The winter has come and gone, just as it seems my life is doing. Best not to think about it. Best to do as my mother did. As the world says to do. My duty. It’s incredibly easy to do. It begins on a Monday and follows into Tuesday, and before you know it, you’re counting off the week, the month, the year. My only goal each day is to arrive at the place where I might finally sit and read the next novel I have borrowed from the Free Library.
Ethel leaves for Jack. My brothers leave for school or factory. I run the house. And my father migrates from his breakfast at the marble-topped table to his books and papers at his chair. Eugene Debs has grown in fame and deed, and so has grown in my father’s estimation of him. Our house fills with Socialist papers. He is also digging into psychology. Between the two of us, the books pile up.
With Arlington in school and my mother in the grave, it is he and I during the long days. It does not escape my heart how much my younger self would have loved this.
“What have you got there?” he growls.
I shift my position in the chair so he can’t read the title of my novel.
“Look here at what I’m reading,” he demands.
I know what he’s reading. He’s reading The Social Democratic. He’s always reading The Social Democratic. I do not look.
“Now here is a man worth reading,” he continues, shaking his paper at me. “Not the ninny you’re holding.”
He drones on. But I don’t listen. I’ve heard this speech before. Yesterday. And the day before that. He believes novels are foolish.
“. . . an uncultivated mind . . .”
He is difficult to shut out.
“Read what will benefit you in the battle of your life,” he admonishes.
“I am reading what will benefit me in the battle of my life. The Three Musketeers. And it’s doing just what I want it to do—taking my mind away from here.” At this, I remove myself to the kitchen, because not even Alexandre Dumas can drown out the annoying brogue of Michael Higgins.
“I see you are agitated, Margaret,” he shouts after me. “ ‘Progress is born of agitation,’ as the good Mr. Debs has said. ‘It is agitation or stagnation.’ ”
I plop myself at the kitchen table and attempt to read, but the word stagnation has me slamming my book down on the cool marble and walking about the floor. And of course, now I am agitated. Making my father right. Which makes me even more agitated.
I stomp over to the cookstove to put the kettle on, but stop. I don’t want tea. I look around the kitchen for what I do want, but I know what I want isn’t here. What I want is . . . beyond here.
I sigh, and turn toward the window and look out into the rainy gloom just as I had once looked in through a window on another gloomy day long ago.
“Mother,” I whisper, so lightly the word doesn’t fog the glass.
I’d do anything to see her reflection behind me. Moving through the kitchen, a baby on her hip, one in her belly, and coughing, even. I’d take her coughing. But the only reflection I see is my own. Silent and still, my long braid neatly plaited and resting over my shoulder, looking very much as if it had been carefully placed there, looking very much like her.
Without thinking, I pick up Mary’s butchering knife and saw through my braid. Hair being sliced through by a knife turns out to be one of the loudest sounds I’ve ever heard. I stare at the rope of it in my hand. What did I do? What did I just do?
I fling the braid and the knife onto the table, clapping both my hands to my head. My head without a braid. A braid I’ve worn all my life.
I look up at my reflection in the window and gasp . . . a real Nan gasp, which makes me laugh. I shake my head and my hair puffs wildly around my shoulders. Staring at this unfamiliar girl in the window, I realize that she too wants something beyond here. Of course she does. We all do.
Mary longs for the stage. Nan burns to write. Every girl I know—Emma, Esther, Amelia—has wanted something beyond . . . perhaps even my mother. Wanting it, though, is one thing. Being able to choose it is quite another. And maybe this is what every girl should know—there is no freedom without choice.
Making the choice to live the life I want to live, the life I need to live, is true agitation. Progress might be born of agitation, as Mr. Debs, said, but I know how much more there is to agitation besides progress. Hard things. Like a beet thrown at close range, and the cold, uncaring eyes of an entire town.
Margaret Louise.
I don’t know what lies beyond. Neither did she. But she knew I’d go. Beets be damned. Maybe this was the reason she sounded so sad.
* * *
I arrive on time for the earliest train with everything I own: a valise carrying two dresses, three pairs of knickers, a nightgown, and of course, my beautiful silk gloves—all neatly folded and packed. My coat is buttoned to my chin to keep out the raw cold of spring. My boots are laced up tightly. My face is washed. My hair, free. Anyone witnessing my clipped stride as I walk down Market Street would have no other choice but to agree, I look like someone who is on her way to challenge the world.