Who Do You Think You Are

because she needed such friends occasionally, at that stage of her life.

Providence
    Rose had a dream about Anna. This was after she had gone away and left Anna behind. She dreamed she met Anna walking up Gonzales Hill. She knew she was coming from school. She went up to speak to her but Anna walked past not speaking. No wonder. She was covered with clay that seemed to have leaves or branches in it, so that the effect was of dead garlands. Decoration; ruination. And the clay or mud was not dry, it was still dripping off her, so that she looked crude and sad, a botched heavy-headed idol.
    “Do you want to come with me, do you want to stay with Daddy?” Rose had said to her, but Anna had refused to answer, saying instead, “I don’t want you to go.” Rose had got a job at a radio station in a town in the Kootenay mountains.
    Anna was lying in the four-poster bed where Patrick and Rose used to sleep, where Patrick now slept alone. Rose slept in the den.
    Anna would go to sleep in that bed, then Patrick would carry her to her own bed. Neither Patrick nor Rose knew when this stopped being occasional, and became essential. Everything in the house was out of kilter. Rose was packing her trunk. She did it in the daytime when Patrick and Anna were not around. She and Patrick spent the evenings in different parts of the house. Once she went into the dining room and found him putting fresh Scotch tape on the snapshots in the album. She was angry at him for doing this. She saw a snapshot of herself, pushing Anna on a swing in the park; herself smirking in a bikini; true lies.
    “It wasn’t any better then,” she said. “Not really.” She meant that she had always been planning, at the back of her mind, to do what she was doing now. Even on her wedding day she had known this time would come, and that if it didn’t she might as well be dead. The betrayal was hers.
    “I know that,” said Patrick angrily.
    But of course it had been better, because she hadn’t started to try to make the break come, she had forgotten for long stretches that it would have to come. Even to say she had been planning to break, had started to break, was wrong, because she had done nothing deliberately, nothing at all intelligently, it had happened as painfully and ruinously as possible with all sorts of shilly-shallying and reconciling and berating, and right now she felt as if she was walking a swinging bridge and could only keep her eyes on the slats ahead, never look down or around.
    “Which do you want?” she said softly to Anna. Instead of answering, Anna called out for Patrick. When he came she sat up and pulled them both down on the bed, one on each side of her. She held on to them, and began to sob and shake. A violently dramatic child, sometimes, a bare blade.
    “You don’t have to,” she said. “You don’t have fights any more.” Patrick looked across at Rose without accusation. His customary look for years, even when they were making love, had been accusing, but he felt such pain on Anna’s account that all accusation was wiped out. Rose had to get up and go out, leaving him to comfort Anna, because she was afraid a great, deceptive rush of feeling for him was on the way.
    It was true, they did not have fights any more. She had scars on her wrists and her body, which she had made (not quite in the most dangerous places) with a razor blade. Once in the kitchen of this house Patrick had tried to choke her. Once she had run outside and knelt in her nightgown, tearing up handfuls of grass. Yet for Anna this bloody fabric her parents had made, of mistakes and mismatches, that anybody could see ought to be torn up and thrown away, was still the true web of life, of father and mother, of beginning and shelter. What fraud, thought Rose, what fraud for everybody. We come from unions which don’t have in them anything like what we think we deserve.
    She wrote to Tom, to tell him what she was going to do. Tom was a teacher at the University of Calgary. Rose was a little bit in love with him (so she said to friends who knew about the affair: a little bit in love ). She had met him here a year ago—he was the brother of a woman she sometimes acted with in radio plays—and since then she had stayed with him once in Victoria. They wrote long letters to each other. He was a courtly man, a historian, he wrote witty and delicately amorous letters. She had been a little afraid that when she announced that she was leaving Patrick, Tom