What Do Women Want

her body was padded without being obese. “There were about twelve guys around her,” Passie said. “She was nude. Big breasts. And vocal, because these men were playing with every existing part of her.”
    Four decades earlier, when the worshipfully maintained mansions of her hometown were opened to the public, as was the tradition for one spring week each year, Passie had been selected to be a hostess. Once, great quantities of cotton had been shipped through this hub of the South. More than a century later, in the late nineteen fifties and early sixties, when Passie was in high school and college, the town poured its fragile pride into this annual display. She sat on one of the porticos. The crepe myrtle was in bloom: blossoms of purple and white and watermelon clouded the lawns and cascaded along the walkways. Her hoop skirt—pale pink—billowed. Her long gloves were dyed to match. “It feels surreal,” she said now, “to have grown up in that time, in that place.”
    At twelve, in the Southern Baptist church where her father taught Sunday school and where she sang in the choir, she had stepped to the front of the sanctuary to have the minister press his hand to her head and lay her backward in the baptismal tank, to be saved. In her late teens, she pledged to meet the standards of the Little Southern Debutantes: to “at all times bring honor to herself” and to “be representative of the wholesome American girl.” At the area’s best women’s college, she was taught how to swivel modestly in and out of an automobile, how to pause for a gentleman to guide her by the arm down a set of stairs, and how to pose in a group photograph if she was in the front row, with feet turned and hands folded and positioned to one side, so that the body suggested an elegant and demure S-shape below a straight, poised neck. “To this day I look at pictures and think that if women would just sit properly they would look so much better.”
    And during college, she was pinned. This was the pulse of those four years. First, she would begin to date a boy from the state university nearby. Then he would give her a lavaliere with his fraternity letters to wear proudly around her neck. “Will you be pinned to me?” he would ask in the next step, and if she said yes, he would affix his fraternity’s embossed shield to her blouse above her heart. About a week later he and all of his brothers would appear at the foot of her dormitory porch. She would come outside, and they would serenade her with their fraternity song: “And the moonlight beams on the girl of my dreams.”
    “I had a traditional vision of life, a fairy princess vision. My desire was for a Prince Charming who lived in a palace to sweep me off my feet. As a child, desire meant the wish for a new dress. As a teenager, it was wanting the right date for parties. At college, it was collecting the right fraternity pin and falling in love. You have your song and you dance at the parties on football weekends and you think he’s going to be your husband. Lust didn’t factor into it that much; it wasn’t the driving force.”
    Nelson arrived as a blind date for her roommate, when, after her graduation, Passie was teaching French at a college a few states away. She had broken with convention in this way, choosing a career rather than marrying quickly, just as she had pushed against convention earlier: winning public speaking contests as an undergraduate and getting herself elected president of her state’s Youth Congress, the first woman ever to hold the office. When the date with the roommate didn’t work out, Nelson and Passie discovered, over Cokes, a little of what they had in common: loving theater (he sold silos for a living and acted with the town’s amateur theater company) and classical music. “I found him an appealing person. And he was nice-looking. Not terribly handsome. But appealing. By that time I’d dated my share of men who were self-absorbed. He did things to make me feel special. I traveled with the foreign languages team, and if I was coming home late, he would have brought over food and left it for me in the refrigerator. He liked to leave my radio tuned to an Indianapolis station that drifted in from three hundred miles away.”
    As she recalled this, we were in their kitchen, Passie, Nelson, and I. Nelson sat in a leather wing chair, while she, on the other side of the counter, made a brisket for dinner and brownies for desert. Their