In Twenty Years I've Never

Few People, Very Few, Have A Treasure, And If You Do You Must Hang Onto It. You Must Not Let Yourself Be Waylaid, And Have It Taken From You.

I Would ... Go Up To The Mailbox And Sit In The Grass, Waiting. ... Till It Came To Me One Day There Were Women Doing This With Their Lives, All Over. There Were Women Just Waiting And Waiting By Mailboxes For One Letter Or Another. I Imagined Me Making This Journey Day After Day And Year After Year, And My Hair Starting To Go Gray, And I Thought, I Was Never Made To Go On Like That. ... If There Were Woman All Through Life Waiting, And Women Busy And Not Waiting, I Knew Which I Had To Be.

I Was Amazed As People Must Be Who Are Seized And Kidnapped, And Who Realize That In The Strange World Of Their Captors They Have A Value Absolutely Unconnected With Anything They Know About Themselves.

She Could Not Explain Or Quite Understand That It Wasn't Altogether Jealousy She Felt, It Was Rage. And Not Because She Couldn't Shop Like That Or Dress Like That. It Was Because That Was What Girls Were Supposed To Be Like. That Was What Men - People, Everybody - Thought They Should Be Like. Beautiful, Treasured, Spoiled, Selfish, Pea-brained. That Was What A Girl Should Be, To Be Fallen In Love With. Then She Would Become A Mother And She'd Be All Mushily Devoted To Her Babies. Not Selfish Anymore, But Just As Pea-brained. Forever.

Now I No Longer Believe That People's Secrets Are Defined And Communicable, Or Their Feelings Full-blown And Easy To Recognize.