Who Do You Think You Are

parents did not approve of the marriage.
    “In the town I come from,” Rose said, exaggerating, “everybody says yez. What’ll yez have? How’re yez doin.”
    “Yez?”
    “Youse. It’s the plural of you.”
    “Oh. Like Brooklyn. And James Joyce. Who does Patrick work for?”
    “His family’s store. His family has a department store.”
    “So aren’t you rich now? Aren’t you too rich to be in the ward?” “We just spent all our money on a house Patrick wanted.” “Didn’t you want it?”
    “Not so much as he did.”
    That was something Rose had never said before.
    They plunged into more random revelations.
    Jocelyn hated her mother. Her mother had made her sleep in a room with white organdy curtains and had encouraged her to collect ducks. By the time she was thirteen Jocelyn had probably the largest collection in the world of rubber ducks, ceramic ducks, wooden ducks, pictures of ducks, embroidered ducks. She had also written what she described as a hideously precocious story called “The Marvelous Great Adventures of Oliver the Grand Duck,” which her mother actually got printed and distributed to friends and relatives at Christmas time.
    “She is the sort of person who just covers everything with a kind of rotten smarminess. She sort of oozes over everything. She never talks in a normal voice, never. She’s coy. She’s just so filthy coy. Naturally she’s a great success as a pediatrician. She has these rotten coy little names for all the parts of your body.”
    Rose, who would have been delighted with organdy curtains, perceived the fine lines, the ways of giving offence, that existed in Jocelyn’s world. It seemed a much less crude and provisional world than her own. She doubted if she could tell Jocelyn about Hanratty but she began to try. She delivered Flo and the store in broad strokes. She played up the poverty. She didn’t really have to. The true facts of her childhood were exotic enough to Jocelyn, and of all things, enviable.
    “It seems more real,” Jocelyn said. “I know that’s a romantic notion.”
    They talked of their youthful ambitions. (They really believed their youth to be past.) Rose said she had wanted to be an actress though she was too much of a coward ever to walk on a stage. Jocelyn had wanted to be a writer but was shamed out of it by memories of the Grand Duck.
    “Then I met Clifford,” she said. “When I saw what real talent was, I knew that I would probably just be fooling around, trying to write, and I’d be better off nurturing him, or whatever the hell it is I do for him. He is really gifted. Sometimes he’s a squalid sort of person. He gets away with it because he is really gifted.”
    “I think that is a romantic notion,” Rose said firmly and jealously. “That gifted people ought to get away with things.”
    “Do you? But great artists always have.”
    “Not women.”
    “But women usually aren’t great artists, not in the same way.” These were the ideas of most well-educated, thoughtful, even unconventional or politically radical young women of the time. One of the reasons Rose did not share them was that she had not been well educated. Jocelyn said to her, much later in their friendship, that one of the reasons she found it so interesting to talk to Rose, from the start, was that Rose had ideas but was uneducated. Rose was surprised at this, and mentioned the college she had attended in Western Ontario. Then she saw by an embarrassed withdrawal or regret, a sudden lack of frankness in Jocelyn’s face—very unusual with her—that that was exactly what Jocelyn had meant.
    After the difference of opinion about artists, and about men and women artists, Rose took a good look at Clifford when he came visiting in the evening. She thought him wan, self-indulgent, and neurotic-looking. Further discoveries concerning the tact, the effort, the sheer physical energy Jocelyn expended on this marriage (it was she who fixed the leaky taps and dug up the clogged drains) made Rose certain that Jocelyn was wasting herself, she was mistaken. She had a feeling that Jocelyn did not see much point in marriage with Patrick, either.
    A T FIRST the party was easier than Rose had expected. She had been afraid that she would be too dressed-up; she would have liked to wear her toreador pants but Patrick would never have stood for it. But only a few of the girls were in slacks. The rest wore stockings, earrings, outfits much like her own. As at any gathering