Who Do You Think You Are

spend a day with us. Wouldn’t you like a day in the country? It’s not very healthy in the glove factory, for a young person. You need the air. Why don’t you come and see us? Why don’t you come today?
    And every time Flo accepted this invitation it would turn out that there was a big fruit preserving or chili sauce making in progress, or they were wallpapering or spring-cleaning, or the threshers were coming. All she ever got to see of the country was where she threw the dishwater over the fence. She never could understand why she went or why she stayed. It was a long way, to turn around and walk back to town. And they were such a helpless outfit on their own. The bishop’s sister put her preserving jars away dirty. When you brought them up from the cellar there would be bits of mold growing in them, clots of fuzzy rotten fruit on the bottom. How could you help but be sorry for people like that?
    When the bishop’s sister was in the hospital, dying, it happened that Flo was in there too. She was in for her gall bladder operation, which Rose could just remember. The bishop’s sister heard that Flo was there and wanted to see her. So Flo let herself be hoisted into a wheel chair and wheeled down the hall, and as soon as she laid eyes on the woman in the bed—the tall, smooth-skinned woman all bony and spotted now, drugged and cancerous—she began an overwhelming nosebleed, the first and last she ever suffered in her life. The red blood was whipping out of her, she said, like streamers.
    She had the nurses running for help up and down the hall. It seemed as if nothing could stop it. When she lifted her head it shot right on the sick woman’s bed, when she lowered her head it streamed down on the floor. They had to put her in ice packs, finally. She never got to say good-bye to the woman in the bed.
    “I never did say good-bye to her.”
    “Would you want to?”
    “Well yes,” said Flo. “Oh yes. I would.”
    Rose brought a pile of books home every night. Latin, Algebra, Ancient and Medieval History, French, Geography. The Merchant of Venice, A Tale of Two Cities, Shorter Poems, Macbeth . Flo expressed hostility to them as she did toward all books. The hostility seemed to increase with a book’s weight and size, the darkness and gloominess of its binding and the length and difficulty of the words in its title. Shorter Poems enraged her, because she opened it and found a poem that was five pages long.
    She made rubble out of the titles. Rose believed she deliberately mispronounced. Ode came out Odd and Ulysses had a long shh in it, as if the hero was drunk.
    Rose’s father had to come downstairs to go to the bathroom. He hung on to the banister and moved slowly but without halting. He wore a brown wool bathrobe with a tasseled tie. Rose avoided looking at his face. This was not particularly because of the alterations his sickness might have made, but because of the bad opinion of herself she was afraid she would find written there. It was for him she brought the books, no doubt about it, to show off to him. And he did look at them, he could not walk past any book in the world without picking it up and looking at its title. But all he said was, “Look out you don’t get too smart for your own good.”
    Rose believed he said that to please Flo, in case she might be listening. She was in the store at the time. But Rose imagined that no matter where Flo was now, he would speak as if she might be listening. He was anxious to please Flo, to anticipate her objections. He had made a decision, it seemed. Safety lay with Flo.
    Rose never answered him back. When he spoke she automatically bowed her head, tightened her lips in an expression that was secretive, but carefully not disrespectful. She was circumspect. But all her need for flaunting, her high hopes of herself, her gaudy ambitions, were not hidden from him. He knew them all, and Rose was ashamed, just to be in the same room with him. She felt that she disgraced him, had disgraced him somehow from the time she was born, and would disgrace him still more thoroughly in the future. But she was not repenting. She knew her own stubbornness; she did not mean to change.
    Flo was his idea of what a woman ought to be. Rose knew that, and indeed he often said it. A woman ought to be energetic, practical, clever at making and saving; she ought to be shrewd, good at bargaining and bossing and seeing through people’s pretensions. At the same time she should be