Annie wondered where the boys were. Card games always made her impatient, though Nora and Evy seemed engrossed. This irritated Annie, who was in a slightly peevish mood. Nora sat in her prim manner, her legs tight together and tucked out to the side. Annie and Evy had just braided her hair and had wound it up into a Dutch twist. Now Nora looked like a woman in a Dutch painting, Annie thought, a solid red-faced woman washing things in a pail. Full-figured, fertile, and fresh, she was bread and pears and large dull green grapes on a pewter plate. She had a man’s strength and a woman’s stamina in that hairless buxom body (peevish, peevish), with her thick ankles and large hands. Annie turned to Evy, with her mousy brown hair, curled away from her face and sprayed stiff. Evy had a girlish floppiness about her, double-jointed, sitting with her legs angled out either side like a frog. She looked closer to fourteen than seventeen, a freckled girl with a sweet gap between her front teeth, pretty greenish eyes, a shapeless little knob of a nose, and that underbite Bennet had inflicted on all his girls. Somehow she hadn’t become gormless, though, like her sisters. Her particular combination of features and petite proportions made her cute in the way a little monkey or baby ogre is cute, because everything is so small and appealing (peevish, peevish, peevish), because the baby ogre giggles and flicks her hair and has a couple of disarming gestures.

She glanced back at Nora, who had just told Evy, “Go fish”: not dignified exactly, just careful and blank and determined. Nora had made the astonishing decision that she wanted Raj. People would be horrified. Her dad would kill her—or kill him. But Nora had clearly put things in the balance and decided that being with him would outweigh even the fury and despair of her family. She had selected Raj despite the huge disadvantage of his skin, which, even for Annie, who adored him, was a qualm. Always aware that he was dark, Annie often caught herself focusing on what made him different from a Negro—his hair, the features of his face, his hands—and she would find herself thinking, He’s white, only with dark skin. Nora was winning him by playing, as women did with men, upon his weaknesses: his innocence, ready guilt, and, of course, desire. Around him she glowed and looked beautiful. She was preparing him as the little factory of her womb prepared itself for production (peevish, peevish, peevish). Annie couldn’t imagine making such a decision about a man at this age, the inverted pyramid of your whole life balanced over this one opportunity.

Nora laid down her last card triumphantly. She had won again.

“Aw, rats.” Evy pettishly flung down her hand.