Sublime

Now the one thing this article didn’t seem to me to consider was how a girl felt.

You see, children were the—the RAISON D'ETRE in this country.

“Well, that’s the way I am,” Edith said. “He’ll have to get used to it, that’s all. That’s the way I am.” “That’s the way she is,” the other woman said.

If Offill’s term has resonated so strongly in recent years, I think it is in part because it points to the ways in which the culture punishes women for being something other than small and silent.

For five or ten years they worked together, growing stronger and wiser and more and more mutually attached, and then the miracle happened—one of these young women bore a child.

On a hot pan she watches the eggs grow white and harden.

I

I AM HERE against my good judgment. I understood long ago just what it would be like; I knew that the weekend would be, above all, over. At home at my desk I doodled on tablets and imagined myself and the child standing side by side on the riverbank behind the cottage in the woods, standing on the riverbank and watching the blossoms float down, or