The Progress of Love

taken with her. Boys were, too, of course, but she said her sister wouldn’t let her go out with them. I never knew if this was true or not. MaryBeth was adept at small fibs, gentle refusals.
    She gave up spelling her name the new way, since I wasn’t to be allowed to change mine. We continued to use the special spellingwhen we signed our notes to each other or wrote letters in the summer.
    When I was halfway through my third year at high school, my Aunt Ena got me a job. I was to work for the Crydermans, two days a week, after school. Aunt Ena knew the Crydermans because she was their cleaning lady. I was to do some ironing and tidying up, and I was to get the vegetables ready for supper.
    “That’s dinner, in their books,” Aunt Ena said, in such a flat voice you couldn’t tell whether she censured the Crydermans for affectation, or conceded them a superior position that gave them a right to it, or simply wished to state that whatever they said or did was completely outside of her range of understanding and ought to be outside of mine.
    Aunt Ena was my father’s aunt, she was that old. She was the cleaning lady in town rather as a doctor might be the Doctor, or a music teacher the Music Teacher. She was respected. She didn’t accept leftover food, no matter how delicious, or take home cast-off clothing, no matter how excellent its condition. Many of the women she worked for felt bound to do some sort of hurry-up cleaning before she arrived, and took their own empty liquor bottles out to the garbage. Aunt Ena was not fooled.
    She and her daughter, Floris, and her son, George, lived in a narrow, tidy house on a steep street where the houses were close together and so near to the street that you could almost touch the porch railings from the sidewalk. My room was behind the kitchen—a former pantry, with pale-green tongue-in-groove walls. I tried to count the boards as I lay in bed, but always had to give up. In the wintertime, I took all my clothes into bed in the morning and got dressed under the covers. There was no provision for heating a pantry.
    Aunt Ena came home worn out from exercising her authority all over town. But she roused herself; she exercised it over us as well. She made us understand—Floris and George and me—that we were all superior people in spite of, or perhaps because of, relative poverty. She made us understand that we had to confirm this everyday of our lives by having our shoes cleaned and our buttons sewn on, by not using coarse language, by not smoking (in the case of women), by getting high marks (me), and by never touching alcohol (everybody). Nobody has a good word to say nowadays for such narrowness and proud caution and threadbare decency. I don’t myself, but I didn’t think at the time that I was suffering much from it. I learned how to circumvent some rules and I went along with others, and in general I accepted that even a superiority based on such hard notions was better than no superiority at all. And I didn’t plan to live on there, like George and Floris.
    Floris had been married once for a short time, but she did not seem to have derived any sense of importance from it. She worked in the shoe store and went to choir practice and was addicted to jigsaw puzzles, of the kind that take up a whole card table. Though I pestered her for it, she would not give me any satisfactory account of her romance or her marriage or her young husband’s death from blood poisoning—a story I would have liked to use, to counterbalance MaryBeth’s true tragic story of the death of her mother. Floris had large gray-blue eyes set so far apart that they almost seemed to be looking in different directions. There was an estranged, helpless expression in them.
    George had not gone past Grade 4 at school. He worked at the piano factory, where he answered to the name of Dumbo without apparent resentment or embarrassment. He was so shy and quiet that he could make Floris with her tired petulance seem spirited. He cut pictures out of magazines and pinned them up around his room—not pictures of half-clothed pretty girls but just of things he liked the look of: an airplane, a chocolate cake, Elsie the Borden cow. He could play Chinese checkers, and sometimes invited me to have a game. Usually I told him I was too busy.
    When I brought MaryBeth home to supper, Aunt Ena criticized the noise the bangles made at the table and wondered that a girl of that age was allowed to pluck her eyebrows.