A review by ampersunder
Who Do You Think You Are? by Alice Munro

4.0

‰ЫПRose gets lonely in new places; she wishes she had invitations. She goes out and walks the streets and looks in the lighted windows at all the Saturday-night parties, the Sunday-night family suppers. It‰ЫЄs no good telling herself she wouldn‰ЫЄt be long inside there, chattering and getting drunk, or spooning up the gravy, before she‰ЫЄd wish she was walking the streets. She thinks she could take on any hospitality. She could go to parties in rooms hung with posters, lit by lamps with Coca-Cola shades, everything crumbly and askew; or else in warm professional rooms with lots of books, and brass rubbings, and maybe a skull or two; even in the recreation rooms she can just see the tops of, through the basement windows: rows of beer stems, hunting horns, drinking horns, guns. She could go and sit on lurex-threaded sofas under hangings of black velvet displaying mountains, galleons, polar bears, executed in brushed wool. She would like very much to be dishing up a costly cabinet de diplomate out of a cut-glass bowl in a rich dining room with a big gleaming belly of a sideboard behind her, and a dim picture of horses feeding, cows feeding, sheep feeding, on badly painted purple grass. Or she could do as well with batter pudding in the eating nook of a kitchen in a little stucco house by the bus stop, plaster pears and peaches decorating the wall, ivy curling out of little brass pots. Rose is an actress; she can fit in anywhere.‰Ыќ