Post by ernesto thaddeus m. solmerano on Jun 13, 2007 20:28:14 GMT -5
SHORT STORY ANALYSIS TEST
Direction: Read the short story carefully then answer the questions that follow.
Regal as a Queen
By Morli A. Dharam
On a Monday morning Mrs. Salvadora Baylon emptied the hamper of dirty clothes on the middle of the bedroom floor to sort out the wash. Out in the yard, Tarzan, teased by Rody and Arnolfo, howled in frenzy. She had a sharp impulse to lean out the window, scold the two boys. However, she sank back on her haunches, passed the back of a hand across her brow, and thinking of a length of stick behind the door resumed her task. She was not aware that during the past few seconds of anger the left corner of her mouth had twitched in a nervous tic. Unless she was told of it, she was no more conscious of this than she was about her thin hank of hair that generally unknotted at her nape and loosened down her back like the lank tail of a pony in Mang Gavino's stable across the lot. It was some seconds more before the tic subsided to a slight quiver, altogether stopped. All the while she sorted out the wash.
In the yard the dog's yelps keened to a high metallic whine like a knife scraping across a plate. On his hind legs, his neck straining against the collar that held him attached by a length of chain to a nail bent and hammered into the doorpost, Tarzan struggled to ward off with his forepaws Rody who crouched before him and plucked with a pair of pliers at a white fine tuft of hair from the pink soft skin around his loins. Arnolfo uttered inarticulate chuckles of pleasure, drooled spit down his chin, jumped up and down showing off before an admiring audience of grimy neighbor children.
From a low rattan chair, Lorenzo, seated under the guava tree, laid down the tiny cup he was holding up to a doll's mouth and, his eyes dilated in horror, leaned forward, shouting at his brothers to stop tormenting the dog, his voice piping from the soft red bud of his mouth exactly girlish in timber and pitch. People seeing him for the first time were apt to think him a girl. His skin was fair and fine, he was by far the prettiest of Mrs. Salvadora Baylon's children with his dark silky hair, his thick-lashed slant eyes, his mouth red and pert. People were certain he was a female until they were told the truth when they looked shocked and gathering their wits about them declared with a mirthless snicker: "What a pity!" And peering closer and stroking his cheek in sympathy, their pity increased and their faces assumed aspects of chagrin when the magnitude of his affliction swept up to them like a fume from a leaky sewer. He was a girlish boy who played with a doll and a set of miniature china under the guava tree, seated on a round rattan chair with its legs especially sawed off for him because his limbs were crippled. He was ten but his legs were the bowed unhardened toddling limbs of a two-year-old.
Inside the house a baby shrilled. Pushing on her long bony flanks Mrs. Salvadora Baylon rose from the floor. The tic at the left corner of her mouth started again as she stared down at a long narrow foot that had gone to sleep. Limping to the door she thrust her head out and called toward the kitchen: "Janet! Come here and rock baby to sleep while I settle those hooligans!" Her voice sounded like cracked china. She felt for the length of stick behind the door, descended the three steps of the entresuelo, slipped her feet into a pair of wooden slippers. At the bottom of the steps the slippers were in disarranged company with several children's pairs jumbled with pairs of boys' sneakers kicked off every which way. The pair she wore was a piebald pink faded from a once gleaming red. The leather vamp was cold, waterlogged, frayed from the repeated hammering of it against the soles from where it got unhinged at a sudden sideward pressure. The heels were worn to nubbins. She thought of buying herself a new pair, but always forgot or if she remembered at the market she would find her money needed for something else.
At the kitchen sink Janet lifted the pyramid of breakfast plates and bowls she had just washed to the drainboard outside the kitchen window. She stood the plates in their customary slats in the order her mother had constantly dinned into her-- the plates here, the deeper plates next, then the bowls here, the spoons turned down there, the cups and tumblers hung upside down from the short pickets that fenced the drainboard. She had had her ears tweaked and had listened far too many times in the past to her mother's tirade in the procedure of stacking chinaware to botch the arrangement now. She knew. She was precise. She flipped her wrists shaking the water off them and then started swinging her arms before and behind her to their fullest circuit as in school calisthenics. When she stopped her hands were certainly less wet and whatever dampness remained she wiped away across her dress behind her as she walked into the long hall that served them as living-dining room to go upstairs to the wailing baby.
Janet stooped over the crib and lifted the baby's legs professionally. The baby was dry. She sat on the bed and rocked the cradle, a large woven basket hung over her parents' bed. The heap of soiled clothing on the floor diffused the sour odor of grime and rancid sweat and illusively, like unraveled thread, the soft reek of vomit lifting in the air. She saw her father's two coats of white drill that she remembered he had each used the week before to the meeting of the Democrata party streaked down the front with a drunk's vomit. She tossed a leg and a pair of khaki trousers covered the coats.
She turned to the baby and hummed, trying to soothe it to sleep. She was in the second grade and liked music very much and yet during the music period she did not sing at all. When in the beginning she had sung along with the rest she had made out her classmates sniggering at her. Her teacher sided with the class and snickered at her too. She could never carry a tune. She was a monotone. At her chores inside the house she sometimes forgot herself and hummed under her breath. No one minded her unless it was her father who if he heard her would josh her on her tonelessness. But she did not mind that at all. She loved her father dearly. Aquilino Baylon was a timekeeper in the Bureau of Public Works. Sometimes just to see him at night home from work ignited in her a burst of love like the sparkling red, green flakes of light spiraling across the sky of a holiday evening. She knew her father loved her too, more than he did any of her brothers. He was proud that she was the spitting image of him as Lorenzo was her mother's. She had her father's round face, round dark eyes, small mobile mouth, only she was serious and intense where he had a gay bright insouciance. She helped her mother put him to bed when he was, late at night, brought home soused and limp between two of his cronies from a political meeting of the Democrata party. They had meetings almost nightly and he came home invariably in the same condition. Afterwards when he had opened his eyes she would take to him a cup of hot black coffee.
During Sunday's and holidays his cronies would drop in and he would send her to Pedro Yam's tienda to get on credit a bottle of gin and several sarsaparilla. Or if he were alone in the house and their credit at Pedro Yam's bad he would scrounge around the house for pennies, at times wheedling them out of Lorenzo or Arnolfo. When she had some of her own she offered it to him gratuitously. Then she'd take a tumbler and buy three pennies--or five pennies-- or ten centavos worth of gin and for another three pennies (and no deposit on the bottle because Pedro Yam knew her personally) she'd get a bottle of sarsaparilla.
She hadn't care for it one way or the other, but one day, overriding her mother's objections. He took her in a calesa hired from Mang Gavino's stable across the lot, drove with her down Avenida Rizal, and stopped at Calle Tayuman where they alighted and went into Salud's Beauty Salon. After which he took her to a vaudeville show at the Palace where they sat in the palco and she joined him in whoops of laughter over the comic, a fat tenor with a big paunch named Vicente Ocampo. The show had opened with an "extravaganza" and she was in ruptures over the lights, the costumes, the dancing, the music, especially a song the fat tenor sang in a mildly bawdy manner. When they got out it was night and past suppertime. He took her to the Panceteria Antigua around the corner and bought siopao and fifty centavos worth of pancit canton, especial (balutin mo, madali!). She bought three cones of peanuts for her brothers and they again took a calesa and it was pleasant nestling against him on the long drive home, down Avenida Rizal, on and on, passed the railroad tracks at Calle Blummentritt, then down Calle Antipolo and on to their house in Calle Solis where she drawled to the cochero with an air: "Doon kami sa looban, mama. Ipasok ninyo." And her brothers' and the neighbors' hullabaloo: "Aba! si Janet!" commenting on her altered appearance, praising her, dispraising her, turning her around, pulling her, teasing her, fingering her hair, making much of her croquignole. Thawed out by their attention she allowed herself to be cajoled into giving her rendition of a number in the show and she stood before them and tried to recall how the song by the fat tenor went and remembering a snatch of it she became aware of their silent gasping laughter and she ran to her father who was laughing the most, flung her arms around his knees and hid her face in his lap. She could never carry a tune. She was a monotone. He ran his fingers through her cropped hair, and raised her head to face him while he announced to the circle of his family and neighbors: "You wait and see! When my darling grows up she'll be a fine actress. She was not named after Janet Gaynor for nothing. You all wait and see."
She wondered if she'd grow up to be as pretty an actress as her mother's picture in color in the wide carved frame above the bed. She looked at the picture idly through the dust-specked glass and once more perceived how truly beautiful the woman therein was with the shining coronet resting royally on her high pompadour, the soft pink tint of her skin, the clear brow, the slant eyes and the queenly elegance of her soft blue terno rich with brilliants. On the left hand corner was the white inscription: Queen Salvadora I, Rizal Day Celebration, December 30, 1922.
In the yard Mrs. Salvadora Baylon loomed before the crouching Rody who ducked his head under the shield of an upraised arm as she brought down the length of stick in whacks across the cheek of his buttock.
"That'll teach you to be noisy when baby's asleep. All right. One more noise out of you and I'll knock these pliers on both your heads. Do you hear, Arnolfo?" She brandished at him the pliers she had confiscated. Arnolfo who sat whimpering beside the skulking dog caught his breath and raised dumb eyes at her. She turned and walked toward Lorenzo seated beneath the guava tree surrounded by the children who like the beads of a shattered rosary had scattered when she appeared with a stick in her hand.
Lorenzo was trilling: "I'm Mrs. Montinola and this is my house. Make believe you're my guests and you've just come. All right. Come in. Sit down, please," he said in English as two girls moved forward into his parlor. Then shifting the doll to a cozier snuggle in his arms he fluted in make-believe English: "Eswars eswars ashane baby good morning awresh frowshane sharrap--" while the two girls broke into a carol of giggles.
Mrs. Salvadora Baylon looked at her son and the quiver in the left corner of her mouth softened to a slight tremor. Smoothing away a tuft of hair that spilled down his brow she felt his head cool and silky under her red roughened hand. "Lorenzo," she said gently, "when the sun gets too hot holler for Rody to help you into the house, will you?"
Lorenzo looked up and the soft red bud of his mouth blossomed in a smile white and pretty. "Yes, mother," he said.
Mrs. Salvadora Baylon entered the house sweeping away from damp forehead wisps of scraggly hair. On the dining table stood her husband's square flask of gin now filled with roots and herbs soaking in liquid the deep rich brown of tobacco. It was a brew most bitterly bitter and after she'd quaffed a tiny beaker of it she sat on a bench wiping the tears from her eyes, the bony strength of her knees dissolved into wisps of melting tallow. The potion (to be taken in the morning after breakfast) had been prescribed by Tekla the midwife as a singularly effective contraceptive.
She stirred herself from the bench and as she walked toward the entresuelo her eyes once more caught the disorder of slippers and shoes at the bottom of the stairs. A pyre of irritation streaked within her. "Janet," she whispered shrilly at the top of the short stairs, "don't you sit there gaping like an idiot? Are you forgetting your chores? Your chores?"
With a start Janet rose from the bed and moved past her down the stairs but not before an ear was caught in the pincers of her mother's fingers and given a sharp tweak.
"Those slippers down there... the times I've told you to fix them neatly... not jumbled like that so that stepping on one a while ago I nearly fell and broke my neck. You'd want me to break my neck, do you? Do you?" The tic in the left corner of her mouth twitched again. "Go on, arrange those slippers, sweep the house, fix all disorder your worthless scamps of brothers do nothing else but make all day."
She strode into the bedroom and peered into the baby's crib now covered with a strip of tulle used as a mosquito net. Then she stooped down and gathered the pile of laundry in her arms, went down, carried them out, and dropped them in the tub.
Direction: Read the short story carefully then answer the questions that follow.
Regal as a Queen
By Morli A. Dharam
On a Monday morning Mrs. Salvadora Baylon emptied the hamper of dirty clothes on the middle of the bedroom floor to sort out the wash. Out in the yard, Tarzan, teased by Rody and Arnolfo, howled in frenzy. She had a sharp impulse to lean out the window, scold the two boys. However, she sank back on her haunches, passed the back of a hand across her brow, and thinking of a length of stick behind the door resumed her task. She was not aware that during the past few seconds of anger the left corner of her mouth had twitched in a nervous tic. Unless she was told of it, she was no more conscious of this than she was about her thin hank of hair that generally unknotted at her nape and loosened down her back like the lank tail of a pony in Mang Gavino's stable across the lot. It was some seconds more before the tic subsided to a slight quiver, altogether stopped. All the while she sorted out the wash.
In the yard the dog's yelps keened to a high metallic whine like a knife scraping across a plate. On his hind legs, his neck straining against the collar that held him attached by a length of chain to a nail bent and hammered into the doorpost, Tarzan struggled to ward off with his forepaws Rody who crouched before him and plucked with a pair of pliers at a white fine tuft of hair from the pink soft skin around his loins. Arnolfo uttered inarticulate chuckles of pleasure, drooled spit down his chin, jumped up and down showing off before an admiring audience of grimy neighbor children.
From a low rattan chair, Lorenzo, seated under the guava tree, laid down the tiny cup he was holding up to a doll's mouth and, his eyes dilated in horror, leaned forward, shouting at his brothers to stop tormenting the dog, his voice piping from the soft red bud of his mouth exactly girlish in timber and pitch. People seeing him for the first time were apt to think him a girl. His skin was fair and fine, he was by far the prettiest of Mrs. Salvadora Baylon's children with his dark silky hair, his thick-lashed slant eyes, his mouth red and pert. People were certain he was a female until they were told the truth when they looked shocked and gathering their wits about them declared with a mirthless snicker: "What a pity!" And peering closer and stroking his cheek in sympathy, their pity increased and their faces assumed aspects of chagrin when the magnitude of his affliction swept up to them like a fume from a leaky sewer. He was a girlish boy who played with a doll and a set of miniature china under the guava tree, seated on a round rattan chair with its legs especially sawed off for him because his limbs were crippled. He was ten but his legs were the bowed unhardened toddling limbs of a two-year-old.
Inside the house a baby shrilled. Pushing on her long bony flanks Mrs. Salvadora Baylon rose from the floor. The tic at the left corner of her mouth started again as she stared down at a long narrow foot that had gone to sleep. Limping to the door she thrust her head out and called toward the kitchen: "Janet! Come here and rock baby to sleep while I settle those hooligans!" Her voice sounded like cracked china. She felt for the length of stick behind the door, descended the three steps of the entresuelo, slipped her feet into a pair of wooden slippers. At the bottom of the steps the slippers were in disarranged company with several children's pairs jumbled with pairs of boys' sneakers kicked off every which way. The pair she wore was a piebald pink faded from a once gleaming red. The leather vamp was cold, waterlogged, frayed from the repeated hammering of it against the soles from where it got unhinged at a sudden sideward pressure. The heels were worn to nubbins. She thought of buying herself a new pair, but always forgot or if she remembered at the market she would find her money needed for something else.
At the kitchen sink Janet lifted the pyramid of breakfast plates and bowls she had just washed to the drainboard outside the kitchen window. She stood the plates in their customary slats in the order her mother had constantly dinned into her-- the plates here, the deeper plates next, then the bowls here, the spoons turned down there, the cups and tumblers hung upside down from the short pickets that fenced the drainboard. She had had her ears tweaked and had listened far too many times in the past to her mother's tirade in the procedure of stacking chinaware to botch the arrangement now. She knew. She was precise. She flipped her wrists shaking the water off them and then started swinging her arms before and behind her to their fullest circuit as in school calisthenics. When she stopped her hands were certainly less wet and whatever dampness remained she wiped away across her dress behind her as she walked into the long hall that served them as living-dining room to go upstairs to the wailing baby.
Janet stooped over the crib and lifted the baby's legs professionally. The baby was dry. She sat on the bed and rocked the cradle, a large woven basket hung over her parents' bed. The heap of soiled clothing on the floor diffused the sour odor of grime and rancid sweat and illusively, like unraveled thread, the soft reek of vomit lifting in the air. She saw her father's two coats of white drill that she remembered he had each used the week before to the meeting of the Democrata party streaked down the front with a drunk's vomit. She tossed a leg and a pair of khaki trousers covered the coats.
She turned to the baby and hummed, trying to soothe it to sleep. She was in the second grade and liked music very much and yet during the music period she did not sing at all. When in the beginning she had sung along with the rest she had made out her classmates sniggering at her. Her teacher sided with the class and snickered at her too. She could never carry a tune. She was a monotone. At her chores inside the house she sometimes forgot herself and hummed under her breath. No one minded her unless it was her father who if he heard her would josh her on her tonelessness. But she did not mind that at all. She loved her father dearly. Aquilino Baylon was a timekeeper in the Bureau of Public Works. Sometimes just to see him at night home from work ignited in her a burst of love like the sparkling red, green flakes of light spiraling across the sky of a holiday evening. She knew her father loved her too, more than he did any of her brothers. He was proud that she was the spitting image of him as Lorenzo was her mother's. She had her father's round face, round dark eyes, small mobile mouth, only she was serious and intense where he had a gay bright insouciance. She helped her mother put him to bed when he was, late at night, brought home soused and limp between two of his cronies from a political meeting of the Democrata party. They had meetings almost nightly and he came home invariably in the same condition. Afterwards when he had opened his eyes she would take to him a cup of hot black coffee.
During Sunday's and holidays his cronies would drop in and he would send her to Pedro Yam's tienda to get on credit a bottle of gin and several sarsaparilla. Or if he were alone in the house and their credit at Pedro Yam's bad he would scrounge around the house for pennies, at times wheedling them out of Lorenzo or Arnolfo. When she had some of her own she offered it to him gratuitously. Then she'd take a tumbler and buy three pennies--or five pennies-- or ten centavos worth of gin and for another three pennies (and no deposit on the bottle because Pedro Yam knew her personally) she'd get a bottle of sarsaparilla.
She hadn't care for it one way or the other, but one day, overriding her mother's objections. He took her in a calesa hired from Mang Gavino's stable across the lot, drove with her down Avenida Rizal, and stopped at Calle Tayuman where they alighted and went into Salud's Beauty Salon. After which he took her to a vaudeville show at the Palace where they sat in the palco and she joined him in whoops of laughter over the comic, a fat tenor with a big paunch named Vicente Ocampo. The show had opened with an "extravaganza" and she was in ruptures over the lights, the costumes, the dancing, the music, especially a song the fat tenor sang in a mildly bawdy manner. When they got out it was night and past suppertime. He took her to the Panceteria Antigua around the corner and bought siopao and fifty centavos worth of pancit canton, especial (balutin mo, madali!). She bought three cones of peanuts for her brothers and they again took a calesa and it was pleasant nestling against him on the long drive home, down Avenida Rizal, on and on, passed the railroad tracks at Calle Blummentritt, then down Calle Antipolo and on to their house in Calle Solis where she drawled to the cochero with an air: "Doon kami sa looban, mama. Ipasok ninyo." And her brothers' and the neighbors' hullabaloo: "Aba! si Janet!" commenting on her altered appearance, praising her, dispraising her, turning her around, pulling her, teasing her, fingering her hair, making much of her croquignole. Thawed out by their attention she allowed herself to be cajoled into giving her rendition of a number in the show and she stood before them and tried to recall how the song by the fat tenor went and remembering a snatch of it she became aware of their silent gasping laughter and she ran to her father who was laughing the most, flung her arms around his knees and hid her face in his lap. She could never carry a tune. She was a monotone. He ran his fingers through her cropped hair, and raised her head to face him while he announced to the circle of his family and neighbors: "You wait and see! When my darling grows up she'll be a fine actress. She was not named after Janet Gaynor for nothing. You all wait and see."
She wondered if she'd grow up to be as pretty an actress as her mother's picture in color in the wide carved frame above the bed. She looked at the picture idly through the dust-specked glass and once more perceived how truly beautiful the woman therein was with the shining coronet resting royally on her high pompadour, the soft pink tint of her skin, the clear brow, the slant eyes and the queenly elegance of her soft blue terno rich with brilliants. On the left hand corner was the white inscription: Queen Salvadora I, Rizal Day Celebration, December 30, 1922.
In the yard Mrs. Salvadora Baylon loomed before the crouching Rody who ducked his head under the shield of an upraised arm as she brought down the length of stick in whacks across the cheek of his buttock.
"That'll teach you to be noisy when baby's asleep. All right. One more noise out of you and I'll knock these pliers on both your heads. Do you hear, Arnolfo?" She brandished at him the pliers she had confiscated. Arnolfo who sat whimpering beside the skulking dog caught his breath and raised dumb eyes at her. She turned and walked toward Lorenzo seated beneath the guava tree surrounded by the children who like the beads of a shattered rosary had scattered when she appeared with a stick in her hand.
Lorenzo was trilling: "I'm Mrs. Montinola and this is my house. Make believe you're my guests and you've just come. All right. Come in. Sit down, please," he said in English as two girls moved forward into his parlor. Then shifting the doll to a cozier snuggle in his arms he fluted in make-believe English: "Eswars eswars ashane baby good morning awresh frowshane sharrap--" while the two girls broke into a carol of giggles.
Mrs. Salvadora Baylon looked at her son and the quiver in the left corner of her mouth softened to a slight tremor. Smoothing away a tuft of hair that spilled down his brow she felt his head cool and silky under her red roughened hand. "Lorenzo," she said gently, "when the sun gets too hot holler for Rody to help you into the house, will you?"
Lorenzo looked up and the soft red bud of his mouth blossomed in a smile white and pretty. "Yes, mother," he said.
Mrs. Salvadora Baylon entered the house sweeping away from damp forehead wisps of scraggly hair. On the dining table stood her husband's square flask of gin now filled with roots and herbs soaking in liquid the deep rich brown of tobacco. It was a brew most bitterly bitter and after she'd quaffed a tiny beaker of it she sat on a bench wiping the tears from her eyes, the bony strength of her knees dissolved into wisps of melting tallow. The potion (to be taken in the morning after breakfast) had been prescribed by Tekla the midwife as a singularly effective contraceptive.
She stirred herself from the bench and as she walked toward the entresuelo her eyes once more caught the disorder of slippers and shoes at the bottom of the stairs. A pyre of irritation streaked within her. "Janet," she whispered shrilly at the top of the short stairs, "don't you sit there gaping like an idiot? Are you forgetting your chores? Your chores?"
With a start Janet rose from the bed and moved past her down the stairs but not before an ear was caught in the pincers of her mother's fingers and given a sharp tweak.
"Those slippers down there... the times I've told you to fix them neatly... not jumbled like that so that stepping on one a while ago I nearly fell and broke my neck. You'd want me to break my neck, do you? Do you?" The tic in the left corner of her mouth twitched again. "Go on, arrange those slippers, sweep the house, fix all disorder your worthless scamps of brothers do nothing else but make all day."
She strode into the bedroom and peered into the baby's crib now covered with a strip of tulle used as a mosquito net. Then she stooped down and gathered the pile of laundry in her arms, went down, carried them out, and dropped them in the tub.