Who Do You Think You Are

to keep them from going completely to ruin. With some the attempt had never been made. These were gray and rotted and leaning over, falling into a landscape of scrub hollows, frog ponds, cattails and nettles. Most houses, however, had been patched up with tarpaper, a few fresh shingles, sheets of tin, hammered-out stovepipes, even cardboard. This was, of course, in the days before the war, days of what would later be legendary poverty, from which Rose would remember mostly low-down things—serious-looking anthills and wooden steps, and a cloudy, interesting, problematical light on the world.
    T HERE WAS A LONG TRUCE between Flo and Rose in the beginning. Rose’s nature was growing like a prickly pineapple, but slowly, and secretly, hard pride and skepticism overlapping, to make something surprising even to herself. Before she was old enough to go to school, and while Brian was still in the baby carriage, Rose stayed in the store with both of them—Flo sitting on the high stool behind the counter, Brian asleep by the window; Rose knelt or lay on the wide creaky floorboards working with crayons on pieces of brown paper too torn or irregular to be used for wrapping.
    People who came to the store were mostly from the houses around. Some country people came too, on their way home from town, and a few people from Hanratty, who walked across the bridge. Some people were always on the main street, in and out of stores, as if it was their duty to be always on display and their right to be welcomed. For instance, Becky Tyde.
    Becky Tyde climbed up on Flo’s counter, made room for herself beside an open tin of crumbly jamfilled cookies.
    “Are these any good?” she said to Flo, and boldly began to eat one. “When are you going to give us a job, Flo?”
    “You could go and work in the butcher shop,” said Flo innocently.
    “You could go and work for your brother.”
    “Roberta?” said Becky with a stagey sort of contempt. “You think I’d work for him?” Her brother who ran the butcher shop was named Robert but often called Roberta, because of his meek and nervous ways. Becky Tyde laughed. Her laugh was loud and noisy like an engine bearing down on you.
    She was a big-headed loud-voiced dwarf, with a mascot’s sexless swagger, a red velvet tam, a twisted neck that forced her to hold her head on one side, always looking up and sideways. She wore little polished high-heeled shoes, real lady’s shoes. Rose watched her shoes, being scared of the rest of her, of her laugh and her neck. She knew from Flo that Becky Tyde had been sick with polio as a child, that was why her neck was twisted and why she had not grown any taller. It was hard to believe that she had started out differently, that she had ever been normal. Flo said she was not cracked, she had as much brains as anybody, but she knew she could get away with anything.
    “You know I used to live out here?” Becky said, noticing Rose. “Hey! What’s-your-name! Didn’t I used to live out here, Flo?”
    “If you did it was before my time,” said Flo, as if she didn’t know anything.
    “That was before the neighborhood got so downhill. Excuse me saying so. My father built his house out here and he built his slaughter-house and we had half an acre of orchard.”
    “Is that so?” said Flo, using her humoring voice, full of false geniality, humility even. “Then why did you ever move away?”
    “I told you, it got to be such a downhill neighborhood,” said Becky. She would put a whole cookie in her mouth if she felt like it, let her cheeks puff out like a frog’s. She never told any more.
    Flo knew anyway, as who didn’t. Everyone knew the house, red brick with the veranda pulled off and the orchard, what was left of it, full of the usual outflow—car seats and washing machines and bedsprings and junk. The house would never look sinister, in spite of what had happened in it, because there was so much wreckage and confusion all around.
    Becky’s old father was a different kind of butcher from her brother according to Flo. A bad-tempered Englishman. And different from Becky in the matter of mouthiness. His was never open. A skinflint, a family tyrant. After Becky had polio he wouldn’t let her go back to school. She was seldom seen outside the house, never outside the yard. He didn’t want people gloating. That was what Becky said, at the trial. Her mother was dead by that time and her sisters married. Just Becky and Robert at home. People would