...she starched and ironed her face, forming it into just what people wanted to see...

Her whole body shivered and her face fell apart like a bride’s pie crust. She put it together again slowly, as if lifting a great weight, by sheer will power. The smile came back, with a couple of corners badly bent.

She lifted her sewing and bit off the thread in the way women do to make your flesh crawl.

She tore off the kerchief from her head and let down her plentiful hair. The weight, the length, the glory was all there. She took careful stock of herself, then combed her hair and tied it back up again.

Her clothes were filled with safety pins and hidden tears.

It was her wedding dress and it had a flare-out bottom, and they had laid her head to foot in it so the dress could spread out, and they had made her a veil out of a mosquito bar so the auger holes in her face wouldn’t show.

Making a story from the messy thoughts and half-thoughts in her head, building a world and lives and taking them apart again, fitting the pieces together another way until it feels right, as right as she can make it feel.

But she didn't listen, she was in the bathroom, she was getting dressed, she was putting on make-up, she was getting ready. Getting ready.

She wanted to be herself again, to recover all that she had been obliged to give up in half a century of servitude that had doubtless made her happy but which, once her husband was dead, did not leave her even the vestiges of her identity.

Here in the city she had gilded her nails. They shone. And she had put on a velvet dress, this soft red one, which was heavy. The buttons were in the form of seashells.

She had put despair and fear aside, as if they were garments she did not choose to wear.

She went up to her room, disembarrassed herself of her finery,

"Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself... ("You, Doctor Martin")"

Since then she had changed so much in her thoughts, in her ways, even in her looks, that she might wonder she knew herself — except that the changes were all in the direction of becoming more and more herself.