Dear Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

imitation.”
    “Could have fooled me. I don’t know what they put you in here for, it’ll freeze your butt off. Excuse me. You want to see the doctor, I can show you. I know where everything is,I’ve lived here practically since I was born. My mother runs the kitchen. My name is Mary. What’s yours?”
    “Vivi. Vivien.”
    “If you are a teacher shouldn’t it be Miss? Miss what?”
    “Miss Hyde.”
    “Tan your hide,” she said. “Sorry, I just thought that up. I’d like if you could be my teacher but I have to go to school in town. It’s the stupid rules. Because I have not got TB.”
    She was leading me while she talked, through the door at the far end of the cloakroom, then along a regular hospital corridor. Waxed linoleum. Dull green paint, an antiseptic smell.
    “Now you’re here maybe I’ll get Reddy to let me switch.”
    “Who is Reddy?”
    “Reddy Fox. It’s out of a book. Me and Anabel just started calling him that.”
    “Who is Anabel?”
    “Nobody now. She’s dead.”
    “Oh, I’m sorry.”
    “Not your fault. It happens around here. I’m in high school this year. Anabel never really got to go to school at all. When I was just in public school Reddy got the town teacher to let me stay home a lot, so I could keep her company.”
    She stopped at a half-opened door and whistled.
    “Hey. I brought the teacher.”
    A man’s voice said, “Okay Mary. Enough out of you for one day.”
    “Okay. I heard you.”
    She sauntered away and left me facing a spare man of ordinary height, whose reddish fair hair was cut very short and glistened in the artificial light from the hallway.
    “You’ve met Mary,” he said. “She has a lot to say for herself.She won’t be in your class so you won’t have to undergo that every day. People either take to her or they don’t.”
    He struck me as between ten and fifteen years older than myself and at first he talked to me just in the way an older man would do. A preoccupied future employer. He asked about my trip, about the arrangements for my suitcase. He wanted to know how I would like living up here in the woods, after Toronto, whether I would be bored.
    Not in the least, I said, and added that it was beautiful.
    “It’s like—it’s like being inside a Russian novel.”
    He looked at me attentively for the first time.
    “Is it really? Which Russian novel?”
    His eyes were a light, bright grayish blue. One eyebrow had risen, like a little peaked cap.
    It was not that I hadn’t read Russian novels. I had read some all through and some partway. But because of that eyebrow, and his amused but confrontational expression, I could not remember any title except
War and Peace
. I did not want to say that because it was what anybody would remember.
    “War and Peace.”
    “Well, it’s only the Peace we’ve got here, I’d say. But if it was the War you were hankering after I suppose you would have joined one of those women’s outfits and got yourself overseas.”
    I was angry and humiliated because I had not really been showing off. Or not only showing off. I had wanted to say what a wonderful effect this scenery had on me.
    He was evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into.
    “I guess I was really expecting some sort of old lady teacher come out of the woodwork,” he said, in some slightapology. “As if everybody of reasonable age and qualifications would have got back into the system these days. You didn’t study to be a teacher, did you? Just what were you planning to do once you got your B.A.?”
    “Work on my M.A.,” I said shortly.
    “So what changed your mind?”
    “I thought I should earn some money.”
    “Sensible idea. Though I’m afraid you won’t earn much here. Sorry to pry. I just wanted to make sure you were not going to run off and leave us in the lurch. Not planning to get married, are you?”
    “No.”
    “All right. All right. You’re off the hook now. Didn’t discourage you, did