A mother and child ride a streetcar, and the mother turns the ride into a lesson. She is not teaching arithmetic or manners. She is teaching attention. "Look at his hands and tell me what is his job," she begins, treating strangers as puzzles to be read from a rough palm, red eyes, or a gold ring on a thumb. By the last stanza the game has become something larger, a way of thinking about what it means to see another person, and to be seen.
The poem's most distinctive feature is its voice. The mother's English drops its linking verbs and articles: "Is enough like Polish to make me laugh," "Remember story." The title places the scene in Cleveland in 1930, and the speech suggests, judging by the grammar and by her ear for accents, that English is not her first language. Pratt never makes this a joke or a pity. The short, plain sentences give the mother authority. She speaks in commands ("Look," "See," "Remember," "Hold my hand"), and each one is a small act of love. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The five-line stanzas follow the rhythm of talk, with its darting questions and half-finished guesses.
Those guesses matter. The mother reads people like a detective, but she is often unsure. "I think her husband is maybe dead" is hedged twice, with "I think" and "maybe." Her judgment of the man in slippers wobbles most. First: "Is he stupid, or did he forget?" Then she looks again, sees his clothes, and revises: "He is not poor." The line is blunt, almost a verdict, but it shows her correcting herself in front of her child. She teaches that looking is not a single glance. It means noticing, doubting, and noticing again. She also tells the child not to stare at the person behind them ("no, don't look"), so curiosity is balanced by tact.
The centre of the poem is the story of the pear. The mother remembers thinking her father "did not miss one pear," and being called a "foolish girl." His answer is that God "looked down from heaven and saw me / like God saw Adam." The comparison echoes the Eden story of stolen fruit and hiding. In her father's version, being seen means being caught: "everything God sees." Yet she passes this on to her own child in a different spirit. Just before the story she has said "always there is something new to see," and just after it she picks out the shining eyes of two women and decides they are girlfriends rather than sisters. Being watched, in the old story, was a threat. Watching, as she practises it on the streetcar, is closer to tenderness. The poem lets both meanings stand, and the mother's habit of noticing seems to come from the same place as her father's warning.
The ending changes the tone. "Here is hospital so we get off." Nothing is explained, but the next line, "Your papa / will be happy. You make him smile," suggests the child's father is inside, and that the whole lesson in looking may have been a way of passing a worrying journey. That is an inference, since the poem never says why he is there. What we can say is that the mother has filled the ride with small mysteries so the child has something to hold besides fear. The final line, "Big step down. Hold my hand," works literally, as a child getting off a streetcar, and also as the step into whatever waits in the hospital.
The poem is significant because it finds a whole moral education inside an ordinary scene. It gives dignity to a speaker whose English is imperfect and whose wisdom is not. It also shows that paying attention to strangers is a skill, and that it can be an act of love. By the end we have watched the mother as closely as she watched everyone else, and we are likely to see her more kindly than she saw the man in slippers.