The Beggar Maid by Alice Munro Page B

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,