Bread — Themes and Context

Mrs. Sturgis brought her attention once more cheerfully back to the lesson.

“Now then, Mildred dearie: _one_ and two and three and four and--_one_ and two and _three_ and four and.... Now you have it; see how easy that is?”

Jeannette passed through the dark intervening rooms of the apartment, catching up her shabby velvet hat from her bed, and came upon her sister Alice in the kitchen.

There was a marked contrast between the two girls. Jeannette, who was several months past her eighteenth birthday, was a tall, willowy girl with a smooth olive-tinted skin, dark eyes, brows and lashes, and straight, lustreless braids of hair almost dead black. She gave promise of beauty in a year or two,--of austere stateliness,--but now she appeared rather angular and ungainly with her thin shoulders and shapeless ankles. She was too tall and too old to be still dressed like a schoolgirl. Alice was only a year her junior, but Alice looked younger. She was softer, rounder, gentler. She had brown hair, brown eyes and a brown skin. “My little brown bird,” her mother had called her as a child. She was busy now at the stove, dumping and scraping out a can of tomatoes into a saucepan. Dinner was in process of preparation. Steam poured from the nozzle of the kettle on the gas range and evaporated in a thin cloud.

“Mama makes me so mad!” Jeannette burst out indignantly. “I _wish_ she wouldn’t be borrowing money from the pupils! She just got ten cents out of Mildred Carpenter.”

She displayed the diminutive coin in her palm. Alice regarded it with a troubled frown.

“It makes me so sick,” went on Jeannette, “wheedling a dime out of a baby like that! I don’t believe it’s necessary, at least Mama ought to manage better. Just think of it! Borrowing money to buy a loaf of bread! ... We’ve come to a pretty state of things.”

“Aw--don’t, Janny,” Alice remonstrated; “you know how hard Mama tries and how people won’t pay their bills.... The Cheneys have owed eighty-six dollars for six months and it never occurs to them we need it so badly.”

“I’d go and get it, if I was Mama,” Jeannette said with determination, putting on her hat and bending her tall figure awkwardly to catch her reflection in a lower pane of the kitchen door. “I wouldn’t stand it. I’d call on old Paul G. Cheney at his office and tell him he’d have to pay up or find someone else to teach his children!”

“Oh, no, you wouldn’t, Janny!--You know that’d never do. Paul and Dorothy have been taking lessons off Mama for nearly three years. Mama’d lose all her pupils if she did things like that.”

“Well--” Jeannette drawled, suddenly weary of the discussion and opening the kitchen door into the hall, “I’m going down to Kratzmer’s.”

In the delicatessen store she was obliged to wait her turn. The shop was well filled with late customers, and the women especially seemed maddeningly dilatory to the impatient girl.

“An’ fifteen cents’ worth of ham ... an’ some of that chow-chow ... and a box of crackers....”

Jeannette studied the rows of salads, pots of baked beans, the pickled pig’s-feet, and sausages. Everything looked appetizing to her, and the place smelled fragrantly of fresh cold meat and creamy cheeses. Most of the edibles Kratzmer offered so invitingly, she had never tasted. She would have liked to begin at one end of the marble counter and sample everything that was on it. She looked curiously at the woman near her who had just purchased some weird-looking, pickled things called “mangoes,” and gone on selecting imported cheeses and little oval round cans with French and Italian labels upon them. Jeannette wondered if she, herself, would ever come to know a time when she could order of Kratzmer so prodigally. She was sick of the everlasting struggle at home of what they should get for lunch or dinner. It was always determined by the number of cents involved.

“Well, dearie,” her mother invariably remonstrated at some suggestion of her own, “that would cost thirty cents and perhaps it would be wiser to wait until next week.”

A swift, vague vision arose of the vital years that were close at hand,--the vital years in which she must marry and decide the course of her whole future life. Was her preparation for this all-important time ever to be beset by a consideration of pennies and makeshifts?

“Vell, Miss Sturgis, vat iss it to-night?”