thought I'd live to see the day when I would be glad that a niece of mine wouldn't go to church with me. And you too, thank God, with your shameless bobbed hair!"
Mae took a bit of jellied bread and washed it down with the coffee. The hot sweet liquid slid soothingly into her small stomach.
"No wonder Charles left you—any decent man would—you don't know the first thing about the responsibility of a home."
It was a forgotten detail in the pattern of Mabel's endlessly rehearsed peroration of grievance that, jealous of her younger prettier sister, she had been opposed to the marriage, heaping fabricated accusations against Charles. She had been as one possessed in her malicious frenzy to deny Mae a love denied to herself. Mabel still could not forgive Mae the experience of a man's love, and she came to think of Charles as a man Mae could not hold, a man who had married the wrong sister.
Mae remembered Charles's unkind reference to Mabel as a bitch in dry rot. Dapper Charles on his quarterly visits from New Orleans to the Bittner Sisters, Dressmakers, where she worked, finally realizing he could not get her without marriage. Like a wren caught by a heedless boy Mae fluttered and then acquiesced. In the marital bed she experienced no passion. There was warm pleasure though that Charles seemed to need her body, a feeling simultaneously submissive and maternal. She was perplexed but not unbearably hurt when Charles finally deserted when Lucy was six; she felt relief, in fact, when he did not return, as he had after many such departures, laden with soiled linen and a morose petulance. Returning, he had required all her attention, which was the only thing Mae resented; for it meant there was not enough time to devote to Lucy who would sit silently on a tiny chair in the corner of the kitchen staring at the strange man as though waiting for him to leave.
Mabel's screeching rent Mae's thoughts: "There was an article the other day about that girl over on the South Side. You know what happened to her. Now her ma can take care of the baby. She was only thirteen too."
It was time to flush away the obscene stream. Mae took her dishes to the sink and turned the faucet to a rush of water. Sometimes, she thought glumly, starvation was preferable. If it were not for Lucy she would—How could Mabel understand about Lucy and boys? It wasn't her fault they wouldn't let her alone. Anyway, it is better for a girl to know about boys than to be swept away by the first one
