Woman’s sad lot!

My installation in the Brunsons’ house had been a disappointment, for I was in many ways farther removed from Betty than before. And so it was that I plucked the sting from my evenings there by silently communing with Nathan Kadish through the lamplit window.

At the Brunsons’, as in my own house, the central figure was a pregnant woman, the very blazing personification of indecency, and Betty, quite unlike myself who found my mother daily more distasteful, adored hers increasingly, though I forgave her for she believed that her mother was going to a hospital to buy a baby from the supply kept there in a large ice-chest. The myth had been so fully developed in her mind that she was convinced the child had been specifically planned as a birthday present for her. It could not be a surprise since sometimes babies spoiled and you could never tell when there was to be a shortage. The Beelers, thoroughly sophisticated, left off their vain instructions when she told them sternly not to dare say anything nasty about her mother ever again. “But lookit how fat she’s getting!” said Esther. “Look here,” snapped Betty, “my Uncle Harry told my mother she had to get fatter, and if you don’t like it, you can go jump in the lake.”

The presence of the Beelers in the house was a sharp thorn in my side, for while I was confined to the kitchen, except when my chores took me into other rooms, they roamed at will throughout the house, obstreperous, dirty, and either through preoccupation with their absurd hilarity or through snobbery, they ignored me. I pondered how Betty, with her fastidious ways, could possibly find them preferable to me. They had warts and they did not wash. Yet, while I was paring vegetables, the three of them sat in the parlor playing Old Maid or came into the kitchen to blow soap bubbles or raced about in the upstairs, howling and giggling in some aimless game. I was not ashamed, though, as soon as they left the house. I was pleased to wear a starched white apron over a black sateen uniform when I brought in the soup and then served the dinner. The dark, round table glittered with silver and pink glass. The centerpiece was a bunch of crystal grapes on an oblong mirror. The Brunsons always ate by candlelight; the radio played soft “dinner music,” “Roses of Picardy,” “The Bells of Saint Mary’s,” and “The Blue Danube.” They had elegant table manners, holding their left hands in their laps, breaking bread into small pieces before they buttered it, and making not a sound in their throats as they drank water.