The Manning Girl by Catherine Browder

Author:Catherine Browder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Published: 2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

9

May and Maude

In only a blink of an eye May outgrew the pink tutu, the white tights and pink ballet slippers. At the end of her fourth year, she’d outgrown an entire wardrobe. By the time she entered kindergarten at age five, ballerina attire had lost its appeal. She’d discovered that dressing like a boy gave her more freedom and that little girl jeans, even peacock-colored ones, were a charm against the jostling of the world.

Tyler missed the ballerina clothes and the dresses with bows. Where was that little girl who awakened his heart each morning, as if the adult heart were an organ that aged and hardened overnight? She’d known what she wanted at three and knew, with equal confidence, at four and now five. Some mornings he thought he was talking to a child twice her age, for his daughter seemed endowed with entirely too many words and mannerisms that made her sound uncannily old. He didn’t want her to grow up so fast or lose one minute of her childhood to the expectations of adults

He felt sure she was receiving all the correct instructions—the dos and don’ts, the table etiquette and courtesies that had somehow been imparted to him and to his parents and grandparents before him—that long trail of teaching that stretched backward in time until it disappeared from sight like a Kansas highway receding westward across the Plains. On the rare occasions she was contrary—“No, Daddy, I hate that dress…These carrots are mushy. You cooked them too long!”—her disobedience was so ordinary it made him laugh.

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