"I may never have another chance like this. If I don't take a sleeper berth I have enough for a round trip and the twenty-five dollars from addressing envelopes for spending money." No point telling Ma she had no intention of returning to Congress.
"It's extravagant. You ought to save for a rainy day," Ma had said.
"I like rain, it makes things grow," she had retorted sassily and got her face slapped.
"You're too young to go gallivanting around New York City."
"I'll be old enough to be married without consent in two months."
"You're too smart to get a husband. You may be smart enough to win a prize for writing an immoral story but you can't even get a fella."
Aunt Mabel turned the trick. When Mae wrote she couldn't come unless someone she trusted like Vida stayed with Lucy, Aunt Mabel knew just how to manipulate Ma.
Two weeks of preparation was a lifetime of nightmare, except for Clem's encouragement, as her going decided his own great leap into a New York exhibition. Semy, on the contrary, made snide remarks about the farmer's daughter going in search of the city slicker. He seemed to take her going as a personal affront. "Don't give my regards to Broadway," he said.
Her heavy coat, which she might need, had a moth hole. The garden string beans were wormy because she never helped pick bugs. Ma remembered every grievance, real and imaginary. Anything and everything to make her miserable, self-conscious, selfish. And the same chores as though she weren't going to leave at all. "Vida, let Tina out. Vida, let Tina in. Vida, give Tina this bone." What a garbage can! Pa drunk and smelling like an old beer barrel. "A great big eighteen-year-old girl who never helps her poor hardworking mother." Too young to leave, too old to leave. Eighteen in two months. Ma with her whine, Pa with his smell, holding her in a vise. Do not honor thy Father and Mother. Oh my!
When the train at last pulled out she felt herself a criminal.
The scenery was as she had envisaged it. The change at Chicago early next morning a jumble. Clattering elevated, slimy cobbles, grimy people; though toward what turned out to be the Lake, buildings were high and glinted excitingly in the early morning sun. But who would think a big city wouldn't be ashamed to have trains ride through awful falling-down slums? At least in Main Street there was nothing as ugly. And in this criminal poverty, feeding on its despair,
