Here they lie iogether, living embodiments of two of the Seven Deadly Sins, but he knows his avarice is no offence because he never spends any money and she knows she is not greedy because the grub she shovels down gives her dyspepsia.
She employs an Irish cook and Bridgets rough-and-ready hand i fulfils Abbys every criterion. Bread, meat, cabbage, potatoes -- Abby was made for the heavy food that made her. Bridget merrily slaps oable boiled dinners, boiled fish, eal mush, Indian pudding, johnnycakes, cookies.
But those cookies. . . ah! there you tou Abbys little weakness. Molasses cookies, oatmeal cookies, raisin cookies. But wheackles a sticky brownie, oozing chocolate, then she feels a queasy sense of having gone almost too far, that sin might be just around the er if her stomach did not immediately palpitate like a guilty sce.
Her flannel nightdress is cut on the same lines as his nightshirt except for the limp flannel frill round the neck. She weighs two hundred pounds. She is five feet nothing tall. The bed sags on her side. It is the bed in which his first wife died.
Last night, they dosed themselves with castor oil, due to the indisposition that kept them both awake and vomiting the whole night before that; the copious results of their purges brim the chamber-pots beh the bed. It is fit to make a sewer faint.
Back to back they lie. You could rest a sword in the space between the old man and his wife, between the old mans bae, the only rigid thing he ever offered her, and her soft, warm, enormous bum. Their purges flailed them. Their faces show up deposing green in the gloom of the curtained room, in which the air is too thick for flies to move.
The you daughter dreams behind the locked door.
Look at the sleepiy!
She threw back the top sheet and her window is wide open but there is no breeze, outside, this m, to shiver deliriously the s. Bright sun floods the blinds so that the linen-coloured light shows us how Lizzie has goo bed as for a levée in a pretty, ruffled nightdress of snatched white muslin with ribbons of pastel pink satin threaded through the eyelets of the lace, for is it not the "naughty ies" everywhere but dour Fall River? Dont the gilded steamships of the Fall River Line signify all the squandered luxury of the Gilded Age within their mahogany and deliered interiors? But dont they sail away from Fall River, to where, elsewhere, it is the Belle Epoque? In New York, Paris, London, champagne corks pop, in Monte Carlo the bank is broken, women fall backwards in a crisp meringue of petticoats for fun and profit, but not in Fall River. Oh, no. So, in the immutable privacy of her bedroom, for her own delight, Lizzie puts on a rich girls pretty nightdress, although she lives in a mean house, because she is a rich girl, too.
But she is plain.
The hem of her nightdress is rucked up above her knees because she is a restless sleeper. Her light, dry, reddish hair, crag with static, slipping loose from the night-time plait, crisps and stutters over the square pillow at which she clutches as she sprawls oomach, havied her cheek oarched pillowcase for ess sake at some earlier hour.
Lizzie was not an affeate diminutive but the h which she had been christened. Since she would always be known as "Lizzie", so her father reasoned, why burden her with the effete and fancy prolongation of "Elizabeth"? A miser ihing, he even cropped off half her name before he gave it
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