Free The Beggar Maid by Alice Munro

that she combined and carried on what he must have thought of as the worst qualities in himself. All the things he had beaten down, successfully submerged, in himself, had surfaced again in her, and she was showing no will to combat them. She mooned and daydreamed, she was vain and eager to show off; her whole life was in her head. She had not inherited the thing he took pride in, and counted on—his skill with his hands, his thoroughness and conscientiousness at any work; in fact she was unusually clumsy, slapdash, ready to cut corners. The sight of her slopping around with her hands in the dishpan, her thoughts a thousand miles away, her rump already bigger than Flo’s, her hair wild and bushy; the sight of the large and indolent and self-absorbed fact of her, seemed to fill him with irritation, with melancholy, almost with disgust.
    All of which Rose knew. Until he had passed through the room she was holding herself still, she was looking at herself through his eyes. She too could hate the space she occupied. But the minute he was gone she recovered. She went back into her thoughts or to the mirror, where she was often busy these days, piling all her hair up on top of her head, turning part way to see the line of her bust, or pulling the skin to see how she would look with a slant, a very slight, provocative slant, to her eyes.
    She knew perfectly well, too, that he had another set of feelings about her. She knew he felt pride in her as well as this nearly uncontrollable irritation and apprehension; the truth was, the final truth was, that he would not have her otherwise and willed her as she was. Or one part of him did. Naturally he had to keep denying this. Out of humility, he had to, and perversity. Perverse humility. And he had to seem to be in sufficient agreement with Flo.
    Rose did not really think this through, or want to. She was as uneasy as he was, about the way their chords struck together.
    W hen Rose came home from school Flo said to her, “Well, it’s a good thing you got here. You have to stay in the store.”
    Her father was going to London, to the Veterans’ Hospital.
    “Why?”
    “Don’t ask me. The doctor said.”
    “Is he worse?”
    “ I don’t know. I don’t know anything. That do-nothing doctor doesn’t think so. He came this morning and looked him over and he says he’s going. We’re lucky, we got Billy Pope to run him down.”
    Billy Pope was a cousin of Flo’s who worked in the butcher shop. He used actually to live at the slaughterhouse, in two rooms with cement floors, smelling naturally of tripe and entrails and live pig. But he must have had a home-loving nature; he grew geraniums in old tobacco cans, on the thick cement windowsills. Now he had the little apartment over the shop, and had saved his money and bought a car, an Oldsmobile. This was shortly after the war, when new cars made a special sensation. When he came to visit he kept wandering to the window and taking a look at it, saying something to call attention, such as, “She’s light on the hay but you don’t get the fertilizer out of her.”
    Flo was proud of him and the car.
    “See, Billy Pope’s got a big back seat, if your father needs to lay down.”
    “Flo!”
    Rose’s father was calling her. When he was in bed at first he very seldom called her, and then discreetly, apologetically even. But he had got past that, called her often, made up reasons, she said, to get her upstairs.
    “How does he think he’ll get along without me down there?” she said. “He can’t let me alone five minutes.” She seemed proud of this, although often she would make him wait; sometimes she would go to the bottom of the stairs and force him to call down further details about why he needed her. She told people in the store that he wouldn’t let her alone for five minutes, and how she had to change his sheets twice a day. That was true. His sheets became soaked with sweat. Late at night she or Rose, or both of them, would be