At this point, as The House on Mango Street approaches and then reaches the turning point from which its resolution will emerge, the book's tensions are drawn more clearly than ever. First, Esperanza makes a decision for herself that is a compromise between her emerging sexuality and her sense of the dangers sexuality holds for her. Then, in her mother's story, she clearly hears the terms of her conflict, the choice she must make. But her loyalty to Sally is met by careless betrayal, leading to disaster.
The decision Esperanza makes in "Beautiful and Cruel" is part real choice, part fantasy, and part compromise. Ultimately, she decides not to follow the accepted, culturally sanctioned example of such women as Rafaela, Minerva, Mamacita, Rosa Vargas — even Sally, Marin, and her own sister Nenny, who are waiting for someone to take them away from their childish dependency into what seems to be only an adult dependency. To Esperanza, if this is what "acting like a woman" amounts to, then she will begin to practice "acting like a man," which means in part that she will start letting somebody else carry out her dinner plate for her (for such things are really the only way she can "act like a man" while she is living in her parents' house). But the way Esperanza reaches this decision is interesting: She tells herself she is "ugly" and will not be courted. In part, she may believe this because she fails to meet her culture's standards of "beauty" — she is "skinny" (by which she probably means her breasts and hips are not yet fully developed). However, her "ugliness" seems to consist of failures in grooming, which suggests that Esperanza is using a familiar and helpful ploy to avoid going the way of Sally, Minerva, and the others — she is pretending to be unattractive; thus, she does not have to deal with the consequences of being "pretty."
