Short stories; United States -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Fiction
Jennie stood in the row before the window, and stared. The longer she
stared the sharper grew the lines that fright and under-feeding had
chiseled about her nose, and mouth, and eyes. When your last meal is an
eighteen-hour-old memory, and when that memory has only near-coffee and a
roll to dwell on, there is something in the sight of January peaches and
great strawberries carelessly spilling out of a tipped box, just like
they do in the fruit picture on the dining-room wall, that is apt to
carve sharp lines in the corners of the face.
The tragic line dwindled, going about its business. The man with the
dinner pail and the lime on his boots spat, drew the back of his hand
across his mouth, and turned away with an ugly look. (Pork was up to
$14.25, dressed.)
The errand boy's blithe whistle died down to a mournful dirge.
He was window-wishing. His choice wavered between the juicy pears, and
the foreign-looking red things that looked like oranges, and weren't.
One hand went into his coat pocket, extracting an apple that was to have
formed the piece de resistance of his noonday lunch. Now he regarded it
with a sort of pitying disgust, and bit into it with the
middle-of-the-morning contempt that it deserved.
The mail carrier pushed back his cap and reflectively scratched his head.
How much over his month's wage would that green basket piled high with
exotic fruit come to?
Jennie stood and stared after they had left, and another line had formed.
If you could have followed her gaze with dotted lines, as they do in the
cartoons, you would have seen that it was not the peaches, or the prickly
pears, or the strawberries, or the muskmelon or even the grapes, that
held her eye. In the center of that wonderful window was an oddly woven
basket. In the basket were brown things that looked like sweet potatoes.
One knew that they were not. A sign over the basket informed the puzzled
gazer that these were maymeys from Cuba.
Maymeys from Cuba. The humor of it might have struck Jennie if she had
not been so Scotch, and so hungry. As it was, a slow, sullen, heavy
Scotch wrath rose in her breast. Maymeys from Cuba.
The wantonness of it! Peaches? Yes. Grapes, even, and pears and
cherries in snow time. But maymeys from Cuba--why, one did not even know
if they were to be eaten with butter, or with vinegar, or in the hand,
like an apple. Who wanted maymeys from Cuba? They had gone all those
hundreds of miles to get a fruit or vegetable thing--a thing so
luxurious, so out of all reason that one did not know whether it was to
be baked, or eaten raw. There they lay, in their foreign-looking basket,
taunting Jennie who needed a quarter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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