Acts of Service

by Lillian Fishman

Vanity is such a sin in women, so obviously, grotesquely shameful, that when people loved my body they usually told me in a tone implying that the very acknowledgment, in any but the most tender postcoital context, was trivial and degrading.

We love what disturbs us if it chooses us and tells us how we matter. Don’t we love a cashed check, a passport, the touch of a president’s hand, though each pleasure rests on a cruelty just beyond our sight? The finger points, without equivocating, at us, and we wonder at being chosen.