Three Women. March Hastings

       1

      He lurched at her from the doorway. Flakes of snow glistened on his straggled eyebrows. She smelled the stench of whiskey in his clothes.

      “Go on, mister. Keep moving.” Paula jostled him away with her free hand and hurried along First Avenue. The freezing streets were slippery beneath her boots but she plunged forward, splashing into lakes of snow and ice gathered at the curb. She hated these winter nights worse than the steaming nights of summer. The wind tore savagely at her face. It seeped in past the woolen scarf and settled bitterly around her neck beneath the chestnut hair. As far as she could see the Avenue was black and lonely. But she knew that men huddled in corners, some asleep and not feeling the cold, others alerted by wild visions more fantastic than the freezing, howling night around her.

      With the container of milk hugged close, she hurried into the entrance of the tenement and through the narrow hall strewn with garbage the kids had pulled out of cans. She clomped up the three flights lighted by weak bulbs and let herself into the apartment. This wasn’t home to her. It was the place where Ma and Pa and Mike and she happened to live because it was cheaper for everyone to live together there.

      She set the package on the small table in the foyer and hung up her coat and scarf on the hook beside Mike’s leather jacket.

      “That you, Paula?” Her mother called from where she stood at the stove, moving a big wooden spoon in a pot of rice.

      You could see the kitchen from the foyer. You could see the bedroom beyond the kitchen where Mike sat cross-legged, reading an airplane magazine like he was in his own private library on Fifth Avenue.

      “I just made it,” Paula said, breathing on the tips of her fingers to get out the sting. “He was just about closing when I got there.” She brought in the paper bag and pulled out the container of milk.

      Why did her Pa always have to get his attacks late at night? Why didn’t he stop drinking so he could eat meals like a normal person? She wanted to respect him but it was hard not to get angry at a man who insisted on killing himself, eating away his stomach with poison that didn’t even give him pleasure anymore. She poured milk into a saucepan and set it on the stove beside the rice.

      “I wish we could keep some extra around for times like this,” Paula said. She didn’t want to tell her mother about the nastiness with that man outside. When a girl gets to be eighteen, there’s no excuse for being afraid. You comb your hair down long around your shoulders and wear the kind of clothes that show off your body so that men will look at you. And you just hope they’re the right kind of men. If it happens to be the other kind, you fight your way through and hope for better next time. Because, she guessed, that’s life.

      Paula took a bowl from the cabinet on the wall and held it while her mother spooned in a mushy helping of rice, straining the starchy water out against the side of the dented pot. Then she spilled the warm milk on top and set the bowl on the checked oilcloth that covered the kitchen table.

      ‘Your