Unit 1: Vocabulary from Readings 5

Maggie will be nervous until after her sister goes: She will stand hopelessly in corners, homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs, eyeing her sister with a mixture of envy and awe.

You’ve no doubt seen those TV shows where the child who has “made it” is confronted, as a surprise, by her own mother and father, tottering in weakly from backstage.

You’ve no doubt seen those TV shows where the child who has “made it” is confronted, as a surprise, by her own mother and father, tottering in weakly from backstage.

She pins on my dress a large orchid, even though she had told me once that she thinks orchids are tacky flowers.

I am the way my daughter would want me to be: a hundred pounds lighter, my skin like an uncooked barley pancake.

Have you ever seen a lame animal, perhaps a dog run over by some careless person rich enough to own a car, sidle up to someone who is ignorant enough to be kind to him? That is the way my Maggie walks.

I see her standing off under the sweet gum tree she used to dig gum out of, a look of concentration on her face as she watched the last dingy gray board of the house fall in toward the red-hot brick chimney.

There are no real windows, just some holes cut in the sides, like the portholes in a ship, but not round and not square, with rawhide holding the shutters up on the outside.

Furtive boys in pink shirts hanging about on washday after school.

“I couldn’t bear it any longer, being named after the people who oppress me.”

Hakim-a-barber said, “I accept some of their doctrines, but farming and raising cattle is not my style.”

She jumped up from the table and went over in the corner where the churn stood, the milk in it clabber by now.