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Authors: Tarashea Nesbit
Tags: Historical
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potty-trained. Rose complained that Starla was taking a lead role in the social activities while she was surely the better qualified.
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M ANY OF US preferred the wives who seemed to have natural curiosity, who asked, How do you think that is constructed? and instead of calling for their husbands to fix the stove, pulled it out from the wall and first attempted to discover how it operated on their own.
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A T NIGHT, AS our husbands snored, we read books on loan to us from friends, sent to us by our parents, checked out from the library, mailed to us as part of our Book-of-the-Month Club subscription. We read stories of women who followed their husbands on unknown adventures, like Osa Johnsonâs I Married Adventure , about a Kansas teenager who married a photographer. Together they traveled to Borneo, Kenya, and the Congo, then, in their fifties, near retiring, pondering whether they should have had children, their commercial flight to California crashed. Her husband died, but Osa lived another twenty years. Had we married mis adventure? Because we were no longer state citizens, we could not legally vote, get divorced, or obtain a fishing license in the state of New Mexico.
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T HE S TRANGER , T HE Little Prince , For Whom the Bell Tolls , Madame Bovary , Native Son , The Grapes of Wrath . Deep within ourselves, we were waiting for something to happen. Our greatest, grandest, most prolonged story: waiting. At times, we became tired from the reading, we wished the next day was already over. But eventually the muscles in our necks relaxed and we slept.
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M ORNINGS WE WOKE and hoped something would arrive for us, but rarely did anything arrive. Because we felt powerless, we went to war over milk shortages, water shortages, maid services, and unfair housing assignments. We said, Someone with one child should not have more help than someone with two. We said, A family that needs only two bedrooms should not get a home with three . The commissary should carry bottled artichoke hearts, the movie schedule should be changed, the neighborâs dog snapped at our child and should be put down, we need a shoe repair service, we need faster mail service, the public laundry is overcrowded, the rifle range is too close.
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W E THREATENED TO strike unless more maids became available. We tried to master cooking on a temperamental stove but we had no eggs and we howled until the veterinarian brought us some. We commissioned our boys to build us a golf course and when we needed to make a fence around it we stole wire from the Army supply office. We created an orchestra, a square dance club, a jazz band, and a tennis court. We got things by calling a meeting. We got things by being devious.
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W HEN THE GROUND trembled and the air smelled like fireworks we knew our husbands, or the military, were trying out explosives. The scent got on our clothes and we could smell sulfur on our hair for days. We tried to control our responses to the sounds in the distance, how they brought the war in close to us and made us worry and we said we would no longer let them do that, even when they rattled our walls, we must not get too upset. We tried to control our impulse to shudder and then one day we noticed we no longer asked What was that? and neither did our children.
Talk
W E DREW CLOSER and lowered our voices.
W E BEGAN BY saying what seemed like nice things. Shirley looked pretty in her white gloves today at the commissary. But that compliment suggested other things, that Shirley was stuck-up, that Shirley thought she was too good to be seen with dirty fingernails like the rest of us.
T O MAKE ONESELF the hero through a pregnant pause. We leaned in close to hear more, our eyes alight. And then what happened, and then what happened .
W E MOVED FROM saying nice things to suggesting the not so nice: Did you see the priest whispering in Dorothy’s ear last night? Don’t you think he was standing awfully
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M ANY OF US preferred the wives who seemed to have natural curiosity, who asked, How do you think that is constructed? and instead of calling for their husbands to fix the stove, pulled it out from the wall and first attempted to discover how it operated on their own.
Â
A T NIGHT, AS our husbands snored, we read books on loan to us from friends, sent to us by our parents, checked out from the library, mailed to us as part of our Book-of-the-Month Club subscription. We read stories of women who followed their husbands on unknown adventures, like Osa Johnsonâs I Married Adventure , about a Kansas teenager who married a photographer. Together they traveled to Borneo, Kenya, and the Congo, then, in their fifties, near retiring, pondering whether they should have had children, their commercial flight to California crashed. Her husband died, but Osa lived another twenty years. Had we married mis adventure? Because we were no longer state citizens, we could not legally vote, get divorced, or obtain a fishing license in the state of New Mexico.
Â
T HE S TRANGER , T HE Little Prince , For Whom the Bell Tolls , Madame Bovary , Native Son , The Grapes of Wrath . Deep within ourselves, we were waiting for something to happen. Our greatest, grandest, most prolonged story: waiting. At times, we became tired from the reading, we wished the next day was already over. But eventually the muscles in our necks relaxed and we slept.
Â
M ORNINGS WE WOKE and hoped something would arrive for us, but rarely did anything arrive. Because we felt powerless, we went to war over milk shortages, water shortages, maid services, and unfair housing assignments. We said, Someone with one child should not have more help than someone with two. We said, A family that needs only two bedrooms should not get a home with three . The commissary should carry bottled artichoke hearts, the movie schedule should be changed, the neighborâs dog snapped at our child and should be put down, we need a shoe repair service, we need faster mail service, the public laundry is overcrowded, the rifle range is too close.
Â
W E THREATENED TO strike unless more maids became available. We tried to master cooking on a temperamental stove but we had no eggs and we howled until the veterinarian brought us some. We commissioned our boys to build us a golf course and when we needed to make a fence around it we stole wire from the Army supply office. We created an orchestra, a square dance club, a jazz band, and a tennis court. We got things by calling a meeting. We got things by being devious.
Â
W HEN THE GROUND trembled and the air smelled like fireworks we knew our husbands, or the military, were trying out explosives. The scent got on our clothes and we could smell sulfur on our hair for days. We tried to control our responses to the sounds in the distance, how they brought the war in close to us and made us worry and we said we would no longer let them do that, even when they rattled our walls, we must not get too upset. We tried to control our impulse to shudder and then one day we noticed we no longer asked What was that? and neither did our children.
Talk
W E DREW CLOSER and lowered our voices.
W E BEGAN BY saying what seemed like nice things. Shirley looked pretty in her white gloves today at the commissary. But that compliment suggested other things, that Shirley was stuck-up, that Shirley thought she was too good to be seen with dirty fingernails like the rest of us.
T O MAKE ONESELF the hero through a pregnant pause. We leaned in close to hear more, our eyes alight. And then what happened, and then what happened .
W E MOVED FROM saying nice things to suggesting the not so nice: Did you see the priest whispering in Dorothy’s ear last night? Don’t you think he was standing awfully
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