THE NEXT MORNING, after an early breakfast, Cora left for town, hoping to be one of the first farmers to get her wheat weighed in at the elevator. She drove the pickup, dragging her load behind her in the big trailer she had borrowed from the co-op. The Mexicans followed, waving goodbye to Penny, who stood in the back yard with Phoebe in her arms. Gilbert had tramped off on foot right after breakfast. He hadn't even said goodbye.
The farm seemed so lifeless and empty with everyone gone. She spent the morning washing the linens the harvest hands had slept in. By noon the sheets were flapping on the clotheslines, but Cora hadn't come back. Penny knew she had to get the grain weighed and sold. She had to go to the bank to deposit the money, return the trailer to the co-op. And they were so low on provisions, she would probably stop at Renfew's to buy groceries. The afternoon dragged on. Penny took the sheets down from the line, ironed them, and put them away. But still Cora did not return.
The baby was cranky, refusing her bottle. Penny took her to the hammock and tried to amuse her with the little bird, waving it aloft and singing, but Phoebe kept on crying. When she was like this only Cora could soothe her. She writhed in Penny's grip and screamed until Penny was ready to scream herself.
Pacing the orchard with Phoebe, she thought of Antonio, how his face had lit up when he smiled at Cora. How Cora had laughed with him. How they had sung in harmony, their voices braiding together. She thought of the way the men had looked at her, how she had become lovely with her hair growing back, her face glowing when she spoke all those foreign words. Those green eyes of hers could pin anyone to the wall. The curve of her mouth when she smiled. Deep down, Cora was a woman like any other. Did every woman have it in her, have that kind of weakness for a man that would cloud her eyes and make her do idiotic things?
For one horrible moment, she wondered if Cora had gone away with Antonio and his brothers. The ghost of Cora's laughter burned in her ears as Phoebe went on shrieking like an abandoned child. She imagined Cora shedding her men's clothes as she had at the lake. Shedding her overalls and becoming a woman again.
What if she had run off? Penny held Phoebe close, crying as she cried. She smoothed her hand over the pale red-gold fuzz on her head. The baby howled in hunger. Why wouldn't she take the bottle? Once Penny had heard that if a childless woman was left alone with a baby she loved enough, milk might spring from her breasts. Hazel Hamilton had told her that, back when Penny had seen her nursing little Ina. Seven years old, she had just gawked, not knowing any better. Mrs. H. had been the one to answer her questions about mothers and babies.
Penny picked up the bottle again and held Phoebe against her chest as if she were Cora nursing her. As if she, not Cora, were her mother. Gently she guided the rubber nipple to the baby's mouth. As Phoebe began to nurse, Penny let herself relax, surrendering to the weight of the baby in her arms, the sway of the hammock that held her. She felt drowsy now, languid. "You're safe," she whispered fiercely. "I won't let anything happen to you." Phoebe grew heavier in her arms until the nipple fell from her mouth. Penny burped her before letting her drift: off to sleep. She thought she herself would drift off, but she heard the grating of tires on gravel, Cora's pickup pulling in the drive. A cold weight settled in her stomach. Who was she trying to kid? She wasn't Phoebe's mother or her salvation, only the hired girl, the one everyone ignored. And now Phoebe's real mother had finally decided to come home.
***
Penny reached the kitchen before Cora did. When she looked out the window, she saw Cora getting something out of the front seat, taking her time. Penny eased Phoebe into her quilt-lined basket without waking her, then grabbed the last bread loaf in the pantry, the last can of tomato soup. Dumping the soup in a pan, she slapped it on the burner. When she heard Cora come in, she didn't turn around, just whipped out the bread knife.
"I thought you weren't coming home. I thought you'd run off with yOUT friends."
"I stopped in Sandborn."
Hearing her mother's voice, Phoebe awoke and started crying. Penny had spent hours trying to calm her, but it took Cora only a few seconds.
"There's my baby," she cooed.
"I don't give a damn where you stopped off," Penny muttered, thinking Cora wouldn't hear. That she wasn't even listening.
She froze when she felt Cora's hand on her shoulder, her touch like her mother's had been the moment before she let loose and smacked her. Still clutching the bread knife, Penny spun around and steeled herself. Cora held out a large box of sky-blue cardboard.
"This is for you," she said quietly. "I drove to Sandborn to get it. To thank you for all the work you did this week."
The bread knife fell from her hand and clattered to the floor as Cora handed her the box. Then Cora picked up Phoebe and walked out the screen door.
Littleton's Apparel. The name of the most expensive shop in Sandborn was written in fancy script on the blue box. The Hamiltons bought their clothes there. Sinking into the rocking chair, Penny made herself count to twenty before she opened it. Parting the tissue paper, her hands brushed against softness. Kitten fur, she thought. Goose down. She pulled out an angora cardigan, silver-gray, like a cloud. Folded in the box beneath it was a pleated skirt of dove-gray lamb's wool lined in ivory satin. She fingered each perfect tuck and seam. Rocking herself, she stroked the angora. Then she thought of the hurt and bewilderment on Cora's face when she had handed her the box. Her mother's words burned in her head: Little shit. While Penny sat there trembling, the tomato soup boiled over.
After cleaning up the mess, Penny made a pot of coffee and heated up a pan of milk to make café con leche, the way Cora liked it. She took the leftover chicken out of the icebox and fixed up a plate of chicken sandwiches, then put everything on a tray and carried it to the back-porch swing, where Cora sat staring into the orchard. Phoebe curled in her mother's arms, gurgling and content. Setting the tray at Cora's feet, Penny knelt to pour her coffee.
"I'm sorry," she said as she handed her the cup.
Cora's fingers were icy, but her voice was even colder. "So you thought I ran off. Did you think I was going to abandon Phoebe?"
Ducking away, Penny found an orange crate on the other end of the porch. She hauled it over to where Cora was sitting, upended it, and placed the tray on it. "I'm really sorry." There was a throbbing behind her ears, a feverish heat in her face. "Thank you for the nice clothes, but you shouldn't have. They're too fancy for me." If she ever had the nerve to wear them to town, people would surely laugh at her. She headed for the back door, the shelter of the house, her room upstairs. But it's not even your room, she reminded herself.
"You're not going to eat with me?" Cora called out.
"I'm not hungry."
"Come back here and sit down!"
Penny dragged herself to the porch swing and took her seat beside Cora, who handed her one of the chicken sandwiches. "My daughter," she said tersely, "is the dearest thing in the world to me. Why do you think I live like this?"
Penny shook her head.
"I left him the day I knew I was pregnant. He knocked me around, but nobody knew. He was a doctor, so he knew how to do it without leaving any marks on me. No one would believe me, not even my best friend."
"That's awful." Penny's throat was so dry, she couldn't swallow.
"She was a charity nurse, just like I used to be. When I broke down and told her what he was doing, she put her hand on my arm and asked me if I knew what a real battered woman looked like. Said she'd seen plenty of them in the South Side slums and that I should know better than to say such things. She couldn't believe a doctor could do that."
Penny thought about Cora's pictures in the photo album. It was true, she decided, that no one seeing her from the outside could comprehend the secrets she was hiding on the inside.
"In the beginning, even I couldn't believe what was happening." Cora spoke in a brittle voice. "I kept praying he would change. But it only got worse. I was afraid I'd lose the baby if I stayed. There was one before that I lost." Her eyes glittered like cold green glass. "Why do you think I cut off my hair and turned myself into a laughingstock?"
Her eyes were so intensely green, Penny had to look away. "I don't know."
"He used to drag me around by the hair. That's why."
Penny flinched. Cora's face was incandescent with anger. The wind kept blowing her hair into her eyes, the hair that now covered her brow, her thick hair the color of Ceylon tea. Penny saw up close the beauty Cora had worked so hard to obscure.
"What about your brother?" she asked in a small voice. Another letter from him had arrived. "Did you tell him?"
For a moment Cora looked lost. "He's in France," she said. "What could he do? I didn't tell him about it until after I left. I could hardly think of the words. It's one thing to tell someone face to face, but to write it in a letter..." She rubbed her forehead with the heel of her hand. "Of course, my husband wrote to him first and told him I had lost my mind."
Suddenly the look on Cora's face was unbearable. Penny wanted to squeeze her hand. She wished she could think of something wise and comforting to say, but she just changed the subject, hoping to ease Cora's sadness.
"Boy, it sure is quiet here now with the Mexicans gone."
To her relief, the color returned to Cora's face. She sipped coffee and looked like her old self again. "I still can't believe you thought I was going to run off with them." She smiled wryly at Penny. "All those brothers except the two youngest are married. They have wives and children back in Mexico they send money to. You know, they loved my grandfather. They thought he was a very good man. I wanted to be as friendly as he always was so they wouldn't think badly of me." She sighed.
"When I worked as a charity nurse, they had me treating the Mexican patients, seeing as I spoke Spanish. A lot of Mexicans come up to Chicago to work in the stockyards. At first I thought I wouldn't have any trouble communicating, but it turned out that the Spanish we spoke down in Chile is completely different from their Spanish. I almost had to learn a whole new language. When Antonio and his brothers were here, it all came back to me."
She let out a long breath. Then, without warning, she looked right into Penny's eyes. "So tell me. What happened between you and your mother? Why won't you see her?"
"Because she hit me good and hard." Penny kept her voice level even as her vision blurred and she struggled not to cry. "She threw me out. She never wanted me anyway. Maybe you heard the rumors—she was never married. I don't know who my father is." She held her shoulders rigid, not letting them buckle or bow. Cora had shed no tears when talking about her husband. Penny willed herself to be just as strong.
"She's fooling around with Mr. Hamilton ... our boss. She was always sending me off to the store so she and him could..." There, she'd done it. Spat out her mother's secret, which she had been dragging around like a sack of filth. Before Cora could start feeling sorry for her, she faced her squarely. "I'm never going back there," she told Cora in her harshest voice. "You're never going back to your husband. Well, I'm never going back to her." Only after she had spoken did she realize she had addressed Cora not in the manner of a hired girl or a headstrong brat but as her equal. Someone who had a say in what went on.
Cora's face was pale. She was the one who looked all shaken up. Something filled her eyes—it wasn't pity but something else. "You're right." She spoke gravely. "You never have to go back there if you don't want to. You can stay here as long as you like." Now Penny thought she really would start to cry. What Cora had done was promise her a home. Cora touched her wrist. "Aren't you going to try on your new clothes?"
Her hands shook as she put on those perfect garments, the first clothes she had ever owned that were brand-new. The satin-lined skirt was smooth as cream against her skin. The angora sweater hugged the curves of her body. For the first time, it was plain to see she had breasts. She was filling out, looking more womanly. No longer a gawky girl resigned to a life of wearing Irene Hamilton's hand-me-downs. In the mirror, she saw a young lady who could put Irene to shame. Spinning in a circle, she watched the pleated skirt unfurl.
When she came down to the kitchen, Cora was making a fresh pot of coffee. "Well, look at you. You'll have to go into town and show off."
Penny flushed in delight. Yet she had to wonder why Cora had given her the sort of clothes that she herself had renounced. All at once she felt self-conscious under Cora's gaze, but instead of dashing upstairs and changing back into her old clothes, she got the book on Patagonia from the parlor, brought it into the kitchen, set it on the table. "What was it like growing up down there?"
Cora poured them each a cup of strong milky coffee. "When I was a girl, my parents ran a guesthouse in a little tówn called Puerto Natales." She opened the book and pointed to a dot on the map. "It wasn't a fancy place, but clean and decent. Most of our guests were cattlemen and prospectors who weren't expecting luxury. We called it the Hospedaje Paraíso—Paradise Lodge." She smiled, lowering her eyes. "My parents were very idealistic. They weren't the stay-at-home-and-sit-in-the-parlor type. They loved the outdoors more than anything. Whenever business was slow, we'd leave the housekeeper in charge and go off camping and fishing." Her face softened, as though remembering something she hadn't allowed herself to think about for a long time.
"We'd load up the pack mules and go off into the Torres del Paine. The Torres are mountains." She showed Penny a picture in the book of jagged peaks. "They look like needles pointing into the sky. The weather in the mountains was always unstable, even in summer. I remember helping put up a tent in the pouring rain. Do you have any idea how heavy wet canvas is?"
Penny shook her head.
"I loved being out in the wilderness. In the grasslands, we had guanacos. Those are wild antelope."
"I saw the pictures of them in the book." Penny grinned.
"I used to sneak up downwind of them, get as close to them as they would let me. I loved being around wild things. My big brother didn't know what to do with me—he was always trying to drag me back. He was afraid they'd kick me, I guess. But I was always sneaking off and doing whatever I wanted. They tell me I was a handful."
She spoke slowly. "Once I saw these white things in the grass. I thought they would be rocks, but they were bones. The vertebrae of some small animal."
"Vertebrae," Penny said. "That's the spine. The parts of the spine." There was an old anatomy textbook in Cora's room upstairs. Penny had paged through it a few times. If she was going to be a nurse, she would have to learn the names of such things.
"That's right. They were only about this big." Cora made a circle with her thumb and forefinger. "I wanted to take one vertebra home with me as a souvenir. I liked to collect things like feathers and bird nests, but I didn't have any bones yet. So I put the vertebra in my saddlebag and took it home. My brother told me I was the oddest child—who ever heard of a little girl collecting bones?" She was silent for a moment, sipping her coffee.
"I want to be a nurse," Penny said shyly. The talk of vertebrae triggered her confession, forcing it from her lips. "Dr. Lovell said I'd make a good nurse."
"I could have told you the same thing." Cora smiled. "Then I imagine you'll be going to high school this fall. Are you registered?"
Penny remembered Gilbert's words. She'd have to go to school every day, return to the world she thought she had left behind.
"Don't look so worried," said Cora. "We'll find a way ... somehow. I'll drive you to town. Maybe I'll have to get another girl to help watch Phoebe while you're in school, but we'll manage."
"But it's so far." Penny chose her words carefully. "If you drove me there in the morning and picked me up after school, you'll be driving over eighty miles a day." How could she tell her it was learning she wanted, not Minerva High School. Penny had no desire to return to Irene's realm of gossip and cliques. If she showed her face in high school, Irene would find a way to ruin it for her. She was perfectly happy with her life of solitude, here with Cora and Phoebe, in a place where Irene couldn't touch her. "Do I have to go to high school to get my diploma?" She threw Cora a quizzical look. "Can't I just read books on my own?"
"Maybe there's another way." Cora took another sip of coffee. "They must bend the rules for families on remote farms. I could talk to Evelyn Haselstrom."
"The English teacher?" Miss Haselstrom lived only a few houses down from the Hamiltons.
"She was my mother's best friend," Cora said. "They used to write each other every month. Maybe she can do something."
Penny's dream took shape, rising before her. Sometimes she thought of her future as a thing she could nourish like a baby in her womb. It would grow and grow until it was too big to fit inside her anymore.
Her dream became manifest in the stack of textbooks, frayed by many hands, that Cora brought back from town one day. Instead of the customary groceries, she laid out the books on the kitchen table. Great Expectations, English and American Literature, Finch's Algebra, Introduction to Biology, A History of Art, The Story of Our Nation, The Odyssey.
"How do you like them?" Cora asked as Penny picked up each book in turn. She leafed through the algebra equations in awe and fear, then looked wildly at Cora.
"I don't know. This looks so hard."
"I'll help you." Cora smoothed her hand over the biology book. "That's how Jacob and I got our schooling down in Chile. At the kitchen table. Our parents were the teachers. My father loved algebra."
"Did you go talk to Miss Haselstrom?" Her head was ringing. The floor seemed to give way beneath her feet.
"I explained your situation. She drew up a study plan, gave me the books, and told me you'll be expected to mail in your homework and assignments. You'll have to do essays and worksheets. A few times a year, she wants you to come in and take exams. She says if you work hard and get good grades, you'll graduate and get your diploma when you're seventeen, just like the other students."
Penny looked at Cora, at how casually she stood there in her corduroy trousers and pressed white shirt. She tried to picture her going into the high school like that, talking to Miss Haselstrom on her behalf. Penny's hand reached out over the books, randomly choosing one. The Odyssey.
"You have to start reading that one today," Cora said. "You can learn about the original Penelope. Think carefully about her story. She was a lot smarter than anyone gave her credit for. A true heroine."
Penny opened the book and began to read, the strange words snaring her in a jeweled net.
Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven
far journeys, after he had sacked Troy's sacred citadel.
"It's best if you read it as an adventure story instead of a long poem," Cora told her. "Just read it and let it sink into you."
The Odyssey was so thick, she thought she might never finish it, but just go on reading forever about Odysseus's adventures and Penelope at her loom. She and Cora took turns reading passages aloud, Cora correcting her pronunciation as she stumbled over the unfamiliar names.
She set up a great loom in her palace, and set to weaving
a web of threads long and fine. Then she said to us:
"Young men, my suitors, now that the great Odysseus has perished,
wait, though you are eager to marry me, until I finish
this web, so that my weaving will not be useless and wasted.
She had to think hard to make sense of the story. Some of the events were so strange. If Troy was so sacred, then why had they sacked it? And why kill an entire group of men just to punish them for stealing cattle? She kept telling herself there was a reason people still read this saga, even though it was almost three thousand years old. There was a reason why she should try to put herself in Odysseus's shoes. Why she should care about his struggle to get home to Ithaca. Why she should learn the unpronounceable names of vanished heroes, monsters, and gods. And about cities like Troy that didn't exist anymore.
It was a mystery to Penny why Cora wanted her to pay special attention to Penelope, whom she considered dull and maddeningly weak. She hated Penelope for letting the suitors barge into her house, eat all her food, and force their attentions on her. She especially hated the way Penelope let her own son boss her around. Even Athena put Penelope to sleep when she wanted to get her out of the way.
Sometimes the gods struck Penny as unsympathetic, too, the way they meddled in people's affairs; helping them, then hurting them; separating them, then bringing them back together. The gods were fickle and could do anything they wanted. Sometimes they disguised themselves as humans and lived for a time among them. Athena usually disguised herself as a man. Who could blame her when being a woman meant being weak and silly like Penelope?
Cora taught her about the ancient world and the Greek pantheon. "Athena's the same goddess as the Roman Minerva."
"I know that," Penny replied, a bit annoyed that Cora could assume her ignorance of how her town got its name. "There's a statue of her in front of the high school."
When she confessed that she had never tasted an olive, Cora bought a small jar of green California olives from Renfew's. One night after putting Phoebe to bed, they ate them, licking the brine from their fingers.
"Olive trees grow everywhere in the Mediterranean," Cora told her. "They're as important for the people there as wheat is here. They put olive oil into everything they cook."
"Have you ever been over there?" Penny asked. "To Greece?" The words wine-dark sea trilled in her head. The taste of olives was still in her mouth. She recalled the photograph labeled Mykonos, Greece, 1919. Cora and her brother sitting at the outdoor table with the jug and the three glasses. The missing corner of the picture where her husband had been before she cut him out. But maybe he hadn't been her husband yet in that picture. He had probably been her suitor then.
"I went overseas as a nurse during the war," Cora said.
Penny nodded, hoping the eagerness on her face didn't reveal what she already knew.
"Then, after the war, my brother and I went to Greece. When we were young, we promised each other we would go one day." Her fingers traced the rim of the glass dish where the olive pits lay in their pool of brine. "We celebrated my twenty-first birthday there."
The table and the three glasses. The man cut out of the picture. Penny reckoned that Cora must have married him not long after that photograph was taken. According to everything she had heard, Cora had returned to Evanston in late 1919 as Dr. Egan's wife. Why had she married right away, Penny wondered, when she could have stayed single, at least for a while? And why had she married him, of all people? She thought of Penelope's suitors in The Odyssey, how menacing they were. But Cora hadn't lived in ancient Greece. She had wealthy grandparents, an education, a real profession. Penny considered the pictures she'd seen of Cora as a nurse. The group portrait with the other nurses and the doctors. She could have done so many things.
"What's your brother like?" she asked.
"We were very close when we were growing up. Best friends. After we lost our parents, Jacob was all I had. I don't know how I would have endured it without him." Cora pushed her hair back from her forehead. "In the beginning, I hated Chicago. Our parents had let us run wild, but my grandparents expected me to behave like a proper young lady. Oh, I'm sure they meant well, but it wasn't easy. I wanted to run away. Jacob promised me that if I held on until I was eighteen, we would go somewhere beautiful and wild together. He would paint and play the piano. He was the artistic one. I would do something outdoorsy like raise horses or fly airplanes." She met Penny's eyes and laughed. "When I was a girl, I had big dreams. But then I got practical and decided to become a nurse.
"Well, Jacob kept his promise to me, in a manner of speaking. He volunteered for the war. Went over as an artillery officer. Thought he could serve his country and see the world. And I went with him. My grandparents couldn't do anything to stop me." She smiled sadly. "After the war, of course, my grandparents expected Jacob to come back to Chicago and take his place running their meatpacking firm. That's how my Viney grandparents made their money. But Jacob wasn't cut out for that kind of life. Instead he bought an old cottage near Aries, among the vineyards and lavender fields. He invited me to stay on with him there, the life we always dreamed of." Cora rested her hands on the edge of the table.
"He was always such a romantic. Through everything, he stayed true to his dreams. I was the one who ended up coming back to Chicago, but he's still there in his little stone house. He teaches English at a boys' school. During the school holidays, he teaches French and art to English boys who come over for the summer. He has a fiancée, too. I think his life is simple but happy."
Cora nodded. "In his last letter, he said he was asking his school for a sabbatical. I hope he can visit me and see his niece."
Upstairs Phoebe whimpered in her sleep. Cora looked up at the ceiling. When her daughter fell silent again, she folded her hands and gazed down at the oilcloth. Everything, Penny thought, boiled down to a handful of choices. She tried to imagine the shape Cora's life would have taken if she had stayed with her brother in France.
"Did you meet your husband over there?" she asked softly.
"He saved my brother's life." Cora spoke with her head bowed, not meeting Penny's eyes. "Jacob was hit by a shell. At the very least, we thought he would lose his leg. But he ... he worked all night without sleep to save him. Jacob still has a limp and some terrible scars, but it's a miracle he's still alive and can walk." Her voice sounded hollow. "He was a brilliant surgeon. No matter how awful it was, he never lost his courage. Even when we ran out of morphine and had nothing to give our patients for the pain."
Cora was white in the face. She couldn't bring herself to call her husband by his name, Penny realized.
"After he saved my brother, I thought he was the most noble, heroic man ever. He and Jacob became good friends. I fancied him, of course, but tried to hide it. I thought he would never return my affection. When he did, I couldn't believe my luck. By then, I'd seen too much death. He made me feel so alive. I couldn't believe how happy I was. Then he proposed."
Cora got up and carried the dish of olive pits to the sink.
The next day when Cora was out, Penny went to her room and opened the wardrobe door. Lifting a pair of rubber boots and then a folded blanket, she uncovered the photo album. She sat on the bed and returned to the pictures of Greece. Here were buildings she now recognized as temples. Pillars carved in the shape of women bore the weight of the roofs. She found a picture of Jacob sitting under a tree. Was it an olive tree, she wondered. He looked so different than he had in the earlier Chicago photographs, his face full of sad wisdom. This was a picture of someone who had crossed over into the land of death, she thought. But then Dr. Egan had rescued him and carried him back into the land of the living. She wished Cora had left at least one of her husband's pictures intact. One day Phoebe might want to see his photograph.
On their next trip into town, Cora took care of the grocery shopping while Penny walked to the library to get some books for her schoolwork. She was wearing her brand-new clothes. Her arms swung freely at her sides as she cut through the Minerva Civic Park, where the Junior Jaycees were having their annual picnic. She strolled past the girls with their hair molded into waves and ringlets, past the boys with their slicked-back cowlicks and their ears that stuck out like jug handles. They couldn't unglue their eyes from her. The sight of her in beautiful clothes seemed to shock them as much as seeing Cora dressed like a man. She drank in the way their heads turned, the way their unbelieving eyes rested on her. Inside she glowed. Everyone who looked at her had to see she was lit up from within like a lamp.
Even Ned Fisk, the boy Irene Hamilton was sweet on, stared at her so intensely it was hard not to burst out laughing. Then, with an electric jolt, she recognized that stare—that was how men looked at her mother. She kept her head up, her pace steady as she walked away from him.
Sometimes, if she was honest with herself, she had to admit she had envied her mother's beauty, wondering if she would ever match up. And sometimes she wished she could tell her mother that she could do better than sneaking around with Mr. H. With her looks, she could have a real suitor who would bring her flowers, take her out to dances. Part of Penny still dreamt of running home, having her mother fuss over her the way she used to, before the business with Mr. H. had started. But it was too late to go back now. It hurt like a wound that wouldn't close, but Penny couldn't cross that divide anymore.
The best she could do was learn from it all. It seemed that a girl had only one chance in life, and she better make the right choice or else spend the rest of her days paying the consequences. She promised herself that she wouldn't get in trouble the way her mother had, wouldn't marry the wrong man the way Cora had. And she wasn't going to be like those girls she passed in the park, either, prancing around with their little boyfriends. Silly crushes and flirtations weren't for her. What a fool she'd made of herself, gushing all over Gilbert, and for nothing! She would hold herself firm and upright as Athena's spear, remain pure and apart until she met the boy she was destined to love. And when she met her true love, she would know at once. It would strike her like lightning, and then she would be capable of any act of passion. Just like Cora's mother, eloping with her love to the bottom of the world.
That was for the future, however, which seemed as distant and ethereal as a star in the sky. She felt so rooted on the Maagdenbergh farm. Even with the diapers to wash, even on the days when Phoebe fussed and screamed, that was her home. At night after she put the baby to bed, she sat up at the kitchen table with her books and struggled with her algebra problems until she mastered them. Sometimes Cora sat down and helped her with an equation. But even algebra was easier to grasp than the idea of the passing of time or the passing of her youth. She told herself that she belonged here with Phoebe and Cora. There were days she believed that this happiness and this dreaming over books would go on forever.