The Beggar Maid by Alice Munro Read Free Book Online Page B

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 hermouth. 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