Once a woman reaches a respectable age, she craves the witness of one more betrothal, one more marriage, one more childbirth, just one more. She stops at nothing to make it happen, always desperate for one more, then just one additional one, then another, and one more. Her grasping claws seek to fill her own ailing mind with extrapolative imaginings of une belle famille nouvelle. Juste une plus.
Or if, he were to be more charitable, which is a difficult attitude to embody towards one’s own mother, but if he were, he would posit that a woman aging appreciates anew the knots of family life knitting people into populus and proving the value of her oeuvre. Family is the agencement that catches communities and saves souls, and it is that fact that feels raw and acute in women of a certain age.
Young ladies immanently shrink from the freedom of the future, while youthful men froth forth with the vigors of the eternal now, yet elder women tendrilously transcend their present and old men are bound by their pasts.
Sasha’s prospects for near-future matrimony were weakly barren, and perhaps Sasha appreciated, even enjoyed, that. Like a desert craves not a marsh, he had no desire for a wife. They were bugles of demands and desires, like mosquitoes with envy. Interested only in trifles and bêtises, lace-fried fluff and delicate whispers of sotto voce gossip. Must everything be castrated down to parasitic orchids, soft edges and understated wallpaper?