Who Do You Think You Are

once.”
    “You said just once. You said we would have a memory instead of a dream.”
    “Jesus. I said a lot of puke.”
    He had said her tongue was like a little warmblooded snake, a pretty snake, and her nipples like berries. He would not care to be reminded.
Overture to Ruslan and Ludmilla: Glinka
Serenade for Strings: Tchaikovsky
Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the Pastoral:
First Movement
The Moldau: Smetana
William Tell Overture: Rossini
    She could not hear any of this music for a long time without a specific attack of shame, that was like a whole wall crumbling in on her, rubble choking her.
    J UST BEFORE CLIFFORD LEFT on tour, Jocelyn had phoned Rose and said that her baby sitter could not come. It was the day she went to see her psychiatrist. Rose offered to come and look after Adam and Jerome. She had done this before. She made the long trip on three buses, taking Anna with her.
    Jocelyn’s house was heated by an oil stove in the kitchen, and an enormous stone fireplace in the small living room. The oil stove was covered with spill-marks; orange peel and coffee grounds and charred wood and ashes tumbled out of the fireplace. There was no basement and no clothes dryer. The weather was rainy, and the ceiling-racks and stand-up racks were draped with damp graying sheets and diapers, hardening towels. There was no washing machine either. Jocelyn had washed those sheets in the bathtub.
    “No washer or dryer but she’s going to a psychiatrist,” said Patrick, to whom Rose sometimes disloyally reported what she knew he would like to hear.
    “She must be crazy,” Rose said. She made him laugh.
    But Patrick didn’t like her going to baby-sit.
    “You’re certainly at her beck and call,” he said. “It’s a wonder you don’t go and scrub her floors for her.”
    As a matter of fact, Rose did.
    When Jocelyn was there, the disorder of the house had a certain willed and impressive quality. When she was gone, it became unbearable. Rose would go to work with a knife, scraping at ancient crusts of Pablum on the kitchen chairs, scouring the coffee pot, wiping the floor. She did spare some time for investigation. She went into the bedroom—she had to watch out for Jerome, a precocious and irritating child—and looked at Clifford’s socks and underwear, all crumpled in with Jocelyn’s old nursing brassieres and torn garter belts. She looked to see if he had a record on the turntable, wondering if it would be something that would make him think of her.
    Telemann. Not likely. But she played it, to hear what he had been hearing. She drank coffee from what she believed to be his dirty breakfast cup. She covered the casserole of Spanish rice from which he had taken his supper the night before. She sought out traces of his presence (he didn’t use an electric razor, he used old-fashioned shaving soap in a wooden bowl), but she believed that his life in that house, Jocelyn’s house, was all pretense, and waiting, like her own life in Patrick’s house.
    When Jocelyn came home Rose felt she ought to apologize for the cleaning she had done, and Jocelyn, really wanting to talk about her fight with the psychiatrist who reminded her of her mother, agreed that it certainly was a cowardly mania, this thing Rose had about housecleaning, and she had better go to a psych herself, if she ever wanted to get rid of it. She was joking; but going home on the bus, with Anna cranky and no preparations made for Patrick’s supper, Rose did wonder why she always seemed to be on the wrong end of things, disapproved of by her own neighbors because she didn’t pay enough attention to housework, and reproved by Jocelyn for being insufficiently tolerant of the natural chaos and refuse of life. She thought of love, to reconcile herself. She was loved, not in a dutiful, husbandly way but crazily, adulterously, as Jocelyn and her neighbors were not. She used that to reconcile herself to all sorts of things: to Patrick, for instance, turning over in bed with an indulgent little clucking noise that meant she was absolved of all her failings for the moment, they were to make love.
    T HE SANE AND DECENT THINGS Clifford had said cut no ice with Rose at all. She saw that he had betrayed her. Sanity and decency were never what she had asked of him. She watched him, in the auditorium of the Powell River High School. She watched him playing his violin, with a somber and attentive expression she had once seen directed towards herself. She did not see