Free Dance of the Happy Shades by Alice Munro

I had a knowledge, though it was not very comprehensive, of the orderly progression of stages, the ritual of back- and front-seat seduction). Almost I wished I was with Adelaide.
    “Do you want to go for a walk?” I said.
    “That’s the first bright idea you’ve had all night,” George told me from the back seat. “Don’t hurry,” he said as we got out. He and Adelaide were muffled and laughing together. “Don’t hurry back!”
    Lois and I walked along a wagon track close to the bush. The fields were moonlit, chilly and blowing. Now I felt vengeful, and I said softly, “I had quite a talk with your mother.”
    “I can imagine,” said Lois.
    “She told me about that guy you went out with last summer.”
    “This summer.”
    “It’s last summer now. He was engaged or something, wasn’t he?”
    “Yes.”
    I was not going to let her go. “Did he like you better?” I said. “Was that it? Did he like you better?”
    “No, I wouldn’t say he liked me,” Lois said. I thought, by some thickening of the sarcasm in her voice, that she was beginning to be drunk. “He liked Momma and the kids okay but he didn’t like me.
Like me,
” she said. “What’s that?”
    “Well, he went out with you—”
    “He just went around with me for the summer. That’s what those guys from up the beach always do. They come down here to the dances and get a girl to go around with. For the summer. They always do.
    “How I know he didn’t
like
me,” she said, “he said I was always bitching. You have to act grateful to those guys, you know, or they say you’re bitching.”
    I was a little startled at having loosed all this. I said: “Did you like him?”
    “Oh, sure! I should, shouldn’t I? I should just get down on my knees and thank him. That’s what my mother does. He brings her a cheap old spotted elephant—”
    “Was this guy the first?” I said.
    “The first steady. Is that what you mean?”
    It wasn’t. “How old are you?”
    She considered. “I’m almost seventeen. I can pass for eighteen or nineteen. I can pass in a beer parlour. I did once.”
    “What grade are you in at school?”
    She looked at me, rather amazed. “Did you think I still went to school? I quit that two years ago. I’ve got a job at the glove-works in town.”
    “That must have been against the law. When you quit.”
    “Oh, you can get a permit if your father’s dead or something.”
    “What do you do at the glove-works?” I said.
    “Oh, I run a machine. It’s like a sewing machine. I’ll be getting on piecework soon. You make more money.”
    “Do you like it?”
    “Oh, I wouldn’t say I loved it. It’s a job—you ask a lot of questions,” she said.
    “Do you mind?”
    “I don’t have to answer you,” she said, her voice flat and small again. “Only if I like.” She picked up her skirt and spread it out in her hands. “I’ve got burrs on my skirt,” she said. She bent over, pulling them one by one. “I’ve got burrs on my dress,” she said. “It’s my good dress. Will they leave a mark? If I pull them all—slowly—I won’t pull any threads.”
    “You shouldn’t have worn that dress,” I said. “What’d you wear that dress for?”
    She shook the skirt, tossing a burr loose. “I don’t know,” she said. She held it out, the stiff, shining stuff, with faintly drunken satisfaction. “I wanted to show you guys!” she said, with a sudden small explosion of viciousness. The drunken, nose-thumbing, toe-twirling satisfaction could not now be mistaken as she stood there foolishly, tauntingly, with her skirt spread out. “I’ve got an imitation cashmere sweater at home. It cost me twelve dollars,” she said. “I’ve got a fur coat I’m paying on, paying on for next winter. I’ve got a fur coat—”
    “That’s nice,” I said. “I think it’s lovely for people to have things.”
    She dropped the skirt and struck the flat of her hand on my face. This was a relief to me, to both of us. We felt