Who Do You Think You Are

Catholic priest came over to her right in the Queen’s Hotel, and flashed his lighter at her before she could get her matches out. She thanked him but did not enter into conversation, lest he should try to convert her.
    Another time, on the way home, she saw at the town end of the bridge a boy in a blue jacket, apparently looking at the water. Eighteen, nineteen years old. Nobody she knew. Skinny, weakly looking, something the matter with him, she saw at once. Was he thinking of jumping? Just as she came up even with him, what does he do but turn and display, holding his jacket open, also his pants. What he must have suffered from the cold, on a day that had Flo holding her coat collar tight around her throat.
    When she first saw what he had in his hand, Flo said, all she could think of was, what is he doing out here with a baloney sausage?
    She could say that. It was offered as truth; no joke. She maintained that she despised dirty talk. She would go out and yell at the old men sitting in front of her store.
    “If you want to stay where you are you better clean your mouths out!”
    Saturday, then. For some reason Flo is not going uptown, has decided to stay home and scrub the kitchen floor. Perhaps this has put her in a bad mood. Perhaps she was in a bad mood anyway, due to people not paying their bills, or the stirring-up of feelings in spring. The wrangle with Rose has already commenced, has been going on forever, like a dream that goes back and back into other dreams, over hills and through doorways, maddeningly dim and populous and familiar and elusive. They are carting all the chairs out of the kitchen preparatory to the scrubbing, and they have also got to move some extra provisions for the store, some cartons of canned goods, tins of maple syrup, coal-oil cans, jars of vinegar. They take these things out to the woodshed. Brian who is five or six by this time is helping drag the tins.
    “Yes,” says Flo, carrying on from our lost starting-point. “Yes, and that filth you taught to Brian.”
    “What filth?”
    “And he doesn’t know any better.”
    There is one step down from the kitchen to the woodshed, a bit of carpet on it so worn Rose can’t ever remember seeing the pattern. Brian loosens it, dragging a tin.
    “Two Vancouvers,” she says softly.
    Flo is back in the kitchen. Brian looks from Flo to Rose and Rose says again in a slightly louder voice, an encouraging sing-song, “Two Vancouvers—”
    “Fried in snot!” finishes Brian, not able to control himself any longer.
    “Two pickled arseholes—” “—tied in a knot!”
    There it is. The filth.
Two Vancouvers fried in snot!
Two pickled arseholes tied in a knot!
    Rose has known that for years, learned it when she first went to school. She came home and asked Flo, what is a Vancouver?
    “It’s a city. It’s a long ways away.” “What else besides a city?”
    Flo said, what did she mean, what else? How could it be fried, Rose said, approaching the dangerous moment, the delightful moment, when she would have to come out with the whole thing.
    “Two Vancouvers fried in snot! / Two pickled arseholes tied in a knot!”
    “You’re going to get it!” cried Flo in a predictable rage. “Say that again and you’ll get a good clout!”
    Rose couldn’t stop herself. She hummed it tenderly, tried saying the innocent words aloud, humming through the others. It was not just the words snot and arsehole that gave her pleasure, though of course they did. It was the pickling and tying and the unimaginable Vancouvers. She saw them in her mind shaped rather like octopuses, twitching in the pan. The tumble of reason; the spark and spit of craziness.
    Lately she has remembered it again and taught it to Brian, to see if it has the same effect on him, and of course it has.
    “Oh, I heard you!” says Flo. “I heard that! And I’m warning you!” So she is. Brian takes the warning. He runs away, out the wood- shed door, to do as he likes. Being a boy, free to help or not, involve himself or not. Not committed to the household struggle. They don’t need him anyway, except to use against each other, they hardly notice his going. They continue, can’t help continuing, can’t leave each other alone. When they seem to have given up they were really just waiting and building up steam.
    Flo gets out the scrub pail and the brush and the rag and the pad for her knees, a dirty red rubber pad. She starts to work on the floor. Rose sits on the kitchen