Ducks, Newburyport

by Lucy Ellmann

the fact that all of a sudden I don’t want to be a housewife or a homemaker or a stay-at-home mom anymore, the fact that I don’t want to have to die the way that woman in Fargo dies, battered to death with a bag over her head and then ground up in a wood chipper by some frozen lakeside, and I don’t want to be a Stepford Wife either and have my brains sucked out and replaced with robot brains, and I don’t want to be Lucille Ball and have to make a fool of myself every week on TV for a living, and I don’t want to be Jeannie out of I Dream of Jeannie and have to live inside a bottle, wearing a jeweled bra and harem pants and waiting for Larry Hagman to want to see me, and I don’t want my kids to have to marry seven brothers, and I don’t want to be pregnant with no heating on in the daytime like that Chaplin girl in Dr. Zhivago, or just get decapitated when the marriage fails like happened to some woman in London, or keep having to pull up sticks and move further into the American wilderness like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Ma whenever the wanderlust strikes Pa again, or end up like Madame Bovary who basically just wanted to go to a few more parties, and instead she