In Every Woman's Life . . . by Alix Kates Shulman

Author:Alix Kates Shulman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media

Back in the study, Rosemary stares vacantly at her proof. Sex, sex! Once it had seemed her very ticket to freedom, her Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria, her Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights. But in the end, it was mostly trouble. Generation after generation: guilt, shame, the monthly pregnancy scare, cystitis (“the honeymoon disease”) with its wake of pain, incontinence, and bright orange pee from the peridium pills. Sometimes the pleasure she touted to her kids didn’t seem worth the trouble. Even when, mellowed by wine in their darkened hideaway, she finally lets her hips go with Peter, it’s always without memory. She can recall the image of her joy—the twining of their arms and legs, the music on the stereo, even the fantasy rolling slowly through her mind—but not the feel of it. How disappointing to find that after all her liberated pretensions, her deepest secret is still, after all, sex.

She turns out the lights, content to have averted disaster for another day. How she longs to protect her children from the ravages of shame, wishes she could teach them everything she knows; but despite the upheavals of the past decades, it’s still impossible to speak truly of sex. As impossible as it was to speak as a child of the thrill of seeing two dogs copulate. No matter how hard she tries, all she ever finds in her mouth are the same pristine or sugared words she’s heard all her life, the safe mouthings of motherhood. The day she announced at dinner in preachy tones that henceforth condoms would be kept on the bathroom shelf beside the tampons for anyone who wanted them, the whole family roared. And when she retells her sisters’ cautionary tales, the children grow bored with the distant past. As for the shuddering thrill she feels when Peter’s cock fills her mouth and he rubs his lips and tongue across her swollen vulva—these secret joys she may never acknowledge, much less describe. Tiptoeing past Spider’s room, she listens to him sleep. The best she can hope for, she decides, is to get Harold and the world to leave the children alone on the improbable chance that they can learn the secrets for themselves in time.

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