..."
"I got lot of them writ out," said Clara, blinking. "You wanna read more?
Why I write them out? Oh, because, you can't tell, maybe you get run over
and in accident and how they going to know who you are or what to do with
the diseased if they don't find something?"
Her thick red hands grew excited. She produced further obituaries. From
her pocketbook, from her bosom, from her pockets and one from under her
hat. I read them. They were all alike, couched in vaguely bombastic terms.
We sat in the rain and I thought:
"Alas, Clara is a bounder. A snob. She writes her own obituaries. Alive
she can think of herself only as Clara, the slavey at whom the boys giggle
and call names. But dead, she is the 'deseased'--the stately corpse
commanding unprecedented attention. The prospect stirs a certain
snobbishness in her. And she sits and writes her death notices out--using
language she tries to remember from reading the funeral accounts of rich
and powerful people."
Clara, her hat awry, her doltish body sagging in the rain--shuffled down
the dirt road once more. Her outing is over. Cinderella returns to the
ashes of life.
THE WAY HOME
He shuffles around in front of the Clinton Street employment agency.
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