she remembers the way she used to sit and fume while her mother did dishes she remembers watching her father slouched oblivious at the head of the table with his paper folded over and his eyes half-lidded and she just stewing in a torrent of restrained invective watching her mother clean those dirty plates and feeling nothing so much as pity and a kind of disappointment all the while wanting to ask her mother how how could you let this happen how could you let yourself be lowered to this and now it has happened to joanna and she is asking the same questions of herself and she has no better answer now than she ever heard .