The Beggar Maid by Alice Munro

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 copperytaste 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