"Peacocks"

It's Saturday night. As Hurricane Irene continues up the coast and to New York, maybe it has already hit, I read this story that screams New York and feel nostalgia for a place I've never lived but always kind of wanted to.

Today's story, "Peacocks" by L.E. Miller is a good story from a good journal, Ascent. The point of view, which at first appears to be the collective "we" is also very interesting, but it later turns out that one women rather than all is narrating, telling the story for the group of them. The story, which is mostly set in the 1950s, begins: "We had values. We had Le Creuset pots. We had fold-out couches in our living rooms, where we slept with our husbands at night. "

The story describes the women in the story as "landsmen, all of us dark-haired women who carried the inflections of our parents’ Yiddish in our speech. Our cramped apartments were fine with us; we would never in a million years live in some bourgeois outpost in Long Island, and the only way we’d return to Brooklyn was in a coffin. We called ourselves The Quorum. We called ourselves the Collective Unconscious of the Upper West Side. " These women are mothers whose children play together "in a bleak little playground near the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine."

All of the women have something in common, but then a new woman moves in who doesn't seem to fit in. The other woman take satisfaction in their lives, but the new woman seems above them and apart from them. But is she really that different?


Like the narrator, do you see a little bit of yourself in Rebecca?