The Unfortunates. Laurie Graham

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       ONE

      It was just as well I had ripped off my Ear Correcting Bandages. Had I been bound up in my usual bedtime torture-wear, I would never have heard my mother’s screams.

      The bandages were part of my preparation for the great husband hunt. I was only fifteen years old, but my mother recognized a difficult case when she saw one. She had taken up the challenge the day after my twelfth birthday and never spared herself since.

      ‘The early bird, Poppy,’ she always said, when I complained. ‘The early bird.’

      And so, assisted by my aunt, she began an all-fronts campaign to catch me a worm.

      I was forbidden candy and other waist-thickening substances. I was enrolled for classes in piano, singing and cotillion dancing, and spent an hour every day in a backboard, during which I practiced French pronunciation whilst a series of Irish maids tried to straighten my hair, or at least, defeat its natural wiriness into the kind of soft loose curls preferred by husbands.

      On alternate days my neck was painted with Gomper’s Patent Skin Whitener, to coax out of it a certain oriental tinge. The label advised using the paste no oftener than once a week. But as my mother said, what did they know? They hadn’t seen my neck.

      As to my nose, she knew the limits of home improvements. I was to go to a beauty doctor in Cincinnati, as soon as I was sixteen, and have a little cartilage shaved off.

      Meanwhile she applied herself to the correction of my protruding ears. She designed an adjustable bandeau to hold them flat against my skull while I slept and had the Irish girl make them up for me in a selection of nightwear colours.

      ‘So you can choose, you see?’ Ma explained. ‘According to your frame of mind.’

      And, gauging my frame of mind all too well, my aunt informed me that some day, when I had grown in wisdom, I would be grateful for their efforts.

      The alternative to all this was that I would be left an old maid.

      I knew what an old maid was. My cousin Addie was being one up in Duluth, Minnesota, riding around all day with her dogs and not wearing corsets. And I knew what marriage was too. My sister Honey had recently married Harry Glaser and as soon as the marrying was done she had to leave home and put up her hair. As far as I could see she wasn’t allowed to play with her dolls anymore, and she had hardly any time for cutting out pretty things for her scrapbook. She had had to go to tea parties all the time, but never appear too eager about cake, and whenever she came to call Ma would make mysterious inquiries.

      ‘Honey,’ she’d whisper, ‘how are Things? Are you still using the Lysol?’

      To avoid the fate that had befallen Honey, I decided on stealthy sabotage rather than outright rebellion. As long as things appeared to be satisfactory my mother took them to be satisfactory. Surface was her preferred level. Hidden depths were unattractive to her, therefore she behaved as though they did not exist. So, every night, I