My Summer With George Read Online Free PDF Page B

what?” and put down her spoon. Our mother, who never scolded or raised her voice, shouted, “You most certainly are not!”
    Susan protested: Jerry had left, so why couldn’t she?
    But Mother just shook her head. “That’s different; he’s a boy. Nice girls never leave home until they get married…Why do you want to leave home?” Mother continued, looking at Susan suspiciously.
    Not understanding Mother’s objections, Susan refused to accept them. There was a YWCA where she could stay cheaply until she got a job; Alice Morrell’s sister had stayed there when she went to New York. And she said that she was a crackerjack typist and could take dictation and would get a job quickly and send money home. She would still help out, she argued.
    That didn’t seem to matter to Mother. She stopped speaking—to any of us. On the Sunday of Susan’s departure, she lay in her darkened room with a damp cloth on her head. Merry and Tina and I alternated between tears and wild excitement as we helped Susan pack her clothes and her life’s savings of forty dollars. We had never had a major conflict in our house; we kids might squabble, but Mother never scolded or got angry or even raised her voice. She had always said we were her angel children. Her rage and silence bewildered and terrified us. We went into her room just before Susan left, but Mother refused even to say goodbye. We walked Susan to the bus station, taking turns carrying her bags. I sobbed the whole way there and back. But after her bus left, we had to go home to make the bread and pastry dough. Mother never left her room at all that day.
    Susan said Mother would get over it in time. She couldn’t believe Mom would stay angry at her, the daughter who had worked hard and uncomplainingly in the bakery for nearly ten years. None of us guessed that our mild, sweet, vaguely anxious, sad mother would go on regarding Susan as something unspeakable for the rest of her life. The night after Susan left, I found Mother sitting alone in the dark living room. I went and put my arms around her and laid my head on her shoulder. She patted my hand vaguely and murmured, in a voice gravelly with rage, “Promise me you won’t grow up to be a cheap slut like your sister.”
    I pulled away in shock. “She’s not a slut!” I didn’t know what a slut was, but I knew it wasn’t good and I knew Susan was good. She was my favorite sister, and if I, too, was a little angry with her, it was only because she had abandoned me, like Jerry. I kept thinking, Mom didn’t get mad at Jerry. It wasn’t fair.
    The United States had entered World War II, and there were lots of jobs for women. Susan got a job as a secretary in the pool of an advertising agency in Manhattan. She found an apartment with two other girls. She didn’t earn as much as Jerry did in the bakery, and her expenses were higher—a share in a Manhattan apartment cost more than a rented room and meals in restaurants in Bridgeport—but she sent twenty dollars home every month. She always enclosed a letter with the check, but Mother never read it or wrote back. Merry and Tina and I did, but we didn’t tell Mom, because after one terrible argument, Mother set her lips and said she never wanted to hear Susan’s name mentioned again. Mother always wrote early to invite Jerry home for Thanksgiving and Christmas, but she never wrote Susan, and Susan never came.
    This unforgivingness in Mother shocked us, like the discovery that someone you’ve always known has an artificial limb you never noticed. But it intimidated us too, which may have been her purpose—conscious or not. None of us wanted Mother to treat us as she had Susan. So when Merry was graduated, she meekly asked Mother what she should do—work in the bakery, get a job in Millington, or go to a city for work. She too had silently taken the precaution of enrolling in the school’s commercial course, and could type and take stenography. Mother set her lips and said