Roxanne patted sweat off his forehead, saying, “Don’t get excited, you haven’t won yet.”

“Roxanne,” he said. “Roxanne. Do you know whose name that was, Roxanne?”

“Hmm?” she said, and I broke in. I couldn’t help it.

“It was Alexander the Great’s wife’s name.”

My head was a magpie’s nest lined with such bright scraps of information.

“Is that so?” said Roxanne. “And who was that supposed to be? Great Alexander?”

I realized something when I looked at Mr. Crozier at that moment. Something shocking, saddening.

He liked her not knowing. I could tell. He liked her not knowing. Her ignorance woke a pleasure that melted on his tongue, like a lick of toffee.

On the first day she had worn shorts, as I did, but the next time and always after that Roxanne wore a dress of some stiff and shiny light green material. You could hear it rustle as she ran up the stairs. She brought a fleecy pad for Mr. Crozier, so he would not develop bedsores. She was dissatisfied with the arrangement of his bedclothes, always, had to put them to rights. But however she scolded, her movements never irritated him, and she made him admit to feeling more comfortable afterwards.

She was never at a loss. Sometimes she came equipped with riddles. Or jokes. Some of the jokes were what my mother would call smutty and would not allow around our house, except when they came from certain of my father’s relatives who had practically no other kind of conversation.

These jokes usually started off with serious-sounding but absurd questions.

Did you hear about the nun who went shopping for a meat grinder?

Did you hear what the bride and groom went and ordered for dessert on their wedding night?

The answers always coming with a double meaning, so that whoever told the joke could pretend to be shocked and accuse the audience of having dirty minds.

And after she had got everybody used to her telling these jokes Roxanne went on to the sort of jokes I didn’t believe my mother knew existed, often involving sex with sheep or hens or milking machines.

“Isn’t that awful?” she always said at the finish. She said she wouldn’t know this stuff if her husband didn’t bring it home from the garage.

The fact that Old Mrs. Crozier snickered shocked me as much as the jokes themselves. I thought that she maybe didn’t get the point but simply enjoyed listening to whatever Roxanne said. She sat with that chewed-in yet absentminded smile on her face as if she’d been given a present she knew she would like, even if she hadn’t got the wrapping off it yet.

Mr. Crozier didn’t laugh, but he never laughed, really. He raised his eyebrows, pretending to scold, to find Roxanne outrageous but endearing all the same. This could have been good manners, or gratitude for all her efforts, whatever they might be.

I myself made sure to laugh, so that Roxanne would not put me down as being full of priggish innocence.

The other thing she did, to keep things lively, was tell about her life. Coming down from some lost little town in northern Ontario to Toronto to visit her older sister, then getting a job at Eaton’s, first cleaning things up in the cafeteria, then being noticed by one of the managers because she worked fast and was always cheerful, and suddenly finding herself a salesgirl in the glove department. (I thought she made this sound something like being discovered by Warner Brothers.) And who should come in one day but Barbara Ann Scott, the skating star, who bought a pair of elbow-length white kid gloves.

Meanwhile Roxanne’s sister had so many boyfriends that she would flip a coin to see who she would go out with almost every night, and she employed Roxanne to meet the rejects regretfully at the front door of the rooming house, while she herself and her pick sneaked out the back. Roxanne said maybe that was how she had developed such a gift of the gab. And pretty soon some of the boys she met this way were taking her out on her own, instead of her sister. They did not know her real age.

“I had me a ball,” she said.

I began to understand that there were certain talkers-certain girls-whom people liked to listen to, not because of what they, the girls, had to say, but because of the delight they took in saying it. A delight in themselves, a shine on their faces, a conviction that whatever they were telling about was remarkable and that they themselves could not help but give pleasure. There might be other people-people like me-who didn’t concede this, but that was their loss. And people like me would never be the audience these girls were after, anyway.

Mr. Crozier sat propped up on his pillows and looked for all the world as if he was happy. Happy just to close his eyes and let her talk, then open his eyes and find her there, like a chocolate bunny on Easter morning. And then with his eyes open follow every twitch of her candy lips and sway of her sumptuous bottom.

Old Mrs. Crozier would rock slightly back and forth in her curious state of satisfaction.

The time Roxanne spent upstairs was as long as she spent downstairs, giving the massage. I wondered if she was being paid. If she wasn’t, how could she afford to take the time? And who could be paying her but Old Mrs. Crozier?

Why?

To keep her stepson happy and comfortable? I doubted it.

To keep herself entertained in a curious way?

One afternoon when Roxanne had left his room, Mr. Crozier said he felt thirstier than usual. I went downstairs to get him some water from the pitcher that was always in the refrigerator. Roxanne was packing up to go home.

“I never meant to stay so late,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to run into that schoolteacher.”

I didn’t understand for a moment.

“You know. Syl-vi-a. She’s not crazy about me either, is she? She ever mention me when she drives you home?”

I said that Sylvia had never mentioned Roxanne’s name to me, during any of our drives. But why should she?

“Dorothy says she doesn’t know how to handle him. She says I make him a lot happier than what she does. Dorothy says that. I wouldn’t be surprised she even told her that to her face.”

I thought of how Sylvia ran upstairs into her husband’s room every afternoon when she got home, before she even spoke to me or her mother-in-law, her face flushed with eagerness and desperation. I wanted to say something about that-I wanted somehow to defend her, but I didn’t know how. And people as confident as Roxanne often seemed to get the better of me, even if it was only by not listening.

“You sure she never says anything about me?”

I said again that no, she didn’t. “She’s tired when she gets home.”

“Yeah. Everybody’s tired. Some just learn to act like they aren’t.”

I did say something then, to balk her. “I quite like her.”

“You qwat like her?” mocked Roxanne.

Playfully, sharply, she jerked at a strand of the bangs I had recently cut for myself.

“You ought to do something decent with your hair.”

Dorothy says.

If Roxanne wanted admiration, which was her nature, what was it Dorothy wanted? I had a feeling there was mischief stirring, but I could not pin it down. Maybe it was just a desire to have Roxanne in the house, her liveliness in the house, double time.

Midsummer passed. Water was low in the wells. The sprinkler truck stopped coming and some stores had put up sheets of what looked like yellow cellophane in their windows to keep their goods from fading. Leaves were spotty, grass dry.

Old Mrs. Crozier kept her garden man hoeing, day after day. That’s what you do in the dry weather, hoe and hoe to bring up any moisture that you can find in the ground underneath.

Summer school at the college would end after the second week of August, and then Sylvia Crozier would be home every day.