Alice Munros Best

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 helplesscorruption, 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 toward 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 onand 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 air ship, 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 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