Who Do You Think You Are

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!
    Flo 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 the 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 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.