Maude

by Donna Foley Mabry

“What do you mean, I can’t do that? The new law says I can.” “It isn’t fitting for women to try to vote. You won’t know what you’re doing.” I got so mad my face must have turned purple.

Yesterday, I heard the men talking out in the front of the store when they didn’t see me in the office. A lot of men are forbidding their wives to vote or telling them who they have to vote for.”

“What’s wrong, Maude?” I shook my head. “Nothing is wrong, Clara. You and I just voted. It’s the first time in my life I felt like I mattered, that I had some say about what was going on. Things couldn’t be more right.”

Every week, I slipped the coins into a pasteboard box and put it under my step-ins in the bottom drawer of the bureau. Every time I added a few cents I felt a warm satisfaction. It wasn’t the amount I had so much as it was the fact that I had it, and George didn’t know about it.

Betty Sue reported to work the next Monday with her long black hair tied up in a scarf. She came home bubbling over with stories about her job installing the little windshield in each Jeep as it rolled by her station. I envied her. Betty Sue would have a life I’d never dreamed possible, working alongside men and women in the outside world.

I hate to tell you that it’s possible for a mother to hate her own child, but sometimes, even if just for a second, it is.