The Beggar Maid (6 page)

It was Cora Rose loved.

Cora lived with her grandparents. Her grandmother went across the bridge to Hanratty, to do cleaning and ironing. Her grandfather was the honey-dumper. That meant he went around cleaning out toilets. That was his job.

Before she had the money saved up to put in a real bathroom Flo had gotten a chemical toilet to put in a corner of the woodshed. A better arrangement than the outhouse, particularly in the wintertime. Cora’s grandfather disapproved. He said to Flo, “Many has got these chemicals in and many has wished they never.”

He pronounced the
ch
in
chemicals
like the
ch
in
church.

Cora was illegitimate. Her mother worked somewhere, or was married. Perhaps she worked as a maid, and she was able to send castoffs. Cora had plenty of clothes. She came to school in fawn-colored satin, rippling over the hips; in royal-blue velvet with a rose of the same material
flopping from one shoulder; in dull rose crepe loaded with fringe. These clothes were too old for her (Rose did not think so), but not too big. She was tall, solid, womanly. Sometimes she did her hair in a roll on top of her head, let it dip over one eye. She and Donna and Bernice often had their hair done in some grown-up style, their lips richly painted, their cheeks cakily powdered. Cora’s features were heavy. She had an oily forehead, lazy brunette eyelids, the ripe and indolent self-satisfaction that would soon go hard and matronly. But she was splendid at the moment, walking in the schoolyard with her attendants (it was actually Donna with the pale oval face, the fair frizzy hair, who came closest to being pretty), arms linked, seriously talking. She did not waste any attention on the boys at school, none of those girls did. They were waiting, perhaps already acquiring, real boyfriends. Some boys called to them from the basement door, wistfully insulting, and Cora turned and yelled at them.

“Too old for the cradle, too young for the bed!”

Rose had no idea what that meant, but she was full of admiration for the way Cora turned on her hips, for the taunting, cruel, yet lazy and unperturbed sound of her voice, her glossy look. When she was by herself she would act that out, the whole scene, the boys calling, Rose being Cora. She would turn just as Cora did, on her imaginary tormentors, she would deal out just such provocative scorn.

Too old for the cradle, too young for the bed!

Rose walked around the yard behind the store, imagining the fleshy satin rippling over her own hips, her own hair rolled and dipping, her lips red. She wanted to grow up to be exactly like Cora. She did not want to wait to grow up. She wanted to be Cora, now.

Cora wore high heels to school. She was not light-footed. When she walked around the schoolroom in her rich dresses you could feel the room tremble, you could hear the windows rattle. You could smell her, too. Her talcum and cosmetics, her warm dark skin and hair.

T
he three of them sat at the top of the fire escape, in the first warm weather. They were putting on nail polish. It smelled like bananas, with a queer chemical edge. Rose had meant to go up the fire escape into the school, as she usually did, avoiding the everyday threat of the
main entrance, but when she saw those girls she turned back, she did not dare expect them to shift over.

Cora called down.

“You can come up if you want to. Come on up!”

She was teasing her, encouraging her, as she would a puppy.

“How would you like to get your nails done?”

“Then they’ll all want to,” said the girl named Bernice, who as it turned out owned the nail polish.

“We won’t do them,” said Cora. “We’ll just do her. What’s your name? Rose? We’ll just do Rose. Come on up, honey.”

She made Rose hold out her hand. Rose saw with alarm how mottled it was, how grubby. And it was cold and trembly. A small, disgusting object. Rose would not have been surprised to see Cora drop it.

“Spread your fingers out. There. Relax. Lookit your hand shake! I’m not going to bite you. Am I? Hold steady like a good girl. You don’t want me to go all crooked, do you?”

She dipped the brush in the bottle. The color was deep red, like raspberries. Rose loved the smell. Cora’s own fingers were large, pink, steady, warm.

“Isn’t that pretty? Won’t your nails look pretty?”

She was doing it in the difficult, now-forgotten style of that time, leaving the half-moon and the whites of the nails bare.

“It’s rosy to match your name. That’s a pretty name, Rose. I like it. I like it better than Cora. I hate Cora. Your fingers are freezing for such a warm day. Aren’t they freezing, compared to mine?”

She was flirting, indulging herself, as girls that age will do. They will try out charm on anything, on dogs or cats or their own faces in the mirror. Rose was too much overcome to enjoy herself, at the moment. She was weak and dazzled, terrified by such high favor.

From that day on, Rose was obsessed. She spent her time trying to walk and look like Cora, repeating every word she had ever heard her say. Trying to
be
her. There was a charm for Rose about every gesture Cora made, about the way she stuck a pencil into her thick, coarse hair, the way she groaned sometimes in school, with imperial boredom. The way she licked her finger and carefully smoothed her eyebrows. Rose licked her own finger and smoothed her own eyebrows,
longing for them to be dark, instead of sunbleached and nearly invisible.

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!

F
lo 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 failed 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.