New gloves, part two

Leta wanted a pair of ladies' dress gloves for her fourteenth birthday. When she told her mother, the older woman looked her in the eye and said, “You’re not old enough.”

For Julia, that was the end of the conversation, but Leta felt the sting of her mother’s comment deeply. She decided then and there that someone was going to give her dress gloves for her birthday, even if that someone was herself. When she went to work at the hat shop, the next afternoon, she priced the item. They were more expensive than she thought, but she was undeterred.

Later that evening while her family was  in the living room, Leta stole into her bedroom and retrieved her small tin box from where it was hidden in her larger box of dolls. Even though she had outgrown playing with them a few years ago, she convinced her mother that the toys had sentimental value, and she wanted to share them with her own daughter some day. However, her primary reason was to designate a safe place for her secret money.

As she was still young, had not been working very long and liked the chocolate-peppermints that the grocer recently began to sell, her financial reserve was quite small, not enough to purchase the gloves she wanted. Still, she was close. She went from the bedroom to the living room with her slate to review her financial capability to  purchase the gloves for herself.

“What are you doing, Leta?” her sister Louise asked after a time.

“Math,” Leta answered without looking up.

“Math?” her mother inquired. “I thought you finished your homework already?”

“Yes, I did, mostly,” Leta answered vaguely, for she did not want to lie to her mother, nor did she want her mother to become too suspicious. “I just wanted to figure out one more problem.”

“There’s not a lot of light, so don’t strain your eyes,” Julia warned.

“I won’t. I’m writing big.”

“Plus, I need you to stitch the sleeves on that blouse for Mrs. Wilbur.”

“Yes, Mother.”

For the next fifteen minutes, Leta completed her mathematical task and created her plan. If she focused and took on a couple of side income-earning projects, she could purchase the gloves within a month.

While her birthday had come and gone, the desire for a fine pair of ladies’ gloves had not, and on a bright spring morning, Leta put on her gloves for school.

“It was a mistake,” she told me over seventy years later. “I went to school with country girls and boys who had no interest in sophisticated ladies’ gloves. They laughed and teased me for trying to be better than they were.”

“That must have been rough,” I said sympathetically.

“It was, my darling, but I wouldn’t let those mean, rough children break my character. I wore those gloves the entire day. And at the end of it, I think a lot of them sort of admired me for not cracking under the pressure.”

“Grandma, that’s terrific!” I exclaimed.

“It also gave me an advantage with some of the older boys,” she added. “They started to look at me differently. Of course, this made my mother and your Uncle Aaron very anxious. And truthfully some of the boys that were attracted to me were rough and vulgar—farmers, workmen and such. But I learned that I deserved to be treated like a lady.”