Who Do You Think You Are

apples and cherries had been tied to the boughs of pine and cedar trees, pictures taken of them and sent to England. That brought the English immigrants, convinced they were coming to a land where the orchards were already in bloom. When she got back to the station with this story everybody laughed; they had heard it so often before.
    She wasn’t forgetting Tom. He wrote; she wrote. Without this connection to a man, she might have seen herself as an uncertain and pathetic person; that connection held her new life in place. For a while it looked as if luck was with them. A conference was set up in Calgary, on radio in rural life, or something of that sort, and the station was sending Rose. All without the least connivance on her part. She and Tom were jubilant and silly on the phone. She asked one of the young teachers across the hall if she would move in and look after Anna. The girl was glad to agree to do it; the other teacher’s boyfriend had moved in, and they were temporarily crowded. Rose went back to the shop where she had bought the bedspread and the pots; she bought a caftan-nightgown sort of robe with a pattern of birds on it, in jewel colors. It made her think of the Emperor’s nightingale. She put a fresh rinse on her hair. She was to go sixty miles by bus, then catch a plane. She would exchange an hour of terror for the extra time in Calgary. People at the station enjoyed scaring her, telling her how the little planes rose almost straight up out of the mountain airport, then bucked and shivered their way over the Rockies. She did think it would not be right to die that way, to crash in the mountains going to see Tom. She thought this, in spite of the fever she was in to go. It seemed too frivolous an errand to die on. It seemed like treachery, to take such a risk; not treachery to Anna and certainly not to Patrick but perhaps to herself. But just because the journey was frivolously undertaken, because it was not entirely real, she believed she would not die.
    She was in such high spirits she played Chinese checkers all the time with Anna. She played Sorry, or any game Anna wanted. The night before she was to leave—she had arranged for a taxi to pick her up, at half-past five in the morning—they were playing Chinese checkers, and Anna said, “Oh, I can’t see with these blue ones,” and drooped over the board, about to cry, which she never did, in a game. Rose touched her forehead and led her, complaining, to bed. Her temperature was a hundred and two. It was too late to phone Tom at his office and of course Rose couldn’t phone him at home. She did phone the taxi, and the airport, to cancel. Even if Anna seemed better in the morning, she wouldn’t be able to go. She went over and told the girl who had been going to stay with Anna, then phoned the man who was arranging the conference, in Calgary. “Oh God, yes,” he said. “Kids!” In the morning, with Anna wrapped in her blanket, watching cartoons, she phoned Tom in his office. “You’re here, you’re here!” he said. “Where are you?”
    Then she had to tell him.
    Anna coughed, her fever went up and down. Rose tried to get the heat up, fiddled with the thermostat, drained the radiators, phoned the landlord’s office and left a message. He didn’t phone back. She phoned him at home at seven o’clock the next morning, told him her child had bronchitis (which she may have believed at the time, but it was not true), told him she would give him one hour to get her some heat or she would phone the newspaper, she would denounce him over the radio, she would sue him, she would find the proper channels. He came at once, with a put-upon face (a poor man trying to make ends meet bedeviled by hysterical women), he did something to the thermostat in the hall, and the radiators started to get hot. The teachers told Rose that he had the hall thermostat fixed to control the heat and that he had never given in to protests before. She felt proud, she felt like a fierce slum mother who had screamed and sworn and carried on, for her child’s sake. She forgot that slum mothers are seldom fierce, being too tired and bewildered. It was her middle-class certainties, her expectations of justice, that had given her such energy, such a high-handed style of abuse; that had scared him.
    After two days she had to go back to work. Anna had improved, but Rose was worried all the time. She could not swallow a cup of coffee, for the chunk of anxiety in her