I come from a family of girls, sisters who always have had secrets. These are secrets we tell only each other, but first, we extract the usual promises of a close-mouthed reception. Like most women must, we have become expert listeners who don`t preach. These secrets range from confessions of drinking too much at an office party to enjoying a kiss from a married man to flirting with even more serious dangers like … we decide there isn`t any more serious danger than kissing a married man.
In these moments of conversation turned confession, we become heroines among ourselves, exploring the slight dramas of our daily lives. We are women who haven`t slipped quite yet into middle age and are pretending for a moment to move daily in a world of glamor and romance-forgiving each other the truth; that is, all of us actually trod along in the slow, slow lanes of fidelity and household routines.
There isn`t much of a trick to this nurturing of heroic personas, to making these mostly false true confessions. It takes but a germ of truth and a large dash of fantasy to bring our secrets to that point when they must be shared, and in the telling, the truth becomes larger than life-larger than the incidents themselves. In these moments we become heroines again. Harmless heroines. For we are not dangerous women: she-devils, Jezebels, Scarletts. We are grown-up girls who, when younger, didn`t have the individual or collective nerve to sow many wild oats-and so now our wayward oats trickle from us in minor acts of rebellion, in over-eating, in the imaginative retelling of our quiet lives.
We are girls together who can listen selectively, knowing that when Mary Ellen says her fingernails caught fire and she had to put them out in a mixed drink, that maybe one fingernail lit up-no damage was done. These confessions replace the early dreams of becoming famous singers, or the mothers of brilliant children. In our stories, we are portrayed as heroines who really did have a dozen boyfriends, instead of girls who dated the same guy for five years and then married him. These guys were good boys, workers, young men who get excited over pole bean crops and the size of backyard tomatoes. They are our loves, the men whose company we still enjoy.
On the brink of middle age, we talk about `what if.` What if we had studied science instead of music, business instead of English, fallen out of love before we said, ”I do”? But these questions do not imply that we are unhappy. The discussions remind us that we made choices. What might have been isn`t what we wanted. We have what we want, and part of what we want is who we are as sisters. When we are together, we are joined by blood and memory in a sisterhood much older than feminism. We believe in the identity of ”us.” And when we are together, this identity can survive romance and excitement-even danger.
I confess that the kiss from a married man was not stolen after all; it was given in the presence of his wife, who is a friend of mine. As for Mary Ellen, when she isn`t setting her fingernails on fire, she grows purple tulips. PK is thinking of changing jobs. Julie did accidentally set her backyard on fire a few weeks ago. The blaze began in her trash can, the result of live embers lifted from her fireplace. The first scorched her grass and ruined her trash can. The next day, her story was reported in a forthright fashion in the local newspaper, and when I read it, I was not surprised that it was not at all like the story she had told to us.
