Who Do You Think You Are

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    F LO HAD GOT into the habit of keeping the table set for the next meal, to save trouble. The plastic cloth was gummy, the outline of the plate and saucer plain on it as the outline of pictures on a greasy wall. The refrigerator was full of sulfurous scraps, dark crusts, furry oddments. Rose got to work cleaning, scraping, scalding. Sometimes Flo came lumbering through on her two canes. She might ignore Rose’s presence altogether, she might tip the jug of maple syrup up against her mouth and drink it like wine. She loved sweet things now, craved them. Brown sugar by the spoonful, maple syrup, tinned puddings, jelly, globs of sweetness to slide down her throat. She had given up smoking, probably for fear of fire.
    Another time she said, “What are you doing in there behind the counter? You ask me what you want, and I’ll get it.” She thought the kitchen was the store.
    “I’m Rose, ” Rose said in a loud, slow voice. “‘We’re in the kitchen . I’m cleaning up the kitchen .”
    The old arrangement of the kitchen: mysterious, personal, eccentric. Big pan in the oven, medium-sized pan under the potato pot on the corner shelf, little pan hanging on the nail by the sink. Colander under the sink. Dishrags, newspaper clippings, scissors, muffin tins, hanging on various nails. Piles of bills and letters on the sewing-machine, on the telephone shelf. You would think someone had set them down a day or two ago, but they were years old. Rose had come across some letters written by herself, in a forced and spritely style. False messengers; false connections, with a lost period of her life.
    “Rose is away,” Flo said. She had a habit now of sticking her bottom lip out, when she was displeased or perplexed. “Rose got married.”
    The second morning Rose got up and found that a gigantic stirring-up had occurred in the kitchen, as if someone had wielded a big shaky spoon. The big pan was lodged behind the refrigerator; the egg lifter was in with the towels, the breadknife was in the flour bin and the roasting pan wedged in the pipes under the sink. Rose made Flo’s breakfast porridge and Flo said, “You’re that woman they were sending to look after me.”
    “Yes.”
    “You aren’t from around here?”
    “No.”
    “I haven’t got money to pay you. They sent you, they can pay you.” Flo spread brown sugar over her porridge until the porridge was entirely covered, then patted the sugar smooth with her spoon.
    After breakfast she spied the cutting board, which Rose had been using when she cut bread for her own toast. “What is this thing doing here getting in our road?” said Flo authoritatively, picking it up and marching off—as well as anybody with two canes could march—to hide it somewhere, in the piano bench or under the back steps.
    Y EARS AGO , Flo had had a little glassed-in side porch built on to the house. From there she could watch the road just as she used to watch from behind the counter of the store (the store window was now boarded up, the old advertising signs painted over). The road wasn’t the main road out of Hanratty through West Hanratty to the Lake, any more; there was a highway bypass. And it was paved, now, with wide gutters, new mercury vapor street lights. The old bridge was gone and a new, wide bridge, much less emphatic, had taken its place. The change from Hanratty to West Hanratty was hardly noticeable. West Hanratty had got itself spruced up with paint and aluminum siding; Flo’s place was about the only eyesore left.
    What were the things Flo put up to look at, in her little porch, where she had been sitting for years now with her joints and arteries hardening?
    A calendar with a picture of a puppy and a kitten on it. Faces turned towards each other so that the noses touched, and the space between the two bodies made a heart.
    A photograph, in color, of Princess Anne as a child.
    A Blue Mountain pottery vase, gift from Brian and Phoebe, with three yellow plastic roses in it, vase and roses bearing several seasons’ sifting of dust.
    Six shells from the Pacific coast, sent home by Rose but not gathered by her, as Flo believed, or had once believed. Bought on a vacation in the State of Washington. They were an impulse item in a plastic bag by the cashier’s desk in a tourist restaurant.
    THE LORD IS MY SHEPHERD , in black cutout scroll with a sprinkling of glitter. Free gift from a dairy.
    Newspaper photograph of seven coffins in a row. Two large and five small.