by Alice Munro
She learned to fend off Franny. She learned never to go near the school basement which had all the windows broken and was black, dripping, like a cave; to avoid the dark place under the steps and the place between the woodpiles; not to attract in any way the attention of the big boys, who seemed like wild dogs, to her, just as quick and strong, capricious, jubilant in attack.
A mistake she made early and would not have made later on was in telling Flo the truth instead of some lie when a big boy, one of the Morey boys, tripped and grabbed her as she was coming down the fire escape, tearing the sleeve of her raincoat out at the armhole. Flo came to the school to raise Cain (her stated intention) and heard witnesses swear Rose had torn it on a nail. The teacher was glum, would not declare herself, indicated Flo’s visit was not welcome. Adults did not come to the school, in West Hanratty. Mothers were strongly partisan in fights, would hang over their gates, and yell; some would even rush out to tug hair and flail shingles, themselves. They would abuse the teacher behind her back and send their children off to school with instructions not to take any lip from her. But they would never have behaved as Flo did, never have set foot on school property, never have carried a complaint to that level. They would never have believed, as Flo seemed to believe (and here Rose saw her for the first time out of her depth, mistaken) that offenders would confess, or be handed over, that justice would take any form but a ripping and tearing of a Morey coat, in revenge, a secret mutilation in the cloakroom.
Flo said the teacher did not know her business.
But she did. She knew it very well. She locked the door at recess and let whatever was going to happen outside, happen. She never tried to make the big boys come up from the basement or in from the fire escape. She made them chop kindling for the stove and fill the drinking pail; otherwise they were at liberty. They didn’t mind the wood-chopping or pumping, though they liked to douse people with freezing water, and came near murder with the axe. They were just at school because there was no place else for them to be. They were old enough for work but there were no jobs for them. Older girls could get jobs, as maids at least; so they did not stay in school, unless they were planning to write the Entrance, go to high school, maybe someday get jobs in stores or banks. Some of them would do that. From places like West Hanratty girls move up more easily than boys.
The teacher had the big girls, excepting those in the Entrance Class, kept busy bossing the younger children, petting and slapping them, correcting spelling, and removing for their own use anything interesting in the way of pencil boxes, new crayons, Cracker Jack jewelry. What went on in the cloakroom, what lunchpail robbing or coat-slashing or pulling down pants there was, the teacher did not consider her affair.
She was not in any way enthusiastic, imaginative, sympathetic. She walked over the bridge every day from Hanratty where she had a sick husband. She had come back to teaching in middle age. Probably this was the only job she could get. She had to keep at it, so she kept at it. She never put paper cut-outs up on the windows or pasted gold stars in the workbooks. She never did drawings on the board with colored chalk. She had no gold stars, there was no colored chalk. She showed no love of anything she taught, or anybody. She must have wished, if she wished for anything, to be told one day she could go home, never see any of them, never open a spelling book, again.
But she did teach things. She must have taught something to the people who were going to write the Entrance, because some of them passed it. She must have made a stab at teaching everybody who came into that school to read and write and do simple arithmetic. The stair railings were knocked out, desks were wrenched loose from the floor, the stove smoked and the pipes were held together with wire, there were no library books or maps, and never enough chalk; even the yardstick was dirty and splintered at one end. Fights and sex and pilferage were the important things going on. Nevertheless. Facts and tables were presented. In the face of all that disruption, discomfort, impossibility, some thread of ordinary classroom routine was maintained; an offering. Some people learned to subtract. Some people learned to spell.
She took snuff. She was the only person Rose had ever seen do that. She would sprinkle a bit on the back of her hand and lift the hand to her face, give a delicate snort. Her head back, her throat exposed, she looked for a moment contemptuous, challenging. Otherwise she was not in the least eccentric. She was plump, gray, shabby.
Flo said she had probably fogged her brain with the snuff. It was like being a drug addict. Cigarettes only shot your nerves.
One thing in the school was captivating, lovely. Pictures of birds. Rose didn’t know if the teacher had climbed up and nailed them above the blackboard, too high for easy desecration, if they were her first and last hopeful effort, or if they dated from some earlier, easier time, in the school’s history. Where had they come from, how had they arrived there, when nothing else did, in the way of decoration, illustration?
A red-headed woodpecker; an oriole; a blue jay; a Canada Goose. The colors clear and long-lasting. Backgrounds of pure snow, of blossoming branches, of heady summer sky. In an ordinary classroom they would not have seemed so extraordinary. Here they were bright and eloquent, so much at variance with everything else that what they seemed to represent was not the birds themselves, not those skies and snows, but some other world of hardy innocence, bounteous information, privileged light-heartedness. No stealing from lunchpails there; no slashing coats; no pulling down pants and probing with painful sticks; no fucking; no Franny.
THERE WERE THREE BIG GIRLS in the Entrance Class. One was named Donna; one was Cora; one was Bernice. Those three were the Entrance Class; there was nobody else. Three queens. But when you looked closer, a queen and two princesses. That was how Rose thought of them. They walked around the schoolyard arm-in-arm, or with their arms around each other’s waists. Cora in the middle. She was the tallest. Donna and Bernice leaning against and leading up to her.
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 got 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 admira tion 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.
THE 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 colour 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 tops 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 to 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. Night-time 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 difference 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, 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 rag-tag 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, lilac, 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 afterwards, 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 to do, 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 reach 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 t
eacher 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?”
