The Gift

“Have a good time,” her mother said gently, feeling faintly sorry for her, as they left. In a way, she thought that she should have been allowed to wear the bright blue dress. It looked so pretty on her and she looked so grown up. But there was no point arguing with Bert once he made his mind up. And she knew how concerned he was about his daughters. Two of his sisters had been forced to get married years before, and he had always said to Margaret that he didn't care what it took, it wasn't going to happen to his daughters. They were going to be good girls, and many nice boys. There were to be no tarts in his house, no illicit sex, no wild goings-on, and he had never made any bones about it. Only Ryan was allowed to do whatever he wanted. He was a boy, after all. He was eighteen now, and worked in Bert's business with him. Bert Robertson had the most successful car repair shop in Onawa, and at three dollars an hour, he ran a damn fine business, and was proud of it.

Ryan liked working for him, and claimed he was as good a mechanic as his father. They got on well, and sometimes on weekends, they went hunting and fishing together, and Margaret stayed home with the girls, and went to the movies with them, or caught up on her sewing. She had never worked, and Bert was proud of that too. He was by no means a rich man, but he could hold his head up all over town, and no daughter of his was going to change that by borrowing a dress and going to the spring dance dressed like an oversexed peacock. She was a pretty girl, but that was all the more reason to keep her down, and see that she didn't go wild like his sisters.

He had married a plain girl; Margaret O'Brien had wanted to become a nun before he met her. And she had been a fine wife to him for nearly twenty years. But he'd never have married her if she'd looked like a fancy piece, the way Maribeth had just tried to do, or given him a lot of arguments, the way Noelle did. A son was a lot easier than a daughter, he'd concluded years before, though Maribeth had certainly never given him any trouble. But she had odd ideas, about women and what they could and couldn't do, about going to school, and even college. Her teachers had filled her head with ideas about how smart she was. And there was nothing wrong with a girl getting an education, to a point, as far as Bert was concerned, as long as she knew when to stop, and when to use it. Bert said frequently that you didn't need to go to college to learn to change a diaper. But a little schooling would have been fine to help him with his business, and he wouldn't mind if she studied bookkeeping and helped him with his books eventually, but some of her crazy ideas were right off the planet. Women doctors, female engineers, women lawyers, even nursing seemed like pushing it to Bert. What the hell was she talking about? Sometimes he really wondered. Girls were supposed to behave themselves so they didn't ruin their lives, or anyone else's, and then they were supposed to get married and have kids, as many as their husbands could afford or said they wanted. And then they were supposed to take care of their husbands and kids, and their home, and not give anyone a lot of trouble. He had told Ryan as much, he'd warned him not to marry some wild girl, and not to get anyone pregnant he didn't want to have to marry. But the girls were another story entirely. They were supposed to behave …and not go out half naked to a dance, or drive their families crazy with half-cocked ideas about women. Sometimes he wondered if the movies Margaret took them to gave them crazy ideas. It certainly wasn't Margaret. She was a quiet woman who had never given him any trouble about anything. But Maribeth. She was another story completely. She was a good girl, but Bert had always thought that her modern ideas would cause a lot of trouble.

Maribeth and David reached the prom more than an hour late, and everyone seemed to be having a good time without them. Although they weren't supposed to drink at the dance, some of the boys in her class already looked drunk, and a few of the girls did too. And she had noticed several couples at the dance in parked cars as they arrived, but she had tried not to notice. It was embarrassing seeing that with David. She hardly knew him, and they weren't really friends, but no one else had asked her to the dance, and she'd wanted to go, just so she could see it, and be there, and see what it was like. She was tired of being left out of everything. She never fit in. She was always different. For years, she had been at the top of her class, and some of the other kids hated her for it, the rest of them just ignored her.