Free The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

orange-pineapple, Maureen with black raspberry.
    “You should have got some,” she said. “They had all kinds. Don’t eat down to the tip of the cone,” she advised Pecola.
    “Why?”
    “Because there’s a fly in there.”
    “How you know?”
    “Oh, not really. A girl told me she found one in the bottom of hers once, and ever since then she throws that part away.”
    “Oh.”
    We passed the Dreamland Theater, and Betty Grable smiled down at us.
    “Don’t you just love her?” Maureen asked.
    “Uh-huh,” said Pecola.
    I differed. “Hedy Lamarr is better.”
    Maureen agreed. “Ooooo yes. My mother told me that a girl named Audrey, she went to the beauty parlor where we lived before, and asked the lady to fix her hair like Hedy Lamarr’s, and the lady said, ‘Yeah, when you grow some hair like Hedy Lamarr’s.’” She laughed long and sweet.
    “Sounds crazy,” said Frieda.
    “She sure is. Do you know she doesn’t even menstrate yet, and she’s sixteen. Do you, yet?”
    “Yes.” Pecola glanced at us.
    “So do I.” Maureen made no attempt to disguise her pride. “Two months ago I started. My girl friend in Toledo, where we lived before, said when she started she was scared to death. Thought she had killed herself.”
    “Do you know what it’s for?” Pecola asked the question as though hoping to provide the answer herself.
    “For babies.” Maureen raised two pencil-stroke eyebrows at the obviousness of the question. “Babies need blood when they are inside you, and if you are having a baby, then you don’t menstrate. But when you’re not having a baby, then you don’t have to save the blood, so it comes out.”
    “How do babies get the blood?” asked Pecola.
    “Through the like-line. You know. Where your belly button is. That is where the like-line grows from and pumps the blood to the baby.”
    “Well, if the belly buttons are to grow like-lines to give the baby blood, and only girls have babies, how come boys have belly buttons?”
    Maureen hesitated. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “But boys have all sorts of things they don’t need.” Her tinkling laughter was somehow stronger than our nervous ones. She curled her tongue around the edge of the cone, scooping up a dollop of purple that made my eyes water. We were waiting for a stop light to change. Maureen kept scooping the ice cream from around the cone’s edge with her tongue; she didn’t bite the edge as I would have done. Her tongue circled the cone. Pecola had finished hers; Maureen evidently liked her things to last. While I was thinking about her ice cream, she must have been thinking about her last remark, for she said to Pecola, “Did you ever see a naked man?”
    Pecola blinked, then looked away. “No. Where would I see a naked man?”
    “I don’t know. I just asked.”
    “I wouldn’t even look at him, even if I did see him. That’s dirty. Who wants to see a naked man?” Pecola was agitated. “Nobody’s father would be naked in front of his own daughter. Not unless he was dirty too.”
    “I didn’t say ‘father.’ I just said ‘a naked man.’”
    “Well…”
    “How come you said ‘father’?” Maureen wanted to know.
    “Who else would she see, dog tooth?” I was glad to have a chance to show anger. Not only because of the ice cream, but because we had seen our own father naked and didn’t care to be reminded of it and feel the shame brought on by the absence of shame. He had been walking down the hall from the bathroom into his bedroom and passed the open door of our room. We had lain there wide-eyed. He stopped and looked in, trying to see in the dark room whether we were really asleep—or was it his imagination that opened eyes were looking at him? Apparently he convinced himself that we were sleeping. He moved away, confident that his little girls would not lie open-eyed like that, staring, staring. When he had moved on, the dark took only him away, not his nakedness. That stayed in the