Who Do You Think You Are

wear shoes. They were all used to this idea, and in some ways they would be more disturbed if his death did not take place, than if it did. No one could ask what he thought about it. He would have treated such an inquiry as an impertinence, a piece of dramatizing, an indulgence. Rose believed he would have. She believed he was prepared for Westminster Hospital, the old soldiers’ hospital, prepared for its masculine gloom, its yellowing curtains pulled around the bed, its spotty basins. And for what followed. She understood that he would never be with her more than at the present moment. The surprise to come was that he wouldn’t be with her less.
    D RINKING COFFEE , wandering around the blind green halls of the new high school, at the Centennial Year Reunion—she hadn’t come for that, had bumped into it accidentally, so to speak, when she came home to see what was to be done about Flo—Rose met people who said, “Did you know Ruby Carruthers was dead? They took off the one breast and then the other but it was all through her, she died.”
    And people who said, “I saw your picture in a magazine, what was the name of that magazine, I have it at home.”
    The new high school had an auto mechanics shop for training auto mechanics and a beauty parlor for training beauty parlor operators; a library; an auditorium; a gymnasium; a whirling fountain arrangement for washing your hands in the Ladies’ Room. Also a functioning dispenser of Kotex.
    Del Fairbridge had become an undertaker.
    Runt Chesterton had become an accountant.
    Horse Nicholson had made a lot of money as a contractor and had left that to go into politics. He had made a speech saying that what they needed was a lot more God in the classroom and a lot less French.

Wild Swans
    Flo said to watch out for White Slavers. She said this was how they operated: an old woman, a motherly or grandmotherly sort, made friends while riding beside you on a bus or train. She offered you candy, which was drugged. Pretty soon you began to droop and mumble, were in no condition to speak for yourself. Oh, Help, the woman said, my daughter (granddaughter) is sick, please somebody help me get her off so that she can recover in the fresh air. Up stepped a polite gentleman, pretending to be a stranger, offering assistance. Together, at the next stop, they hustled you off the train or bus, and that was the last the ordinary world ever saw of you. They kept you a prisoner in the White Slave place (to which you had been transported drugged and bound so you wouldn’t even know where you were), until such time as you were thoroughly degraded and in despair, your insides torn up by drunken men and invested with vile disease, your mind destroyed by drugs, your hair and teeth fallen out. It took about three years, for you to get to this state. You wouldn’t want to go home, then, maybe couldn’t remember home, or find your way if you did. So they let you out on the streets.
    Flo took ten dollars and put it in a little cloth bag which she sewed to the strap of Rose’s slip. Another thing likely to happen was that Rose would get her purse stolen.
    Watch out, Flo said as well, for people dressed up as ministers. They were the worst. That disguise was commonly adopted by White Slavers, as well as those after your money.
    Rose said she didn’t see how she could tell which ones were disguised.
    Flo had worked in Toronto once. She had worked as a waitress in a coffee shop in Union Station. That was how she knew all she knew. She never saw sunlight, in those days, except on her days off. But she saw plenty else. She saw a man cut another man’s stomach with a knife, just pull out his shirt and do a tidy cut, as if it was a water-melon not a stomach. The stomach’s owner just sat looking down surprised, with no time to protest. Flo implied that that was nothing, in Toronto. She saw two bad women (that was what Flo called whores, running the two words together, like badminton) get into a fight, and a man laughed at them, other men stopped and laughed and egged them on, and they had their fists full of each other’s hair. At last the police came and took them away, still howling and yelping.
    She saw a child die of a fit, too. Its face was black as ink.
    “Well I’m not scared,” said Rose provokingly. “There’s the police, anyway.”
    “Oh, them! They’d be the first ones to diddle you!”
    She did not believe anything Flo said on the subject of sex.
    Consider the