Lives of Girls and Women

There was a whole new language to learn in their house. Conversations there had many levels, nothing could be stated directly... My mother's disapproval was open and unmistakable, like heavy weather; theirs came like tiny razor cuts, bewilderingly, in the middle of kindness. They had the Irish gift for rampaging mockery, embroidered with deference. (41)

I felt remorse, that kind of tender remorse which has on its other side a brutal, umblemished satisfaction. (70)

to some people, maybe to most people, knowledge was just oddity; it stuck out like warts. But I shared my mother's appetite myself, I could not help it. (73)

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 the 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 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.

Is your mother going on the road much these days?' they would ask me, and I would say no, oh no, she isn't going out much anymore, but I knew they knew I lied. "Not much time for ironing," they might continue compassionately, examining the sleeve of my blouse. "Not much time for ironing when she has to go out on the road." I felt the weight of my mother's eccentricities, of something absurd and embarrassing about her - the aunts would just show me a little at a time - land on my own coward's shoulders. I did want to repudiate her, crawl into favor, orphaned, abandoned in my wrinkled sleeves. At the same time I wanted to shield her. She would never have understood how she needed shielding from twoold ladies with their mild bewildering humor, their tender proprieties.

When I bit Mary Agnes I thought I was biting myself off from everything. I thought I was putting myself outside, where no punishment would ever be enough, where nobody would dare ask me to look at a dead man, or anything else, again. I thought they would all hate me, and hate seemed to be so much to be coveted then, like a gift of wings.

When I was younger, out at the end of the Flats Road, I would watch her walk across the yard to empty the dishwater, carrying the dishpan high, like a priestess, walking in an unhurried, stately way and flinging the dishwater with a grand gesture over the fence. Then I had supposed her powerful, a ruler, also content. She had power still ,but not so much as perhaps she thought. And she was in now way content. Not a priestess. She had a loudly growling stomach, whose messages she laughed at or ignored but which embarrassed me, unbearably. Her hair grew out in little wild gray-brown tufts and thickets; every permanent she got turned to frizz. Had all her stories, after all, to end up with just her, the way she was now, just my mother in Jubilee?