The Beggar Maid Read online

  Imitation was not enough. Rose went further. She imagined that she would be sick and Cora would somehow be called to look after her. Nighttime cuddles, strokings, rockings. She made up stories of danger and rescue, accidents and gratitude. Sometimes she rescued Cora, sometimes Cora rescued Rose. Then all was warmth, indulgence, revelations.

  That’s a pretty name.

  Come on up, honey.

  The opening, the increase, the flow, of love. Sexual love, not sure yet exactly what it needed to concentrate on. It must be there from the start, like the hard white honey in the pail, waiting to melt and flow. There was some sharpness lacking, some urgency missing; there was the incidental differences in the sex of the person chosen; otherwise it was the same thing, the same thing that has overtaken Rose since. The high tide; the indelible folly; the flash flood.

  When things were flowering—lilacs, apple trees, hawthorns along the road—they had the game of funerals, organized by the older girls. The person who was supposed to be dead—a girl, because only girls played this game—lay stretched out at the top of the fire escape. The rest filed up slowly, singing some hymn, and cast down their armloads of flowers. They bent over pretending to sob (some really managed it) and took the last look. That was all there was to it. Everybody was supposed to get a chance to be dead but it didn’t work out that way. After the big girls had each had their turn they couldn’t be bothered playing subordinate roles in the funerals of the younger ones. Those left to carry on soon realized that the game had lost all its importance, its glamor, and they drifted away, leaving only a stubborn ragtag to finish things off. Rose was one of those left. She held out in hopes that Cora might walk up the fire escape in her procession, but Cora ignored it.

  The person playing dead got to choose what the processional hymn was. Cora had chosen “How beautiful Heaven must be.” She lay heaped with flowers, mostly lilacs, and wore her rose crepe dress. Also some beads, a brooch that said her name in green sequins, heavy face powder. Powder was trembling in the soft hairs at the corners of her mouth. Her eyelashes fluttered. Her expression was concentrated, frowning, sternly dead. Sadly singing, laying down lilacs, Rose was close enough to commit some act of worship, but could not find any. She could only pile up details to be thought over later. The color of Cora’s hair. The under-strands shone where it was pulled up over her ears. A lighter caramel, warmer, than the hair on top. Her arms were bare, dusky, flattened out, the heavy arms of a woman, fringe lying on them. What was her real smell? What was the statement, frowning and complacent, of her plucked eyebrows? Rose would strain over these things afterward, when she was alone, strain to remember them, know them, get them for good. What was the use of that? When she thought of Cora she had the sense of a glowing dark spot, a melting center, a smell and taste of burnt chocolate, that she could never get at.

  What can be done about love, when it gets to this point, of such impotence and hopelessness and crazy concentration? Something will have to whack it.

  She made a bad mistake soon. She stole some candy from Flo’s store, to give to Cora. An idiotic, inadequate thing to do, a childish thing, as she knew at the time. The mistake was not just in the stealing, though that was stupid, and not easy. Flo kept the candy up behind the counter, on a slanted shelf, in open boxes, out of reach but not out of sight of children. Rose had to watch her chance, then climb up on the stool and fill a bag with whatever she could grab—gum drops, jelly beans, licorice allsorts, maple buds, chicken bones. She didn’t eat any of it herself. She had to get the bag to school, which she did by carrying it under her skirt, the top of it tucked into the elastic top of her underpants. Her arm was pressed tightly against her waist to hold everything in place. Flo said, “What’s the matter, have you got a stomachache?” but luckily was too busy to investigate.

  Rose hid the bag in her desk and waited for an opportunity, which didn’t crop up as expected.

  Even if she had bought the candy, obtained it legitimately, the whole thing would have been a mistake. It would have been all right at the beginning, but not now. By now she required too much, in the way of gratitude, recognition, but was not in the state to accept anything. Her heart pounded, her mouth filled with the strange coppery taste of longing and despair, if Cora even happened to walk past her desk with her heavy, important tread, in her cloud of skin-heated perfumes. No gesture could match what Rose felt, no satisfaction was possible, and she knew that what she was doing was clownish, unlucky.

  She could not bring herself to offer it, there was never a right time, so after a few days she decided to leave the bag in Cora’s desk. Even that was difficult. She had to pretend she had forgotten something, after four, run back into the school, with the knowledge that she would have to run out again later, alone, past the big boys at the basement door.

  The teacher was there, putting on her hat. Every day for that walk across the bridge she put on her old green hat with a bit of feather stuck in it. Cora’s friend Donna was wiping off the boards. Rose tried to stuff the bag into Cora’s desk. Something fell out. The teacher didn’t bother, but Donna turned and yelled at her, “Hey, what are you doing in Cora’s desk?”

  Rose dropped the bag on the seat and ran out.

  The thing she hadn’t foreseen at all was that Cora would come to Flo’s store and turn the candy in. But that was what Cora did. She did not do it to make trouble for Rose but simply to enjoy herself. She enjoyed her importance and respectability and the pleasure of grown-up exchange.

  “I don’t know what she wanted to give it to me for,” she said, or Flo said she said. Flo’s imitation was off, for once; it did not sound to Rose at all like Cora’s voice. Flo made her sound mincing and whining.

  “I-thought-I-better-come-and-tell-you!”

  The candy was in no condition for eating, anyway. It was all squeezed and melted together, so that Flo had to throw it out.

  Flo was dumbfounded. She said so. Not at the stealing. She was naturally against stealing but she seemed to understand that in this case it was the secondary evil, it was less important.

  “What were you doing with it? Giving it to her? What were you giving it to her for? Are you in love with her or something?”

  She meant that as an insult and a joke. Rose answered no, because she associated love with movie endings, kissing, and getting married. Her feelings were at the moment shocked and exposed, and already, though she didn’t know it, starting to wither and curl up at the edges. Flo was a drying blast.

  “You are so,” said Flo. “You make me sick.”

  It wasn’t future homosexuality Flo was talking about. If she had known about that, or thought of it, it would have seemed to her even more of a joke, even more outlandish, more incomprehensible, than the regular carrying-on. It was love she sickened at. It was the enslavement, the self-abasement, the self-deception. That struck her. She saw the danger, all right; she read the flaw. Headlong hopefulness, readiness, need.

  “What is so wonderful about her?” asked Flo, and immediately answered herself. “Nothing. She is a far cry from good-looking. She is going to turn out a monster of fat. I can see the signs. She is going to have a mustache, too. She has one already. Where does she get her clothes from? I guess she thinks they suit her.”

  Rose did not reply to this and Flo said further that Cora had no father, you might wonder what her mother worked at, and who was her grandfather? The honey-dumper!

  Flo went back to the subject of Cora, now and then, for years.

  “There goes your idol!” she would say, seeing Cora go by the store after she had started to high school.

  Rose pretended to have no recollection.

  “You know her!” Flo kept it up. “You tried to give her candy! You stole that candy for her! Didn’t I have a laugh.”

  Rose’s pretense was not altogether a lie. She remembered the facts, but not the feelings. Cora turned into a big dark sulky-looking girl with round shoulders, carrying her high school books. The books were no help to her, she fail
ed at high school. She wore ordinary blouses and a navy blue skirt, which did make her look fat. Perhaps her personality could not survive the loss of her elegant dresses. She went away, she got a war job. She joined the Air Force, and appeared home on leave, bunched into their dreadful uniform. She married an airman.

  Rose was not much bothered by this loss, this transformation. Life was altogether a series of surprising developments, as far as she could learn. She only thought how out-of-date Flo was, as she went on recalling the story and making Cora sound worse and worse—swarthy, hairy, swaggering, fat. So long after, and so uselessly, Rose saw Flo trying to warn and alter her.

  The school changed with the war. It dwindled, lost all its evil energy, its anarchic spirit, its style. The fierce boys went into the Army. West Hanratty changed too. People moved away to take war jobs and even those who stayed behind were working, being better paid than they had ever dreamed. Respectability took hold, in all but the stubbornest cases. Roofs got shingled all over instead of in patches. Houses were painted, or covered with imitation brick. Refrigerators were bought and bragged about. When Rose thought of West Hanratty during the war years, and during the years before, the two times were so separate it was as if an entirely different lighting had been used, or as if it was all on film and the film had been printed in a different way, so that on the one hand things looked clean-edged and decent and limited and ordinary, and on the other, dark, grainy, jumbled, and disturbing.

  The school itself got fixed up. Windows replaced, desks screwed down, dirty words hidden under splashes of dull red paint. The Boys’ Toilet and the Girls’ Toilet were knocked down and the pits filled in. The Government and the School Board saw fit to put flush toilets in the cleaned-up basement.

  Everybody was moving in that direction. Mr. Burns died in the summertime and the people who bought his place put in a bathroom. They also put up a high fence of chicken wire, so that nobody from the schoolyard could reach over and get their lilacs. Flo had put in a bathroom too by this time. She said they might as well have the works, it was wartime prosperity.

  Cora’s grandfather had to retire, and there never was another honey-dumper.

  Half a Grapefruit

  Rose wrote the Entrance, she went across the bridge, she went to high school.

  There were four large clean windows along the wall. There were new fluorescent lights. The class was Health and Guidance, a new idea. Boys and girls mixed until after Christmas, when they got on to Family Life. The teacher was young and optimistic. She wore a dashing red suit that flared out over the hips. She went up and down, up and down the rows, making everybody say what they had for breakfast, to see if they were keeping Canada’s Food Rules.

  Differences soon became evident, between town and country.

  “Fried potatoes.”

  “Bread and corn syrup.”

  “Tea and porridge.”

  “Tea and bread.”

  “Tea and fried eggs and cottage roll.”

  “Raisin pie.”

  There was some laughing, the teacher making ineffectual scolding faces. She was getting to the town side of the room. A rough sort of segregation was maintained, voluntarily, in the classroom. Over here people claimed to have eaten toast and marmalade, bacon and eggs, Corn Flakes, even waffles and syrup. Orange juice, said a few.

  Rose had stuck herself on to the back of a town row. West Hanratty was not represented, except by her. She was wanting badly to align herself with towners, against her place of origin, to attach herself to those waffle-eating coffee-drinking aloof and knowledgeable possessors of breakfast nooks.

  “Half a grapefruit,” she said boldly. Nobody else had thought of it.

  As a matter of fact Flo would have thought eating grapefruit for breakfast as bad as drinking champagne. They didn’t even sell grapefruit in the store. They didn’t go in much for fresh fruit. A few spotty bananas, small unpromising oranges. Flo believed, as many country people did, that anything not well-cooked was bad for the stomach. For breakfast they too had tea and porridge. Puffed Rice in the summertime. The first morning the Puffed Rice, light as pollen, came spilling into the bowl, was as festive, as encouraging a time as the first day walking on the hard road without rubbers or the first day the door could be left open in the lovely, brief time between frost and flies.

  Rose was pleased with herself for thinking of the grapefruit and with the way she had said it, in so bold, yet so natural, a voice. Her voice could go dry altogether in school, her heart could roll itself up into a thumping ball and lodge in her throat, sweat could plaster her blouse to her arms, in spite of Mum. Her nerves were calamitous.

  She was walking home across the bridge a few days later, and she heard someone calling. Not her name but she knew it was meant for her, so she softened her steps on the boards, and listened. The voices were underneath her, it seemed, though she could look down through the cracks and see nothing but fast-running water. Somebody must be hidden down by the pilings. The voices were wistful, so delicately disguised she could not tell if they were boys’ or girls’.

  “Half-a-grapefruit!”

  She would hear that called, now and again, for years, called out from an alley or a dark window. She would never let on she heard, but would soon have to touch her face, wipe the moisture away from her upper lip. We sweat for our pretensions.

  It could have been worse. Disgrace was the easiest thing to come by. High school life was hazardous, in that harsh clean light, and nothing was ever forgotten. Rose could have been the girl who lost the Kotex. That was probably a country girl, carrying the Kotex in her pocket or in the back of her notebook, for use later in the day. Anybody who lived at a distance might have done that. Rose herself had done it. There was a Kotex dispenser in the girls’ washroom but it was always empty, would swallow your dimes but disgorge nothing in return. There was the famous pact made by two country girls to seek out the janitor at lunchtime, ask him to fill it. No use.

  “Which one of you is the one that needs it?” he said. They fled. They said his room under the stairs had an old grimy couch in it, and a cat’s skeleton. They swore to it.

  That Kotex must have fallen on the floor, maybe in the cloakroom, then been picked up and smuggled somehow into the trophy case in the main hall. There it came to public notice. Folding and carrying had spoiled its fresh look, rubbed its surface, so that it was possible to imagine it had been warmed against the body. A great scandal. In morning assembly, the Principal made reference to a disgusting object. He vowed to discover, expose, flog and expel the culprit who had put it on view. Every girl in the school was denying knowledge of it. Theories abounded. Rose was afraid that she might be a leading candidate for ownership, so was relieved when responsibility was fixed on a big sullen country girl named Muriel Mason, who wore slub rayon housedresses to school, and had B.O.

  “You got the rag on today, Muriel?” boys would say to her now, would call after her.

  “If I was Muriel Mason I would want to kill myself,” Rose heard a senior girl say to another on the stairs. “I would kill myself.” She spoke not pityingly but impatiently.

  Every day when Rose got home she would tell Flo about what went on in school. Flo enjoyed the episode of the Kotex, would ask about fresh developments. Half-a-grapefruit she never got to hear about. Rose would not have told her anything in which she did not play a superior, an onlooker’s part. Pitfalls were for others, Flo and Rose agreed. The change in Rose, once she left the scene, crossed the bridge, changed herself into chronicler, was remarkable. No nerves anymore. A loud skeptical voice, some hip-swinging in a red and yellow plaid skirt, more than a hint of swaggering.

  Flo and Rose had switched roles. Now Rose was the one bringing stories home, Flo was the one who knew the names of the characters and was waiting to hear.

  Horse Nicholson, Del Fairbridge, Runt Chesterton. Florence Dodie, Shirley Pickering, Ruby Carruthers. Flo waited daily for news of them. She called them Jokers.

  “Well, what did th
ose jokers get up to today?”

  They would sit in the kitchen, the door wide open to the store in case any customers came in, and to the stairs in case her father called. He was in bed. Flo made coffee or she told Rose to get a couple of Cokes out of the cooler.

  This is the sort of story Rose brought home:

  Ruby Carruthers was a slutty sort of girl, a redhead with a bad squint. (One of the great differences between then and now, at least in the country, and places like West Hanratty, was that squints and walleyes were let alone, teeth overlapped or protruded any way they liked.) Ruby Carruthers worked for the Bryants, the hardware people; she did housework for her board and stayed in the house when they went away, as they often did, to the horse races or the hockey games or to Florida. One time when she was there alone three boys went over to see her. Del Fairbridge, Horse Nicholson, Runt Chesterton.

  “To see what they could get,” Flo put in. She looked at the ceiling and told Rose to keep her voice down. Her father would not tolerate this sort of story.

  Del Fairbridge was a good-looking boy, conceited, and not very clever. He said he would go into the house and persuade Ruby to do it with him, and if he could get her to do it with all three of them, he would. What he didn’t know was that Horse Nicholson had already arranged with Ruby to meet him under the veranda.

  “Spiders in there, likely,” said Flo. “I guess they don’t care.”

  While Del was wandering around the dark house looking for her, Ruby was under the veranda with Horse, and Runt who was in on the whole plan was sitting on the veranda steps keeping watch, no doubt listening attentively to the bumping and the breathing.