Living Out Loud Read Online Free PDF

laugh but never likes to feel laughed at, he looked in the mirror and saw someone he was not. “I look really great,” he said.
    (By contrast, the little one was a bunny, quite himself in artificial white pile. “Hop, hop, hop,” he said for three hours. “Hop, hop, hop,” he said for two weeks afterward. Of course, I chose the costume, and when he chooses for himself perhaps he will choose something more contrary to his essential nature. Like a clerical collar. This year he is a black cat, which is just right.)
    This year the elder boy is a witch, which is just right, too. He says he loves witches because they are mean and nasty, although he is not mean and nasty at all. He will wear a black robe, a pointed hat, and wrinkles made of eyeliner. A broom but no wig. “I am a boy witch,” he says with dignity.
    I, of course, go along for the ride, at least for the next few years, until the day when they say “Mo-om!” in that unpleasant, whiny voice and march off by themselves with their pillowcases, their voices muffled behind their masks. Last year I thought seriously about dressing up as something for the sake of verisimilitude—I’m short, I could pass!—but abandoned the idea in a rare moment of complete and total common sense. This year I will not be so foolish.
    The other day on the telephone a friend recalled one of the saddest moments of her youth: the night when her sister came home in tears and announced that she had become too old to go out on Halloween. I remember it, too—that night looking into the mirror at a Gypsy, with hoop earrings and a rakish headscarf and an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse, and knowing in a kind of clear, horrible grown-up way that it was something I was not. And getting door duty from then on in, giving outM & M’s to kids who were rowdy, jubilant, somehow freed from themselves, and happy not to find behind the door one of those moms who gave out apples. I’ve been on door duty every Halloween since. Last year I suppose I wanted to make one last stab at the magic. But the wand’s been passed.

   BEING   
       A        
WOMAN

WOMEN ARE JUST BETTER

    M y favorite news story so far this year was the one saying that in England scientists are working on a way to allow men to have babies. I’d buy tickets to that. I’d be happy to stand next to any man I know in one of those labor rooms the size of a Volkswagen trunk and whisper “No, dear, you don’t really need the Demerol; just relax and do your second-stage breathing.” It puts me in mind of an old angry feminist slogan: “If men got pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” I think this is specious. If men got pregnant, there would be safe, reliable methods of birth control. They’d be inexpensive, too.
    I can almost hear some of you out there thinking that I do not like men. This isn’t true. I have been married for some years to a man and I hope that someday our two sons will grow up to be men. All three of my brothers are men, as is my father. Some of my best friends are men. It is simply that I think women are superior to men.There, I’ve said it. It is my dirty little secret. We’re not supposed to say it because in the old days men used to say that women were superior. What they meant was that we were too wonderful to enter courtrooms, enjoy sex, or worry our minds about money. Obviously, this is not what I mean at all.
    The other day a very wise friend of mine asked: “Have you ever noticed that what passes as a terrific man would only be an adequate woman?” A Roman candle went off in my head; she was absolutely right. What I expect from my male friends is that they are polite and clean. What I expect from my female friends is unconditional love, the ability to finish my sentences for me when I am sobbing, a complete and total willingness to pour their hearts out to me, and the ability to tell me why the meat thermometer isn’t supposed to touch the bone.
    The inherent