The Beggar Maid (7 page)

T
he 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

R
ose 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 those 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.

Presently Horse crawled out and said he was going into the house to find Del, not to enlighten him but to see how the joke was working, this being the most important part of the proceedings, as far as Horse was concerned. He found Del eating marshmallows in the pantry and saying Ruby Carruthers wasn’t fit to piss on, he could do better any day, and he was going home.

Meanwhile Runt had crawled under the veranda and got to work on Ruby.

“Jesus Murphy!” said Flo.

Then Horse came out of the house and Runt and Ruby could hear him overhead, walking on the veranda. Said Ruby, who is that? And Runt said, oh, that’s only Horse Nicholson.
Then who the hell are you?
said Ruby.

Jesus Murphy!

Rose did not bother with the rest of the story, which was that Ruby got into a bad mood, sat on the veranda steps with the dirt from underneath all over her clothes and in her hair, refused to smoke a cigarette or share a package of cupcakes (now probably rather squashed) that Runt had swiped from the grocery store where he worked after school. They teased her to tell them what was the matter and at last she said, “I think I got a right to know who I’m doing it with.”

“She’ll get what she deserves,” said Flo philosophically. Other people thought so too. It was the fashion, if you picked up any of Ruby’s things, by mistake, particularly her gym suit or running shoes, to go and wash your hands, so you wouldn’t risk getting V.D.

Upstairs Rose’s father was having a coughing fit. These fits were desperate, but they had become used to them. Flo got up and went to the bottom of the stairs. She listened there until the fit was over.

“That medicine doesn’t help him one iota,” she said. “That doctor couldn’t put a Band-Aid on straight.” To the end, she blamed all Rose’s father’s troubles on medicines, doctors.

“If you ever got up to any of that with a boy it would be the end of you,” she said. “I mean it.”

Rose flushed with rage and said she would die first.

“I hope so,” Flo said.

H
ere is the sort of story Flo told Rose:

When her mother died, Flo was twelve, and her father gave her away. He gave her to a well-to-do farming family who were to work her for her board and send her to school. But most of the time they did not send her. There was too much work to be done. They were hard people.

“If you were picking apples and there was one left on the tree you would have to go back and pick over every tree in the entire orchard. The same when you were out picking up stones in the field. Leave one and you had to do the whole field again.”

The wife was the sister of a bishop. She was always careful of her skin, rubbing it with Hinds Honey and Almond. She took a high tone with everybody and was sarcastic and believed that she had married down.

“But she was good-looking,” said Flo, “and she gave me one thing. It was a long pair of satin gloves, they were a light brown color. Fawn. They were lovely. I never meant to lose them but I did.”

Flo had to take the men’s dinner to them in the far field. The husband opened it up and said, “Why is there no pie in this dinner?”

“If you want any pie you can make it yourself,” said Flo, in the exact words and tone of her mistress when they were packing the dinner. It was not surprising that she could imitate that woman so well; she was always doing it, even practicing at the mirror. It
was
surprising she let it out then.

The husband was amazed, but recognized the imitation. He marched Flo back to the house and demanded of his wife if that was what she had said. He was a big man, and very bad-tempered. No, it is not true, said the bishop’s sister, that girl is nothing but a troublemaker and a liar. She faced him down, and when she got Flo alone she hit her such a clout that Flo was knocked across the room into a cupboard. Her scalp was cut. It healed in time without stitches (the bishop’s sister didn’t get the doctor, she didn’t want talk), and Flo had the scar still.

She never went back to school after that.

Just before she was fourteen she ran away. She lied about her age and got a job in the glove factory, in Hanratty. But the bishop’s sister found out where she was, and every once in a while would come to see her. We forgive you, Flo. You ran away and left us but we still think of you as our Flo and our friend. You are welcome to come out and spend a day with us. Wouldn’t you like a day in the country? It’s not very healthy in the glove factory, for a young person. You need the air. Why don’t you come and see us? Why don’t you come today?

And every time Flo accepted this invitation it would turn out that there was a big fruit preserving or chili sauce making in progress, or they were wallpapering or spring-cleaning, or the threshers were coming. All she ever got to see of the country was where she threw the
dishwater over the fence. She never could understand why she went or why she stayed. It was a long way, to turn around and walk back to town. And they were such a helpless outfit on their own. The bishop’s sister put her preserving jars away dirty. When you brought them up from the cellar there would be bits of mold growing in them, clots of fuzzy rotten fruit on the bottom. How could you help but be sorry for people like that?