Who Do You Think You Are

said, applauding Flo. “Ten thousand electric lights!”
    There was a feeling of permission, relaxation, even a current of happiness, in the room.
    Y EARS 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. Photographed 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