Ranch Girl Essay

961 Words4 Pages
Ranch Girl What can I say about Ranch Girl? For one, she’s a girl with no name. Not once, does the author give her a name. At first it seems funny but as the story progresses, you see that it’s meant to take you from a third person narrative to almost a first person. It’s as if the Ranch Girl has stepped outside her body and is narrating the story herself, but with a hint of unfamiliarity. It’s about a young white girl, not rich, but not poor either, but because she was raised on a ranch, she considers herself just a little lower class than most middleclass white kids she goes to school with and not once has a girl from school, come out to her house. Her dad is the foreman on Ted Haskell’s Running H ranch. Both her dad and Haskell’s wives have run off, to leave the two men raising teen daughters on their own. While the hired hands live and eat in the bunkhouse, their foreman has his own house and usually falls asleep sipping a can of beer while eating crackers and cheese. The lord of the manor, Old Man Haskell, grills up steaks from his cows, the only thing he really knows how to cook. Why his foreman and his daughter aren’t invited up to dine with the Boss and his daughter remains a mystery. The two girls have been friends since they were knee high to a saddle bronco but Carla Haskell, like the girls at school, have never been inside the foreman’s house, set a piece down the road from her luxurious main ranch house. You see, at the foreman’s house, the walls are just unpainted chipboard and the bathroom only has a toilet, not even a tub. If it wasn’t for the pink blanket and the plastic horse models on the walls of the foreman’s daughter’s room, you’d never known a girl lived in the little foreman’s house. From the first time she met Suzy Haskell, the ranch owner’s third wife, an ex-hippy with a Ph. D. who reads tarot cards, she is told by Suzy
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