one of them as a bride. They understood that no one wanted to grow old the way cousin Eva did; ugly and alone. In the second part of the story, Maria and Miranda are now ages ten and fourteen, respectively, and they are away from home at the Convent of the Child Jesus in New Orleans. They spend each Saturday sitting in wait to see if their deportment has merited them a visit from a relative and a subsequent trip to the race track where they would each be given one dollar to bet on any horse they chose. Some Saturdays were spent just waiting with no one showing up. This meant that they had received bad grades that week and were being punished for it. One Saturday, however, the girls' father shows up to take them to the track. Uncle Gabriel, who had been married to Amy and was a major character in the family legend, was racing a horse at the track. It was this particular weekend where Miranda realizes that the myths she grew up just accepting as truth were really embellishments and revised history. Uncle Gabriel does not resemble the man from the myth of Aunt Amy at all. He is overweight and a drunkard. At first glance, Uncle Gabriel was described as "a vast bulging man with a red face and immense tan ragged mustaches fading into grey" (197). Maria and Miranda both know that the description that had of Uncle Gabriel was not accurate. "Maria and Miranda stared, first at him, then at each other. ‘Can that be our Uncle Gabriel?' their eyes asked. ‘Is that Aunt Amy's handsome romantic beau?'" (197). The second section also provides a self-realization for Miranda. It is in this section that Miranda realizes that she is never going to become a southern belle. "Her father had said one day that she was going to be a little thing all her life, she would never be tall; and this meant, of course, that she would never be a beauty like Aunt Amy" (196). Since she was small in stature, she makes the decision that she want...
