“The Mirror,” Mary Cassatt, 1906 (I love this, because it’s not idealized)

I love reading novels.  I read classics, I read Viragos.

I was on a bicycle at the gym, reading a Virago.  Suddenly I looked up.  It is not something you want to do at the gym after a certain age. There are mirrors everywhere, and who wants to look in mirrors?   My hair was uncombed,  I wore wrinkled hospital pants, I mean REALLY wrinkled, and the illusion that I look as I did as a young woman (which is anybody’s private image) popped.

Needless to say, I felt slightly annoyed.  I went home, changed my clothes, stuck a lot of pins in my hair, and put on lipstick.

My husband laughed at me.  Are you wearing lipstick?

I smeared it off with a Kleenex.

That’s better.

It is rather unusual to wear lipstick at home. The thing about being married for a long time is that you you’ve seen each other scruffy, been on camping trips where you’ve forgotten your toothbrushes and had to smear toothpaste on your teeth with your fingers.

None of it fazes my husband.

I am healthy, and that is what matters.

Usually I know this.

Sometimes I have to remember how to be an American woman.  And so I am reading some books by American women this weekend.

1.  Jo-Ann Mapson’s Bad Girl Creek.  Mapson writes beautifully, and has a smart perspective on the difficulties of women’s lives.  Her heroines are strong, sometimes they are wild, and they are always independent.  I have just barely begun this, and it is already fascinating.  Phoebe Thomas, who is in a wheelchair, has inherited her aunt’s flower farm. According to the cover, three other displaced women join her.

2.  Madeleine L’Engle’s Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage.  Needless to say, I read her books as a child, but have also read some of her adult books in the last few years.  This is a memoir about her marriage to Hugh, an actor.

3.  Deborah Crombie’s A Share in Death.  Deborah Crombie is a Texan who has lived in the UK, and her mysteries are set in England.  So there we have it, an American writing a series about Scotland yard Superintendent Duncan Kincaid.  A mystery is always distracting, but is this cheating because it’s set in England?

4.  Sue Kaufman’s Falling Bodies. Kaufman wrote Diary of a Mad Housewife, one of my favorite novels, and, according to the cover flap, this is about a woman who lives in a book-filled apartment and has family problems in a rough year.

I can’t wait to read these!