The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence

give a Christly curse how I talk, so get that through your head. It don’t matter to me what your friends or your old man think.”
    He believed his words implicitly. But what a green girl I must have been, to believe them equally. After the first year of our marriage, I let Bram go to town alone, and I stayed home. He raised no objection. It left him more free to seek out his old cronies in the beer parlor,and if he came home drunk, the horses found their way with no difficulty.
        I hear the footsteps on the carpeted stair. They sound muted and velvety, as though it were a smotherer. I do not like those footsteps. I don’t trust them.
Who is it?
Who is it?
I want to shout, but my voice emerges punily, a little squawk. A suspicion comes to mind. Have Doris and Marvin gone out after all, leaving me here? That is what they have done. I am certain of it. Oh, without even telling me, so I could bolt the doors. They have gone, flown like heedless children. I can just see the pair of them, giggling together as they sneak off, across the front porch, down the steps and away. And someone else is here, now. Doris read me from the papers not long ago, all about a molester who broke into women’s apartments. The newspapers said he had small soft hands—how disgusting in a man. When the intruder opens the door, I won’t be able to rise from my chair. How simple to strangle. A flick of a necktie and I’m done for. Well, he won’t find me as helpless as he thinks, not by a long shot. Doris hasn’t given me a manicure for a fortnight. I’ll claw him.
    A knock. “Can I come in, Mother?”
    Marvin. Why should I have thought otherwise? I must not let him see my agitation or hell think me daft. Or if he doesn’t, Doris will, trotting behind him.
    “What’s the matter, Marvin? What is it, for mercy’s sake? What’s the matter now?”
    He stands there awkwardly, his hands held out. Doris sidles up to him, nudges his ribs with a brown rayon elbow.
    “Go on now, Marv. You promised.”
    Marvin clears his throat, swallows, but fails to speak.
    “Stop fidgeting, Marvin, for heaven’s sake. I can’t bear people who fidget. What is it?”
    “Doris and me, we’ve been thinking—” His voice peters out, goes thin as shadows, vanishes. Then, in a gunfire burst of words, “She can’t look after you any longer, Mother. She’s not been well herself. The lifting—it’s too much. She just can’t do it—”
    “Not to mention the disturbed nights—” Doris prompts.
    “Yes, the nights. She’s up and down a dozen times and never gets a decent sleep. You need professional care, Mother—a nurse who’ll see to everything. You’d be much happier, yourself, as well—”
    “More comfortable,” Doris says. “We’ve been to Silverthreads Home, Mother, and it’s really cozy. You’d love it, once you got used to it.”
    I can only gaze as though hypnotized. My fingers pleat my dress.
    “A nurse—why should I need a nurse?”
    Doris darts forward, her face not soft and flabby now, but peering earnestly. She gesticulates, as though she could convince me by this trembling of her hands.
    “They’re young and strong, and it’s their business. They know how to lift a person. And all the other things—the beds—”
    “What of the beds?” My voice is austere, but for some reason my hands are unsteady on the squeezed silk of the dress. Doris reddens, glances at Marvin. He shrugs, abandoning her to her own judgment.
    “You’ve wet your sheets,” she says, “nearly every night these past few months. It makes a lot of laundry,and we haven’t been able to afford the automatic washer yet.”
    Appalled, I search her face.
    “That’s a lie. I never did any such thing. You’re making it up. I know your ways. Just so you’ll have some reason for putting me away.”
    She grimaces, an unappealing look, and I see that she is nearly in tears.
    “I guess maybe I shouldn’t have told you,” she says. “It’s not a nice thing