Read The Appetites of Girls for Free Online

calm they looked, and I imagined that none of them was keeping my late hours. But when, later in the period, Miss Fielding checked over what each of us had written so far, she complimented my understanding of St. John’s values versus Rochester’s and of Rochester’s development throughout the novel. “You are off to a good start,” she said. “Now rethink how you will pull your argument together in the closing sections so that you do not stray from your topic.”
    At home that final afternoon before the essay would be turned in, Sarah and Valerie were in their room, their door closed, singing along with the
Cats
cassette playing on their shared stereo. (Now that I was in eighth grade, Mama believed we were old enough to look after ourselves for the short hour between our return from school and hers from work.) I spread my papers once more across the living room desk and considered how to rework the last two pages of my essay. Despite the music thumping from my sisters’ room, I dashed off three revised concluding paragraphs, my thoughts tumbling out almost more quickly than I could record them.
    “Hello, girls!” Mama called when she entered, hanging her fall trench coat in the hall closet, shaking off her buckled heels. She walked to where I was working, kissing the top of my head. “Almost finished?” she asked offhandedly, as if the question were no more than a politeness. But from where she stood behind my chair, I knew she was hoping for a glance at what I had composed.
    “Yes, just about! Until today I thought maybe I’d made a mess of it, but Miss Fielding said she liked much of what I’ve written, and I think I’ve almost fixed the parts that were wrong.”
    “Oh, so fast?” Mama smiled, but her voice was low, as if the words were thick in her throat.
    “I know—the ideas just flew out of me!” I grinned and twirled my pen between my fingers.
    “Good, very good. Now that you’re close to finishing, perhaps I should take a quick peek at what you have so far—”
    “What, Ma?”
    “Just as a simple proofread, a second pair of eyes. Only to catch things you may have missed or to give a simple suggestion here or there. Especially if only yesterday you still had concerns. . . . It can’t hurt, can it? I’m sure it’s perfectly acceptable.”
    As Mama searched for a pen in the desk drawer and pulled over one of the dining chairs, setting it beside mine, I was not entirely certain Miss Fielding would say it was
perfectly
acceptable; but suddenly fearing I could not possibly have sorted out my points so quickly, I nodded my agreement.
    Mama read through the paper once and then a second time, and as she did, she found many things to question—things I had not yet considered, things that had not caught Miss Fielding’s eye. But Miss Fielding had given only minutes to my paper, and Mama hunched over my essay with me until long after midnight, until my eyes stung with fatigue. And gradually I saw that what had seemed so ordered earlier in the day had only been a tangled muddle. And I resented Miss Fielding for having made me believe I’d had only simple revisions left.
    “What if you said this instead? Just an idea.”
    “Oh, yes, Ma. Yes, that’s good.” Always her new phrase seemed better than what I had written. Change after change after change, until, by the time our final draft was done, I could no longer remember what the essay had once been.
    I received an A− on the assignment Mama had helped with.
Well executed
, Miss Fielding wrote on the final page,
though I am surprised you abandoned the original plan for your paper
.
    “A-minus, Ma,” I said later that day, and showed her the mark. But I did not mention Miss Fielding’s comment on the essay or that I wondered what my grade might otherwise have been.

    The next September, as Mama had hoped, another small increase in Poppy’s salary allowed them to enroll Sarah in private school as well. “Your turn will come, too.” Mama