The Beggar Maid by Alice Munro Page A

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 She only thought how out-of-date Flo was, as she went on recalling the story and making Cora sound worse and worse—swarthy,hairy, swaggering, fat.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.
    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 tothose 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