She was sitting in the grass, merely wondering, when Lenore lighted another cigarette and drifted away into the house. Nora kept trying to visualize the extremities involved in going “too far”—trying to associate the imaginary behavior of Lenore with the rather nebulously described activities of the ladies in Sin on Seven Streets, until Queenie made his pounce at the bird, and missed.
The bird merely gave a little squeak and flew away.
Queenie sat down and groomed his tail, glancing once at Nora with the look of a cat who was fooling anyhow and merely enjoyed scaring hell out of birds. Nora went home. She stopped at the dining-room doors, but they were drawn together. She listened to voices. “Henry, you’re the leader here! I say we need help from Washington and you ought to phone.”
“I say, let’s start a campaign to boycott all advertisers in the Transcript. We’ve given years, here, to this organization. It’s intended to save Green Prairie in case of an emergency. We cannot allow a newspaper to ridicule us, censure, blame…!”
Newspapers, Nora thought loftily, going away, do what they please.
She went upstairs slowly. Music drifted from Ted’s radio in the attic. The day, all of it, had blanked from Nora’s mind, save for one thing: her braids. She felt she was a neglected child and would have to take care of herself. She went to her mother’s sewing basket, found the big shears, and cut off both braids, hastily lest she change her mind.
They did not cut easily. She had to hack them off, one strand at a time. When she finished—when she held in her two hands the light-brown pigtails, still beribboned at the ends, tinged here and there with a slightly greenish cast from their contact with grubby hands—an expression of purest delight set Nora’s light-blue eyes dancing. Site had done it. They were done for. She had done it by herself, because it was her hair and it was unbearable, and nobody else but herself cared particularly what happened to her. She ran skipping to see the effect in the long mirror in her mother’s room.
And when she saw, she was devastated. In her mind’s eye, she had overlooked the present phase—the ragged, wrong-length hacked locks that were not a recognizable bob of any kind but merely the plain evidence of devastation. A long, low wail escaped Nora and rose to a penetrating wail of dismay.
Downstairs, Henry sat with some thirty men and women, block wardens, section heads, neighbors, old friends, most of them his own age, many of them people with whom he’d gone through grammar and high school in Green Prairie. They were angry, intent people, who felt themselves grossly abused and made ridiculous before their own community. Now, as they talked, they valiantly uttered what they had thitherto felt only a little, or fractionally, or not at all: that their work in Civil Defense was of critical importance because of its purpose.
Most of the men were employed in good positions, like Henry Conner; most of the women were housewives. But Ed Pratt, sitting in a kitchen chair (hastily transported for the meeting by Ted) with his hat still on the back of his head and a toothpick in his teeth, was a house painter. Joe Dennison, his broad backside propped on the window sill and his blue shirt open, owned and ran a bulldozer, contracting privately for its use. Ed and Joe were joint heads of the section’s demolition squad.