This Is Not for You by Jane Rule Page A

and pans and things like that.”
    “You won’t need many pans,” I said.
    “I’d never be able to learn to cook more than one thing at a time, anyway. Isn’t it a great table? I can have my desk at this end, work at the other end and eat in the middle.”
    “Has she told you the name of the bear?”
    “Pooh,” you said, and even you cringed.
    “It’s a terrible place, E.,” I said, laughing. “I can’t imagine anyone but you living in it.”
    “My own,” you said, looking around curiously.
    Frank’s notion (shared by other people) that you were purposely rebelling against your mother didn’t really explain your choice. The way you lived in any setting was not as conscious as that. You were, in fact, so little separated from your childhood that Lady Alice’s sad snobbery and exiled dining-room furniture probably reminded you of home and gave you some comfort. You had always spent more time in maids’ quarters than in your own, and this room might have been the attic of your mother’s town house where you and your brother played on rainy days, a place where you had learned to order people’s trunks and old rockers and bedsprings into your own design. Far from being rebellious, you had looked for and found just the kind of playroom you were accustomed to. The only difference, admittedly a happy one, was that you never had to go downstairs to eat, say hello to guests or good night to your mother. You could even sleep among the inventions of your day.
    “But she’ll be so cold,” Doris protested when I described the place to her. “And she won’t eat properly. Isn’t her mother giving her enough money?”
    “She’s bought herself a complete, very expensive mountaineering outfit and two cases of baked beans,” I said. “And she has a record player just like the one she gave me, so she must have some money.”
    “Is she just slightly feeble-minded?”
    “It’s her tree house, Doris. I expect one day I’ll find her with a blanket draped over the chairs, sitting under it on the floor reading something wicked out of Godey’s Lady’s Book .”
    “That goes back to my generation’s older generation—and farther.”
    “Esther’s old-fashioned.”
    “Will she be all right?”
    “I imagine so. She can have dinner with me a couple of times a week. Slade’s practically around the corner from me.”
    “I meant to pass on a compliment from Frank the other night. He wanted to know where on earth you’d learned to cook.”
    “That certainly doesn’t sound a compliment.”
    “But it is. He was really quite nervous about having dinner with you before we came. I saw him putting stomach pills into his pill box. “You really are a very good cook, Kate, and I can’t think where you learned.”
    “I’ve always been fed well, and I can read.”
    “I suppose, if anybody had ever let me—or if it had ever occurred to me to go out on my own the way all you kids seem to—I would have been more like Esther—made a kind of mud pie party out of the whole thing. So the question is, where did you get the confidence you have about ordinary living?”
    “It doesn’t seem important enough to me to be bad at it.”
    “Is there anything important like that?”
    Loving, I might have said, but I probably didn’t really know that much at the time.
    “I have a project for you,” I said. “I want you to ask me and a young man named Andrew Belshaw to dinner next week.”
    “Fine. Who is he?”
    “I met him in Spain and saw something of him in California last spring. He’s Canadian—Alberta oil, here for a Ph.D. at Cambridge. I think Frank would like him, and I’m sure you would.”
    “And you do?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    I did not meet Andrew’s boat train. He telephoned after he had checked in at the Cumberland and asked me to meet him there for a drink. I caught a bus along Oxford Street and sat down, by mistake, next to a woman with pale red hair and a neatly trimmed red beard and mustache. No one