Just As I Thought by Grace Paley Read Free Book Online Page B

You understand this story. It means, make something of yourself.
    That’s right, says an aunt, the one who was mocked for not having married, whose beauty, as far as the family was concerned, was useless, because no husband ever used it.
    And another thing, she said, I just reminded myself to tell you. Darling, she said, I know you want to go to the May Day parade with your friends, but you know what? Don’t carry the flag. I want you to go. I didn’t say you don’t go. But don’t carry the flag. The one who carries the flag is sometimes killed. The police go crazy when they see that flag.
    I had dreamed of going forth with a flag—the American flag on July 4, the red flag of the workers on May Day. How did the aunt know this? Because I know you inside out, she said, since you were born. Aren’t you my child, too?
    The sister-mother is the one who is always encouraging. You can do this, you can get an A, you can dance, you can eat squash without vomiting, you can write a poem. But a couple of years later, when love and sex struck up their lively friendship, the sister was on the worried mother’s side, which was the sad side, because that mother would soon be dying.
    One evening I hear the people in the dining room say that the mother is going to die. I remain in the coat closet, listening. She is not going to die soon, I learn. But it will happen. One of the men at the table says that I must be told. I must not be spoiled. Others disagree. They say I have to go to school and do my homework. I have to play. Besides, it will be several years.
    I am not told. Thereafter I devote myself to not having received that knowledge. I see that my mother gazes sadly at me, not reproachfully, but with an anxious look, as I wander among the other mothers, leaning on their knees, writing letters, making long phone calls. She doesn’t agree with their politics, what will become of mine? Together with the aunts and grandmother she worked to make my father strong enough and educated enough so he could finally earn enough to take care of us all. She was successful. Despite this labor, time has passed. Her life is a known closed form. I understand this. Does she? This is the last secret of all. Then for several years, we are afraid of each other. I fear her death. She is afraid for my life.
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    Of which fifty years have passed, much to my surprise. Using up the days and nights in a lively manner, I have come to the present, daughter of mothers and mother to a couple of grown-up people. They have left home. What have I forgotten to tell? I have told them to be kind. Why? Because my mother was. I have told them when they drop a nickel (or even a shirt) to leave it for the gleaners. It says so in the Bible and I like the idea. Have I told them to always fight for mass transportation and not depend on the auto? Well, they know that. Like any decent kids of Socialist extraction, they can spot the oppressor smiling among the oppressed. Take joy in the struggle against that person, that class, that fact. It’s very good for the circulation; I’m sure I said that. Be brave, be truthful, but do they know friendship first, competition second, as the Chinese say? I did say, Better have a trade, you must know something to be sure of when times are hard, you don’t know what the Depression was like, you’ve had it easy. I’ve told them everything that was said to me or near me. As for the rest, there is ordinary place and terrible time—aunts, grandparents, neighbors, all my pals from the job, the playground and the PTA. It is on the occasion of their one hundred thousandth bicentennial that I have recalled all those other mothers and their histories.
     
    —1975

Like All the Other Nations
     
    I want to read this story to you first and then I want to say a few things. This is called “A Midrash on Happiness”; I don’t think this is really a midrash, but I called it that.
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    What she meant by