need some help

need two make tow reading log  for the tow stories means one for each story

“The Answer Is No” by Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006)

http://www.sabri.org/The-Answer-No.htm

The important piece of news that the new headmaster had arrived spread through the school. She heard of it in the women teachers’ common room as she was casting a final glance at the day’s lessons. There was no getting away from joining the other teachers in congratulating him, and from shaking him by the hand too. A shudder passed through her body, but it was unavoidable.

“They speak highly of his abilities,” said a colleague of hers. “And they talk too of his strictness.”

It had always been a possibility that might occur, and now it had. Her pretty face paled, and a staring look came to her wide black eyes.

When the time came, the teachers went in single file, decorously attired, to his open room. He stood behind his desk as he received the men and women. He was of medium height, with a tendency to portliness, and had a spherical face, hooked nose, and bulging eyes; the first thing that could be seen of him was a thick, puffed-up mustache, arched like a foam-laden wave. She advanced with her eyes fixed on his chest. Avoiding his gaze, she stretched out her hand. What was she to say? Just what the others had said? However, she kept silent, uttered not a word, What, she wondered, did his eyes express? His rough hand shook hers, and he said in a gruff voice, “Thanks.” She turned elegantly and moved off.

She forgot her worries through her daily tasks, though she did not look in good shape. Several of the girls remarked, “Miss is in a bad mood.” When she returned to her home at the beginning of the Pyramids Road, she changed her clothes and sat down to eat with her mother. “Everything all right?” inquired her mother, looking her in the face.

“Badran, Badran Badawi,” she said briefly. “Do you remember him? He’s been appointed our headmaster.”

“Really!”

Then after a moment of silence, she said, “It’s of no importance at all – it’s an old and long-forgotten story.”

After eating, she took herself off to her study to rest for a while before correcting some exercise books. She had forgotten him completely. No, not completely. How could he be forgotten completely? When he had first come to give her a private lesson in mathematics, she was fourteen years of age. In fact, not quite fourteen. He had been twenty-five years older, the same age as her father. She had said to her mother, “His appearance is a mess, but he explains things well,” And her mother had said, “We are not concerned with what he looks like; what’s important is how he explains things.”

He was an amusing person, and she got on well with him. and benefited from his knowledge. How, then, had it happened? In her innocence she had not noticed any change in his behavior to put her on her guard. Then one day he had been left on his own with her, her father having gone to her aunt’s clinic. She had not the slightest doubts about a man she regarded as a second father. How, then, had it happened? Without love or desire on her part the thing had happened. She had asked in terror about what had occurred, and he had told her, “Don’t be frightened or sad. Keep it to yourself and I’ll come and propose to you the day you come of age.”

And he had kept his promise and had come to ask for her hand. By then she had attained a degree of maturity that gave her an understanding of the dimensions of her tragic position. She had found that she had no love or respect for him and that he was as far as he could be from her dreams and from the ideas she had formed of what constituted an ideal an moral person. But what was to be done? Her father had passed away two years ago, and her mother had been taken aback by the forwardness of the man. However, she had said to her, “I know your attachment to your personal independence, so I leave the decision to you.”

She had been conscious of the critical position she was in. She had either to accept or to close the door forever. It was the sort of situation that could force her into something she detested. She was the rich beautiful girl, a byword in Abbaiyya for her nobility of character, and now here she was struggling helplessly in a well-sprung trap, while he looked down at her with rapacious eyes. Just as she had hated his strength, so too she hated her own weakness. To have abused her innocence was one thing, but for him to have the upper hand now that she was fully in possession of her faculties was something else. He had said, “So here I am, making good my promise because I love you.” He had also said, “I know of your love of teaching, and you will complete your studies at the College of Science.”

She had felt such anger as she had never felt before. She had rejected coercion in the same way as she rejected ugliness. It had meant little to her to sacrifice marriage. She had welcomed being on her own, for solitude accompanied by self-respect was not loneliness. She had also guessed he was after her money. She had told her mother quite straightforwardly, “No,” to which her mother had replied, “I am astonished you did not make this decision from the first moment.”

The man had blocked her way outside and said, “How can you refuse? Don’t you realize the outcome?”

And she had replied with an asperity he had not expected, “For me any outcome is preferable to being married to you.”

After finishing her studies, she had wanted something to do to fill her spare time, so she had worked as a teacher. Chances to marry had come time, but she had turned her back on them all.

“Does no one please you?” her mother asked her.

“I know what I am doing,” she had said gently.

“But time is going by.”

“Let it go as it pleases, I am content.”

Day by day she becomes older. She avoids love, fears it. With all her strength she hopes that life will pass calmly, peacefully, rather than happily. She goes on persuading herself that happiness is not confined to love and motherhood. Never has she regretted her firm decision. Who knows what the morrow holds? But she was certainly unhappy that he could again make his appearance in her life, that she would be dealing with him day after day, and that he would be making of the past a living and painful present.

Then, the first time he was alone with her in his room, he asked her, “How are you?”

She answered coldly, “I’m fine.”

He hesitated slightly before inquiring, ” Have you not…I mean, did you get married”

In the tone of someone intent on cutting short a conversation, she said “I told you, I am fine.”

292 Tillie Olsm

I Stand Here Ironing

Tillie Olsen (/9/3- )

See page 159 for a biographical note on the author.

I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth
with the iron.

“1 wish you would manage the time to come in and talk with me about your
daughter. I’m sure you can help me understand her. She’s a youngster who needs
help and whom I’m deeply interested in helping.”

“Who needs help:’ … Even if I came, what good would it do? You think be­
cause 1 am her mother I have a key, or that in some way you could use me as a
key? She has lived for nineteen years. There is all that life that has happened out­
side of me, beyond me.

And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total?

I

will start and there will be an interruption and I will have to gather it all together
again. Or I will become engulfed with all I did or did not do, with what should
have been and what cannot be helped.

She was a beautiful baby. The first and only one of our five that was beauti­
ful at birth. You do not guess how new and uneasy her tenancy in her
now-loveliness. You did not know her all those years she was thought homely, or
see her poring over her baby pictures, making me tell her over and over how
beautiful she had been-and would be, I would tell her-and was now, to the
seeing eye. But the seeing eyes were few or nonexistent. Including mine.

I nursed her. They feel that’s important nowadays. I nursed all the children,
but with her, with all the fierce rigidity of first motherhood, I did like the books
then said. Though her cries battered me to trembling and my breasts ached with
swollenness, I waited till the clock decreed.

Why do I put that first? I do not even know if it matters, or if it explains any­
thing.

She was a beautiful baby. She blew shining bubbles of sound. She loved mo­
tion, loved light, loved color and music and textures. She would lie on the floor
in her blue overalls patting the surface so hard in ecstasy her hands and feet
would blur. She was a miracle to me, but when she was eight months old I had to
leave her daytimes with the woman downstairs to whom she was no miracle at
all, for I worked or looked for work and for Emily’s father, who “could no longer
endure” (he wrote in his good-bye note) “sharing want with us.”

I Stand Here Ironing 293

1 was nineteen. It was the pre-relief, pre-WPAl world of the depression. I
would start running as soon as 1 got off the streetcar, running up the stairs, the
place smelling sour, and awake or asleep to startle awake, when she saw me she
would break into a dogged weeping that could not be comforted, a weeping I
can hear yet.

After a while I found a job hashing at night so I could be with her days, and
it was better. But it came to where I had to bring her to his family and leave her.

It took a long time to raise the money for her fare back. Then she got
chicken pox and I had to wait longer. When she finally came, 1 hardly knew her,
walking quick and nervous like her father, looking like her father, thin, and
dressed in a shoddy red that yellowed her skin and glared at the pockmarks. All
the baby loveliness gone.

She was two. Old enough for nursery school they said, and 1 did not know
then what I know now-the fatigue of the long day, and the lacerations of group
life in the kinds of nurseries that are only parking places for children.

Except that it would have made no difference if 1had known. It was the only
place there was. It was the only way we could be together, the only way 1 could
hold a job.

And even without knowing, 1knew. 1knew the teacher that was evil because
all these years it has curdled into my memory, the little boy hunched in the cor­
ner, her rasp, “why aren’t you outside, because Alvin hits you? that’s no reason,
go out, scaredy.” 1 knew Emily hated it even if she did not dutch and implore
“don’t go Mommy” like the other children, mornings.

She always had a reason why we should stay home. Momma, you look sick.
Momma, I feel sick. Momma, the teachers aren’t here today, they’re sick.
Momma, we can’t go, there was a fire there last night. Momma, it’s a holiday to­
day, no school, they told me.

But never a direct protest, never rebellion. 1 think of our others in their
three-, four-year-oldness–the explosions, tempers, the denunciations, the de­
mands–and I feel suddenly ill. 1 put the iron down. What in me demanded that
goodness in her? And what was the cost, the cost to her of such goodness?

The old man living in the back once said in his gentle way: “You should
smile at Emily more when you look at her.” What was in my face when 1 looked
at her? I loved her. There were all the acts of love.

It was only with the others I remembered what he said, and it was the face of
joy, and not of care or tightness or worry I turned to them-too late for Emily.
She does not smile easily, let alone almost always as her brothers and sisters do.
Her face is closed and sombre, but when she wants, how fluid. You must have

‘Works Prog~ss Administration. This government program provided work to many unemployed
people during the Depression.

294 Tillie Olsen

seen it in her pantomimes. you spoke of her rare gift for comedy on the stage
that rouses laughter out of the audience so dear they applaud and applaud and
do not want to let her go.

Where does it come from, that comedy? There was none of it in her when
she came back to me that second time, after I had to send her away again. She
had a new daddy now to learn to love, and I think perhaps it was a better time.

Except when we left her alone nights. telling ourselves she was old enough.
“Can’t you go some other time, Mommy. like tomorrow?” she would ask.

“Will it be just a little while you’ll be gone? Do you promise?”
The time we came back, the front door open, the clock on the floor in the

hall. She rigid awake. “It wasn’t just a little while. I didn’t cry. Three times I called
you, just three times, and then I ran downstairs to open the door so you could
come faster. The clock talked loud. I threw it away, it scared me what it talked.”

She said the clock talked loud again that night I went to the hospital to have
Susan. She was delirious with the fever that comes before red measles, but she
was fully conscious all the week I was gone and the week after we were home
when she could not come near the new baby or me.

She did not get welL She stayed skeleton thin, not wanting to eat, and night
after night she had nightmares. She would call for me, and I would rouse from
exhaustion to sleepily call back: “You’re all right, darling, go to sleep, it’s just a
dream,” and if she still called, in a sterner voice, “now to go sleep, Emily, there’s
nothing to hurt you.” Twice, only twice, when I had to get up for Susan anyhow,
I went in to sit with her.

Now when it is too late (as if she would let me hold and comfort her like I
do the others) I get up and go to her at once at her moan or restless stirring. “Me
you awake, Emily? Can I get you something?” And the answer is always the same:
“No, I’m all right, go back to sleep, Mother.”

They persuaded me at the clinic to send her away to a convalescent home in
the country where “she can have the kind of food and care you can’t manage for
her, and you’ll be free to concentrate on the new baby.” They still send children
to that place. I see pictures on the society page of sleek young women planning
affairs to raise money for it, or dancing at the affairs, or decorating Easter eggs or
filling Christmas stockings for the children.

They never have a picture of the children so I do not know if the girls still
wear those gigantic red bows and the ravaged looks on the every other Sunday
when parents can come to visit “unless otherwise notified”-as we were notified
the first six weeks.

Oh it is a handsome place, green lawns and tall trees and fluted flower beds.
High up on the balconies of each cottage the children stand, the girls in their red
bows and white dresses, the boys in white suits and giant red ties. The parents
stand below shrieking up to be heard and the children shriek down to be heard,
and between them the invisible wall “Not To Be Contaminated by Parental
Germs or Physical Affection.”

I Stand Here Ironing 295

There was a tiny girl who always stood hand in hand with Emily. Her par­
ents never came. One visit she was gone. “They moved her to Rose Cottage”
Emily shouted in explanation. “They don’t like you to love anybody here.”

She wrote once a week, the labored writing of a seven-year-old. “I am fine.
How is the baby. If I write my letter nicely I will have a star. Love.” There never
was a star. We wrote every other day, letters she could never hold or keep but
only hear read~nce. “We simply do not have room for children to keep any
personal possessions,” they patiently explained when we pieced one Sunday’s
shrieking together to plead how much it would mean to Emily, who loved so to
keep things, to be allowed to keep her letters and cards.

Each visit she looked frailer. “She isn’t eating;’ they told us.
(They had runny eggs for breakfast or mush with lumps, Emily said later, I’d

hold it in my mouth and not swallow. Nothing ever tasted good, just when they
had chicken.)

It took us eight months to get her released home, and only the fact that she
gained back so little of her seven lost pounds convinced the social worker.

I used to try to hold and love her after she came back, but her body would
stay stiff, and after a while she’d push away. She ate little. Food sickened her, and
I think much of life too. Oh she had physical lightness and brightness, twinkling
by on skates, bouncing like a ball up and down up and down over the jump rope,
skimming over the hill; but these were momentary.

She fretted about her appearance, thin and dark and foreign-looking at a
time when every little girl was supposed to look or thought she should look a
chubby blonde replica of Shirley Temple. The doorbell sometimes rang for her,
but no one seemed to come and play in the house or be a best friend. Maybe be­
cause we moved so much.

There was a boy she loved painfully through two school semesters. Months
later she told me how she had taken pennies from my purse to buy him candy.
“Licorice was his favorite and I brought him some every day, but he still liked
Jennifer better’n me. Why, Mommy?” The kind of question for which there is no
answer.

School was a worry to her. She was not glib or quick in a world where glib­
ness and quickness were easily confused with ability to learn. To her overworked
and exasperated teachers she was an overconscientious “slow learner” who kept
trying to catch up and was absent entirely too often.

I let her be absent, though sometimes the illness was imaginary. How differ­
ent from my now-strictness about attendance with the others. I wasn’t working.
We had a new baby, I was home anyhow. Sometimes, after Susan grew old
enough, I would keep her home from school, too, to have them all together.

Mostly Emily had asthma, and her breathing, harsh and labored, would fill
the house with a curiously tranquil sound. I would bring the two old dresser
mirrors and her boxes of collections to her bed. She would select beads and sin­
gle earrings, bottle tops and shells, dried flowers and pebbles, old postcards and

,.,

296 Tillie Olsen 1Stand Here Ironing 297

scraps, all sorts of oddments; then she and Susan would play Kingdom, setting
up landscapes and furniture, peopling them with action.

Those were the only times of peaceful companionship between her and Su­
san. I have edged away from it, that poisonous feeling between them, that terri­
ble balancing of hurts and needs I had to do between the two, and did so badly,
those earlier years.

Oh there are conflicts between the others too, each one human, needing, de­
manding, hurting, taking-but only between Emily and Susan, no, Emily to­
ward Susan that corroding resentment. It seems so obvious on the surface, yet it
is not obvious. Susan, the second child, Susan, golden- and curly-haired and
chubby, quick and articulate and assured, everything in appearance and manner
Emily was not; Susan, not able to resist Emily’s precious things, losing or some­
times clumsily breaking them; Susan telling jokes and riddles to company for
applause while Emily sat silent (to say to me later: that was my riddle, Mother, I
told it to Susan); Susan, who for all the five years’ difference in age was just a year
behind Emily in developing physically.

I am glad for that slow physical development that widened the difference
between her and her contemporaries, though she suffered over it. She was too
vulnerable for that terrible world of youthful competition, of preening and
parading, of constant measuring of yourself against every other, of envy, “If I
had that copper hair,” “If I had that skin….” She tormented herself enough
about not looking like the others, there was enough of the unsureness, the hav­
ing to be conscious of words before you speak, the constant caring-what are
they thinking of me? without having it all magnified by the merciless physical
drives.

Ronnie is calling. He is wet and I change him. It is rare there is such a cry
now. That time of motherhood is almost behind me when the ear is not one’s
own but must always be racked and listening for the child cry, the child call. We
sit for a while and I hold him, looking out over the city spread in charcoal with
its soft aisles of light. “Shoogily,” he breathes and curls closer. I carry him back to
bed, asleep. Shoogily. A funny word, a family word, inherited from Emily, in­
vented by her to say: comfort.

In this and other ways she leaves her seal, I say aloud. And startle at my say­
ing it. What do I mean? What did I start to gather together, to try and make co­
herent? I was at the terrible, growing years. War years. I do not remember them
well. I was working. there were four smaller ones now, there was not time for her.
She had to help be a mother, and housekeeper, and shopper. She had to set her
seal. Mornings of crisis and near hysteria trying to get lunches packed, hair
combed, coats and shoes found, everyone to school or Child Care on time, the
baby ready for transportation. And always the paper scribbled on by a smaller
one, the book looked at by Susan then mislaid, the homework not done. Run­
ning out to that huge school where she was one, she was lost, she was a drop; suf­
fering over the unpreparedness, stammering and unsure in her classes.

There was so little time left at night after the kids were bedded down. She
would struggle over books, ,always eating (it was in those years she developed her
enormous appetite that Is legendary in our family) and I would be ironing, or
preparing food for the next day, or writing V-mail to Bill, or tending the baby.
Sometimes, to make me laugh, or out of her despair, she would imitate happen.
ings or types at school.

I think I said once: “Why don’t you do something like this in the school am­
ateur show?” One morning she phoned me at work, hardly understandable
through the weeping: “Mother, I did it. I won, I won; they gave me first prize;
they clapped and clapped and wouldn’t let me go.”

Now suddenly she was Somebody, and as imprisoned in her difference as
she had been in anonymity.

She began to be asked to perform at other high schools, even in colleges,
then at city and statewide affairs. The first one we went to, I only recognized her
that first moment when thin, shy, she almost drowned herself into the curtains.
Then: Was this Emily? The control, the command, the convulsing and deadly
clowning, the spell. then the roaring, stamping audience, unwilling to let this
rare and precious laughter out of their lives.

Afterwards: You ought to do something about her with a gift like that-but
without money or knowing how, what does one do? We have left it all to her,
and the gift has as often eddied inside, clogged and clotted, as been used and
growing.

She is coming. She runs up the stairs two at a time with her light graceful
step, and I know she is happy toriight. Whatever it was that occasioned your call
did not happen today.

“Aren’t you ever going to fInish the ironing, Mother? Whistler painted his
mother in a rocker. I’d have to paint mine standing over an ironing board.” This
is one of her communicative nights and she tells me everything and nothing as
she fixes herself a plate of food out of the icebox.

She is so lovely. Why did you want me to come in at all? Why were you con­
cerned? She will find her way.

She starts up the stairs to bed. “Don’t get me up with the rest in the morn­
ing.””But I thought you were having midterms.” “Oh, those,” she comes back in,
kisses me, and says quite lightly, “in a couple of years when we’ll all be atom­
dead they won’t matter a bit.”

She has said it before. She believes it. But because I have been dredging the
past, and all that compounds a human being is so heavy and meaningful in me, I
cannot endure it tonight.

I will never total it all. I will never come in to say: She was a child seldom
smiled at. Her father left me before she was a year old. I had to work her first six
years when there was work, or I sent her home and to his relatives. There were
years she had care she hated. She was dark and thin and foreign-looking in a
world where the prestige went to blondeness and curly hair and dimples, she was

296 Tillie Olsen

scraps, all sorts of oddments; then she and Susan would play Kingdom, setting
up landscapes and furniture, peopling them with action.
Those were the only times of peaceful companionship between her and Su­
san. I have edged away from it, that poisonous feeling between them, that terri­
ble balancing of hurts and needs I had to do between the two, and did so badly,
those earlier years.

Oh there are conflicts between the others too, each one human, needing, de­
manding, hurting, taking-but only between Emily and Susan, no, Emily to­
ward Susan that corroding resentment. It seems so obvious on the surface, yet it
is not obvious. Susan, the second child, Susan, golden- and curly-haired and
chubby, quick and articulate and assured, everything in appearance and manner
Emily was not; Susan, not able to resist Emily’s precious things, losing or some­
times clumsily breaking them; Susan telling jokes and riddles to company for
applause while Emily sat silent (to say to me later: that was my riddle, Mother, I
told it to Susan); Susan. who for all the five years’ difference in age was just a year
behind Emily in developing physically.

I am glad for that slow physical development that widened the difference
between her and her contemporaries, though she suffered over it. She was too
vulnerable for that terrible world of youthful competition, of preening and
parading, of constant measuring of yourself against every other, of envy. “If I
had that copper hair:’ “If I had that skin….” She tormented herself enough
about not looking like the others, there was enough of the unsureness, the hav­
ing to be conscious of words before you speak, the constant caring-what are
they thinking of me? without having it all magnified by the merciless physical
drives.

Ronnie is calling. He is wet and I change him. It is rare there is such a cry
now. That time of motherhood is almost behind me when the ear is not one’s
own but must always be racked and listening for the child cry, the child call. We
sit for a while and I hold him. looking out over the city spread in charcoal with
its soft aisles of light. “Shoogily:’ he breathes and curls closer. I carry him back to
bed, asleep. Shoogily. A funny word, a family word, inherited from Emily, in­
vented by her to say: comfort.

In this and other ways she leaves her seal, I say aloud. And startle at my say­
ing it. What do I mean? What did I start to gather together, to try and make co­
herent? I was at the terrible, growing years. War years. I do not remember them
well. I was working, there were four smaller ones now, there was not time for her.
She had to help be a mother, and housekeeper, and shopper. She had to set her
seal. Mornings of crisis and near hysteria trying to get lunches packed, hair
combed, coats and shoes found, everyone to school or Child Care on time, the
baby ready for transportation. And always the paper scribbled on by a smaller
one, the book looked at by Susan then mislaid, the homework not done. Run­
ning out to that huge school where she was one, she was lost, she was a drop; suf­
fering over the unpreparedness, stammering and unsure in her classes.

I Stand Here Ironing 297

There was so little time left at night after the kids were bedded down. She
would struggle over books”always eating (it was in those years she developed her
enormous appetite that is legendary in our family) and I would be ironing, or
preparing food for the next day, or writing V-mail to Bill, or tending the baby.
Sometimes, to make me laugh, or out of her despair, she would imitate happen­
ings or types at school.

I think I said once: “Why don’t you do something like this in the school am­
ateur show?” One morning she phoned me at work, hardly understandable
through the weeping: “Mother, I did it. I won, I won; they gave me first prize;
they clapped and clapped and wouldn’t let me go.”
Now suddenly she was Somebody, and as imprisoned in her difference as
she had been in anonymity.

She began to be asked to perform at other high schools, even in colleges,
then at city and statewide affairs. The first one we went to, I only recogniz.ed her
that first moment when thin, shy, she almost drowned herself into the curtains.
Then: Was this Emily? The control, the command, the convulsing and deadly
clowning, the spell, then the roaring, stamping audience, unwilling to let this
rare and precious laughter out of their lives.

Afterwards: You ought to do something about her with a gift like that-but
without money or knowing how, what does one do? We have left it all to her,
and the gift has as often eddied inside, clogged and clotted. as been used and
growing.

She is coming. She runs up the stairs two at a time with her light graceful
step. and I know she is happy toriight. Whatever it was that occasioned your call
did not happen today.

“Aren’t you ever going to finish the ironing, Mother? Whistler painted his
mother in a rocker. I’d have to paint mine standing over an ironing board.” This
is one of her communicative nights and she tells me everything and nothing as
she fixes herself a plate of food out of the icebox.

She is so lovely. Why did you want me to come in at all? Why were you con­
cerned? She will find her way.

She starts up the stairs to bed. “Don’t get me up with the rest in the morn­
ing:’ “But I thought you were having midterms.” “Oh, those,” she comes back in,
kisses me, and says quite lightly, “in a couple of years when we’ll all be atom­
dead they won’t matter a bit.”

She has said it before. She believes it. But because I have been dredging the
past. and all that compounds a human being is so heavy and meaningful in me, I
cannot endure it tonight.

I will never total it all. I will never come in to say: She was a child seldom
smiled at. Her father left me before she was a year old. I had to work her first six
years when there was work, or I sent her home and to his relatives. There were
years she had care she hated. She was dark and thin and foreign-looking in a
world where the prestige went to blondeness and curly hair and dimples, she was

298 Tillie OIsm

slow where glibness was prized. She was a child of anxious, not proud, love. We
were poor and could not afford for her the soil of easy growth. I was a young
mother, I was a distracted mother. There were other children pushing up, de­
manding. Her younger sister seemed all that she was not. There were years she
did not want me to touch her. She kept too much in herself, her life was such she

;/:1 had to keep too much in herself. My wisdom came too late. She has much to her
;1

and probably little will come of it. She is a child of her age, of depression, of war,
of fear.

Let her be. So all that is in her will not bloom-but in how many does it?

:’i
There is still enough left to live by. Only help her to know-help make it so there
is cause for her to know-that she is more than this dress on the ironing board.
helpless before the iron.

1961

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POETRY
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EN220 – Short Story Reading Log

Name of story: _

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Author and important information about him/her: ___________________________________________________

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Time period/era: _____________________________________________________________________________

Setting: ____________________________________________________________________________________

Characters: major (name and briefly describe: round/dynamic? Flat/static?) ______________________________

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Minor (name and identify): _____________________________________________________________________

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Theme: _____________________________________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________________________________________Plot: _______________________________________________________________________________________

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Point of view (type of narrator): _________________________________________________________________

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Conflict(s): _________________________________________________________________________________

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Questions for discussion: ______________________________________________________________________

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Likes: ______________________________________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________________________________________Dislikes: ____________________________________________________________________________________

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New words: _________________________________________________________________________________

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