She still makes pies, but they are nothing like what she'd dreamt of as a girl. Ellen dumps flour and lard into her little bowl and stirs. When it seems properly mixed, she dumps it onto the table, hardly caring that she's rolling it out over the dust. Flour is getting too hard to come by anyways to waste it on tabletops. She picks up the dough and sets it to the side, sweeping up the floury dust on the table into a small pile. She smiles, poking a little hole in the top, remembering one of the happiest times of her life.
After we finished the worst pies ever baked, I remembered something.
"Papa, you said you had a surprise for me. What is it? Did you find more money on the street?"
He laughed. "No, Nellie. Better'n that. Your mother's sister Nettie is coming to town. I got word from her that she just couldn't stay away and let you grow up a heathen." He threw a letter on the table. "I, ah, had the landlady read it for me." He looked away, embarrassed. Aunt Nettie had started to teach me how to read, in one of her few attempts to teach me to be lady-like. I didn't much like Aunt Nettie, but she had money, and whenever she came to visit, we ate a little better. I felt silly now for wasting money on the pie.
"When's she supposed to get here?" I asked, trying not to sound disappointed. Just then, there was a knock at the door to our little room, and before I could answer it, in swept Aunt Nettie.
My aunt was a force to be reckoned with. She was squeezed into what she supposed were fashionable clothes, and wore the most gigantic, moth-eaten hat. She fluttered a little fan in her white-gloved hands. The gloves were a little too small for her large, sausage-like fingers, and tended towards the gray side. I never saw her frequently enough to know for certain that she only had one pair, but I suspected as much.
"My my," she sniffed, looking around the room. "No one even opens a door for a visitor around here. Or stands when a lady," she smoothed her dress, "enters a room." My poor father stumbled out of his chair to stand, trying to show good breeding.
She flounced through the apartment and sat down in my papa's chair. "Come here, Ellen," she cooed. "Let Aunt Nettie have a look at you." I stood and hesitantly made my way over, feeling more than a little like a fly on a spiderweb. "I won't bite, child. Let me have a look!" I stood in front of her.
"Well, isn't she a scrawny thing." She reached up and pinched my cheek between two of those huge fingers. "Needs more meat on her bones, that's what the gentlemen like."
"Aunt Nettie, I'm not…"
"Hush, child. Didn't I teach you to speak when you're spoken too?" She tutted. "Very well. Let me talk to your papa for a while. Run along." I stayed where I was. My home was only one room. Where else would I go? I started to wash up the supper dishes, while Nettie lectured my father on how "cleanliness is next to godliness," and "suitable upbringing for a young lady" and other such talk.
"Come here, Ellen. Your father and I have something to tell you," Nettie demanded. Obediently, I stood by her chair.
"It has come to my attention that this little room is no place for a young lady. While I'm sure your father has done his best," she sniffed as she took in the surroundings, clearly implying that his best was not good enough, " it is much more appropriate for a young lady to spend her time amongst other ladies of good breeding, in order to be suitable to join society." I looked from her to my father, not understanding.
"What your Aunt Nettie is trying to tell you, love, is that you're going to go stay with her for a while. It's better for girls to be around women, and since your mother died, there aren't any women around to teach you to be a lady." My papa looked down, not meeting my eyes, and scraped some dirt out from under his fingernail.
"And this is the surprise, Papa? I'm going to stay with Aunt Nettie? I have to leave you?" I was horrified. My papa was the most important person in my life, and now I would have to leave him! "Can't you come with us?"
"Oh no, Ellen. That would be quite improper. Your father has his job at the docks to think of," looking reprovingly at me. "But think of it this way. You'll get to live by the seaside, in my home. The sea air is healthy for a young lady, much better than the air in the city." She sniffed again.
And so the next morning, I'd packed up my few belongings, and my father took me to the train station, where the huge black engine sat, belching steam. Aunt Nettie bundled me into the cramped passenger car, and we left my father behind. I waved as long as I could see him, but he stood, hands in the pockets of his breeches, head hanging.
Life with Aunt Nettie wasn't as horrid as I'd originally imagined, but it wasn't easy either. Aunt Nettie had a house near the seaside, but it was old, and as she put it, she simply "wasn't up to as much housework as she used to be," and certainly couldn't afford a maid. So it was up to me to keep up appearances, tying rags over my dresses to keep them from getting too dirty while I swept and dusted.
Mornings were spent visiting neighbors, or having lady callers. Aunt Nettie would gossip, while I sat quietly with my hands in my lap and tried to appear a lady. But in the afternoons, worn out from all the socializing, Aunt Nettie would take a nap. And then I had my chance.
I would leave the house, and walk down to the seaside by myself. Dressed in my drab clothes, no one ever gave me so much as a second look, which was how I liked it. I'd get down to the sand, and kneel down and just run my hands through it. While the seagulls called, and the waves boiled over the shore, I built sand castles, and sand pies, and dug holes, and collected seashells. It was so difficult to bring myself back to Aunt Nettie's house after that, but I always had to be cautious, lest she wake before I returned, or worse, before I'd dusted all the sand off my clothes and hands.
"Someday," I would vow to myself, "I will have my own house by the sea, and I will go down to the water every day for as long as I like. And someone else can do the dusting!"
Ellen sighs as she begins to pound the dough with her rolling pin, then sets to work making it as thin as possible. She stops often to rest her arms, feeling wearily as if the pin were made of stone. She still longs for her own house by the seashore, but that dream is as hopeless as trying to keep her thinning, wild hair in respectable curls.