(2 of 3)
They will arrive at the hall, the auditorium, the community center, take their seats—and slowly it will begin to happen. The extraordinary thing. The thing they have really come for, the speeches aside. The thing the speeches generate, but which takes on a life of its own. For as she sits and listens, she begins to feel the flickers and currents of a mass communion, a rising sense of excitement that she imagines parallels what one feels at a revival meeting. She doesn't get up and cry "Right On!" (which she suspects is already passé) like the girl down front, she doesn't hop up and shout "Yes, sister, yes!" But she feels this powerful thing happening, this sweeping, surging, gathering-up-momentum feeling of intense camaraderie, solidarity movement. Action. Yes, sister, yes. All of which is pretty damned strange—she has never been much of a one for sisterly activities, and she largely disagrees with what it seems to her the voices from the platform are suggesting: she is not ready to turn it all around, to start again. Yet here, among her own—kind? Yes, kind —she feels the sweep of mass identification, feels the sense of Tightness, shared protectiveness: we are all birds of a feather. This is the way, the path. And yet.
Yet, after the meeting has dispersed, after the ball is over, and the sense of excitement and communion begins to dim, she climbs into her car, station wagon, Land Rover, bus, taxi—and goes home. And it hits her. She arrives home to pay the sitter or what-have-you, to take over the children, to keel the pot like greasy Joan, to put the kettle on like Polly, to take up the reins of her existence. Only —something is wrong.
She is overwhelmed by a terrible sense of wrongness, of jarring inconsistency. There was that surging, powerful feeling in the hall, and now, stranded on the linoleum under the battery of fluorescent kitchen lights, there is this terrible sense of isolation, of walls closing in, of being trapped. It doesn't compute. Something in her calculations is wrong. She stands there, with a sense of being too late, passed by, stuck—but she doesn't burst into tears. The days of weeping are over. In spite of the desolation she feels, she knows that she is not alone; she has company and they are legion. There is enormous comfort in knowing that. And knowing that is one of the big changes in her life.
There have been many other changes. Perhaps the most important is that she has learned to speak up without the fear (yes, it was a fear) of being called a ballbuster, an aggressive or castrating female (the counterpart tag of male chauvinist pig). She has also learned to assert herself, insist on certain rights—mostly around the house, true, but that's where, after all, she spends most of her time. She asks—does not demand—that her children, her husband pitch in, share some of the trivial drudgery: she swears that gone are the days when, the country weekend over, the rest of the family sat out in the car waiting for her to pack up the last carryall and check the last stove burner, giving her an occasional impatient blast on the horn.