Who Do You Think You Are

slapped across the hospital linoleum in her bare feet. A nurse came running, warned her to put on slippers.
    “I don’t own any slippers.”
    “Do you own shoes?” said the nurse rather nastily.
    “Oh, yes. I own shoes.”
    Jocelyn went back to the little metal cabinet beside her bed and took out a pair of large, dirty, run-over moccasins. She went off making as sloppy and insolent a noise as before.
    Rose was longing to know her.
    The next day Rose had her own book out to read. It was The Last
    Puritan, by George Santayana, but unfortunately it was a library copy; the title on the cover was rubbed and dim, so it was impossible that Jocelyn should admire Rose’s reading material as Rose had admired hers. Rose didn’t know how she could get to talk to her.
    The woman who had explained about her cupboards was talking about how she used her vacuum cleaner. She said it was very important to use all the attachments because they each had a purpose and after all you had paid for them. Many people didn’t use them. She described how she vacuumed her living-room drapes. Another woman said she had tried to do that but the material kept getting bunched up. The authoritative woman said that was because she hadn’t been doing it properly.
    Rose caught Jocelyn’s eye around the corner of her book.
    “I hope you polish your stove knobs,” she said quietly.
    “I certainly do,” said Jocelyn.
    “Do you polish them every day?”
    “I used to polish them twice a day but now that I have the new baby I just don’t know if I’ll get around to it.”
    “Do you use that special stove-knob polish?”
    “I certainly do. And I use the special stove-knob cloths that come in that special package.”
    “That’s good. Some people don’t.”
    “Some people will use anything.”
    “Old dishrags.”
    “Old snotrags.”
    “Old snot.”
    After this their friendship bloomed in a hurry. It was one of those luxuriant intimacies that spring up in institutions; in schools, at camp, in prison. They walked in the halls, disobeying the nurses. They annoyed and mystified the other women. They became hysterical as schoolgirls, from the things they read aloud to each other. They did not read Gide or Santayana but the copies of True Love and Personal Romances which they had found in the waiting room.
    “It says here you can buy false calves,” Rose read. “I don’t see how you’d hide them, though. I guess you strap them on your legs. Or maybe they just sit here inside your stockings but wouldn’t you think they’d show?”
    “On your legs?” said Jocelyn. “You strap them on your legs? Oh, false calves! False calves! I thought you were talking about false calves ! False baby cows!”
    Anything like that could set them off.
    “False baby cows!”
    “False tits, false bums, false baby cows!”
    “What will they think of next!”
    The vacuum-cleaning woman said they were always butting in and spoiling other people’s conversations and she didn’t see what was so funny about dirty language. She said if they didn’t stop the way they carried on they would sour their milk.
    “I’ve been wondering if maybe mine is sour,” Jocelyn said. “It’s an awfully disgusting color.”
    “What color?” Rose asked.
    “Well. Sort of blue.”
    “Good God, maybe it’s ink!”
    The vacuum-cleaning woman said she was going to tell the nurse they were swearing. She said she was no prude, but. She asked if they were fit to be mothers. How was Jocelyn going to manage to wash diapers, when anybody could see she never washed her dressing gown?
    Jocelyn said she planned to use moss, she was an Indian.
    “I can believe it,” the woman said.
    After this Jocelyn and Rose prefaced many remarks with: I’m no prude, but .
    “I’m no prude but would you look at this pudding!”
    “I’m no prude but it feels like this kid has a full set of teeth.”
    The nurse said, wasn’t it time for them to grow up?
    Walking in the halls, Jocelyn told Rose that she was twenty-five, that her baby was to be called Adam, that she had a two-year-old boy at home, named Jerome, that her husband’s name was Clifford and that he played the violin for a living. He played in the Vancouver Symphony. They were poor. Jocelyn came from Massachusetts and had gone to Wellesley College. Her father was a psychiatrist and her mother was a pediatrician. Rose told Jocelyn that she came from a small town in Ontario and that Patrick came from Vancouver Island and that his