C4 antho - Chamber Four

Peacocks
________
by L.E. Miller
from Ascent
We had values. We had Le Creuset pots. We had fold-out
couches in our living rooms, where we slept with our husbands
at night. Beside these couches, we had books stacked
on the floor: Modern Library editions of Kafka and James
Joyce and George Sand. Beneath these high-minded selections,
we had Lorna Doone and Anne of Green Gables,
touchstones from a time when reading in bed was our guiltiest
pleasure.
We had blue jeans long before other women wore them.
We had degrees in literature and anthropology and biology,
hard-won in night classes at City College. We had aspirations
but did not yet have careers. We had cookbooks with French
recipes that confounded us. For a few years, we tried to muddle
through until we gave up on the fancy dinners our children
despised and turned back to the roasted meats of our
childhoods.
And we all had children: two or three apiece, whose
strollers we tucked beneath the stairways in our buildings.
* * * *
We were individuals, of course, but we seemed so much
alike, I still speak of us today in the plural. Each of us had
endured bookish, lonely childhoods in the outer boroughs;
we had been the pride and bane of our immigrant parents’
lives. When we found one another along the broad avenues