Lives of Girls and Women Read Free

enough to change tits to heels . Where had that rhyme come from? Even Uncle Benny said it. Irene was white-haired, not from age but because she was born that way, and her skin also was white as goosefeathers.
    The Flats Road was the last place my mother wanted to live. As soon as her feet touched the town sidewalk and she raised her head, grateful for town shade after Flats Road sun, a sense of relief, a new sense of consequence flowed from her. She would send me to Buckles’ Store when she ran out of something, but she did her real shopping in town. Charlie Buckle might be slicing meat in his back room when we went by; we could see him through the dark screen like a figure partly hidden in a mosaic, and bowed our heads and walked quickly and hoped he did not see us.
    My mother corrected me when I said we lived on the Flats Road; she said we lived at the end of the Flats Road, as if that made all the difference. Later on she was to find she did not belong in Jubilee either, but at present she took hold of it hopefully and with enjoyment and made sure it would notice her, calling out greetings to ladies who turned with surprised, though pleasant, faces, going into the dark dry-goods store and seating herself on one of the little high stools and calling for somebody to please get her a glass of water after that hot dusty walk. As yet I followed her without embarrassment, enjoying the commotion.
    My mother was not popular on the Flats Road. She spoke to people here in a voice not so friendly as she used in town, with severe courtesy and a somehow noticeable use of good grammar. To Mitch Plim’s wife—who had once worked, though I did not know it then, in Mrs. McQuade’s whorehouse—she did not speak at all. She was on the side of poor people everywhere, on the side of Negroes and Jews and Chinese and women, but she could not bear drunkenness, no, and she could not bear sexual looseness, dirty language, haphazard lives, contented ignorance; and so she had to exclude the Flats Road people from the really oppressed and deprived people, the real poor whom she still loved.
    My father was different. Everybody liked him. He liked the Flats Road, though he himself hardly drank, did not behave loosely with women or use bad language, though he believed in work and worked hard all the time. He felt comfortable here, while with men from town, with any man who wore a shirt and tie to work, he could not help being wary, a little proud and apprehensive of insult, with that delicate, special readiness to scent pretension that is some country people’s talent. He had been raised (like my mother, but she had cast all that behind her) on a farm deep in the country; but he did not feel at home there either, among the hard-set traditions, proud poverty and monotony of farm life. The Flats Road would do for him; Uncle Benny would do for his friend.
    Uncle Benny my mother was used to. He ate at our table every day at noon, except Sunday. He stuck his gum on the end of his fork, and at the end of the meal took it off and showed us the pattern, so nicely engraved on the pewter-coloured gum it was a pity to chew it. He poured tea into his saucer and blew on it. With a piece of bread speared on a fork he wiped his plate as clean as a cat’s. He brought into the kitchen a smell, which I did not dislike, of fish, furred animals, swamp. Remembering his manners in the country way, he would never help himself, or take a second helping till asked three times.
    He told stories, in which there was nearly always something happening that my mother would insist could not have happened, as in the story of Sandy Stevenson’s marriage.
    Sandy Stevenson had married a fat woman from down east, out of the county altogether, and she had two thousand dollars in the bank and she owned a Pontiac car. She was a widow. No sooner had she come to live with Sandy, here on the Flats Road twelve, fifteen years ago, than things began to happen. Dishes smashed themselves on the