Who Do You Think You Are

would think there was something disastrously wrong, when she saw Anna in front of the television set eating Captain Crunch, at the very hour when families everywhere were gathered at kitchen or dining-room tables, preparing to eat and quarrel and amuse and torment each other. She got a chicken, she made a thick golden soup with vegetables and barley. Anna wanted Captain Crunch instead. She said the soup had a funny taste. It’s lovely soup, cried Rose, you’ve hardly tasted it, Anna, please try it.
    “For my sake,” it’s a wonder she didn’t say. She was relieved, on the whole, when Anna said calmly, “No.”
    At eight o’clock she began to hound Anna into her bath, into bed. It was only when all this was accomplished—when she had brought the final glass of chocolate milk, mopped up the bathroom, picked up the papers, crayons, felt cutouts, scissors, dirty socks, Chinese checkers, also the blanket in which Anna wrapped herself to watch television, because the apartment was cold, made Anna’s lunch for the next day, turned off her light over her protest—that Rose could settle down with a drink, or a cup of coffee laced with rum, and give herself over to satisfaction, appreciation. She would turn off the lights and sit by the high front window looking out over this mountain town she had hardly known existed a year ago, and she would think what a miracle it was that this had happened, that she had come all this way and was working, she had Anna, she was paying for Anna’s life and her own. She could feel the weight of Anna in the apartment then just as naturally as she had felt her weight in her body, and without having to go and look at her she could see with stunning, fearful pleasure the fair hair and fair skin and glistening eyebrows, the profile along which, if you looked closely, you could see the tiny almost invisible hairs rise, catching the light. For the first time in her life she understood domesticity, knew the meaning of shelter, and labored to manage it.
    “What made you want out of marriage?” said Dorothy. She had been married too, a long time ago.
    Rose didn’t know what to mention first. The scars on her wrist? The choking in the kitchen, the grubbing at the grass? All beside the point.
    “I was just bored,” said Dorothy. “It just bored the hell out of me, to tell you the honest truth.”
    She was half-drunk. Rose started to laugh and Dorothy said, “What in hell are you laughing at?”
    “It’s just a relief to hear somebody say that. Instead of talking about how you didn’t communicate.”
    “Well, we didn’t communicate, either. No, the fact was I was out of my mind over somebody else. I was having an affair with a guy who worked for a newspaper. A journalist. Well, he went off to England, the journalist did, and he wrote me a letter over the Atlantic saying he really truly loved me. He wrote me that letter because he was over the Atlantic, and I was here, but I didn’t have sense enough to know that. Do you know what I did? I left my husband—well, that was no loss—and I borrowed money, fifteen hundred dollars I borrowed from the bank . And I flew to England after him. I phoned his paper, they said he’d gone to Turkey. I sat in the hotel waiting for him to come back. Oh, what a time. I never went out of the hotel. If I went to get a massage or have my hair done I told them where to page me. I kept pestering them fifty times a day. Isn’t there a letter? Wasn’t there a phone call? Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”
    “Did he ever come back?”
    “I phoned again, they told me he’d gone to Kenya. I had started getting the shakes. I saw I had to get hold of myself so I did, in the nick of time. I flew home. I started paying back the bloody bank.”
    Dorothy drank vodka, unmixed, from a water tumbler.
    “Oh, two or three years later I met him, where was it. It was in an airport. No, it was in a department store. I’m sorry I missed you when you came to England, he said. I said, oh, that’s all right, I managed to have a good time anyway. I was still paying it back. I should’ve told him he was a shit.”
    At work Rose read commercials and the weather forecasts, answered letters, answered the telephone, typed up the news, did the voices in Sunday skits written by a local minister, and planned to do interviews. She wanted to do a story on the town’s early settlers; she went and talked to an old blind man who lived above a feed store. He told her that in the old days