Who Do You Think You Are

with it instead, dropping coins ostentatiously through their fingers. That was a giddy time late at night in the rented kitchen on the mountainside. Bounty where you’d never look for it; streaks of loss and luck. One of the few times, one of the few hours, when Rose could truly say she was not at the mercy of past or future, or love, or anybody. She hoped it was the same for Anna.
    Tom wrote her a long letter, a loving humorous letter, mentioning fate. A grieved, relieved renunciation, before he set off for England. Rose didn’t have any address for him, there, or she might have written asking him to give them another chance. That was her nature.
    This last snow of the winter was quickly gone, causing some flooding in the valleys. Patrick wrote that he would drive up in June, when school was out, and take Anna back with him for the summer. He said he wanted to start the divorce, because he had met a girl he wanted to marry. Her name was Elizabeth. He said she was a fine and stable person.
    And did Rose not think, said Patrick, that it might be better for Anna to be settled in her old home next year, in the home she had always known, to be back at her old school with her old friends (Jeremy kept asking about her) rather than traipsing around with Rose in her new independent existence? Might it not be true—and here Rose thought she heard the voice of the stable girlfriend— that she was using Anna to give herself some stability, rather than face up to the consequences of the path she had chosen? Of course, he said, Anna must be given her choice.
    Rose wanted to reply that she was making a home for Anna here, but she could not do that, truthfully. She no longer wanted to stay. The charm, the transparency, of this town was gone for her. The pay was poor. She would never be able to afford anything but this cheap apartment. She might never get a better job, or another lover. She was thinking of going east, going to Toronto, trying to get a job there, with a radio or television station, perhaps even some acting jobs. She wanted to take Anna with her, set them up again in some temporary shelter. It was just as Patrick said. She wanted to come home to Anna, to fill her life with Anna. She didn’t think Anna would choose that life. Poor, picturesque, gypsying childhoods are not much favored by children, though they will claim to value them, for all sorts of reasons, later on.
    Anna went to live with Patrick and Elizabeth. She began to take drama and ballet lessons. Elizabeth thought she should have some accomplishments, and keep busy. They gave her the four-poster bed, with a new canopy, and got her a kitten.
    Elizabeth made her a nightgown and cap to match the bed. They sent Rose a picture of her sitting there, with the kitten, looking demure and satisfied in the midst of all that flowered cloth.
    The spotted fish died first, then the orange one. That was before Anna left. Neither suggested another trip to Woolworth’s, so that the black one should have company. It didn’t look as if it wanted company. Swollen, bug-eyed, baleful and at ease, it commanded the whole fishbowl for its own.
    Anna made Rose promise not to flush it down the toilet after she, Anna, was gone. Rose promised, and before she left for Toronto she walked over to Dorothy’s house, carrying the fishbowl, to make her this unwelcome present. Dorothy accepted it decently, said she would name it after the man from Seattle, and congratulated Rose on leaving.
    Rose set to work cleaning out the apartment, finding marbles and drawings and some letters by Anna begun—mostly at Rose’s instigation—and never finished, never mailed.
    Dear Daddy,
    I am fine. Are you? I was sick but I am fine now. I hope you are not sick.
    Dear Jeremy,
    How tall are you now? I am fine.

Simon’s Luck
    Rose gets lonely in new places; she wishes she had invitations. She goes out and walks the streets and looks in the lighted windows at all the Saturday-night parties, the Sunday-night family suppers. It’s no good telling herself she wouldn’t be long inside there, chattering and getting drunk, or spooning up the gravy, before she’d wish she was walking the streets. She thinks she could take on any hospitality. She could go to parties in rooms hung with posters, lit by lamps with Coca-Cola shades, everything crumbly and askew; or else in warm professional rooms with lots of books, and brass rubbings, and maybe a skull or two; even in the recreation rooms she can just see