She would be expected
to explain satisfactorily why she had left the real West for the mimic
West of Hollywood. She did not acknowledge to herself that she also
could not face the admission of failure to carry out what she had begun.
She had told her dad that she wanted to fight with him, even though
"fighting" in this case meant washing the coarse clothing of her father
and Frank, scrubbing the rough, warped boards of the cabin floor, and
frying ranch-cured bacon for every meal, and in making butter to sell,
and counting the eggs every night and being careful to use only the
cracked ones for cooking.
She hated every detail of this crude housekeeping, from the chipped
enamel dishpan to the broom that was all one-sided, and the pillow slips
which were nothing more nor less than sugar sacks. She hated it even
more than she had hated the Casa Grande and her mother's frowsy
mentality. But because she could see that she made life a little more
comfortable for her dad, because she felt that he needed her, she would
stay and assure herself over and over that she was staying merely
because she was too proud to go back to the old life and own the West a
failure.
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