Michael Malone - Weebly

partially conflicted and restricted. Now, finally, at fiftytwo,
Tracy Canopy was free. Never again would she
be caught between the shame of having her pigtails
yanked and the shame of not having them yanked.
Never again, to escape pity and censure, need she
submit to the rituals of being whistled at (or not), being
asked out to be whiskered across the face and
squeezed elsewhere (or not), of being given away, a
raffle prize, in a church, then carted off to the
deflowering like Anne Boleyn (or not). Free from the
urge to give birth, and from months calendared by
blood, Tracy Canopy felt free as a butterfly after a
clumsy crawl as a caterpillar and a long, will-less,
squishy passivity in the marriage cocoon.
No doubt it was a matter of metabolism or
hormones or genes or diet or morphology. Look at
Beanie. Or Evelyn, confessing that she "longed to have
a man." Longed? What did that mean? The way Evelyn
had oohed and aahed all her life over men, had even at
six delighted in getting her hair yanked, had even at
fourteen secretly fashioned in an attic room a shrine to
Charles Boyer, with candles burning before his