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quick and shallow. At last the screen door of Juanita’s house slammed gently. No doubt the old people turned in their beds with relief. Home at last was the tall, curly-haired, curious voluptuary; asleep once more the swollen and coarsened daughter. It all had to be paid for by Juanita, every penny of the cost. She wept from hangovers, from misery, from confusion, the terrible confusion of a distorted world that was darkening around her. And finally she wept from venereal disease. Sympathy and bewilderment among all the women in her house. Juanita is not feeling well today, her raw-boned mother, large and neat in a long, full housedress, would say. Maybe she’s catching a little cold. Scornfully the neighbors would say: She’s caught more than a little cold this time.
    Not too many years later Juanita died of prodigious pains and sores; she went out in unbelievable suffering.
    I like to remember the patience of old spinsters, some that looked like sea captains with their clear blue eyes, hair of soft, snowy whiteness, dazzling cheerfulness. Solitary music teachers, themselves bred on toil, leading the young by way of pain and discipline to their own honorable impasse, teaching in that way the scales of disappointment.
    The paradox of the woman who reaches her true spinsterhood only after she is at last married and settled. She takes command and reaches a state of dominating dependency to which only she has the clue. How confident her reign, how skillful the solitary diplomacy, the ordering of the future and control of the present. She gathers in revenues and makes dispensations, carefully, never forgetting that she is alone.
    Or when spinsters come in pairs, sometimes brothers and sisters, Clifford and Hepzibah. Beneath the pruderies and reticence, the humble acquiescence, the thin authority, the veils of a legendary chagrin d’amour , lovers unknown killed in wars: a tremendous turbulence rushes forth in season. Northern lights, comets.
    Society tries to write these lives before they are lived. It does not always succeed. I have known from home the anarchic sexual secrets of plain, unmarried schoolteachers, some with their thick saving accounts, their accumulation of house lots and rooming houses, their hoarded legacies from parents, aunts, and uncles. Often these women tricked fate by their hidden inclination to men of bad character, younger than themselves: a yard man, a drifter, ex-convict. Gentlemen do not appeal to all women.
    Je t’adore, brigand .
    My own affectionate, tireless mother had nine children. This fateful fertility kept her for most of her life under the dominion of nature. It was a thing, a presence, and she seemed to walk about encased in the clear globe of it. It was what she was always doing, and in the end what she had done.
    Sometimes in the dark of my own nights her life would come back to me. When the counterpane was thrown aside, the light of the Hotel Empire shining red through the bamboo slats. Love and alcohol and the clothes on the floor; perfumes. No, no it was impossible that it was the same. Impersonal history, that which spreads over all, had altered the bedroom, the lovemaking.
    My mother’s femaleness was absolute, ancient, and there was a peculiar, helpless assertiveness about it. Not the assertiveness of opinion, for she seemed to have no opinion about it and would, even when she was past seventy, merely shrug and looked perplexed when the subject of her own childbearing was raised. Or sometimes she might say: It did not make me miserable, if that’s what you want to know.
    The assertiveness was merely the old, profound acceptance of the things of life. It was modest, smooth and soft as a handful of cotton. Without plan, without provision. All of that comes later as the body and even the soul go about the daily caring for the results of this seemingly natural acceptance.
    And she was nothing at all like the cheerful twos and threes of the 1950’s, all of them living out their