Who Do You Think You Are by Alice Munro Page A

Flo’s and told everything. She told Flo who bought hair dye and slimming medicine and French safes. As for the cushion business, you could send away for it but there was sure to be a comment at the Post Office, and Flo knew people there as well. She also hoped to buy some bangles, and an angora sweater. She had great hopes of silver bangles and powder-blue angora. She thought they could transform her, make her calm and slender and take the fizz out of her hair, dry her underarms and turn her complexion to pearl.
    The money for these things, as well as the money for the trip, came from a prize Rose had won, for writing an essay called “Art and Science in the World of Tomorrow.” To her surprise, Flo asked if she could read it, and while she was reading it, she remarked that they must have thought they had to give Rose the prize for swallowing the dictionary. Then she said shyly, “It’s very interesting.”
    She would have to spend the night at Cela McKinney’s. Cela McKinney was her father’s cousin. She had married a hotel manager and thought she had gone up in the world. But the hotel manager came home one day and sat down on the dining room floor between two chairs and said, “I am never going to leave this house again.” Nothing unusual had happened, he had just decided not to go out of the house again, and he didn’t, until he died. That had made Cela McKinney odd and nervous. She locked her doors at eight o’clock. She was also very stingy. Supper was usually oatmeal porridge, with raisins. Her house was dark and narrow and smelled like a bank.
    The train was filling up. At Brantford a man asked if she would mind if he sat down beside her.
    “It’s cooler out than you’d think,” he said. He offered her part of his newspaper. She said no thanks.
    Then lest he think her rude she said it really was cooler. She went on looking out the window at the spring morning. There was no snow left, down here. The trees and bushes seemed to have a paler bark than they did at home. Even the sunlight looked different. It was as different from home, here, as the coast of the Mediterranean would be, or the valleys of California.
    “Filthy windows, you’d think they’d take more care,” the man said. “Do you travel much by train?”
    She said no.
    Water was lying in the fields. He nodded at it and said there was a lot this year.
    “Heavy snows.”
    She noticed his saying snows, a poetic-sounding word. Anyone at home would have said snow .
    “I had an unusual experience the other day. I was driving out in the country. In fact I was on my way to see one of my parishioners, a lady with a heart condition—”
    She looked quickly at his collar. He was wearing an ordinary shirt and tie and a dark blue suit.
    “Oh, yes,” he said. “I’m a United Church minister. But I don’t always wear my uniform. I wear it for preaching in. I’m off duty today.”
    “Well as I said I was driving through the country and I saw some Canada Geese down on a pond, and I took another look, and there were some swans down with them. A whole great flock of swans. What a lovely sight they were. They would be on their spring migration, I expect, heading up north. What a spectacle. I never saw anything like it.”
    Rose was unable to think appreciatively of the wild swans because she was afraid he was going to lead the conversation from them to Nature in general and then to God, the way a minister would feel obliged to do. But he did not, he stopped with the swans.
    “A very fine sight. You would have enjoyed them.”
    He was between fifty and sixty years old, Rose thought. He was short, and energetic-looking, with a square ruddy face and bright waves of gray hair combed straight up from his forehead. When she realized he was not going to mention God she felt she ought to show her gratitude.
    She said they must have been lovely.
    “It wasn’t even a regular pond, it was just some water lying in a field. It was just by luck the water was