Текст к заданию 2A
“Where do they get vegetables like this?” Minnie asked. She saw the other women feeling the tomatoes, sampling the lush bunches of grapes. “The prices are the same as we pay. But what a difference.”
Mrs. Jameson laughed a little. “It’s worth driving over here, isn’t it?” she said. “We used to live not far from here. That’s how I happen to know about it.” But Mariana suspected this store was not unique, that in gringo neighborhoods everything was a little better.
At the meat counter, Minnie was even more impressed. She examined carefully all the meat behind the glass, and then asked the butcher to cut some fillet mignon. Mariana couldn’t ever recall her mother order that, and she noticed it was the most expansive meat. She thought she understood why she ordered it.
On the way back to East Los Angeles, Mariana sensed her mother felt defensive and perhaps a little offended because the gringa had shown her a better way to do something, had shown that shopping near home was not good enough for someone with taste.
She heard her mother say, “Next week Pete’s buying me a new Cadillac. Then I’ll take you shopping with me,” and Mariana had never seen such a forced smile on her mother’s face.
“Oh, that’ll be nice,” Mrs. Jameson said.
Richard Vasquez