The Hired Girl(10)

I hate Father, and that makes me feel wicked. I’m sure the Blessed Mother wouldn’t hold with me hating him so much. It’s unnatural to hate my own father. But why isn’t he more natural? Why doesn’t he care one bit for my happiness? When I think of him telling Miss Chandler not to come again — ! — and I recall the contemptuous sound in his voice when he said no one would marry me — ! — it chokes me with hatred.

I wouldn’t have thought the not-marrying part would hurt so much. Even when I was a little girl, I never planned on getting married. I never liked any of the boys at school. They’re all so crude. Alice Marsh has a crush on Cy Watkins, and he carries her books from school, but I never cared for any boy like that. The only man I was ever really interested in was Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre. He’s depraved but he isn’t crude. He speaks so beautifully and asks such interesting questions. And he never minded that Jane was plain, because he was capable of true love. If I were ever going to marry, it would only be if I found true love. But I don’t expect to find it. Nobody around here is the least bit like Mr. Rochester. I guess Father’s right — if I did want to get married, I’d have to marry someone around here, and the girls outnumber the boys, so it’s likely I wouldn’t be asked. But the way he said it — as if I’d have to be one of the girls that nobody wanted — gnaws at my vitals. I felt so humiliated. And in front of Miss Chandler, too!

I stopped writing just now so that I could look in the mirror and judge how pretty I am. Sometimes I look better by moonlight or candlelight — the darker it is, the prettier I look. But of course, I’d forgotten my face. When I looked into the glass I saw the madwoman in Jane Eyre — a countenance fearful and ghastly, savage and discolored. Of course I couldn’t see exactly how discolored I was, because the light was dim. But I look frightful. I think of Father saying, “Who’s going to marry her?” and it seems true. Not that I want to get married. I’d rather be a schoolteacher. That was Ma’s plan for me.

But I can’t be a schoolteacher, because I haven’t enough education. And if I can’t get married, there’s nothing for me in the future. I’ll be stuck here my whole life long. Now I see that’s the worst of what happened with Father today. He crushed my last hope. That sounds like something someone in a novel might say, but it’s true: I have no future. He won’t allow me an education; I haven’t any friends; I’m not even allowed to borrow books. My life stretches ahead of me, empty save for drudgery, farm work and housework, day after day, season after season. That’s what Father’s life is like — mean and narrow, with the whole world wrapped up in this farm.

Only he doesn’t mind it. He wants me to be like him, yoked to the plow, toiling away, counting every penny, hating every kind of weather that falls from the sky. He never reads, he barely thinks, he has no God but Mammon, and he loves nobody.

I wonder if he ever loved Ma. I don’t think he could have — not much, anyway, because if he’d loved her, she wouldn’t have been so unhappy. I once asked Ma why she chose to marry Father, and she smiled in a way that was like wincing. She said it wasn’t a question of picking and choosing. There was never anyone else. By the time Father came along, she was twenty-six and an old maid.

I believe she wished she’d stayed an old maid. It wouldn’t have been easy for her, because she lived with Great-Aunt Alma, and Great-Aunt Alma is a horrible old woman. But I think life with Father was worse. Ma always warned me against getting married. She wanted something different for me.

I remember when I was seven years old and first went off to school. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to go, because the boys hated school. But Ma made me a new dress out of her old blue calico, and that tipped the scales in the other direction. I headed off to school in my new dress, determined to behave myself, because sometimes Luke was whipped in school and then Father whipped him again when he came home.

My teacher was Miss Lang. She set the oldest girl in charge of the other students and took the whole primary class outside and had us sit under a tree. She sat in a chair and read to us from a book of fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen. She read “Thumbelina.” I’d never heard such a story in my life. I could see it before my eyes, painted in the brightest, most delicate hues — that tiny little fairy child, rowing her flower-petal canoe. Oh, how I longed to be that fairy and row that tiny canoe! And then, how terrible it was that poor Thumbelina was carried off by a toad! Luke used to put toads down my back, and I’ve always hated them. And then, after Thumbelina got free of the toad, she was carried off by the horrid june bug!