Just As I Thought by Grace Paley

happiness, she said, was the following: she meant having (or having had) (or continuing to have) everything. By everything she meant, first, the children, then a dear person to live with, preferably a man, but not necessarily (by live with, she meant for a long time, but not necessarily). Along with and not in preferential order, she required three or four best women friends to whom she could tell every personal fact and then discuss on the widest, deepest, and most hopeless level the economy, the constant, unbeatable, cruel war economy, the slavery of the American worker to the idea of that economy, the complicity of male people in the whole structure, the dumbness of men (including her preferred man) on this subject. By dumbness, she meant everything dumbness has always meant: silence and stupidity. By silence, she meant refusal to speak; by stupidity, she meant refusal to hear. For happiness, she required women to walk with. To walk in the city arm in arm with a woman friend (as her mother had with aunts and cousins so many years ago) was just plain essential. Oh! those long walks and intimate talks, better than standing alone on the most admirable mountain or in the handsomest forest or hay-blown field (all of which were certainly splendid occupations for the wind-starved soul). More important even (though maybe less sweet because of age) than the old walks with boys she’d walked with as a girl, that nice bunch of worried left-wing boys who flew (always slightly handicapped by that idealistic wing) into a dream of paid-up mortgages with a small room for opinion and solitude in the corner of home. Oh, do you remember those fellows, Ruthy?
    Remember? Well, I’m married to one.
    But she had, Faith continued, democratically tried walking in the beloved city with a man, but the effort had failed since from about that age—twenty-seven or -eight—he had felt an obligation, if a young woman passed, to turn abstractedly away, in the middle of the most personal conversation, or even to say confidentially, Wasn’t she something?—or clasping his plaid shirt, at the heart’s level, Oh my God! The purpose of this: perhaps to work a nice quiet appreciation into thunderous heartbeat as he had been taught on pain of sexual death.
    For happiness, she also required work to do in this world and bread on the table. By work to do, she included the important work of raising children righteously up. By righteously, she meant that along with being useful and speaking truth to the community, they must do no harm. By harm, she meant not only personal injury to the friend the lover the co-worker the parent (the city the nation) but also the stranger; she meant particularly the stranger in all her or his difference, who, because we were strangers in Egypt, deserves special goodness for life, or at least until the end of strangeness. By bread on the table, she meant no metaphor but truly bread, as her father had ended every single meal with a hunk of bread. By hunk, she was describing one of the attributes of good bread.
    Suddenly she felt she had left out a couple of things: love. Oh yes, she said, for she was talking, talking all this time, to patient Ruth, and they were walking for some reason in a neighborhood where she didn’t know the children, the pizza places, or the vegetable markets. It was early evening and she could see lovers walking along Riverside Park with their arms around one another, turning away from the sun, which now sets among the new apartment houses of New Jersey, to kiss. Oh, I forgot, she said, now that I notice, Ruthy I think I would die without love. By love, she probably meant she would die without being in love. By in love, she meant the acuteness of the heart at the sudden sight of a particular person or the way over a couple of years of interested friendship one is suddenly stunned by the lungs’ longing for more and more breath in the presence of that friend, or nearly drowned to the knees by the salty