I can work outside all day, breaking ice to get water for washing I can eat pork liver cooked over the open fire minutes after it comes steaming from the hog. I can kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man. In the winter I wear flannel nightgowns to bed and overalls dur.ing the day. In real life I am a large, big.boned woman with rough, man.working hands. She pins on my dress a large orchid, even though she has told me once that she thinks orchids are tacky flowers. Then we are on the stage and Dee is embracing me with tears in her eyes. There I meet a smiling, gray, sporty man like Johnny Carson who shakes my hand and tells me what a fine girl I have. Out of a dark and ated limousine I am ushered into a bright room filled with many people. Sometimes I dream a dream in which Dee and I are suddenly brought together on a TV program of this sort. Sometimes the mother and father weep, the child wraps them in her arms and leans across the table to tell how she would not have made it without their help. (A pleasant surprise, of course: What would they do if parent and child came on the show only to curse out and insult each other?) On TV mother and child embrace and smile into each other's faces. You've no doubt seen those TV shows where the child who has "made it" is confronted, as a surprise, by her own mother and father, tottering in weakly from backstage. She thinks her sister has held life always in the palm of one hand, that "no" is a word the world never learned to say to her. Maggie will be nervous until after her sister goes: she will stand hopelessly in corners, homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs, eying her sister with a mixture of envy and awe. When the hard clay is swept clean as a floor and the fine sand around the edges lined with tiny, irregular grooves, anyone can come and sit and look up into the elm tree and wait for the breezes that never come inside the house. A yard like this is more comfortable than most people know. I will wait for her in the yard that Maggie and I made so clean and wavy yesterday afternoon.
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