Who Do You Think You Are?

by Alice Munro

  “The line I lived on when I was just young,” Flo said, “it was the worst place ever created for suiciding.”

  “A line is a concession road. In the township,” Rose said to Patrick. She had doubts about what was coming, and rightly so, for then Patrick got to hear about a man who cut his own throat, his own throat, from ear to ear, a man who shot himself the first time and didn’t do enough damage, so he loaded up and fired again and managed it, another man who hanged himself using a chain, the kind of chain you hook on a tractor with, so it was a wonder his head was not torn off.

  Tore off, Flo said.

  She went on to a woman who, though not a suicide, had been dead in her house a week before she was found, and that was in the summer. She asked Patrick to imagine it. All this happened, said Flo, within five miles of where she herself was born. She was presenting credentials, not trying to horrify Patrick, at least not more than was acceptable, in a social way; she did not mean to disconcert him. How could he understand that?

  “You were right,” said Patrick, as they left Hanratty on the bus. “It is a dump. You must be glad to get away.”

  Rose felt immediately that he should not have said that.

  “Of course that’s not your real mother,” Patrick said. “Your real parents can’t have been like that.” Rose did not like his saying that either, though it was what she believed, herself. She saw that he was trying to provide for her a more genteel background, perhaps something like the homes of his poor friends: a few books about, a tea tray, and mended linen, worn good taste; proud, tired, educated people. What a coward he was, she thought angrily, but she knew that she herself was the coward, not knowing any way to be comfortable with her own people or the kitchen or any of it. Years later she would learn how to use it, she would be able to amuse or intimidate right-thinking people at dinner parties with glimpses of her early home. At the moment she felt confusion, misery.

  Nevertheless her loyalty was starting. Now that she was sure of getting away, a layer of loyalty and protectiveness was hardening around every memory she had, around the store and the town, the flat, somewhat scrubby, unremarkable countryside. She would oppose this secretly to Patrick’s views of mountains and ocean, his stone and timbered mansion. Her allegiances were far more proud and stubborn than his.

  But it turned out he was not leaving anything behind.

  PATRICK GAVE HER a diamond ring and announced that he was giving up being a historian for her sake. He was going into his father’s business.

  She said she thought he hated his father’s business. He said that he could not afford to take such an attitude now that he would have a wife to support.

  It seemed that Patrick’s desire to marry even to marry Rose, had been taken by his father as a sign of sanity. Great streaks of bounty were mixed in with all the ill will in that family. His father at once offered a job in one of the stores, offered to buy them a house. Patrick was as incapable of turning down this offer as Rose was of turning down Patrick’s, and his reasons were as little mercenary as hers.

  “Will we have a house like your parents?” Rose said. She really thought it might be necessary to start off in that style.

  “Well, maybe not at first. Not quite so—”

  “I don’t want a house like that! I don’t want to live like that!” “We’ll live however you like. We’ll have whatever kind of house you like.”

  Provided it’s not a dump, she thought nastily.

  Girls she hardly knew stopped and asked to see her ring, admired it, wished her happiness. When she went back to Hanratty for a weekend, alone this time, thank God, she met the dentist’s wife on the main street.

  “Oh, Rose, isn’t it wonderful! When are you coming back again? We’re going to give a tea for you, the ladies in town all want to give a tea for you!”

  This woman had never spoken to Rose, never given any sign before of knowing who she was. Paths were opening now, barriers were softening. And Rose—oh, this was the worst, this was the shame of it—Rose, instead of cutting the dentist’s wife, was blushing and skittishly flashing her diamond and saying yes, that would be a lovely idea. When people said how happy she must be she did think herself happy. It was as simple as that. She dimpled and sparkled and turned herself into a fiancée with no trouble at all. Where will you live, people said and she said oh, in British Columbia! That added more magic to the tale. Is it really beautiful there, they said, is it never winter?

  “Oh, yes!” cried Rose, “Oh, no!”

  SHE WOKE UP EARLY, got up and dressed and let herself out of the side door of Dr. Henshawe’s garage. It was too early for the buses to be running. She walked through the city to Patrick’s apartment. She walked across the park. Around the South African War Memorial a pair of greyhounds were leaping and playing, an old woman standing by, holding their leashes. The sun was just up, shining on their pale hides. The grass was wet. Daffodils and narcisus in bloom.

  Patrick came to the door, tousled, frowning sleepily, in his gray and maroon striped pajamas.

  “Rose! What’s the matter?”

  She couldn’t say anything. He pulled her into the apartment. She put her arms around him and hid her face against his chest and in a stagey voice said, “Please Patrick. Please let me not marry you.”

  “Are you sick? What’s the matter?”

  “Please let me not marry you,” she said again, with even less conviction.

  “You’re crazy.”

  She didn’t blame him for thinking so. Her voice sounded so unnatural, wheedling, silly. As soon as he opened the door and she faced the fact of him, his sleepy eyes, his pajamas, she saw that what she had come to do was enormous, impossible. She would have to explain everything to him, and of course she could not do it. She could not make him see her necessity. She could not find any tone of voice, any expression of the face, that would serve her.

  “Are you upset?” said Patrick. “What’s happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  “How did you get here anyway?”

  “Walked.”

  She had been fighting back a need to go to the bathroom. It seemed that if she went to the bathroom she would destroy some of the strength of her case. But she had to. She freed herself. She said, “Wait a minute, I’m going to the john.”

  When she came out Patrick had the electric kettle going, was measuring out instant coffee. He looked decent and bewildered.

  “I’m not really awake,” he said. “Now. Sit down. First of all, are you premenstrual?”

  “No.” But she realized with dismay that she was, and that he might be able to figure it out, because they had been worried last month.

  “Well, if you’re not premenstrual, and nothing’s happened to upset you, then what is all this about?”

  “I don’t want to get married,” she said, backing away from the cruelty of I don’t want to marry you.

  “When did you come to this decision?” “Long ago. This morning.”

  They were talking in whispers. Rose looked at the clock. It was a little after seven.

  “When do the others get up?”

  “About eight.”

  “Is there milk for the coffee?” She went to the refrigerator. “Quiet with the door,” said Patrick, too late.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, in her strange silly voice.

  “We went for a walk last night and everything was fine. You come this morning and tell me you don’t want to get married. Why don’t you want to get married?”

  “I just don’t. I don’t want to be married.”

  “What else do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Patrick kept staring at her sternly, drinking his coffee. He who used to plead with her do you love me, do you really, did not bring the subject up now.

  “Well I know.”

  “What?”

  “I know who’s been talking to you.”

  “Nobody has been talking to me.”

  “Oh, no. Well, I bet. Dr. Hensha
we has.”

  “No.”

  “Some people don’t have a very high opinion of her. They think she has an influence on girls. She doesn’t like the girls who live with her to have boyfriends. Does she? You even told me that. She doesn’t like them to be normal.”

  “That’s not it.”

  “What did she say to you, Rose?”

  “She didn’t say anything.” Rose began to cry.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Oh, Patrick, listen, please, I can’t marry you, please, I don’t know why, I can’t, please, I’m sorry, believe me, I can’t,” Rose babbled at him, weeping, and Patrick saying, “Ssh! You’ll wake them up!” lifted or dragged her out of the kitchen chair and took her to his room, where she sat on the bed. He shut the door. She held her arms across her stomach, and rocked back and forth.

  “What is it Rose? What’s the matter? Are you sick!”

  “It’s just so hard to tell you!”

  “Tell me what?”

  “What I just did tell you.”

  “I mean have you found out you have T.B. or something?” “No!”

  “Is there something in your family you haven’t told me about?

  Insanity?” said Patrick encouragingly.

  “No!” Rose rocked and wept.

  “So what is it?”

  “I don’t love you!” she said. “I don’t love you. I don’t love you.” She fell on the bed and put her head in the pillow. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I can’t help it.”

  After a moment or two Patrick said, “Well. If you don’t love me you don’t love me. I’m not forcing you to.” His voice sounded strained and spiteful, against the reasonableness of what he was saying. “I just wonder,” he said, “if you know what you do want. I don’t think you do. I don’t think you have any idea what you want. You’re just in a state.”

  “I don’t have to know what I want to know what I don’t want!” Rose said, turning over. This released her. “I never loved you.”

  “Ssh. You’ll wake them. We have to stop.”

  “I never loved you. I never wanted to. It was a mistake.”

  “All right. All right. You made your point.”

  Patrick’s face was so white the birthmark stood out like a cut, and that only made her eager to continue.

  “Why am I supposed to love you? Why do you act as if there was something wrong with me if I didn’t? You despise me. You despise my family and my background and you think you are doing me a great favor—”

  “I fell in love with you,” Patrick said. “I don’t despise you. Oh, Rose. I worship you.”

  “You’re a sissy,” Rose said. “You’re a prude.” She jumped off the bed with great pleasure as she said this. She felt full of energy. More was coming. Terrible things were coming.

  “You don’t even know how to make love right. I always wanted to get out of this from the very first. I felt sorry for you. You won’t look where you’re going, you’re always knocking things over, just because you can’t be bothered, you can’t be bothered noticing anything, you’re so wrapped up in yourself, and you’re always bragging, it’s so stupid, you don’t even know how to brag right, if you really want to impress people you’ll never do it, the way you do it all they do is laugh at you!”

  Patrick sat on the bed and looked up at her, his face open to whatever she would say. She wanted to beat and beat him, to say worse and worse, uglier and crueller, things. She took a breath, drew in air, to stop the things she felt rising in her from getting out.

  “I don’t want to see you, ever!” she said viciously. But at the door she turned and said in a normal and regretful voice, “Good-bye.”

  PATRICK WROTE HER A NOTE: “I don’t understand what happened the other day and I want to talk to you about it. But I think we should wait for two weeks and not see or talk to each other and find out how we feel at the end of that time.”

  Rose had forgotten all about giving him back his ring. When she came out of his apartment building that morning she was still wearing it. She couldn’t go back, and it seemed too valuable to send through the mail. She continued to wear it, mostly because she did not want to have to tell Dr. Henshawe what had happened. She was relieved to get Patrick’s note. She thought that she could give him back the ring then.

  She thought about what Patrick had said about Dr. Henshawe. No doubt there was some truth in that, else why should she be so reluctant to tell Dr. Henshawe she had broken her engagement—so unwilling to face her sensible approval, her restrained, relieved congratulations?

  She told Dr. Henshawe that she was not seeing Patrick while she studied for her exams. Rose could see that even that pleased her.

  She told no one that her situation had changed. It was not just Dr. Henshawe she didn’t want knowing. She didn’t like giving up being envied; the experience was so new to her.

  She tried to think what to do next. She could not stay on at Dr. Henshawe’s. It seemed clear that if she escaped from Patrick, she must escape from Dr. Henshawe too. And she did not want to stay on at the college, with people knowing about her broken engagement, with the girls who now congratulated her saying they had known all along it was a fluke, her getting Patrick. She would have to get a job.

  The Head Librarian had offered her a job for the summer but that was perhaps at Dr. Henshawe’s suggestion. Once she moved out, the offer might not hold. She knew that instead of studying for her exams she ought to be downtown, applying for work as a filing clerk at the insurance offices, applying at Bell Telephone, at the department stores. The idea frightened her. She kept on studying. That was the one thing she really knew how to do. She was a scholarship student after all.

  On Saturday afternoon, when she was working at the Library, she saw Patrick. She did not see him by accident. She went down to the bottom floor, trying not to make a noise on the spiraling metal staircase. There was a place in the stacks where she could stand, almost in darkness, and see into his carrel. She did that. She couldn’t see his face. She saw his long pink neck and the old plaid shirt he wore on Saturdays. His long neck. His bony shoulders. She was no longer irritated by him, no longer frightened by him; she was free. She could look at him as she would look at anybody. She could appreciate him. He had behaved well. He had not tried to rouse her pity, he had not bullied her, he had not molested her with pitiful telephone calls and letters. He had not come and sat on Dr. Henshawe’s doorstep. He was an honorable person, and he would never know how she acknowledged that, how she was grateful for it. The things she had said to him made her ashamed now. And they were not even true. Not all of them. He did know how to make love. She was so moved, made so gentle and wistful, by the sight of him, that she wanted to give him something, some surprising bounty, she wished to undo his unhappiness.

  Then she had a compelling picture of herself. She was running softly into Patrick’s carrel, she was throwing her arms around him from behind, she was giving everything back to him. Would he take it from her, would he still want it? She saw them laughing and crying, explaining, forgiving. I love you, I do love you, it’s all right, I was terrible, I didn’t mean it, I was just crazy, I love you, it’s all right. This was a violent temptation for her; it was barely resistable. She had an impulse to hurl herself. Whether it was off a cliff or into a warm bed of welcoming grass and flowers, she really could not tell.

  It was not resistable, after all. She did it.

  WHEN ROSE AFTERWARDS REVIEWED and talked about this moment in her life—for she went through a period, like most people nowadays, of talking freely about her most private decisions, to friends and lovers and party acquaintances whom she might never see again, while they did the same—she said that comradely compassion had overcome her, she was not proof against the sight of a bare bent neck. Then she went further into it, and said greed, greed. She said she had run to him and clung to him and overcome his suspicions and kissed and cried and reinstated herself simply because she did not know how to do without his love and his promise
to look after her; she was frightened of the world and she had not been able to think up any other plan for herself. When she was seeing life in economic terms, or was with people who did, she said that only middle-class people had choices anyway, that if she had had the price of a train ticket to Toronto her life would have been different.

  Nonsense, she might say later, never mind that, it was really vanity, it was vanity pure and simple, to resurrect him, to bring him back his happiness. To see if she could do that. She could not resist such a test of power. She explained then that she had paid for it. She said that she and Patrick had been married ten years, and that during that time the scenes of the first break-up and reconciliation had been periodically repeated, with her saying again all the things she had said the first time, and the things she had held back, and many other things which occurred to her. She hopes she did not tell people (but thinks she did) that she used to beat her head against the bedpost, that she smashed a gravy boat through a dining-room window; that she was so frightened, so sickened by what she had done that she lay in bed, shivering, and begged and begged for his forgiveness. Which he granted. Sometimes she flew at him; sometimes he beat her. The next morning they would get up early and make a special breakfast, they would sit eating bacon and eggs and drinking filtered coffee, worn out, bewildered, treating each other with shamefaced kindness.

  What do you think triggers the reaction? they would say.

  Do you think we ought to take a holiday? A holiday together?

  Holidays alone?

  A waste, a sham, those efforts, as it turned out. But they worked for the moment. Calmed down, they would say that most people probably went through the same things like this, in a marriage, and indeed they seemed to know mostly people who did. They could not separate until enough damage had been done, until nearly mortal damage had been done, to keep them apart. And until Rose could get a job and make her own money, so perhaps there was a very ordinary reason after all.

  What she never said to anybody, never confided, was that she sometimes thought it had not been pity or greed or cowardice or vanity but something quite different, like a vision of happiness. In view of everything else she had told she could hardly tell that. It seems very odd; she can’t justify it. She doesn’t mean that they had perfectly ordinary, bearable times in their marriage, long busy stretches of wallpapering and vacationing and meals and shopping and worrying about a child’s illness, but that sometimes, without reason or warning, happiness, the possibility of happiness, would surprise them. Then it was as if they were in different though identical-seeming skins, as if there existed a radiantly kind and innocent Rose and Patrick, hardly ever visible, in the shadow of their usual selves. Perhaps it was that Patrick she saw when she was free of him, invisible to him, looking into his carrel. Perhaps it was. She should have left him there.