Who Do You Think You Are

drink it.”
    She made Rose think of a woman who had started in labor.
    Such was her concentration, her determination, her urgency. Rose thought Flo felt her death moving in her like a child, getting ready to tear her. So she gave up arguing, she got dressed, hastily packed a bag for Flo, got her to the car and drove her out to the Home, but in the matter of Flo’s quickly tearing and relieving death she was mistaken.
    S OME TIME BEFORE THIS , Rose had been in a play, on national television. The Trojan Women . She had no lines, and in fact she was in the play simply to do a favor for a friend, who had got a better part elsewhere. The director thought to liven all the weeping and mourning by having the Trojan women go bare-breasted. One breast apiece, they showed, the right in the case of royal personages such as Hecuba and Helen; the left, in the case of ordinary virgins or wives, such as Rose. Rose didn’t think herself enhanced by this exposure—she was getting on, after all, her bosom tended to flop—but she got used to the idea. She didn’t count on the sensation they would create. She didn’t think many people would be watching. She forgot about those parts of the country where people can’t exercise their preference for quiz shows, police-car chases, American situation comedies, and are compelled to put up with talks on public affairs and tours of art galleries and ambitious offerings of drama. She did not think they would be so amazed, either, now that every magazine rack in every town was serving up slices and cutlets of bare flesh. How could such outrage fasten on the Trojan ladies’ sad-eyed collection, puckered with cold then running with sweat under the lights, badly and chalk-ily made-up, all looking rather foolish without their mates, rather pitiful and unnatural, like tumors?
    Flo took to pen and paper over that, forced her stiff swollen fingers, crippled almost out of use with arthritis, to write the word Shame . She wrote that if Rose’s father had not been dead long ago he would now wish that he was. That was true. Rose read the letter, or part of it, out loud to some friends she was having for dinner. She read it for comic effect, and dramatic effect, to show the gulf that lay behind her, though she did realize, if she thought about it, that such a gulf was nothing special. Most of her friends, who seemed to her ordinarily hard-working, anxious, and hopeful, people, could lay claim to being disowned or prayed for, in some disappointed home.
    Halfway through, she had to stop reading. It wasn’t that she thought how shabby it was, to be exposing and making fun of Flo this way. She had done it often enough before; it was no news to her that it was shabby. What stopped her was, in fact, that gulf; she had a fresh and overwhelming realization of it, and it was nothing to laugh about. These reproaches of Flo’s made as much sense as a protest about raising umbrellas, a warning against eating raisins. But they were painfully, truly, meant; they were all a hard life had to offer. Shame on a bare breast.
    Another time, Rose was getting an award. So were several other people. A reception was being held, in a Toronto hotel. Flo had been sent an invitation, but Rose had never thought that she would come. She had thought she should give someone’s name, when the organizers asked about relatives, and she could hardly name Brian and Phoebe. Of course it was possible that she did, secretly, want Flo to come, wanted to show Flo, intimidate her, finally remove herself from Flo’s shade. That would be a natural thing to want to do.
    Flo came down on the train, unannounced. She got to the hotel. She was arthritic then, but still moving without a cane. She had always been decently, soberly, cheaply, dressed, but now it seemed she had spent money and asked advice. She was wearing a mauve and purple checked pants suit, and beads like strings of white and yellow popcorn. Her hair was covered by a thick gray-blue wig, pulled low on her forehead like a woollen cap. From the vee of the jacket, and its too-short sleeves, her neck and wrists stuck out brown and warty as if covered with bark. ‘When she saw Rose she stood still. She seemed to be waiting—not just for Rose to go over to her but for her feelings about the scene in front of her to crystallize.
    Soon they did.
    “Look at the Nigger!” said Flo in a loud voice, before Rose was anywhere near her. Her tone was one of simple, gratified astonishment, as