and he’s adopted.”
    I perk up. “Adopted?”
    “And around your age, Louise, which threw me for a loop when Bill told me, considering as how they’re old enough to be the grandparents. I’d go over, welcome them to the neighbourhood and all, but if they say Heil Hitler I’ll keel over dead.”
    “I’ve never met anybody who was adopted,” I say.
    “Probably couldn’t have her own babies for one reason or another.” She turns to Mrs. Carver. “I don’t know if you heard, but I lost a baby, it’ll be four years come Valentine’s Day. The doctors said it was because I was run ragged. I’m lucky to be alive.” She presses her palms into her eyes.
    Before I understand that she is crying, Mrs. Carver is out of her chair. She hurries around the table and pats Mrs. Dingwall’s bouncing shoulders. “Should I get a Kleenex?” I ask. No response. I look at the calendar—it’s thumbtacked to the wall beside the phone—and realize that yesterday, December eighth, was the anniversary of my conception. Feeling entitled, I take the last cookie.
    It is Mrs. Carver who moves me, with her twitching face and her fast pats that I doubt can be very comforting. For Mrs. Dingwall I feel only exasperation. I nibble the edges of the cookie and look at her chewed-to-the-quick fingernails, the dirt in the creases of her knuckles, and feel a pure, ruthless disgust for the tragedies of adults. The mess they make of things.
    The following morning, instead of waking up anxious, as I almost always do, I wake up happy. I review the events ofthe previous day to come up with a reason, but there isn’t one. It’s a strange, hollow happiness, almost unbearable. Joy, I think. Maybe what this feeling is, is joy.
    I look at my bedside clock. Eight-fifteen. That isn’t my father shovelling, then, so early on a Saturday morning. I get up and draw back the curtains. The glass is frosted over. With my thumbnail I try to clear a spot, but the frost is too thick, so I undo the clasp and crank the window open.
    Snow lies like a pelt over everything. Cars, shrubs, hedges. The only tracks—and they cut across our property a couple of yards from the window—were made by a person walking over everyone’s lawn, straight through the drifts. Who? The shoveller is Mr. Parker, across the road. In all the whiteness his red cap is a gash. “Day is breaking,” I think, equating this fracturing event with the rasping sound of his shovel.
    Even happier now because of the snow, I go to the closet and get my bathrobe and mule slippers. The bathrobe is the same style and colour as the one hanging in my mother’s closet, and whenever I put mine on I remember how my mother agonized over whether we should buy the champagne or the cornflower blue. We ended up with the champagne because it matched her hair. “The blue matches your eyes,” I pointed out and was told, coldly, that her eyes are delft.
    I open the bedroom door, tiptoe down the hall. In front of my father’s door I listen. His quiet snores remind me of men on television breathing through skin-diving nozzles or gas masks. I would like to burst in and tell him about the snowfall but I have never entered my parents’ room whenthe door was shut, and now that my mother has left and I know my father misses her laugh, I’m afraid of finding him in some unimaginable grief-ridden condition.
    I keep going, down to the