Who Do You Think You Are

table, the only place left to sit, swinging her legs. She can feel the cool oilcloth, because she is wearing shorts, last summer’s tight faded shorts dug out of the summer-clothes bag. The smell a bit moldy from winter storage.
    Flo crawls around underneath, scrubbing with the brush, wiping with the rag. Her legs are long, white and muscular, marked all over with blue veins as if somebody had been drawing rivers on them with an indelible pencil. An abnormal energy, a violent disgust, is expressed in the chewing of the brush at the linoleum, the swish of the rag.
    What do they have to say to each other? It doesn’t really matter. Flo speaks of Rose’s smart-aleck behavior, rudeness and sloppiness and conceit. Her willingness to make work for others, her lack of gratitude. She mentions Brian’s innocence, Rose’s corruption. Oh, don’t you think you’re somebody, says Flo, and a moment later, Who do you think you are? Rose contradicts and objects with such poisonous reasonableness and mildness, displays theatrical unconcern. Flo goes beyond her ordinary scorn and self-possession and becomes amazingly theatrical herself, saying it was for Rose that she sacrificed her life. She saw her father saddled with a baby daughter and she thought, what is that man going to do? So she married him, and here she is, on her knees.
    At that moment the bell rings, to announce a customer in the store. Because the fight is on, Rose is not permitted to go into the store and wait on whoever it is. Flo gets up and throws off her apron, groaning—but not communicatively, it is not a groan whose exasperation Rose is allowed to share—and goes in and serves. Rose hears her using her normal voice.
    “About time! Sure is!”
    She comes back and ties on her apron and is ready to resume. “You never have a thought for anybody but your own-self! You never have a thought for what I’m doing.”
    “I never asked you to do anything. I wished you never had. I would have been a lot better off.”
    Rose says this smiling directly at Flo, who has not yet gone down on her knees. Flo sees the smile, grabs the scrub rag that is hanging on the side of the pail, and throws it at her. It may be meant to hit her in the face but instead it falls against Rose’s leg and she raises her foot and catches it, swinging it negligently against her ankle.
    “All right,” says Flo. “You’ve done it this time. All right.”
    Rose watches her go to the woodshed door, hears her tramp through the woodshed, pause in the doorway, where the screen door hasn’t yet been hung, and the storm door is standing open, propped with a brick. She calls Rose’s father. She calls him in a warning, summoning voice, as if against her will preparing him for bad news. He will know what this is about.
    The kitchen floor has five or six different patterns of linoleum on it. Ends, which Flo got for nothing and ingeniously trimmed and fitted together, bordering them with tin strips and tacks. While Rose sits on the table waiting, she looks at the floor, at this satisfying arrangement of rectangles, triangles, some other shape whose name she is trying to remember. She hears Flo coming back through the woodshed, on the creaky plank walk laid over the dirt floor. She is loitering, waiting, too. She and Rose can carry this no further, by themselves.
    Rose hears her father come in. She stiffens, a tremor runs through her legs, she feels them shiver on the oilcloth. Called away from some peaceful, absorbing task, away from the words running in his head, called out of himself, her father has to say something. He says, “Well? What’s wrong?”
    Now comes another voice of Flo’s. Enriched, hurt, apologetic, it seems to have been manufactured on the spot. She is sorry to have called him from his work.
    Would never have done it, if Rose was not driving her to distraction. How to distraction? With her back-talk and impudence and her terrible tongue. The things Rose has said to Flo are such that, if Flo had said them to her mother, she knows her father would have thrashed her into the ground.
    Rose tries to butt in, to say this isn’t true.
    What isn’t true?
    Her father raises a hand, doesn’t look at her, says, “Be quiet.” When she says it isn’t true, Rose means that she herself didn’t start this, only responded, that she was goaded by Flo, who is now, she believes, telling the grossest sort of lies, twisting everything to suit herself. Rose puts aside her other knowledge