Michael Malone - Weebly

couldn't win it, you could just keep day by day trying
not to lose it. Holding on wears you down. For her it
was awful, but I didn't know it then."
Polly wondered if Luke knew it, recalling now that,
like her dad when he had been at school, Luke was
always at work somewhere—bagging groceries,
delivering papers, shoveling snow. Funny, she'd often
envied him those male prerogatives, those victorious
proofs of independence and self-sufficiency. Funny, she
had never thought that he worked because he had to,
that he was trying not to lose a war. Their history
teacher, Ms. Rideout, who had lost heart and quit, had
told them, stuttering, that America believed in a race up
a ladder and warned you that if you weren't fit enough
to grasp the top rung, you had no one but yourself to
blame. She said this was a cruel myth, that some people
had no time even to reach for the bottom foothold up;
they were too busy scrambling in the ground for food.
Polly remembered how Luke had argued with the
teacher and reminded her of many heroes of the
American Dream who had awakened like Carnegie,
richer than fabled kings. And the teacher had reminded