More in Anger by J. Jill Robinson Page A

could have pitched her out the window without remorse. Her parents had met them at the station and brought them home. From the second her mother knelt down in front of Ruby and Ruby put her arms around her grandmother’s neck and they cooed at each other and exchanged Eskimo kisses, Pearl knew that the arrangement was a bad idea. Her mother would try to take over and spoil the child.
    But by then it was too late—she was a prisoner—and worse, she was in a prison of her own making. There would be no escape until Tom returned from England. It would be months. Could be years. Pearl heaved a great sigh. And to think she had done this to herself. Her mother would drive her around the bend before then, because she wouldn’t stop meddling, and all too soon Pearl saw that her prediction was accurate: Opal was going to ruin Ruby. If Pearl announced a new policy she wanted implemented re child-rearing, her mother instantly met it with an argument as to its inefficacy.
    Pearl brushed her hair. What right did her mother think she had to question her, the child’s own mother, as to her tactics? Ten strokes. Just what did Opal think she could teach Pearl about being a mother? Twenty. It wasn’t as if Opal had been an extraordinary mother herself. Look at her elder daughter—here, in the mirror. Was she on top of the world in any regard? Not likely. Thirty. Abandoned by her husband, saddled with a child. She bent over and dropped her head. Forty. Well, she would persevere in spite of her misgivings. What choice was there, really? Fifty. She sat up, tossed her head back, and put her silver-backed hairbrush down in its place with the rest of her boudoir set, patted it affectionately, and took up her nail file.
    Being back here, in this house, in this room, she found herself responding and reacting to her parents as though she were twelve, or seventeen, not almost twenty-eight and a mother with a two-year-old. Speaking of which, Pearl could hear Ruby’s juicy cough and her snorting and snuffling next door, along with the murmur of a voice that was either the maid’s or Opal’s. At least Ruby wasn’t cranky with her cold: she liked taking herpink cough syrup, and she liked watching the steam coming out of the kettle in her room. No doubt her Gramma Opal was waiting on her hand and foot. Spoiling her even further.
    (A week later, Pearl would come down with Ruby’s cold, and she became much sicker with it than Ruby had been. She didn’t leave her bed for a week. It didn’t help matters that her mother’s sickroom technique was deplorable: Pearl would ask for a glass of water and it might be half an hour before her mother would return. Or a handkerchief—once she’d ended up using a corner of the sheet, so then of course the bed had to be changed, and Pearl had to get out of bed and sit in a chair.)
    Vigorously, Pearl filed her nails, creating a point on each one. To top off her misery, Tom’s latest letter was a complete dud. It contained not one word of affection until he signed it “Love, Tom.” And this, this one reference to love, was all he had to offer in a wedding-anniversary letter? Sure, greeting cards might be hard to come by in wartime, but words were free for the choosing. Why on earth did he think she would be interested in hearing what the editorial in the Yorkshire Post was about in the stead of endearments and words of love? Did he have rocks in his head? Or was their marriage old already, only three years on? Perhaps he had forgotten about her; perhaps he just didn’t care, or surely to God he could use his imagination and visualize what her life looked like right now. Couldn’t he tell that she had nothing to look forward to, to keep her spirits up, the way he did?
    And the icing on the cake was that throughout her entire sickness and for three days beyond, not one single word from her husband. Not one, while she had managed to