The film begins with a woman opening the drapes and picking up after her husband: “Early morning in the universe. The wife is getting up, opening up the windows. She’s a painter and her husband’s a railroad brakeman….” She never acquires a name, never paints, but is only the wife, the one who gets the kid breakfast and dispatches him to school, tends the house, and represents all the things the men are escaping or avoiding and definitely disdaining.
