Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You Read Online Free Page A

pressure of his fingers as if they had left dents just above where her skirt fastened. It had felt like somebody absent-mindedly trying out the keys of a piano.

    Et had set up in the dressmaking business. She had a long narrow room on the Square, once a shop, where she did all her fitting, sewing, cutting, pressing and, behind a curtain, her sleeping and cooking. She could lie in bed and look at the squares of pressed tin on her ceiling, their flowerpattern, all her own. Arthur had not liked her taking up dressmaking because he thought she was too smart for it. All the hard work she had done in History had given him an exaggerated idea of her brains. “Besides,” she told him, “it takes more brains to cut and fit, if you do it right, than to teach people about the War of 1812. Because, once you learn that, it’s learned and isn’t going to change you. Whereas every article of clothing you make is an entirely new proposition.”
    â€œStill it’s a surprise,” said Arthur, “to see the way you settle down.”
    It surprised everybody, but not Et herself. She made the change easily, from a girl turning cartwheels to a town fixture. She drove the other dressmakers out of business. They had been meek, unimportant creatures anyway, going around to people’s houses, sewing in back rooms and being grateful for meals. Only one serious rival appeared in all Et’s years, and that was a Finnish woman who called herself a designer. Some people gave her a try, because people are never satisfied, but it soon came out she was all style and no fit. Et never mentioned her, she let people find out for themselves; but afterwards, when this woman had left town and gone to Toronto—where, from what Et had seen on the streets, nobody knew a good fit from a bad—Et did not restrain herself. She would say to a customer she was fitting, “I see you’re still wearing that herringbone my foreigner friend tacked together for you. I saw you on the street.”
    â€œOh, I know,” the woman would say. “But I do have to wear it out.”
    â€œYou can’t see yourself from behind anyway, what’s the difference.”
    Customers took this kind of thing from Et, came to expect it, even. She’s a terror, they said about her, Et’s a terror. She had them at a disadvantage, she had them in their slips and corsets. Ladies who looked quite firm and powerful, outside, were here immobilized, apologetic, exposingsuch trembly, meek-looking thighs squeezed together by corsets, such long sad breast creases, bellies blown up and torn by children and operations.
    Et always closed her front curtains tight, pinning the crack.
    â€œThat’s to keep the men from peeking.”
    Ladies laughed nervously.
    â€œThat’s to keep Jimmy Saunders from stumping over to get an eyeful.”
    Jimmy Saunders was a World War I veteran who had a little shop next to Et’s, harness and leather goods.
    â€œOh, Et. Jimmy Saunders has a wooden leg.”
    â€œHe hasn’t got wooden eyes. Or anything else that I know of.”
    â€œEt you’re terrible.”

    Et kept Char beautifully dressed. The two steadiest criticisms of Char, in Mock Hill, were that she dressed too elegantly, and that she smoked. It was because she was a teacher’s wife that she should have refrained from doing either of these things, but Arthur of course let her do anything she liked, even buying her a cigarette holder so she could look like a lady in a magazine. She smoked at a high school dance, and wore a backless satin evening dress, and danced with a boy who had got a high school girl pregnant, and it was all the same to Arthur. He did not get to be Principal. Twice the school board passed him over and brought in somebody from outside, and when they finally gave him the job, in 1942, it was only temporarily and because so many teachers were away at war.
    Char fought hard all these years to keep