She didn't want to smile and agree with Carmine when he said President Roosevelt was ruining the country, and she didn't want to sit quietly crocheting lace while her sons and their friends talked about baseball. In the years that she had been in America she had taught herself not only to speak English but to read and write it. She went through the newspaper every day, and she had opinions about things. She didn't want to be a part of the background; she wanted attention. She wanted people to listen when she talked, to laugh at her jokes, and—it was shameful to admit—she wanted to be admired. But those were not the feelings of a good woman. Those were the feelings of a putaña—an opera singer who had had a child she couldn't keep because there was no father.

There was something warm trickling down her shin. Mifalda looked down and saw blood. She'd fallen on the packed snow when she was racing through the park and she must have hurt her knee, although she didn't remember it. Her stocking was ripped too. It served her right for running off in the middle of the day. It served her right for wishing—even for a moment—that she was young and free.

She hurried inside the house. After she'd bandaged her knee, there would still be time to make a fresh applesauce cake before the children came home from school. If she could get it cool enough, she'd put a lemon icing on it—the boys liked that.

IT WASN'T UNTIL late in the day that Mifalda and Ana finished washing the last of the sheets. As they piled the wet mass into the laundry basket, Mifalda heard the back door to the kitchen slam shut. A high, sweet voice was singing, “Pants angelicus fit pants hominum; Oat pants coelicus figuris terminum.” Mifalda's daughter was home. The little girl had been named Lucia after Carmine's mother. But she had informed all of them that they were not to call her that foreign-sounding name anymore. Nine-year-old Lucia was now, if you please, Lu.

“Like that character in the funny papers?” Mifalda had asked sarcastically. But her daughter had informed her with a giggle that she was thinking of Little Lulu.

Her daughter's rejection of her grandmother's name had annoyed Mifalda. True, she hadn't liked her mother-in-law, but there was respectability and tradition in the handing down of a family name. Her spoiled daughter didn't know what life could be like without that sense of belonging.