Who Do You Think You Are

him wait; sometimes she would go to the bottom of the stairs and force him to call down further details about why he needed her. She told people in the store that he wouldn’t let her alone for five minutes, and how she had to change his sheets twice a day. That was true. His sheets became soaked with sweat. Late at night she or Rose, or both of them, would be out at the washing machine in the woodshed. Sometimes, Rose saw, her father’s underwear was stained. She would not want to look, but Flo held it up, waved it almost under Rose’s nose, cried out, “Lookit that again!” and made clucking noises that were a burlesque of disapproval.
    Rose hated her at these times, hated her father as well; his sickness; the poverty or frugality that made it unthinkable for them to send things to the laundry; the way there was not a thing in their lives they were protected from. Flo was there to see to that.
    R OSE STAYED IN THE STORE . No one came in. It was a gritty, windy day, past the usual time for snow, though there hadn’t been any. She could hear Flo moving around upstairs, scolding and encouraging, getting her father dressed, probably, packing his suitcase, looking for things. Rose had her school books on the counter and to shut out the household noises she was reading a story in her English book. It was a story by Katherine Mansfield, called The Garden Party . There were poor people in that story. They lived along the lane at the bottom of the garden. They were viewed with compassion. All very well. But Rose was angry in a way that the story did not mean her to be. She could not really understand what she was angry about, but it had something to do with the fact that she was sure Katherine Mansfield was never obliged to look at stained underwear; her relatives might be cruel and frivolous but their accents would be agreeable; her compassion was floating on clouds of good fortune, deplored by herself, no doubt, but despised by Rose. Rose was getting to be a prig about poverty, and would stay that way for a long time.
    She heard Billy Pope come into the kitchen and shout out cheerfully, “Well, I guess yez wondered where I was.”
    Katherine Mansfield had no relatives who said yez .
    Rose had finished the story. She picked up Macbeth . She had memorized some speeches from it. She memorized things from Shakespeare, and poems, other than the things they had to memorize, for school. She didn’t imagine herself as an actress, playing Lady Macbeth on a stage, when she said them. She imagined herself being her, being Lady Macbeth.
    “I come on foot,” Billy Pope was shouting up the stairs. “I had to take her in.” He assumed everyone would know he meant the car. “I don’t know what it is. I can’t idle her, she stalls on me. I didn’t want to go down to the city with anything running not right. Rose home?”
    Billy Pope had been fond of Rose ever since she was a little girl. He used to give her a dime, and say, “Save up and buy yourself some corsets.” That was when she was flat and thin. His joke.
    He came into the store.
    “Well Rose, you bein a good girl?”
    She barely spoke to him.
    “You goin at your schoolbooks? You want to be a schoolteacher?” “I might.” She had no intention of being a schoolteacher. But it was surprising how people would let you alone, once you admitted to that ambition.
    “This is a sad day for you folks here,” said Billy Pope in a lower voice. Rose lifted her head and looked at him coldly.
    “I mean, your Dad goin down to the hospital. They’ll fix him up, though. They got all the equipment down there. They got the good doctors.”
    “I doubt it,” Rose said. She hated that too, the way people hinted at things and then withdrew, that slyness. Death and sex were what they did that about.
    “They’ll fix him and get him back by spring.”
    “Not if he has lung cancer,” Rose said firmly. She had never said that before and certainly Flo had not said it.
    Billy Pope looked as miserable and ashamed for her as if she had said something very dirty.
    “Now that isn’t no way for you to talk. You don’t talk that way. He’s going to be coming downstairs and he could of heard you.”
    There is no denying the situation gave Rose pleasure, at times. A severe pleasure, when she was not too mixed up in it, washing the sheets or listening to a coughing fit. She dramatized her own part in it, saw herself clear-eyed and unsurprised, refusing all deceptions, young in years