The Boston Girl(3)

Miss Chevalier was a small woman, a few inches shorter than me, which meant less than five feet. She had a moon face and chubby fingers and coppery hair that sprang straight up from her head, which is why some of the girls called her The Poodle. But she had one of those smiles that makes you feel like you just did something right, which was a good thing since I was a nervous wreck when I went to her office to practice.

I only got halfway through the poem when Miss Chevalier stopped me and asked if I knew what impetuous meant. She was nice about it, but I wanted to sink through the floor because not only did I not know what the word meant, I had mispronounced it.

I’m sure I turned bright red, but Miss Chevalier pretended not to notice and handed me the dictionary and said to read the definition out loud.

I will never forget; impetuous means two things. “Rushing with great force or violence,” and “acting suddenly, with little thought.”

She asked me which one I thought Mr. Longfellow meant. I reread those definitions over and over, trying to figure out the right answer, but Miss Chevalier must have read my mind. “There is no wrong answer,” she said. “I want to know your opinion, Addie. What do you think?”

I had never been asked for my opinion, but I knew I couldn’t keep her waiting so I said the first thing that came into my head, which was, “Maybe he meant both.”

She liked that. “The patriots had to be impetuous both ways or they wouldn’t have dared challenge the British.” Then she asked, “Would you call yourself impetuous, Addie?”

That time, I knew she was asking for an opinion. “My mother thinks I am.”

She said mothers were right to be concerned for their daughters’ welfare. “But I believe that girls need gumption, too, especially in this day and age. I believe you are a girl with gumption.”

After I looked up gumption, I never let anyone call Miss Chevalier The Poodle again.

—

I told Celia and my parents about the big honor of reciting for the Saturday Club, but when the day came and I put on my coat, Mameh said, “You’re not going anywhere.”

I told her they were waiting for me and that I had practiced and they couldn’t start without me but she shrugged like it was nothing. “It’s too cold. Let someone else get pneumonia.”

I couldn’t believe what she was saying. I argued and I begged and finally I was yelling. “No one else can do it. They’re counting on me. If I don’t go, I won’t be able to show my face there again.”

Mameh said, “When I was your age I didn’t step a foot outside without my mother, so close your mouth before I get mad.”

Celia said, “Let her go, Mameh. It’s not far. She can wear my scarf.”

My mother almost never snapped at Celia, but she said, “Stay out of this. That one sits in that school while you’re killing yourself at work. She’s already ruining her eyes from reading. No man wants to marry a girl with a squint.”

“Maybe I don’t want to get married.” The moment I said that, I ran behind where Celia was sitting so Mameh couldn’t slap me. But she just laughed. “Are you so stupid? Marriage and children are a woman’s crown.”

I said, “Like for Mrs. Freistadt?”

Mameh didn’t have an answer for Mrs. Freistadt. She lived across the street. One day her husband came home from work and said he couldn’t live with a woman he didn’t love, so after twenty years and four little girls, he walked out. Just like that.

The wife didn’t speak English and she didn’t know how to do anything but clean and cook. They got so poor—she and the daughters—everyone in the neighborhood was ashamed for them.

Talking about Mrs. Freistadt was the last straw for Mameh and she came at me with both hands, slapping and cursing and saying things like “Ungrateful worm. Monster. A plague you are.”

I was jumping around to keep away from her, which made her even madder. “My father would have taken a strap to you,” she yelled, and finally got me on my cheek with a loud slap that made Celia wail as if Mameh had hit her instead of me.

My mother had me against the wall, holding my wrists, and I was hollering, “Leave me alone,” when Papa walked in and told her to let me go.

Mameh screamed, “You don’t do anything and I’m not having another whore in this family.”

“Don’t use that word,” he yelled. “Betty is a good girl.”

Someone started pounding on the door. “Shut up in there.”

Celia had been crying the whole time, but now she started banging her forehead on the table. She was saying, “Stop, stop, stop,” and hitting her head hard enough that we could hear the sound of her face on the wood.

Papa grabbed her by the shoulders. “Lena, she’s hurting herself.”

Mameh let go of me to look and I ran.



The cold wind on my face felt like it was washing away everything that happened upstairs. I walked fast and whispered the poem to myself in time with my feet.

Listen my children and you shall hear

Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,

On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;

Hardly a man is now alive

Who remembers that famous day and year.

I was almost calm when I got to the settlement house, but it was a big shock to see all the chairs and benches in the big meeting room full of girls, talking and laughing with each other.