A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert

The Barnes & Noble Review

The catalyst for Kate Walbert's novel A Short History of Women occurs surprisingly languidly as British suffragette Dorothy Trevor Townsend slowly wastes away in a hospital during the opening months of World War I. She's alone -- most of the doctors have gone to treat soldiers, and her children are prohibited from visiting. She leaves them as orphans -- her daughter Evie stays in England at a boarding school, while Evie's brother Thomas is shipped to San Francisco.

Dorothy has chosen to starve herself for the cause of women's rights, undertaking a hunger strike after a lecture for women (given by a man) attempts to answer the "woman question." (As in, what will we do with all of those women? They just keep wanting stuff.) In a mark of the fluid narrative style which Walbert employs throughout the novel, Dorothy's fatal decision to stop eating is never documented. Rather, Walbert uses her deft touch and impeccable prose to guide the reader to the quiet moments in Dorothy's hospital room, back into the memory of her childhood, and forward to her final day alive. But this is just the beginning of the author's graceful shuffling of times and perspectives, as the author follows five generations of women as their lives intersect with the evolving permutations of the "woman question."

Walbert's most emblematic and beautiful writing occurs in the sections devoted to Dorothy and her thoughts. As Dorothy starves to death, Walbert's prose is ethereal and focused on delicate, poetic images contrasted with small shots of angry humor.

Dorothy hallucinates her childhood friend, Hilde, visiting the hospital:

Once, even, she rose from the rain, drifting in with the breeze of it; someone had propped open the window with a stick.
"Hilde?"
"Yes, Mrs. Townsend?" The attendant shakes Dorothy's shoulder.
"The lilies," Dorothy says, blinking Hilde gone. "They reek."

The novel's points of view shift from Dorothy Trevor Townsend to her daughter, Evie; her son Thomas's daughter, Dorothy Townsend Barrett and Barrett's two daughters, Caroline and Liz.

Such undercut lyricism aside, it is Evie who emerges as the book's most interesting character. Disowning her mother after Dorothy's death, Evie is awarded a scholarship to Barnard and travels from London to New York by ship. In an echo of Dorothy's starvation, Evie is too poor to buy food en route and faints at the college's admissions window. A fellow passenger from the ship helps her, and she ends up moving into his house, forming a platonic, lifelong friendship. Evie has no children, no lovers. Her answer to the "woman question" is embodied in her pursuit of a degree in chemistry, following her childhood love of numbers at a time when women in science were better kept out of sight and out of mind. She conveys the experience of this separate existence richly:

We were in the 'science wing,' a series of bunkered rooms deep beneath campus constructed out of cement blocks and painted a putty yellow. (It is now our college bomb shelter fully stocked with cans of soup and dried noodles, I'm told.) No natural light could reach us, and little sound. Occasionally we smelled the smoked from the cigarettes in the girls' lounge just above us, but apart from that it was as if they had put the chemistry students in a separate galaxy, like electrons circling the nucleus of campus.

Thomas's daughter, Dorothy Townsend Barrett's, passages begin a section that originally appeared in a tale collected in The Best American Short Stories, 2007. Barrett protests the Iraq war by taking her camera to a military airfield and attempts to photograph the coffins emerging from the plane. She's arrested for every attempt, and her millionaire daughter, Caroline, retrieves her each time.

Walbert also writes of Dorothy Barrett's life as a young wife in the 1970s. This chapter is reminiscent of the author's collection of short stories, Our Kind, which were all told from the point of view of a group of aging neighborhood women. Permeated by a mesmerizing sense of anger, Our Kind uses its first-person-plural narration to embody a powerfully moblike sensibility. The women shift from flat-out rage at one another, their husbands, and children to a genuine confusion of how all of their days cumulated into nothing more than a lifetime of gossip and easily recalled slights.

Though Barrett's time as a wife is not quite as angry as the memories of the group in Our Kind, it is, nonetheless, filled with a confused ennui. She goes to a rap session -- the early-1970s answer to addressing the woman question -- organized by Mary "Chick" Chickarella, the female golf pro of their club. Though Barrett plays a small role in the session, her aimlessness is clear. Her contribution is "I am a hollow bone," remembered from a note written by her daughter, while the other women talk about abortions and birth experiences.

The small section about Dorothy Barrett's daughter, Liz, is the stuff of Mommy Lit -- that genre spawned by chick lit once babies became a celebrity fashion accessory. Liz is an affluent New York City mother, the kind who can employ a nanny for when she wants to pursue her ceramics. She goes to a playdate where she and another mommy outdo each other with tales of their upper-class parenting hardships. Little is gained from this addition to the narrative, but the novel is so wonderful leading up to this section, that little is lost.

What the contemporary section does make clear is that Walbert is as at home in 1914 England as she is in present-day New York. Her research never draws attention to itself but merely provides a backdrop to the characters' stories, though the reader is jarred awake in the contemporary narratives. Blogging enters the novel, and the bright white screen of a computer is a harsh entry into the present day after the past narratives had been muted, quiet, an escape from our daily lives, though Walbert does a good job of capturing the particular culture of blogs and comments from readers named "LuvMyKoffee" and "Robinsnest."

A Short History of Women could be explosive -- there are wars and dead children, dead mothers, the breakdown of a marriage -- but Walbert treats her characters with gentleness and wry curiosity. The novel's dreamlike tone is punctuated with precisely calculated moments of humor and rage, guiding the reader to the heart of each character's genuine, baffled wonder at the ultimately unanswerable woman question. --Melissa Lion

Melissa Lion is the author of two young adult novels novels, Swollen and Upstream. She is a professional writer and blogger living in Portland, Oregon.

From the Publisher

From National Book Award nominee Kate Walbert, a provocative and beautiful novel about five generations of women.

The Washington Post - Valerie Sayers

Walbert's books have all dealt…with the lives of women, but this one is her most ambitious and impressive. The novel shuffles geographies and eras…as if to reflect the non-linear progress of feminism. Walbert also utilizes compression and flashback to sweep through time, her style reminiscent of a host of innovative writers from Virginia Woolf to Muriel Spark to Pat Barker…A Short History deals with complicated women living in complicated times, and if it is empathetic, it is also disturbing, as all moral conundrums are. It is a witty and assured testament to the women's movement and women writers, obscure and renowned.

The New York Times - Leah Hager Cohen

Nearly everything about Kate Walbert's new novel is wickedly smart…Walbert's primary concerns—unlike those of some of her characters—aren't political. Her writing wears both its intelligence and its ideology lightly. No manifesto, this is a gorgeously wrought and ultimately wrenching work of art.

Publishers Weekly

Walbert-2004 National Book Award nominee for Our Kind-offers a beautiful and kaleidoscopic view of the 20th century through the eyes of several generations of women in the Townsend family. The story begins with Dorothy Townsend, a turn-of-the-century British suffragist who dies in a hunger strike. From Dorothy's death, Walbert travels back and forth across time and continents to chronicle other acts of self-assertion by Dorothy's female descendants. Dorothy's daughter, Evelyn, travels to America after WWI to make her name in the world of science-and escape from her mother's infamy. Decades later, her niece, also named Dorothy, has a late-life crisis and gets arrested in 2003 for taking photos of an off-limits military base in Delaware. Dorothy's daughters, meanwhile, struggle to find meaning in their modern bourgeois urban existences. The novel takes in historical events from the social upheaval of pre-WWI Britain to VJ day in New York City, a feminist conscious-raising in the '70s and the Internet age. The lives of these women reveal that although oppression of women has grown more subtle, Dorothy's self-sacrifice reverberates through generations. Walbert's look at the 20th century and the Townsend family is perfectly calibrated, intricately structured and gripping from page one. (June)

Eleanor J. Bader - Library Journal

When 34-year-old British feminist Dorothy Townsend intentionally starves herself to death to win attention for women's suffrage, she leaves behind two children. It's 1914, and the pair is separated, never to reunite. Walbert's latest work-her previous novel, Our Kind, was a 2004 National Book Award finalist-imagines the impact of Townsend's suicide on four successive generations of Townsend women, all of them named Dorothy. Was the act a sign of desperation, a brilliant way to divert attention from an impending world war, or a selfish renunciation of maternal obligation? Walbert's intricately layered novel examines the past 100 years with subtlety and wit, simultaneously addressing the ways historical memory intrudes and recedes in individual lives. It's gripping, intense, and powerful. Walbert's language is elegant, her images resonant. Characters are recognizable but not clichéd and will stay with readers as wise, if also flawed and struggling, exemplars of political and intellectual engagement. Highly recommended for all contemporary fiction collections.

Kirkus Reviews

Five generations of willful, restless women struggle to find an identity beyond that of wife and mother. Dorothy Trevor Townsend bequeathes one heck of a legacy when she dies at age 34 in 1914. The British suffragette starves herself to death as an act of civil disobedience, leaving behind two fatherless children and a married lover. Her act is doubly shocking, occurring as it does during the carnage of World War I. Dorothy's son Thomas ends up with family friends in California, becomes a musician and dies young of alcoholism. Daughter Evelyn endures wartime deprivations at boarding school before finding her way to America as well. She becomes a well-known chemistry professor at Barnard, eschewing traditional attachments and family life. Thomas's daughter, Dorothy Townsend Barrett, takes a different route, marrying and producing three children, only to realize in her 70s that she has always been miserable. So she protests the Iraq war, divorces her devoted husband Charles and starts a blog, to the horror of her responsible eldest daughter Caroline. With an empty nest and a divorce of her own, Caroline is stunned to recognize the role that fear has played in her life. Caroline's sister Liz, like the others, has talent and brains, but late motherhood and a busy, privileged life in Manhattan have made her question what it all means. When Liz was a child, she slipped into her mother's purse a verse she'd written that contained the line "I am a hollow bone." It resonates throughout the lives of all these women: "It's as if I echo, or rather, feel in myself an absence," says Dorothy Barrett. "I feel as if I've forgotten something, as if there's a question I forgot to answer." Walbert (Our Kind,2004, etc.) is careful to give equal weight to their challenges through different eras. The male characters are not as fully fleshed out as they could be, but Charles' longing for the wife he never really had is quite moving. Daring and devastating: 20th-century history made personal.

Product Details

• Reading Group Guide
• Read an Excerpt

Reading Group Guide

This reading group guide for A Short History of Women includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Kate Walbert. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

Introduction

Kate Walbert's A Short History of Women chronicles the lives of five generations of women as they attempt to navigate turbulent times in the history of both Britain and the United States. From a European suffragist who starves herself for women's rights in 1914 to her great-granddaughter in New York in 2007, Walbert's work highlights the love, friendship, and regrets that each of these women experienced. Readers will be swept up in the tremulous times as these five women attempt to find their way in a society that needs an answer to "The Woman Question."

Questions for Discussion

1. Throughout the novel, Walbert consistently reveals future events before they occur - from Father Fairfield's death to Dorothy Townsend (Barrett's) impending divorce. Why do you think she chooses to do this? How does this change the pacing of the story?

2. How is Evelyn's release of the canary symbolic of her own desires? (p.15) Why do you think she gets so angry when the bird refuses to leave on its own? How does she feel once it is gone? How does this parallel the actions that Evelyn eventually takes?

3. The novel opens with Evelyn Charlotte Townsend's mother starving herself for her cause, a death "brought on by modern ideas, pride, acertain vanity or rather, unreasonable expectations." (p. 76) How does her death spur on the next generation of this family? How do you think things would have been different if she had not died? Would Evelyn and subsequent Townsend generations have been as bold as they were? Why or why not?

4. Discuss how all the women in the novel struggle between their rebellious ideals and trying to lead a "normal" life. Do you believe Dorothy when she says that she "didn't sign on for this?" (p. 74)

5. How did you feel when Evelyn lied to Stephen Pope about her family? Why do you think she says "I'll start from nothing...I am now no one's daughter." (p. 90) Does she really reject her past or is she more like her mother than she wants to admit?

6. Each of the women in the novel at one point or another rejects the life they are leading. The most notable instance is Dorothy Townsend's (Barrett) radical change following her son's death. Discuss how each of the women, like Dorothy Townsend, "shed a skin." (p. 104)

7. Discuss the theme of loss in A Short History of Women. What are the major losses that each character experiences? How does this affect the women they are and the women they become?

8. Evie has a long standing relationship with Stephen Pope and has a love for him that she claims is "not what a woman's love should be or look like, absent, as it is, a family, a husband." (p. 173) Yet, they have a very solid and caring relationship. How does this compare to someone like Dorothy Townsend (Barrett) who has a husband she no longer loves?

9. How does Fran's question of "Did you ever ruin your life for a feeling?" (p. 191) reflect the struggles that each woman has experienced? What is Elizabeth's response to Fran's question? Do you think she believes her response? What do you think her response would be if asked the same question about her mother?

10. Which of Dorothy's descendants do you think best embodies her strength and will for the cause? Which do you think embodies it the least? Why?

Enhance Your Book Club

1. Track your own ancestry - were there any rebellious relatives in your past? Find out and then share with your bookclub.

2. Make your own "short history" - pick an important time period and then find a woman who played a pivotal role. See who you and the rest of your bookclub come up with.

3. Women's suffrage was a long time in the making. Research its history and then share an interesting fact you learned with your bookclub.

A Conversation with Kate Walbert

1. What was your inspiration for writing A Short History of Women?

WALBERT: The novel began for me with the voice of Evelyn Charlotte Townsend. It is Evelyn's mother, Dorothy Trevor Townsend, a British suffragette, who has starved herself, and it is Evelyn who announces her mother's death in the opening sentence with a kind of nonchalance that I found oddly cold and compelling. I'm always listening for the secret in a line, and it seemed Evelyn might have a few secrets. Still, I was in unfamiliar territory — England, the suffrage movement — and yet Evelyn's voice persisted, and from it branched the other voices, the other characters of the novel, each speaking as a witness to her particular moment in history: the British suffrage movement and the eve of WWI; the start of the Iraq war; V-J Day; the Seventies consciousness-raising period, and post 9/11 Manhattan.

2. Your book covers over 100 years of history; what were some of the challenges associated with writing a book that covered so much time? What research did you have to do to write A Short History of Women?

WALBERT: Well, I'm not a historian nor am I a particularly good researcher so the challenges in writing a book that takes place over an entire century were great. I tried not to be overwhelmed by them. My real interest was in imagining the specific lives of my characters and the details of their worlds — worlds inevitably defined by the times in which they lived, whether it was the dawn of the internet or the years of the world wars. What eventually became clear to me, especially after finishing the chapter that takes place in Manhattan, 2007, was that regardless of the era all the women shared a kind of collective yearning, a desire to start anew, to break for freedom, to ram their heads against whatever seemed to stand in the way of their emancipation: from the most obvious barrier of not having the vote to the more oblique and insidious barrier of motherhood in the age of anxiety — what the writer Judith Warner has called, "perfect madness."

3. You are an accomplished writer who has received several impressive accolades, including being a National Book Award finalist for Our Kind and the winner of the Connecticut Book Award for Fiction in 2002. Did you always want to be a writer? What advice do you have for budding writers?

WALBERT: When I was a kid, I wanted to be a composer. I loved the piano and loved writing music. This evolved into composing stories early in high school, and I was lucky enough to have had one of those remarkable English teachers who encouraged me.

My advice to budding writers would be to do anything else if you're good at anything else but if you want to write then persevere. There's a lot of rejection and long terrible bouts of silence, but if you show up and do your work I believe that eventually your work will be rewarded by whatever the thing is that occasionally swoops down and makes writing feel easy — that alone is worth the years of effort.

4. Who is your favorite character in the novel? Who was the most fun to write? Who was the hardest to write? Are any of the characters we encounter based on people you know?

WALBERT: Perhaps my favorite character — at this particular moment that I'm asked the question — is the one I call the original Dorothy, Dorothy Trevor Townsend. She remains an enigma to me because her decision to starve herself was one of both supreme selfishness and supreme selflessness and I'm intrigued by the impossibility of reconciling the two. In this way, she was the most difficult to write and the most fun, though fun in writing is definitely a relative term (see answer to question 3!). I also loved writing Richard Thorke, the lecturer who delivers the pompous talk to the gathering of women in the second chapter of the book, a lecture he entitles A Short History of Women: Some Comments on the Woman Question. I took much of the tone of his lecture from reading various scientists and historians from that era who were trying to puzzle out "the woman question," namely, whether women should be emancipated and on what terms. There were numerous preposterous reasons, ardently defended, that women were inferior and must be judged as so, for instance this from The Popular Science Monthly, 1882: "the sum total of food converted into thought by women can never equal the sum total of food converted into thought by men. It follows, therefore, that men will always think more than women."

Thorke's lecture is a distillation of many of these theories delivered in a scatter shot, nonsensical address. I've no doubt that most of us have sat through lectures of this kind at some point in our lives, and it was interesting to me that while I was working on this chapter Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard University, delivered his now infamous comments at the meeting of the economic research bureau, speculating that innate differences in ability, or "differential ability of aptitude at the high end" might be the reason why so few women held leadership positions in the sciences and math. He reportedly used as anecdotal evidence the fact that his daughter, when given a toy truck, had turned it into a baby doll. When I read about the controversy it struck me anew that the progress of women's history is not linear, and that with each successive generation we inevitably circle back to some variation of the "woman question."

5. You often reveal future events before they occur - from Father Fairfield's death to Dorothy Townsend (Barrett's) impending divorce. Why did you choose to do this?

WALBERT: This is not a conscious stylistic choice, nor any part of a grand plan on my part. In thinking about it, I remember something a playwriting teacher once told my class: a successful play is written in response to an action that has already occurred off-stage. It struck me at the time that this must be true, since, for better or worse, lives are often lived in response to what has happened before. So I guess I'm drawn to writing about the echoes and repercussions of the act rather than the act itself. For me the more interesting question to puzzle out is what's left undone and unsaid given what has come before.

6. What is the significance of the title A Short History of Women? Do you feel that these generations of women speak of the struggles that all women have encountered?

WALBERT: It was supposed to be ironic, since I thought this was going to be a really long book. I wrote pages and pages and pages, but I'm a glutton for revision and so I carved away more than half of what I wrote. I like to think of how painters often repeatedly cover a canvas, painting over one image with the next and the next. So maybe my big book is still there but in relief. I don't presume that these women speak for all women — they only speak for themselves given the particular angle of my approach. My hope is that their stories resonate with the reader.

7. You cover such a vast amount in history in this work. Which person from history do you most admire? Why?

WALBERT: I admire many persons from history — one of my favorites is Jeannette Rankin, the first woman to serve in U.S. Congress who voted against both world wars and over the course of her work for various peace movements rode the banana boats to India in pursuit of meeting Gandhi. I also admire many members of my own family whom I never got the chance to meet. I'm thinking of my paternal grandmother, Ruby Pearl Jewel. She was a tenant farmer and a poet and one famous (at least in our household) story of Ruby is of the day that she purchased from an estate sale with money she didn't have an intricately carved, silk-covered Victorian sofa, and how the sofa was hoisted onto the back of their pickup truck to be driven to the farm. My father, a young boy at the time, remembers his mother sitting on that sofa on the back of the pickup truck as it was driven down the long dusty driveway, and how he stood up from where he'd been working in the fields and watched her go by. I admire her tremendously for that, for riding on the sofa and buying it regardless. I often wonder about her life and the limits of her life. She died at a young age, a result of worrying about her two oldest sons fighting in the Second World War.

8. What comment do you hear most often from your readers? How do you respond?

WALBERT: One of the comments I often hear from readers, given my last three books, is that they're surprised that I'm not older. I often write of the generation that came of age in the 1950s and early 1960s — my mother's generation. Years ago, in graduate school, I had an index card taped over my desk that read, "What is imagined is real, and what is real is never strong." I have no idea who said it; I think one of my teachers must have quoted it and I dutifully took it down without attributing it to anyone. But I will say that in my own experience of writing fiction I've found that the best has borne out just that way. I write to fill in the gaps of history that I could never fully know, to address the silences. And so because of this I tend to be drawn to times that I have not observed directly. I guess I need that distance, that forced imagining, to find my way to what feels true and vivid and, weirdly, real. If I've lived it myself then I'm too close, too pressed up against the glass to view anything from the proper perspective for fiction.

9. What's next? Are you currently working on any projects?

WALBERT: I'm working on a play and I have an image for another story or possibly novel and a few phrases I'd like to circle around. That's about as good as it gets!

Read an Excerpt

Dover, Delaware, 2003

The soldiers keep Dorothy in view. She carries the tripod, unsteadily, and an extra poncho for a bib. That they have let her come this far might be due to weather, or possibly the kinds of amusements of which she remains unaware. Still, she assumes that they watch, tracking her as she stomps along the fence and positions herself by the sign that clearly states: No Trespassing, Government Property, Photography Forbidden.

It has turned a wet September, everywhere raining so the leaves, black and slick, paste to the soles of her boots. Really, they are Caroline's, Wellingtons borrowed from the back of the hallway closet where earlier Dorothy rummaged as Charles watched, wondering where she could possibly be going in such weather.

She turned, boot in hand.

"It's raining," he repeated.

Deaf at most decibels, Charles refused to wear aids (vanity? fear?), preferring to cast his voice into silence, hoping for an echo or a nod.

"Nowhere," she had said, because this is nowhere, or anywhere, or somewhere not particularly known: an hour's drive north if you took the busy roads, and then country, mostly, the drizzle graying the already gray landscape. Ye olde etcetera — cornfields, silos, a ravaged billboard for Daniel's peas, fresh from California, though this is technically Delaware and the land of soybeans. Ducks, too, the fall season in full swing; the drizzle split by the crack crack crack of the hunters' guns.

She parks near the drainage ditch that edges the fence, chain link, as if for dogs, though there are no dogs here, only a guard tower, a landing field, and the soldiers who wait for the planes. But that isn't right,exactly. The place is vast, a city of a place, with barracks — are those called barracks? — and trucks and cul-de-sacs and no doubt children sleeping, army brats — or is this marines? — in the two-story housing labyrinth not so distant from where she gets out, near the drainage ditch, near the landing field, near the place where the plane will descend. This she knows. The rest — the presence of children, the numbers involved, the ranking, the hierarchy — she truthfully has no idea.

Dorothy skewers the tripod in the mud and adjusts the poncho to cover her. Today, she plans to fight back. She can almost taste it; see herself in her resistance: Dorothy Barrett, granddaughter to the suffragette, mother to three: Caroline, Liz, and the dead one, James; wife to Charles. She mounts the camera on the track and angles the lens toward where the plane will descend — they come from the East, she has learned, out of Mecca, the bodies mostly coffined, then wrapped in flags, but sometimes carried in a tiny box.

"Christ, Mother," Caroline said after the first arrest, the fine. "Get a life."

"Your great-grandmother starved to death on principle; she literally ate nothing."

"I know, I know. I've seen the postage stamp," Caroline said.

"I think it changed things then," Dorothy said. "To do something. She made up her mind; she took a stand — "

"And look what happened to your dad? Anyway, you said she might have been unbalanced. A bit insane, wasn't she? You've said that before. She might have been suffering from — "

"Hysteria?" Dorothy said, hearing her own tone of voice — hysterical. "The point is, she did something."

"It's illegal to take pictures there."

"This is a free country."

"Please," Caroline said.

The two sat at Caroline's kitchen table, Caroline in one of her suits meant for business, her cigarette burning in the ashtray a tenyear- old James had spun out of clay. Caroline's daughter, little Dorothy, is elsewhere, having reached the age of the disappeared — her voice shouting orders from behind the locked door of her bedroom or even standing present, her body a studded cast of her former self; if she is somewhere within it she is very, very deep.

"I should never have told you I voted for him," Caroline said.

"I would have guessed."

"Consider my client base," Caroline said.

"Please," Dorothy said.

"Anyway, the law has to do with respect," Caroline said. "Or something. They make the rules for a reason, I'm sure. It's none of our business. None of your business."

"Says who?" Dorothy said, to which Caroline had some sort of reply.

Dorothy listened for a while, and then she did not; she thought of other things, how she would like to have believed that not so long ago Caroline would have stood beside her at the fence, that she, former president of the student council and Future Leaders for Justice, might have carried a sign or at least shouted an obscenity. But this was before Caroline divorced and took that new job in the Financial District. The Dead Zone, she called it, but the money's good, she said. It's serious money.

"Mother?"

"I was listening," Dorothy said.

"Forget it," Caroline said. She tapped her nails, those nails, on the table, then the doorbell rang — pizza delivery — and the conversation ended.

"Dinnertime," she yelled in the direction of the door.

Crack. Crack. Crack.

The soldiers have had enough. They climb down from their tower to slog through duck country, technically Delaware, the first state, though most have trouble with the history; one can hear their boots, or is that frogs? The sucking. Soon enough they'll reach her. Dorothy records their magnified approach; records them unlocking the gate and stepping to the other side, records their blank expressions. The trouble is she can only pretend to hate them.

"Good morning, Mrs. Barrett." This from the one Dorothy calls Tweedledee.

She straightens up, adjusts the poncho.

"We'll remind you that you're trespassing. That taking photographs is forbidden."

"Today," she says, hand on tripod. "I plan to resist."

Their arms remain folded. Four pair, as usual; a pack; a team; a unit, perhaps, or would they be a regiment? No, a regiment is bigger, a regiment is many. She tries to remember from mornings James explained the exact order of things — sergeant to lieutenant to captain to king — his miniature warriors arranged throughout the house in oddly purposeful groupings. She would find them everywhere, assaulting a sock, scaling the Ping-Pong table, plastic, molded men with clearly defined weaponry and indistinct faces. When she banished them to his room, fearing someone would trip and break a bone, James had cried and cried.

"That would be more than your usual fine, Mrs. Barrett."

He is a horse's ass, but then again, a boy once James's age, who should be pitied.

"I plan to resist," she repeats. One of the Mute Ones has his and out as if to help her across the muddy plain. They are waiting, she knows, for Dorothy to do something. Collapse, she thinks, then does, more a buckle than a collapse, knowing full well the ridiculousness of it, how small she'll become. The big one bends down to help her. Now, she thinks, though it is not until it is done that she understands she has found the courage to do it, biting the soft part of that hand, the hammock of skin between thumb and forefinger.

Caroline sits next to Charles in the detention waiting room, no question who's the boss. That girl could split atoms, Charles had once said. We ought to lease her to GE.

Sorry, darling, Dorothy mouths to him. He looks at her with his doggy yellow eyes not hearing a thing; then Caroline leads them both out.

In the fresh sunshine they blink; "Look how the weather's changed!" Dorothy says, reflexively. "What a treat!"

Caroline has opened the car door.

"Get in," she says.

They sit in silence all the way home, the radio punched to static and static and static then punched off, again, then the familiar drive, the front door, the hallway, the kitchen. Caroline makes tea and calls a what-there-is-of-the-Family Meeting, Liz trapped in the city, attempting another pregnancy (busy, busy, busy!), and the hole in the place where James would have been. Dorothy steps into it and wanders around while Caroline speaks of Responsibility and Reputation and Appropriate Behavior, and yes, Patriotism, but mostly, mostly, mostly, Mother, Embarrassment.

"And what of history?" Dorothy says. "Lineage?"

"Mother," Caroline says. "I'm at wit's end."

Dorothy would like to cradle Caroline in her arms, Caroline sleepy and hatted and a bit jaundice yellow, but she cannot. Caroline has grown; she's taller than Dorothy and now divorced and a multimillionaire, she has confessed. Mill-ions, she said.

"Where are your friends, Mother?" Caroline asks.

Dorothy shrugs. She hasn't thought of friends recently, nor her standing Wednesday at Sheer Perfection; her hair's gone shaggy and her cuticles have grown over their moons.

"I'm sorry, darling," she says. "I'll stop."

Copyright © 2009 by Kate Walbert