Harvor, Elisabeth – “A Day at the Front, A Day at the Border”

It is June. 1969. Ten o’clock on a Saturday morning. Right away we are led around to the back where folding chairs have been set up. The first thing I notice is that we are all wearing pants. There are four pairs of shorts (two pairs short shorts, two pairs Bermudas), one pair of long flowered culottes, two pairs of bell-bottom jeans and one pair of pink stretch pants, positioned neatly to one side of the chair as if the wearer were riding up a ski lift, except that the slope behind her is green, not white. All around us are ice-cream-coloured houses angled in various ways on what appears to be continuous lawn. Along a part of this continuous lawn a man is guiding a power mower. The powerful droning is overwhelming. “Saboteur,” someone says, and in fact his sabotage is so effective she has to say it twice. Not for him to hear. Just for us. Since no-one wants to go over and tell him to stop, there is nothing left for us to do but to hike our chairs into a smaller circle and start to read the literature.

Down on the grass, sandals and handbags are at odds with each other. The anxious matching of purses to shoes of our mothers’ generation is not in evidence here. Handbags are of two types: either handwoven and Greek or hand-tooled and Mexican. If leather, they are of a different leather from their darker or paler leather sandals. Some of the handbags are hanging on the arms of chairs, like horses’ nose bags, stuffed with pamphlets, some are lying on the grass, their flaps back, their inner lips curved with great widths of white, the white of papers, the white of revolutionary material from south of the border. The radical student, imported from Toronto especially for this occasion, is passing some of the stuff around. She is saying that the group in Toronto has split the same way the groups in the States have – into Feminists and Marxist Women. She is a Marxist Woman.

Florence Ferrara is saying that two of her boys have just been landed. Somebody says, Good, somebody says, Hooray, somebody else says, Things looked kind of bad there for a while, it looked like Immigration was going to act tough. Florence Ferrara is one of the women who is counselling deserters from the American Army on how to get their landed-immigrant status. She has been involved in marches, demonstrations and sit-ins for years. She could write a guided tour of all the jails from here to Edmonton. Today she is wearing a batik blouse that the colours have bled out of. I imagine Florence Ferrara sitting in jail and the colours bleeding out of her batik blouse, but it is entirely more likely that this has happened at other times – out in the brilliant sun when she was marching or sitting-in or weeding her organic garden. Florence Ferrara is the oldest woman here, she is also the most beautiful and the most dynamic. Some people think she’s crazy, some people think she’s a show-off, but I am one of her fans. The radical student is about twenty-one and the rest of us must have an average age of thirty-five. All of us who have an average age of thirty-five have small children. Only Florence Ferrara and the radical student are free. We discuss this. “It’s not the truth that shall make ye free,” someone says, “it’s day nurseries.” This brings broad smiles all round. From there the discussion goes predictably on to co-operatives, communes, retreats, abortion. Then Florence Ferrara says that the United States is like the Male – aggressive, power-mad, authoritarian, exploiting – and that Canada, with her long history of welcoming fugitives to the maternal bosom (fugitives running all the way from United Empire Loyalists and slaves to draft resisters and deserters), passive, motherly, dependent, exploited and taken for granted, Canada is the Female.

“And always the last to know,” I say.

“How do you mean, Anna?”

“I was thinking of the revolution,” I say. “After all, here’s all this material from south of the border, these attitudes have been in existence for quite some time there, and not just there, but other places too. Finnish women, Dutch women, Swedish women, have all been familiar with this kind of thing for years”. Everyone nods. “Do you know what my five-year-old son said to me the other day? He said, Why isn’t God a Woman?”

“You should have said, like the suffragettes, She is!”

“What did you say?”

“I said he was an idea.”

“He!”

“Correction: I said God was an idea.”

Liz, sitting beside me says, “Intellectualizing!”

So I decide to stop talking for a while. It is true that my kids are inordinately interested in God. They also ask me, with amazing regularity, Does God fart? Because they know I don’t know. They can ask me questions about sex and know I will tell them everything, I will even dutifully inform them that sex is fun, but when they ask me questions about Heaven they know I’m on unsure ground. Not long ago they had a holiday from school. It was raining and they were with me in the kitchen. Billie was sitting at the kitchen table drawing his masterpieces of monsters and explosions. And Shaun was standing at the kitchen door hating God for making it rain.

“That proves God doesn’t exist!” he cried out in anguish. “If he existed he would know that today is a holiday and that I don’t want rain!”

“Suppose there is a God,” I say, “and I’m not saying that there is or there isn’t, because to tell you the truth, I don’t know,” I say, “but let us say for the purposes of this discussion that there is a God, and let us also say for the purposes of this discussion that one of his jobs as God is to answer people’s prayers. Then suppose there is a farmer, right here in the Ottawa valley, who has been praying for rain, but you, Shaun, also right here in the Ottawa valley, have been praying for sun. What’s poor old God supposed to do? You see, it’s not reasonable to suppose that God could answer everybody’s prayers. People aren’t praying for the same things! There are many people in the world and they aren’t all praying for the same things.”

After this, I go on drying dishes, pleased with myself. I believe I have taught my child the most difficult lesson of life, this lesson being that he is not the centre of the universe. And there is a great silence while Billie at the drawing board, Shaun at the door and I at the dishpan contemplate the wisdom of my words.

“I don’t care!” Shaun cries out suddenly. “I still hate God because he’s ruined my day!”

Can it be that I’ve wasted my breath?

But Billie, who so far has not said a single word, is about to speak. He continues to draw Batman’s cape with five-year-old abandon as he does so. And this is what he says to his older brother:

“It’s not God you should hate, it’s the farmer.”

I tell this to Dr. Grecco, lying on the cold brown leather of his couch. So he can see how brilliant my children are. You might have tried dealing with their feelings, is all he says.

I have always had great faith in the logic and generosity of children. I even once helped to organize an anti-war action around that faith. It was a children’s march held on the day the Canadian Air Force threw its annual air show. The theme of the march was Drop Flowers, Not Bombs, the idea being to embarrass the military with the merciless logic of the child, to wound it with roses in its exposed metal flank. With great enthusiasm I painted piles of posters of airplanes dropping bouquets of roses, zinnias, daisies. But my pièce de resistance was a poster of a general with a black walrus moustache (in India ink) and two small square glints in his roving black India-ink eyes. But instead of having military medals and crosses on his chest he was decorated with carnations and daisies hung from v’s of striped ribbon. Then in large black letters I painted across the bottom: BOUTONNIERES! PAS CROIX DES GUERRES! This satisfied my passion for protest, decoration and bilingualism all in one fell swoop and later, after the march, I tacked the posters to the wall of the children’s playroom where even now I occasionally hear their five-to-eight-year-old friends cry out in astonishment: “Drop flowers, Not bombs. … That’s crazy!” and “What does this one here mean? Is it French or something?” My faith in the logic and fair play of children has thus more than once been ruthlessly slapped down. Of course, one can assume that such children have already been corrupted by the system and are not speaking for themselves.

I come to, back to the meeting, and hear Pink Stretch Ski-Pants talking about orgasms. Their sedative effect. Cheaper and more fun than sleeping pills. She will give her husband perfect freedom to have any number of affairs. If only he will also give her the same. I look carefully at Pink Stretch Ski-Pants. Her skin is speckled as a trout’s with reddish brown freckles. But it isn’t Pink Stretch Ski-Pants who’s at this moment a fish. We are the fishes. She’s throwing us a line – one of the standard lines, true – nicely festooned with bait. And any moment now, we, an upward avalanche of fishes, are going to rise to the occasion and begin, one by one, to bob for the bait. And any moment now, too, that gentle esprit de corps with which we were hatched (like new chicks) from our battered station-waggons will have been distorted into our adhering (like barnacles) to a taut party line. I can see that. I can also see that the analogies are moving from sea to land. Evolution in the Analogy Department. I can make a Saturday’s list:
Barnacles
Chicks
Line
Bait
Fish
and this can go on, quite logically, to
Hook
and that to
Pain (which is French for bread. And that is strangely fitting – since everything has its uses).

For instance, if I, a painter, paint from painful experience, then the pain that feeds the painting buys the bread. You can even go on from there and play little bilingual games; as, for example, “Man does not live by pain alone.”

Now the trend has begun. Several women say that they wouldn’t mind if their husbands had affairs. Freedom for all. A tall dark girl called Karen begins a survey. Would you mind? she says to Florence Ferrara. Florence Ferrara says she would not mind. (Ah, but Florence is safe, her husband wouldn’t dare, Liz signals with her eyes to me.)

The woman in the flowered culottes says she would not mind.

Maria, the radical student, doubts she’ll ever bother to marry, but if she does, No, she would not mind.

Inevitably, Karen is going to get to me.

Liz says she doesn’t know if she would mind or not. She shrugs. She abstains.

The fine-boned girl says she would not mind.

Karen gets to me.

“Anna?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Yes what?” everybody says.

“Yes, I would mind. I mind. I have minded.” I have conjugated minding. I have confronted brave generalities with particular pain. And I have defined myself as the reactionary of this group.

“How did you find out?” is the first question. I shrug.

“Why did you mind?”

“I don’t know why I minded. But I can’t lie and say I didn’t.”

“I cannot tell a lie,” says Karen, morosely, tapping her pencil against her wine-glass stem. “With my little hatchet –”

“That’s it!” Florence Ferrara cries. “even our political anecdotes come from down there!” But who knows any stories about Sir John A. Macdonald? Apocryphal or otherwise?”

“We all know that he drank like a fish—” the woman in the flowered culottes says.

Karen raises her wine-glass that was recently a cherry tree and is now once again a wine-glass. “To Sir John A.—” she says.

“Do you feel possessive about your husband?” Maria is asking me.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“What part of your husband do you feel you own? Arms? Legs? Genitals? What?”

“No part. That’s the point. I’m possessive, and he won’t be possessed.”

Again, “How did you find out?”

“The first time, I got a letter from the woman’s husband.” And now here I am in the group remembering this letter, remembering how it began, “I am sorry to have to tell you – .” Why tell me, then? Why ruin my makeshift, make-believe world? I remember that his handwriting was in a script so perfect it looked as if each letter had been shot from a gun to fall precisely on a series of invisible bull’s eyes on the pale blue airmail paper.

“What was this woman like?”

Her name was Jocelyn. He had made her write my name and address on the envelope. Her handwriting looked like a poorly done piece of knitting – clots of letters like clots of black wool, then the letters unravelling, then being awkwardly knitted up again. Had her husband stood over her, forcing her to humiliate herself with that plaintive uneasy childish scrawl?

“She was young. She admired him very much. She adored him, as a matter of fact.” I speak from the dead centre of experience. But as I do so I am watching their faces all the time, navigating carefully between arousing either pity or contempt. “I was young too,” I say “and did not adore him enough.” I smile. Very soon they will lift my suffering from me and explain it in sociological terms. Maybe that’s what I want. And then I think about how Jocelyn looked. Colourless lashes, watery pig-like blue eyes, a long Renaissance face, long shiny caramel hair, centre-parted. Jocelyn, a mixture of pig and madonna.

“Does your husband require a lot of adoration?”

“Quite a lot.”

“He sounds like a baby.”

“All men are babies,” says Karen.

“He exploited that girl,” Florence Ferrara says.

“Maybe that girl exploited him,” I say. Now I am in the beautiful position of having everyone tear him apart while I defend him. Liz gives me a shrewd look. She goes through the literature. “Hold everything, girls!” she cries. The “girls” is a parody of middle-aged women calling each other “girls.” “Ah,” she says, “here it is, and I quote: ‘Since when do revolutionaries exploit each other?’”

“Was that girl a revolutionary?”

“We were all in the anti-war movement together,” I say.

“Has he had any, ah, liaisons, since?”

“One,” I say.

“That I know of,” I add, striking fear into every eye.

“What was the reason this time?”

“He felt he was getting old.”

“Jesus! He has no monopoly on that feeling!”

“How’d you find out this time?”

“Through movies and dreams.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“No!” says Liz, saving me.

But it’s true. It was through movies and dreams. It was that year he was living away from home, working in Quebec. One weekend when we were lying together in bed he told me that he had been to see the movie Belle de Jour while he was away. It was a movie I had seen earlier. It was a movie that had upset me. We lay in bed and talked about it in detail. You couldn’t tell what was fantasy and what was reality in that movie. Some people said that the key to knowing the difference lay in the sub-titles. Whenever an incident was a fantasy the sub-titles were supposed to have gone into gothic script. What about the audience where the film was made, then, in France, I asked Karl. And where Karl had seen it, in French, without sub-titles, in Quebec? Without sub-titles how did they know? Karl and I disagreed on what was fantasy and what was reality.

I said to Karl: “Belle de Jour had a good imagination. Most of the movie just happened in her mind.”

Karl said, “I don’t agree. I think she really had this crazy gold-toothed lover.”

“And you think this lover shot up her husband and crippled him?”

“Sure.”

“And blinded him?”

“Yes, Your Honour.”

“How do you explain the appearance, then, in advance of the shooting incident, of the wheel-chair? Premonition?”

“Coincidence, Your Honour.”

“There are no coincidences. Look: the camera lingers over a wheel-chair that Belle de Jour and her husband are passing as they’re walking along the street. And later, when the husband has been crippled, he appears to be sitting in the same wheel-chair that a long time before, in happier days, they passed in the street. How do you explain that?”

“In all works of art there are mysteries, Your Honour.”

I felt disoriented. Up to this point I had imagined I was the one on the side of mystery. Now Karl seemed to be changing the terms of reference. I turned anxiously toward him.

“But do you remember what the husband was saying to Belle de Jour around the time they were passing the wheel-chair?”

“No, what?”

“He was saying he thought they should have a child.”

“So?”

“Well, my guess is that Belle de Jour was thrown into a panic by the idea of a child, of pregnancy – or maybe simply by the idea of the kind of sexual relationship that could lead to the conceiving of a child – and so she immediately began to have death-wishes against her husband and her eye fell on the wheel-chair and in her own practical, fantastic way she immediately worked up a fantasy around it.”

“Putting him in a wheel-chair isn’t killing him.”

“It’s putting him into a place where he can’t make her pregnant though. It’s putting him into a place where he can’t make sexual demands. It’s putting him out of commission.”

“I’m sure that problem could be handled.” I felt him smiling in the dark.

“With a little ingenuity,” he said.

“Only with her co-operation, though, Karl.”

“Yeah, that’s true.”

“And the horses were running along with an empty carriage at the end of the movie, remember that. To me, that proves the whole thing happened in her mind.”

“No, I think it really happened. Terrible things can happen in life.”

“Did you see it alone?”

“No.”

“With a girl?”

“With a girl.”

“What’s her name?”

“Her name is Giselle and she’s teaching me French.”

After that, every weekend I said “How’s Giselle?” and every weekend he said “Fine.” When I asked him if he was attracted to her he said no, he wasn’t, she didn’t have any breasts. I have since realized that whenever Karl is attracted to a girl he always tells me she hasn’t any breasts. This is supposed to allay my anxiety. And how did I find out in the end? Well, he more or less told me. He half-told me. He made a lot of jokes. “Giselle is pretty good in bed,” he would say and then he would say he was only joking, that she really wasn’t very attractive. A girl for talking French with, not for sleeping with. But one Sunday morning he was polishing his shoes and he called out to me that during the night he had dreamed he was polishing his shoes. Karl, who never dreams, who says he never dreams, had dreamed he was polishing his shoes. I stood at the stove holding a warm egg wobbling on a spoon. Patches of wet, small allotments on the world of the egg were disappearing into steam. He said that in his dream he kept applying more polish at the same time that he was trying to shine the polish off. This dream seemed to say that he had a conflict. The whole next week while he was away again I kept thinking about his dream and the next time he came home I said, “You’ve been sleeping with her.” And he said – and it was suddenly as if we were reading a script for an afternoon soap opera – “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you for the last three months.” We have these strange dialogues in instalments. Weeks pass between sentences.

Somebody is saying that the pamphlets should also be printed in French, and then somebody says it’s time to go inside for food. We all go in out of the hot sun. On the table there are black olives like round black stones on a wet beach, and sliced tomatoes and a lot of salads. Someone has put on a record of Judy Collins singing the songs of Leonard Cohen. Someone says: “She sings his songs better than he does.” Not true, I think. He sings them the right way, he sings them like a child singing himself to sleep.

“Sit beside me, Liz.”

Liz collapses on the sofa beside me. She is either sunburned or drunk. Maybe both. Liz is both dogmatic and whimsical. It is a combination that alarms and charms me since it is what I also am. On the other side of me the pale fine-boned girl is telling me that her husband has the emotional age of a child of eight.

Karen is pouring more wine and asking more questions. Each time she fills a glass she gets an answer. “How did your husbands feel about your coming here for the whole day?” It turns out that some husbands felt pleased and proud (paternalism!), some felt anxious (with good reason!), some were patronizing and covered their fear with jokes.

“Anna?”

“He was fairly amenable and somewhat amused. He looked a little put upon when I said I wouldn’t have time to serve everybody breakfast and so I said, ‘This isn’t so bad, we’ve been married ten years and this is the first time you’ve had to look after the kids for the whole day,’ and he said. ‘Revenge, Revenge, all women ever think of is Revenge!’”

There are several loud moans. One woman who has recently been beckoning her fingers into the air above her head to indicate “in quotes” now brings her fingers down to her face and beckons them beneath her eyes to indicate “in tears.”

Now Karen is coming around with the desserts and more questions.

“In what ways do your husbands feel critical of you?”

Some women can’t think of any ways their husbands could possibly be critical of them. Incredible. “They lie,” Liz says to me.

The dessert, which looks like dirty chunks of foam, is very good. I can see a dreamy diagnostic look in the eyes of at least two of the women. It looks like they are suppressing an insurrectionary impulse to ask for the recipe.

“Hey, Liz, who’s the one in the flowered culottes?”

“Eunice Something-or-Other. What Eunice really wants is revolutionary carte blanche to make every man from here to Mexico. To hell with her. She isn’t bright enough for this discussion anyway.”

Still, I feel some kind of warmth. Especially toward Liz, Maria the Marxist, Florence the Mad-Sane, and myself. But also toward the fine-boned girl with the eight-year-old husband, Eunice of the Flowered Culottes, Pink Stretch Ski-Pants and Karen, the Dark Lady of the Surveys. I wonder, though, why I’m giving everyone a nick-name. I’ve over-revealed myself, that’s why. It’s a defence. Funny names for the people I’ve told too much to. Now Maria is saying that lower-class boys are sexually very uninhibited because of the communal nature of lower-class life. Very few bedrooms. Maybe everybody in the same bedroom. “The lower-class is very matter-of-fact,” Maria says. “Describing the sexual life of his parents he will simply say: ‘Daddy gets on top of Mummy and they fuck.’” “Or Mummy gets on top of Daddy,” I say. “Anyway, I thought that that was just a myth – the wantonness of the lower classes.”

“Well, there are a lot of myths,” Maria says dreamily. “Take the widespread belief in the tremendous freedom and frequency of sex among kids in their teens and early twenties, for instance. After all, we too have our hang-ups.”

Several of the women look deeply grateful to hear it.

“We should soon be going,” Liz whispers to me.

Oh God, I haven’t told anywhere near the whole truth. It’s true that Karl exploits me, but it is also true that I ask to be exploited. Only Karl and Dr. Grecco know that. Only Karl and Dr. Grecco know that when, in bed, coming toward what might delicately be called the oceanic moment, what I say to Karl is this: “Fuck me! Screw me!” Even, on rare occasions, “Rape me!” We hadn’t been married two weeks before I started saying those words to Karl. At first they had an exciting effect on him. “Thank you for saying the things you said,” he would say afterwards, with great circumspection. Not saying himself what the words were. But after a while he found that he didn’t really like it after all. He began to compliment me on those times I didn’t say anything. “You didn’t have to say anything that time,” he would say. And I know now that I must try to spare him from the words that are both animus and dregs, both dark core and essence, of what’s really been happening between men and women since almost forever. Or is that the way it really is? I think you will argue, Sisters, that to wish for exploitation is to have experienced it, since you can’t wish for what you don’t know. But it’s also true that I cannot tell this story to you, sisters in the struggle, I have only been able to tell it to Dr. Grecco. Who is one of the enemy. Who is one of the arch-enemies. A psychoanalyst. Born a man. Raised an Italian. Trained a Freudian. Three strikes against him from the start. And yet I trust him more than I trust any of you. More even than my three best women friends, one of whom is sometimes Liz. I trust him (and this really is crazy!) even though I know that the circle in which he liberates me is a circle surrounded by walls. I sometimes worry about his wife though. Some of the analytic sessions have been dominated by my concern for her freedom. He implies that this is none of my business and also, perhaps, not my real concern. But if she makes him possible so that he can come to his office and make me possible, who I is to say that my liberation is not at the expense of hers?

Maria is saying that one of the “feely” groups in the United States spent six months talking about masturbation. And in unison we all cry out in astonishment, Six months! which is somewhat easier than crying out in astonishment, Masturbation!

Then we gather together our papers and pamphlets and sunglasses and our beautiful handbags from the lands of coups and revolutions and we all go out to the cars. Maria and I are riding with Liz. Maria climbs into the back. I sit in the front. Liz steers a careful course between children playing ball in suburban streets. Maria lounges in the back seat and sighs. I turn and look at her with wary respect. She yawns, stretches. “Well,” she says, “that really went very well….Of course all the women there were good at verbalizing….All vaguely left-wing…all intelligent…well-educated….”

Oh God, she’s lumping us all together.

“Whaddayah mean, well-educated? University?”

“Yeah. University.”

“I only went to high school,” I say.

“Anna was a drop-out nurse,” says Liz.

“Now there’s a microcosm of the whole male-female thing for you,” I say, “the hospital, and how it’s run. The nurses are exploited mothers and waitresses. The doctors are the bosses. Nurses: women. Doctors: men. And what is every nurse’s dream? To marry a doctor. And what is every woman’s dream? To marry a man.”

“Well you know it’s a funny thing,” Maria says, “but in Russia where most of the doctors are now women, doctors don’t have much status any more. And they are getting lower salaries.”

Incredible, we all say. Incredible.

“I read the other day that some male radical leader – at Berkeley, I think it was – said, “Let them eat cock.” Did you read that?”

“Yeah,” says Maria. “Who needs that? Who needs the social Darwinism of these latter-day male Marie Antoinettes? You should read Marlene Dixon on this.”

“Ah, Mr. Faithful Begg and Mr. Strangeways Pigg, where are you now that we really need you? Where are your representatives in the present age?”

“Who were they?” Liz asks me.

“Two nineteenth-century British parliamentarians who tried to get the vote for women. Bertrand Russell writes about them in Marriage and Morals.”

Liz says: “My problem is I can’t think of any men I really like.”

Maria says: “And what did you do then?”

“When?”

“After you were a drop-out nurse.”

“Oh a little typing. While I sat around on my fanny waiting for Karl to marry me and take care of me forever and ever.”

“You exploited him then.”

“That’s right.”

“And what do you do now?”

“I paint.”

Maria looks as if she will have to know what kinds of paintings I paint before she can decide if this is a good thing. Fair enough. Liz’s car turns into the street where I live. I can see Maria wondering: Social realism or stripes? In fact, Maria, neither one nor the other. I paint people. People who live in an enchanted doom, mired in paint and indecision. But now we’re here. I say good-bye and get out of the car.

In the garden spring is over. The lilac blooms have shrunk into turrets of rusted flowers. Lower down, holes and trenches have been abandoned for yet another approximation of the real thing: the five-o’clock television cartoons. I am very anxious to see Karl. I run up the back stairs, my fat brown legs propelled by guilt and power. Inside, Karl is en route to the bathroom with a pale wet diaper. I can see he is making an effort to greet me with neither pleasure nor reproach. Did he learn this lack of love from me? Or at his own mother’s knee? And in any case, why should I think that somewhere, somehow, some woman has been responsible? The truth is, now that I’m here I wonder why I’ve hurried. All day long (maybe all life long) people have been like mirages. The closer you get to them the more they are not there. I am no exception. Karl is no exception. In the living-room, Shaun and Billie, watching the cartoons, are no exception. Only Tim, standing in the middle of the room, hobbled by his rubber pants, is perhaps an exception. And that part of him that marks him as an oppressor of me and all my kind is hanging there, pristine and perfect and pure. Ah Tim! Someday that lower hanging nose of yours will be able – at moments both convenient and inconvenient – to grow as long as Pinocchio’s. But not till you’ve reached the age of puberty and lies. (And that in itself is a lie. The memory of having been betrayed tends to make me melodramatic.) Tim hobbles toward me. We embrace. We are still closely bound, attached, although the cord has long since been replaced, first by the streams of milk from my breasts, and now by his drool, which has attached itself in an uncertain silver string to my sweater. I feel a terrible warmth for everyone in this room. I feel as if I’m going to cry. Now I’ve knelt to the floor and Tim and I are rocking rhythmically together, cheek to cheek, until Karl nearly intervenes with clean diaper and safety pins. I stand up, then go out to the kitchen to start the supper. And as I am cooking I am sending unheard messages to my family:

Cinderella is home again, People! But she is old and inefficient and her mind’s on other things. She has sisters, too, millions of sisters, but her sisters are not ugly. Still, because she has feelings of guilt because of where she’s been, before the clock strikes twelve tonight she will have confessed all. She got her prince, by the way, and then discovered that that was not the real issue. The shoe didn’t even fit. If the shoe fits, the prince said, Wear it. And everyone, their toes shoved together like fat worms inside that questing testing cone of clear glass, tried to pretend it did – but it didn’t fit anyone, not even that tricky little liar, Cinderella. Besides, Cinderella only married the prince in order to get away from her mother. Although she also believed (maybe still believes) in love love love. And Cinderella’s mother was mean because she wasn’t, among other things, liberated. The difficult words here are: among other things. Tomorrow, when my position will no doubt have altered yet once again, these words may well loom even larger. In the meantime, there are geometric progressions, Children, even in fairy tales. And for the moment (only for the moment, just for today) this story has a moral. The moral lies in what kind of story it is. And the moral is this: If Cinderella and the prince live happily ever after, then this story is a tragedy.