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[...] It occurred to me that she didn’t know what she was doing; she was not really as sure of everything as she seemed. It was a painfully difficult thought to arrive at, and it clung to me. Why hadn’t I realized it before? Also, she sort of hated me, it seemed to me. I had never noticed that befo…

When I came out again, an hour later, my mother was in bed reading a magazine; she looked as if she had been wounded in a dozen places. My sister sat in her room, in front of the mirror. Her hair streamed down the back of her neck and lay in touching, defenseless little curls on the towel she had o…

“Sonny’s a very intelligent boy,” my mother said. “He comes from a good family.”

“I don’t care,” my sister said. “I don’t want to waste myself on him.”

“Waste yourself ?” My mother laughed derisively. I got up and went to the door of my sister’s room. My sister was sitting at her dressing tab…

"Mother, do you know what Ceil Johnson said to me today? She said that Beryl Feringhaus—you know, the real-estate people—was heartbroken because she thought Sonny Bruster was going to get engaged to her.” My sister giggled. Her long hair was tangled, and my mother yanked a comb through it.

“Mayb…

Toward the end of March, in St. Louis, slush fills the gutters, and dirty snow lies heaped alongside porch steps, and everything seems to be suffocating in the embrace of a season that lasts too long. Radiators hiss mournfully, no one manages to be patient, the wind draws tears from your eyes, the …