Still Life
But no matter what she did, it was not enough to sustain her. Her restlessness showed in her short temper and her long silences, in the way she seemed to grow colder, more detached, less focused every year. I don’t know what her dreams were, and I am not sure she knew either, at least not in the way women of later generations have known that they wanted to be veterinarians or cops, wanted to live in San Francisco or train for the Olympics. She just wanted excitement, I think, and romance. She wanted to be Bette Davis. She wanted Paul Henreid to put two cigarettes between his lips, light them both and pass one to her. I
nstead, she found herself behind the wheel of a DeSoto waiting to pick up her husband at a Long Island train station, living in a split-level, standing in line for her “house money” twice a month. And so, slowly, over the years, she began to forget who she was. She stopped painting. She stopped playing the piano. The dressmaker’s dummy went down to the basement, and the sewing machine got picked up by a Salvation Army truck one day. She stopped doing projects. She stopped volunteering. Instead, she sat in the club chair by the picture window reading Sidney Sheldon novels, chain-smoking Tareytons and drinking vodka straight, no ice, all afternoon.
She was living a life she chose by acquiescence rather than decision. She stayed because that’s what women of her generation did, because she didn’t know she had other choices, because she was selfless, because she was scared, because she was lazy. She stayed out of love. She stayed out of a failure of imagination.