Who Do You Think You Are?

by Alice Munro

  Flo comes into the room without knocking, but with a hesitation that shows it might have occurred to her. She brings a jar of cold cream. Rose is hanging on to advantage as long as she can, lying face down on the bed, refusing to acknowledge or answer.

  “Oh come on,” Flo says uneasily. “You aren’t so bad off, are you? You put some of this on and you’ll feel better.”

  She is bluffing. She doesn’t know for sure what damage has been done. She has the lid off the cold cream. Rose can smell it. The intimate, babyish, humiliating smell. She won’t allow it near her. But in order to avoid it, the big ready clot of it in Flo’s hand, she has to move. She scuffles, resists, loses dignity, and lets Flo see there is not really much the matter.

  “All right,” Flo says. “You win. I’ll leave it here and you can put it on when you like.”

  Later still a tray will appear. Flo will put it down without a word and go away. A large glass of chocolate milk on it, made with Vita-Malt from the store. Some rich streaks of Vita-Malt around the bottom of the glass. Little sandwiches, neat and appetizing. Canned salmon of the first quality and reddest color, plenty of mayonnaise. A couple of butter tarts from a bakery package, chocolate biscuits with a peppermint filling. Rose’s favorites, in the sandwich, tart and cookie line. She will turn away, refuse to look, but left alone with these eatables will be miserably tempted, roused and troubled and drawn back from thoughts of suicide or flight by the smell of salmon, the anticipation of crisp chocolate, she will reach out a finger, just to run it around the edge of one of the sandwiches (crusts cut off!) to get the overflow, get a taste. Then she will decide to eat one, for strength to refuse the rest. One will not be noticed. Soon, in helpless corruption, she will eat them all. She will drink the chocolate milk, eat the tarts, eat the cookies. She will get the malty syrup out of the bottom of the glass with her finger, though she sniffles with shame. Too late.

  Flo will come up and get the tray. She may say, “I see you got your appetite still,” or, “Did you like the chocolate milk, was it enough syrup in it?” depending on how chastened she is feeling, herself. At any rate, all advantage will be lost. Rose will understand that life has started up again, that they will all sit around the table eating again, listening to the radio news. Tomorrow morning, maybe even tonight. Unseemly and unlikely as that may be. They will be embarrassed, but rather less than you might expect considering how they have behaved. They will feel a queer lassitude, a convalescent indolence, not far off satisfaction.

  One night after a scene like this they were all in the kitchen. It must have been summer, or at least warm weather, because her father spoke of the old men who sat on the bench in front of the store.

  “Do you know what they’re talking about now?” he said, and nodded his head towards the store to show who he meant, though of course they were not there now, they went home at dark.

  “Those old coots,” said Flo. “What?”

  There was about them both a geniality not exactly false but a bit more emphatic than was normal, without company.

  Rose’s father told them then that the old men had picked up the idea somewhere that what looked like a star in the western sky, the first star that came out after sunset, the evening star, was in reality an airship hovering over Bay City, Michigan, on the other side of Lake Huron. An American invention, sent up to rival the heavenly bodies. They were all in agreement about this, the idea was congenial to them. They believed it to be lit by ten thousand electric light bulbs. Her father had ruthlessly disagreed with them, pointing out that it was the planet Venus they saw, which had appeared in the sky long before the invention of an electric light bulb. They had never heard of the planet Venus.

  “Ignoramuses,” said Flo. At which Rose knew, and knew her father knew, that Flo had never heard of the planet Venus either. To distract them from this, or even apologize for it, Flo put down her teacup, stretched out with her head resting on the chair she had been sitting on and her feet on another chair (somehow she managed to tuck her dress modestly between her legs at the same time), and lay stiff as a board, so that Brian cried out in delight, “Do that! Do that!”

  Flo was double-jointed and very strong. In moments of celebration or emergency she would do tricks.

  They were silent while she turned herself around, not using her arms at all but just her strong legs and feet. Then they all cried out in triumph, though they had seen it before.

  Just as Flo turned herself Rose got a picture in her mind of that airship, an elongated transparent bubble, with its strings of diamond lights, floating in the miraculous American sky.

  “The planet Venus!” her father said, applauding Flo. “Ten thousand electric lights!”

  There was a feeling of permission, relaxation, even a current of happiness, in the room.

  YEARS LATER, many years later, on a Sunday morning, Rose turned on the radio. This was when she was living by herself in Toronto.

  Well sir.

  It was a different kind of a place in our day. Yes it was.

  It was all horses then. Horses and buggies. Buggy races up and down the main street on the Saturday nights.

  “Just like the chariot races,” says the announcer’s, or interviewer’s, smooth encouraging voice.

  I never seen a one of them.

  “No sir, that was the old Roman chariot races I was referring to.

  That was before your time.”

  Musta been before my time. I’m a hunerd and two years old. “That’s a wonderful age, sir.”

  It is so.

  She left it on, as she went around the apartment kitchen, making coffee for herself. It seemed to her that this must be a staged interview, a scene from some play, and she wanted to find out what it was. The old man’s voice was so vain and belligerent, the interviewer’s quite hopeless and alarmed, under its practiced gentleness and ease. You were surely meant to see him holding the microphone up to some toothless, reckless, preening centenarian, wondering what in God’s name he was doing here, and what would he say next?

  “They must have been fairly dangerous.”

  What was dangerous?

  “Those buggy races.”

  They was. Dangerous. Used to be the runaway horses. Used to be a plenty of accidents. Fellows was dragged along on the gravel and cut their face open. Wouldna matter so much if they was dead. Heh.

  Some of them horses was the high-steppers. Some, they had to have the mustard under their tail. Some wouldn step out for nothin. That’s the thing it is with the horses. Some’ll work and pull till they drop down dead and some wouldn pull your cock out of a pail of lard. Hehe.

  It must be a real interview after all. Otherwise they wouldn’t have put that in, wouldn’t have risked it. It’s all right if the old man says it. Local color. Anything rendered harmless and delightful by his hundred years.

  Accidents all the time then. In the mill. Foundry. Wasn’t the precautions.

  “You didn’t have so many strikes then, I don’t suppose? You didn’t have so many unions?” Everybody taking it easy nowadays. We worked and we was glad to get it. Worked and was glad to get it.

  “You didn’t have television.”

  Didn’t have no T.V. Didn’t have no radio. No picture show.

  “You made your own entertainment.”

  That’s the way we did.

  “You had a lot of experiences young men growing up today will never have.”

  Experiences.

  “Can you recall any of them for us?”

  I eaten groundhog meat one time One winter You wouldna cared for it. Heh.

  There was a pause, of appreciation, it would seem, then the announcer’s voice saying that the foregoing had been an interview with Mr. Wilfred Nettleton of Hanratty, Ontario, made on his hundred and second birthday, two weeks before his death, last spring. A living link with our past. Mr. Nettleton had been interviewed in the Wawanash County Home for the Aged.

  Hat Nettleton.

  Horsewhipper into centenarian. Photogr
aphed on his birthday, fussed over by nurses, kissed no doubt by a girl reporter. Flash bulbs popping at him. Tape recorder drinking in the sound of his voice. Oldest resident. Oldest horsewhipper. Living link with our past.

  Looking out from her kitchen window at the cold lake, Rose was longing to tell somebody. It was Flo who would enjoy hearing. She thought of her saying Imagine! in a way that meant she was having her worst suspicions gorgeously confirmed. But Flo was in the same place Hat Nettleton had died in, and there wasn’t any way Rose could reach her. She had been there even when that interview was recorded, though she would not have heard it, would not have known about it. After Rose put her in the Home, a couple of years earlier, she had stopped talking. She had removed herself, and spent most of her time sitting in a corner of her crib, looking crafty and disagreeable, not answering anybody, though she occasionally showed her feelings by biting a nurse.

  Privilege

  Rose knew a lot of people who wished they had been born poor, and hadn’t been. So she would queen it over them, offering various scandals and bits of squalor from her childhood. The Boys’ Toilet and the Girls’ Toilet. Old Mr. Burns in his Toilet. Shorty McGill and Franny McGill in the entrance to the Boys’ Toilet. She did not deliberately repeat the toilet locale, and was a bit surprised at the way it kept cropping up. She knew that those little dark or painted shacks were supposed to be comical—always were, in country humor—but she saw them instead as scenes of marvelous shame and outrage.

  The Girls’ Toilet and the Boys’ Toilet each had a protected entry-way, which saved having a door. Snow blew in anyway through the cracks between the boards and the knotholes that were for spying. Snow piled up on the seat and on the floor. Many people, it seemed, declined to use the hole. In the heaped snow under a glaze of ice, where the snow had melted and frozen again, were turds copious or lonesome, preserved as if under glass, bright as mustard or grimy as charcoal, with every shading in between. Rose’s stomach turned at the sight; despair got hold of her. She halted in the doorway, could not force herself, decided she could wait. Two or three times she wet on the way home, running from the school to the store, which was not very far. Flo was disgusted.

  “Wee-pee, wee-pee,” she sang out loud, mocking Rose. “Walking home and she had a wee pee!”

  Flo was also fairly pleased, because she liked to see people brought down to earth, Nature asserting itself; she was the sort of woman who will make public what she finds in the laundry bag. Rose was mortified, but didn’t reveal the problem. Why not? She was probably afraid that Flo would show up at the school with a pail and shovel, cleaning up, and lambasting everybody into the bargain.

  She believed the order of things at school to be unchangeable, the rules there different from any that Flo could understand, the savagery incalculable. Justice and cleanliness she saw now as innocent notions out of a primitive period of her life. She was building up the first store of things she could never tell.

  She could never tell about Mr. Burns. Right after she started to school, and before she had any idea what she was going to see—or, indeed, of what there was to see—Rose was running along the school fence with some other girls, through the red dock and goldenrod, and crouching behind Mr. Burns’s toilet, which backed on the schoolyard. Someone had reached through the fence and yanked the bottom boards off, so you could see in. Old Mr. Burns, half-blind, paunchy, dirty, spirited, came down the backyard talking to himself, singing, swiping at the tall weeds with his cane. In the toilet, too, after some moments of strain and silence, his voice was heard.

  There is a green hill far away

  Outside a city wall

  Where the dear Lord was crucified

  Who died to save us all.

  Mr. Burns’s singing was not pious but hectoring, as if he longed, even now, for a fight. Religion, around here, came out mostly in fights. People were Catholics or fundamentalist Protestants, honor-bound to molest each other. Many of the Protestants had been—or their families had been—Anglicans, Presbyterians. But they had got too poor to show up at those churches, so had veered off to the Salvation Army, the Pentecostals. Others had been total heathens until they were saved. Some were heathens yet, but Protestant in fights. Flo said the Anglicans and the Presbyterians were snobs and the rest were Holy Rollers, while the Catholics would put up with any two-facedness or debauching, as long as they got your money for the Pope. So Rose did not have to go to any church at all.

  All the little girls squatted to see, peered in at that part of Mr.

  Burns that sagged through the hole. For years Rose thought she had seen testicles but on reflection she believed it was only bum. Something like a cow’s udder, which looked to have a prickly surface, like the piece of tongue before Flo boiled it. She wouldn’t eat that tongue, and after she told him what it was Brian wouldn’t eat it either, so Flo went into a temper and said they could live on boiled baloney.

  Older girls didn’t get down to look, but stood by, some making puking noises. Other little girls jumped up and joined them, eager to imitate, but Rose remained squatting, amazed and thoughtful. She would have liked longer to contemplate, but Mr. Burns removed himself, came out buttoning and singing. Girls sneaked along the fence, to call to him.

  “Mr. Burns! Good morning Mr. Burns! Mr. Burns-your-balls!” He came roaring at the fence, chopping with his cane, as if they were chickens.

  Younger and older, boys and girls and everybody—except the teacher, of course, who locked the door at recess and stayed in the school, like Rose holding off till she got home, risking accidents and enduring agonies—everybody gathered to look in the entryway of the Boys’ Toilet when the word went round: Shortie McGill is fucking Franny McGill!

  Brother and sister.

  Relations performing.

  That was Flo’s word for it: perform. Back in the country, back on the hill farms she came from, Flo said that people had gone dotty, been known to eat boiled hay, and performed with their too-close relations. Before Rose understood what was meant she used to imagine some makeshift stage, some rickety old barn stage, where members of a family got up and gave silly songs and recitations. What a performance! Flo would say in disgust, blowing out smoke, referring not to any single act but to everything along that line, past and present and future, going on anywhere in the world. People’s diversions, like their pretensions, could not stop astounding her.

  Whose idea was this, for Franny and Shortie? Probably some of the big boys dared Shortie, or he bragged and they challenged him. One thing was certain: the idea could not be Franny’s. She had to be caught for this, or trapped. You couldn’t say caught, really, because she wouldn’t run, wouldn’t put that much faith in escaping. But she showed unwillingness, had to be dragged, then pushed down where they wanted her. Did she know what was coming? She would know at least that nothing other people devised for her ever turned out to be pleasant.

  Franny McGill had been smashed against the wall, by her father, drunk, when she was a baby. So Flo said. Another story had Franny falling out of a cutter, drunk, kicked by a horse. At any rate, smashed. Her face had got the worst of it. Her nose was crooked, making every breath she took a long, dismal-sounding snuffle. Her teeth were badly bunched together, so that she could not close her mouth and never could contain her quantities of spit. She was white, bony, shuffling, fearful, like an old woman. Marooned in Grade Two or Three, she could read and write a little, was seldom called on to do so. She may not have been so stupid as everybody thought, but simply stunned, bewildered, by continual assault. And in spite of everything there was something hopeful about her. She would follow after anybody who did not immediately attack and insult her; she would offer bits of crayon, knots of chewed gum pried off seats and desks. It was necessary to fend her off firmly, and scowl warningly whenever she caught your eye.

  Go away Franny. Go away or I’ll punch you. I will. I really will. The use Shortie was making of her, that others made, would continue. She would get pregnant, be taken away, come b
ack and get pregnant again, be taken away, come back, get pregnant, be taken away again. There would be talk of getting her sterilized, getting the Lions Club to pay for it, there would be talk of shutting her up, when she died suddenly of pneumonia, solving the problem. Later on Rose would think of Franny when she came across the figure of an idiotic, saintly whore, in a book or a movie. Men who made books and movies seemed to have a fondness for this figure, though Rose noticed they would clean her up. They cheated, she thought, when they left out the breathing and the spit and the teeth; they were refusing to take into account the aphrodisiac prickles of disgust, in their hurry to reward themselves with the notion of a soothing blankness, undifferentiating welcome.

  The welcome Franny gave Shortie was not so saintly, after all. She let out howls, made ripply, phlegmy, by her breathing problems. She kept jerking one leg. Either the shoe had come off, or she had not been wearing shoes to start with. There was her white leg and bare foot, with muddy toes—looking too normal, too vigorous and self-respecting, to belong to Franny McGill. That was all of her Rose could see. She was small, and had got shoved to the back of the crowd. Big boys were around them, hollering encouragement, big girls were hovering behind, giggling. Rose was interested but not alarmed. An act performed on Franny had no general significance, no bearing on what could happen to anyone else. It was only further abuse.

  When Rose told people these things, in later years, they had considerable effect. She had to swear they were true, she was not exaggerating. And they were true, but the effect was off-balance. Her schooling seemed deplorable. It seemed she must have been miserable, and that was not so. She was learning. She learned how to manage in the big fights that tore up the school two or three times a year. Her inclination was to be neutral, and that was a bad mistake; it could bring both sides down on you. The thing to do was to ally yourself with people living near you, so you would not be in too much danger walking home. She was never sure what fights were about, and she did not have a good instinct for fighting, did not really understand the necessity. She would always be taken by surprise by a snowball, a stone, a shingle whacked down from behind. She knew she would never flourish, never get to any very secure position—if indeed there was such a thing—in the world of school. But she was not miserable, except in the matter of not being able to go to the toilet. Learning to survive, no matter with what cravenness and caution, what shocks and forebodings, is not the same as being miserable. It is too interesting.