“Did I tell you

“Did I tell you?” Mother says. “Fanny Peatrow got engaged.”
“Good for Fanny,knockoff handbags.”
“Not even a month after she got that teller job at the Farmer’s Bank.”
“That’s great, Mother.”
“I know,” she says, and I turn to see one of those lightbulb-popping looks of hers. “Why don’t you go down to the bank and apply for a teller job?”
“I don’t want to be a bank teller, Mama.”
Mother sighs, narrows her eyes at the spaniel, Shelby, licking his nether parts. I eye the front door, tempted to ruin the clean floors anyway. We’ve had this conversation so many times.
“Four years my daughter goes off to college and what does she come home with?” she asks.
“A diploma?”
“A pretty piece of paper,” Mother says.
“I told you. I didn’t meet anybody I wanted to marry,” I say.
Mother rises from her chair, comes close so I’ll look her in her smooth, pretty face. She’s wearing a navy blue dress, narrow along her slim bones. As usual her lipstick is just so,UGG Clerance, but when she steps into the bright afternoon sun, I see dark stains, deep and dried, on the front of her clothes. I squint my eyes, trying to see if the stains are really there. “Mama? Are you feeling bad?”
“If you’d just show a little gumption, Eugenia—”
“Your dress is all dirty on the front.”
Mother crosses her arms. “Now, I talked to Fanny’s mother and she said Fanny was practically swimming in opportunities once she got that job.”
I drop the dress issue. I’ll never be able to tell Mother I want to be a writer. She’ll only turn it into yet another thing that separates me from the married girls. Nor can I tell her about Charles Gray, my math study partner last spring, at Ole Miss. How he’d gotten drunk senior year and kissed me and then squeezed my hand so hard it should’ve hurt but it didn’t, it felt wonderful the way he was holding me and looking into my eyes. And then he married five-foot Jenny Sprig.
What I needed to do was find an apartment in town, the kind of building where single, plain girls lived, spinsters, secretaries, teachers. But the one time I had mentioned using money from my trust fund, Mother had cried—real tears. “That is not what that money’s for, Eugenia. To live in some rooming house with strange cooking smells and stockings hanging out the window. And when the money runs out, what then? What will you live on?” Then she’d draped a cold cloth on her head and gone to bed for the day.
And now she’s gripping the rail, waiting to see if I’ll do what fat Fanny Peatrow did to save herself. My own mother is looking at me as if I completely baffle her mind with my looks, my height, my hair. To say I have frizzy hair is an understatement. It is kinky, more pubic than cranial, and whitish blond, breaking off easily,nike shox torch ii, like hay. My skin is fair and while some call this creamy, it can look downright deathly when I’m serious, which is all the time. Also,mont blanc pens, there’s a slight bump of cartilage along the top of my nose. But my eyes are cornflower blue, like Mother’s. I’m told that’s my best feature.
“It’s all about putting yourself in a man-meeting situation where you can—”
“Mama,” I say, just wanting to end this conversation, “would it really be so terrible if I never met a husband?”