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and her hair was cut fetchingly short.
    â€˜Architecture,’ she answered and then smiled apologetically. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t stop to talk. I’m late for class.’
    She’s going to design buildings , I thought as she hurried away . How wonderful would that be?
    I crossed over St Charles Avenue into Audubon Park as if in a dream. What was this strange curtain that separated me fromthose confident, self-determined girls? I knew the answer: they were middle class and as such were free to develop their minds and use their bodies any way they pleased. They didn’t carry the weight of the Creole aristocracy on their shoulders. I was sure they hadn’t been taught from nursery age to recite their entire family tree.
    I sat on a park bench and watched the ducks swimming on the pond. There had been some Creole women who’d run their own plantations and left them to their daughters, but the fortunes of the women of the de Villeray family had always been tied to their menfolk. And the men had squandered those fortunes and left us struggling to make ends meet. Well, except for prudent Uncle Rex; but he was twenty years older than Aunt Elva, and I was very aware that Maman, Mae and I would be out on the street the moment he drew his last breath.
    Why is it this way? I asked myself, gazing at the trees. Did I really have no choice but to watch our family slowly sink into destitution in the same way some geologists declared that New Orleans was gradually sinking into the ocean?
    I looked about me and saw a young woman selling watermelon slices from a vending cart. People came to the cart, she gave them a slice of melon and they handed her some money. I kept staring at those coins. It seemed to me that she wasn’t doing so badly with nothing more than watermelons to sell. I noticed how she spoke cheerfully to people as they purchased their fruit and that seemed to encourage them to buy more. Her stock moved quickly and she was done by the early afternoon.
    How hard can it be? I wondered. I’d been brought up to believe that women couldn’t manage money, but that young woman seemed to be managing it very well.
    On my trip home, it was as if my eyes had been opened: I noticed all the women vendors who worked in the French Quarter selling everything from alligator pears to jewellery toyo-yos. There were women working in beauty parlours, and demonstrating kitchen devices in department stores, and even female artists selling their paintings in Jackson Square. Who said women couldn’t handle money?
    By the time I reached our apartment, I’d made a decision. It wasn’t marriage that was going to save us. It was money — and I had to learn how to make some. I, Vivienne ‘Ruby’ de Villeray, was going to do what no woman in my family had ever done before me. I was going to get a job.

    â€˜No good can come of this, Miss Ruby!’ Mae warned as she helped me to dress. ‘Not for a young lady in your position. Those women you saw the other day don’t come from the same folk you do. God gave us all a place and we should be satisfied with it. Once you start questioning one part of your life, you start questioning everything.’
    â€˜Listen, Mae,’ I said, fixing my hair in the mirror, ‘God gave me two arms, two legs and a head and I intend to use them to get us out of this fix. Didn’t you always teach me that God helps those who help themselves?’
    Mae shook her head. ‘Small people shouldn’t get ideas above their station and grand people shouldn’t get ones below theirs — that’s what my grandmama used to say.’
    â€˜I’ve got to try something different from what we’ve been doing. Otherwise what will we do when there’s nothing left to sell? Now you keep Maman occupied until I get home. Tell her I’m taking piano and singing lessons in exchange for keeping Adalie de Pauger company. She’ll be