Rose Mellie Rose

"After Miss Martha and I left the Continental, we walked along the boulevard of the port like last Sunday. I talked about Pim. I also told her we went down to the restrooms and what we did in the stall. Miss Martha smiled and said I was the right age for that. She squeezed my arm very hard."

I think this quote intrigued me the most out of what I read. In the world created by the story, it seems like a perfectly acceptable thing for a 12 year old girl to lose her virginity and for her to make no big deal about it- even going on to be grateful for the trucker for taking her virginity. I couldn't figure out if Mellie just didn't know better, or its an acceptable thing in the world of the book- but this paragraph made me think it was the latter. Miss Martha brought her along with her to the dance knowing what was going to happen in the restroom. Did she do this because she already knew that Mellie wasn't a virgin and she needed someone to share her shame with? Or is it a fairly normal thing for little girls to have sex with older men at dance clubs or at all in this world? The sentence that says that Miss Martha told her she was at the right age for sex and then squeezed her arm very hard made me think that she knew what she was doing with Mellie was frowned upon. It would be helpful if we had other character's insight on this whole situation as well, because at this point it seems like the only characters that know about Mellie's sex life are the truck driver, Miss Martha, and Pim; And they all see nothing wrong with it. Mellie never tells Yem about her sexual experience, and the book never even gets into her sexual experiences with him even though he ends up becoming her husband. Was she ashamed to tell him? I don't really think she understood the concept of sex. For her it was as normal as any other human experience.