A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [106]
She told Mama what had happened to her in the cellar. She said nothing about Joanna. Katie sighed and said, “So soon? You’re just thirteen. I didn’t think it would come for another year yet. I was fifteen.”
“Then…then…this is all right what’s happening?”
“It’s a natural thing that comes to all women.”
“I’m not a woman.”
“It means you’re changing from a girl into a woman.”
“Do you think it will go away?”
“In a few days. But it will come back again in a month.”
“For how long?”
“For a long time. Until you are forty or even fifty.” She mused a while. “My mother was fifty when I was born.”
“Oh, it has something to do with having babies.”
“Yes. Remember always to be a good girl because you can have a baby now.” Joanna and her baby flashed through Francie’s mind. “You mustn’t let the boys kiss you,” said Mama.
“Is that how you get a baby?”
“No. But what makes you get a baby often starts with a kiss.” She added, “Remember Joanna.”
Now, Katie didn’t know about the street scene. Joanna happened to pop into her mind. But Francie thought she had wonderful powers of insight. She looked at Mama with new respect.
Remember Joanna. Remember Joanna. Francie could never forget her. From that time on, remembering the stoning women, she hated women. She feared them for their devious ways, she mistrusted their instincts. She began to hate them for this disloyalty and their cruelty to each other. Of all the stone-throwers, not one had dared to speak a word for the girl for fear that she would be tarred with Joanna’s brush. The passing man had been the only one who spoke with kindness in his voice.
Most women had the one thing in common: they had great pain when they gave birth to their children. This should make a bond that held them all together; it should make them love and protect each other against the man-world. But it was not so. It seemed like their great birth pains shrank their hearts and their souls. They stuck together for only one thing: to trample on some other woman…whether it was by throwing stones or by mean gossip. It was the only kind of loyalty they seemed to have.
Men were different. They might hate each other but they stuck together against the world and against any woman who would ensnare one of them.
Francie opened the copybook which she used for a diary. She skipped a line under the paragraph that she had written about intolerance and wrote:
“As long as I live, I will never have a woman for a friend. I will never trust any woman again, except maybe Mama and sometimes Aunt Evy and Aunt Sissy.”
31
TWO VERY IMPORTANT THINGS HAPPENED IN THE YEAR THAT FRANCIE was thirteen. War broke out in Europe and a horse fell in love with Aunt Evy.
Evy’s husband and his horse, Drummer, had been bitter enemies for eight years. He was mean to the horse; he kicked him and punched him and cursed at him and pulled too hard on the bit. The horse was mean to Uncle Willie Flittman. The horse knew the route and stopped automatically at each delivery. It had been his habit to start up again as soon as Flittman mounted the wagon. Lately, he had taken to starting up the instant Flittman got off to deliver milk. He’d break into a trot and often Flittman had to run more than half a block to catch up with him.
Flittman was through delivering at noon. He’d go home to eat dinner, then bring the horse and wagon back to the stable where he was supposed to wash Drummer and the wagon. The horse had a mean trick. Often when Flittman was washing under his belly, he’d wet on him. The other fellows would stand around waiting for this to happen so that they could have a good laugh. Flittman couldn’t stand it so he got in the habit of washing the horse in front of his house. That was all right in the summer but it was a little hard on the horse in the winter. Often, on a bitterly cold day, Evy would go down and tell Willie that it was a mean thing to wash Drummer in the cold and with cold water, too. The horse seemed to know that Evy was taking his part. As she argued with her husband, Drummer would