Who Do You Think You Are

believe you, Clifford.”
    “Well, I don’t really go to the psych at all. I go to the dirty movies down on Yonge.”
    Clifford went off to sit in the sauna.
    Rose watched him leave the room. He was wearing jeans, and a
    T-shirt that said Just passin thru . His waist and hips were narrow as a twelve-year-old’s. His gray hair was cut in a very short brush cut, showing his skull. Was this the way musicians wore their hair nowadays, when politicians and accountants were bushy and bearded, or was it Clifford’s own perversity? His tan looked like pancake makeup, though it was probably all real. There was something theatrical about him altogether, tight and glittery and taunting. Something obscene about his skinniness and sweet, hard smile.
    “Is he well?” she said to Jocelyn. “He’s terribly thin.”
    “He wants to look like that. He eats yogurt and black bread.” “You can never split up,” Rose said, “because your house is too beautiful.” She stretched out on the hooked rug. The living room had white walls, thick white curtains, old pine furniture, large bright paintings, hooked rugs. On a low round table at her elbow was a bowl of polished stones for people to pick up and hold and run through their fingers. The stones came from Vancouver beaches, from Sandy Cove and English Bay and Kitsilano and Ambleside and Dundarave. Jerome and Adam had collected them a long time ago.
    J O CELYN AND CLIFFORD left British Columbia soon after Clifford returned from his provincial tour. They went to Montreal, then to Halifax, then to Toronto. They seemed hardly to remember Vancouver. Once they tried to think of the name of the street where they had lived and it was Rose who had to supply it for them. When Rose lived in Capilano Heights she used to spend a lot of time remembering the parts of Ontario where she had lived, being faithful, in a way, to that earlier landscape. Now that she was living in Ontario she put the same sort of effort into remembering things about Vancouver, puzzling to get details straight, that were in themselves quite ordinary. For instance, she tried to remember just where you waited for the Pacific Stage bus, when you were going from North Vancouver to West Vancouver. She pictured herself getting on that old green bus around one o’clock, say, on a spring day. Going to baby-sit for Jocelyn. Anna with her, in her yellow slicker and rainhat. Cold rain. The long, swampy stretch of land as you went into West Vancouver. Where the shopping-centers and highrises are now. She could see the streets, the houses, the old Safeway, St. Mawes Hotel, the thick closing-in of the woods, the place where you got off the bus at the little store. Black Cat cigarettes sign. Cedar dampness as you walked in through the woods to Jocelyn’s house. Deadness of early afternoon. Nap time. Young women drinking coffee looking out of rainy windows. Retired couples walking dogs. Pad of feet on the thick mold. Crocuses, early daffodils, the cold bulbs blooming. That profound difference of the air close to the sea, the inescapable dripping vegetation, the stillness. Anna pulling on her hand, Jocelyn’s brown wooden cottage ahead. Such a rich weight of apprehension, complications descending as she neared that house.
    Other things she was not so keen on remembering.
    She had wept on the plane, behind her sunglasses, all the way from Powell River. She wept, sitting in the waiting room at the Vancouver airport. She was not able to stop weeping and go home to Patrick. A plainclothes policeman sat down beside her, opened his jacket to show her his badge, asked if there was anything he could do for her. Someone must have summoned him. Terrified at being so conspicuous, she fled to the Ladies’. She didn’t think to comfort herself with a drink, didn’t think of looking for the bar. She never went to bars then. She didn’t take a tranquilizer, didn’t have any, didn’t know about them. Maybe there weren’t such things.
    The suffering. What was it? It was all a waste, it reflected no credit. An entirely dishonorable grief. All mashed pride and ridiculed fantasy. It was as if she had taken a hammer and deliberately smashed her big toe. That’s what she thinks sometimes. At other times she thinks it was necessary, it was the start of wrecks and changes, the start of being where she is now instead of in Patrick’s house. Life making a gigantic fuss, as usual, for a small effect.
    Patrick could not speak when she told him. He