Who Do You Think You Are

off the boat because she was pregnant.
    Filming this scene, they collected a sizeable crowd. When they broke and walked towards the sheltered part of the deck, to put on their coats and drink coffee, a woman in the crowd reached out and touched Rose’s arm.
    “You won’t remember me,” she said, and in fact Rose did not remember her. Then this woman began to talk about Kingston, the couple who had given the party, even about the death of Rose’s cat. Rose recognized her as the woman who had been doing the paper on suicide. But she looked quite different; she was wearing an expensive beige pant-suit, a beige and white scarf around her hair; she was no longer fringed and soiled and stringy and mutinous-looking. She introduced a husband, who grunted at Rose as if to say that if she expected him to make a big fuss about her, she had another thing coming. He moved away and the woman said, “Poor Simon. You know he died.”
    Then she wanted to know if they were going to be shooting any more scenes. Rose knew why she asked. She wanted to get into the background or even the foreground of these scenes so that she could call up her friends and tell them to watch her. If she called the people who had been at that party she would have to say that she knew the series was utter tripe but that she had been persuaded to be in a scene, for the fun of it.
    “Died?”
    The woman took off her scarf and the wind blew her hair across her face.
    “Cancer of the pancreas,” she said, and turned to face the wind so that she could put the scarf on again, more to her satisfaction. Her voice seemed to Rose knowledgeable and sly. “I don’t know how well you knew him,” she said. Was that to make Rose wonder how well she knew him? That slyness could ask for help, as well as measure victories and surprises. She tucked her chin in, knotting the scarf.
    “So sad,” she said, business-like now. “Sad. He had it for a long time.”
    Somebody was calling Rose’s name; she had to go back to the scene. The girl didn’t throw herself into the sea. They didn’t have things like that happening in the series. Such things always threatened to happen but they didn’t happen, except now and then to peripheral and unappealing characters. People watching trusted that they would be protected from predictable disasters, also from those shifts of emphasis that throw the story line open to question, the disarrangements which demand new judgments and solutions, and throw the windows open on inappropriate unforgettable scenery.
    Simon’s dying struck Rose as that kind of disarrangement. It was preposterous, it was unfair, that such a chunk of information should have been left out, and that Rose even at this late date could have thought herself the only person who could seriously lack power.

Spelling
    In the store, in the old days, Flo used to say she could tell when some woman was going off the track. Special headgear or footwear were often the first giveaways. Galoshes flopping open on a summer day. Rubber boots they slopped around in, or men’s workboots. They might say it was on account of corns, but Flo knew better. It was deliberate, it was meant to tell. Next might come the old felt hat, the torn raincoat worn in all weathers, the trousers held up at the waist with twine, the dim shredded scarves, the layers of ravelling sweaters.
    Mothers and daughters often the same way. It was always in them. Waves of craziness, always rising, irresistible as giggles, from some place deep inside, gradually getting the better of them.
    They used to come telling Flo their stories. Flo would string them along. “Is that so?” she would say. “Isn’t that a shame?”
    My vegetable grater is gone and I know who took it.
    There is a man comes and looks at me when I take my clothes off at night. I put the blind down and he looks through the crack.
    Two hills of new potatoes stolen. A jar of whole peaches. Some nice ducks’ eggs.
    One of those women they took to the County Home at last. The first thing they did, Flo said, was give her a bath. The next thing they did was cut off her hair, which had grown out like a haystack. They expected to find anything in it, a dead bird or maybe a nest of baby mouse skeletons. They did find burrs and leaves and a bee that must have got caught and buzzed itself to death. When they had cut down far enough they found a cloth hat. It had rotted on her head and the hair had just pushed up through it, like grass through