The Summer Without Men

soul that has been mutilated. The crooked Abigail is trembling. I notice how skeletal her arms are under her dragon blouse. I suffer irrational worry that the strength of her emotion will shake her fragile bones to the breaking point, and I deflect the conversation to men and women and the question of constancy, one close to my heart. What do the discussants think of Anne’s argument about women and men in her conversation with Captain Harville?
     
“Yes, we certainly do not forget you so soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You are forced on exertion. You have always a profession, pursuits, business of some sort or other, to take you back into the world immediately and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions.”
    With the exception of myself, there wasn’t a woman in the room under seventy-five. The two schoolteachers, three housewives, and part-time greeting card wit may all have been born in the Land of Opportunity, but that opportunity had been heavily dependent on the character of their private parts. I remembered my mother’s words: “I always thought I’d go on and get at least a master’s degree, but there was so little time and not enough money.” A sudden image of my mother at the kitchen table with her French grammar book came back to me, her lips moving as she silently repeated the verb conjugations to herself.
    Harville brings out the BIG GUNS to refute Anne, albeit in a highly civil manner.
     
“… I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman’s inconstancy. Song and proverbs, all talk of woman’s fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men.”
“Perhaps I shall.—Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.”
    Of course, the pen that inscribed those words was in Austen’s hand, and a neat hand it was, too. The woman’s handwriting had all the clarity and precision of her prose. And the pen, as it were, Dear Reader, is now in my hand, and I am claiming the advantage, taking it for myself, for you will notice that the written word hides the body of the one who writes. For all you know, I might be a MAN in disguise. Unlikely, you say, with all this feminist prattle flying out here and there and everywhere, but can you be sure? Daisy had a feminist professor at Sarah Lawrence, most decidedly a man, married, too, with children and a Yorkie, and on the rampage for women, a noble defender of the second sex. Mia might really be Morton for all you know. I, your own personal narrator, might be wearing a pseudonymous mask.
    But back to our story: Not surprisingly, the women of Rolling Meadows are in Anne’s corner. Even our Peg of Permanent Sunshine allows that there were times at home with her five “wonderful children” when she longed for some diversion, when her feelings preyed upon her, and then, in a moment of startling revelation, the resident optimist confesses that there had been days when she had been “pretty darned tired and blue,” and that in her experience far more men have the gift for forgetting women than women have for forgetting men. Weren’t they the ones who turned around and got married just months after their wives “passed away”? (I suppressed comment that Boris hadn’t even waited for me to die.)
    Betty offers humorous quote: “I am woman. I am invincible. I am pooped!”
    Laughter.
    Rosemary notes the exception to the rule of women waiting, pining, hoping: Regina.
    Titters.
    My mother rises to fellow Swan’s defense: “She had fun, though!”
    Abigail nods, regards my mother lovingly, and says in a loud, if hoarse voice, “Who’s to say we shouldn’t all have had more fun!”
    Who is to say? Not I surely. Not my mother, not Dorothy, not Betty, not Rosemary, not even Peg, although the latter proffers the buoyant comment that they are having fun, well, aren’t they, right now, at this “very minute”? And the carpe diem sentiment does, in fact, brighten the entire room, if not literally, then figuratively.
    After that, there was some pleased nodding, some silent sipping, and some tangents onto the movie being shown in the screening room at seven, It Happened One Night,