If ideas of physical beauty are destructive, so are ideas of romantic love. Once Pecola starts to menstruate, she knows that physically she is ready to have a child, but Frieda tells her that first she must get someone to love her. Pecola’s tragedy is that she does not know how to do that. She is aware of the choking sounds and silence of her parents’ lovemaking and the commercial sex of the three prostitutes—China, Poland, and Marie—who live upstairs, but her father’s attempt to show his love for her gives her a painful initiation into sex as devastating as his own was. In trying to express his love for her, Cholly destroys her: “He, at any rate, was the one who loved her enough to touch her, envelop her, give something of himself to her. But his touch was fatal, and the something he gave her filled the matrix of her agony with death. Love is never any better than the lover.”