Without Prejudice Read Online Free PDF Page A

that, wouldn’t you, Bobby?’ his father went on, and there was a tone to his voice which he sensed meant his father was trying to reassure himself, and that he wanted Bobby’s help. So he nodded and smiled weakly.
    ‘Atta boy,’ said his father, and then he was gone.
    He did not know what to do with himself, so he sat at the kitchen table while Gladys stayed standing at the stove. ‘You want something to eat?’ she said without kindness in her voice, and he just shook his head. She turned, fork in hand, and looked at him. ‘What you starin’ at, boy? Why don’t you go and play?’
    He shook his head again, because awkward as he felt here in the kitchen, with no toys to play with and no sense that Gladys wanted him around, he knew that he didn’t want to leave the room – not with no one else in the apartment. Who knows what could happen to him back in the bedroom with no one within calling distance? This scary fat woman was paying no attention to anything but the sizzling going on in the skillet right beneath her eyes.
    He knew about choice now – between, say, chocolate and butterscotch top cones at the Dairy Queen in Michigan – but had never faced a situation where the choices seemed equally bad. The strain was too much and he began to cry, and he hoped this would somehow resolve the situation. And normally it would have – someone would have comforted him. Even Mike was nice to him when he cried – unless it was Mike who had made him cry.
    But Gladys ignored him, and concentrated on the pork chops she was lifting now, one by one, onto a platter lined with paper towel. ‘Don’t that smell good?’ she said out loud, which made Bobby only cry harder. She put down her fork and turned off the gas burner on the white enamel stove top, then began to untie her apron. Bobby moved towards her, still wailing, and she stood stockstill – which encouraged him to think she had time for him now, and he held his arms out, unambiguously asking to be hugged.
    She reached out and patted him on top of his head, but ignored his outstretched arms. ‘Child, you stop your crying now.’
    But he couldn’t, and as the tears kept running down his face he saw through his watery eyes a look of exasperation start to spread on Gladys’s face. Suddenly, she reached down and grabbed his wrist, then waddling towards the door began to lead him out of the room. He resisted at first, but she tightened her grip and kept moving her bulky frame until he was forced to go with her or risk being dragged across the floor.
    She took him all the way to the back of the apartment, down the dark hall, then along the short passageway to the back bedroom.
    ‘Go on and play with them,’ she said, pointing at the pool of marbles he’d left on the thin carpet between the twin beds. He looked at them dumbly, wondering why his mother wasn’t there and why in the world he had been left alone with this fat mean woman. And then she left, too.
    He sat on the floor with his legs crossed Indian-style, staring at the marbles almost without recognition, so focused was he on his own misery. He cried again, and kept crying, unselfconsciously, although a little part of him hoped that by crying louder – he did this at one point – it would somehow draw someone back to comfort him.
    In desperation, he twice went up to the kitchen: the first time Gladys said nothing at all but simply clutched him again by the wrist and led him back to the back bedroom. The second time she wasn’t in the kitchen, and he started to panic, since somehow being left alone was worse even than being left with this Gladys creature, and he ran out into the dining room and into the sun porch and through the living room, his fears growing into uncontrolled agitation, until he found her in the front hall dusting the big chest of drawers.
    His relief was so great that he could not understand why Gladys did not share it, for she gave an exasperated sigh and this time when she deposited him