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the breakfast table: An e-mail conversation about the news of the day.

Timothy Noah and Marjorie Williams

the breakfast table
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from: Marjorie Williams

Jersey Girls

Posted Friday, July 10, 1998, at 4:28 PM ET

Dear Tim,

Interesting how infanticide stories lead you to George Will-ian questions about prevalence and the collapse of Western civ, and me (a Jersey girl myself) to the small-bore questions of human motivation. I admit to following these accounts with fascination--along with the endless grim metro stories, which seem to come at least two a week, about men and women who beat or scald or choke their toddlers to death. Those are torment to read, but it somehow seems that someone should. In a weird way I understand this latter kind of crime more easily than the former; there isn't a parent in the world who hasn't known rage in the face of a small child's complete refusal to give ground to the needs and rhythms of adult life, and I think I can imagine myself into understanding the combination of ignorance and impulse and misery and fury that could make a two-year-old an enemy for not being able to stop crying.

But despite my belief that denial is one of the most powerful forces known to humankind, I'm miles from being able to fathom the fear and denial that would be involved in (1) hiding a pregnancy for nine months, (2) enduring childbirth alone, unmedicated, in a motel room and then (3) doing away with the baby. I'm not suggesting for a second that this crime is worse than the other; only that it's more opaque.

Sorry to close out the week on such dark thoughts; perhaps I'm just trying to shed them. I'm off, this afternoon, to take Willie and Alice for haircuts, which always feels to me like something of a treat. Willie, 5, has sat still for his haircuts since before he was two, composed as a little prince on the barber's chair. Alice, 2 ½, has always been a moving target. Recently, though, she has started to associate her dawning, avid awareness of gender with her hair; and so now she declares that we are going to Mitch (the haircutter) so that "Mitch will make me a girl." For this reason, she has announced, she is now prepared to sit still. ("I will sit by yourself," she adds, to indicate that she no longer needs to perch on my lap for her haircut.) I try telling her that she is already and always a girl, but she seems to know better.

Hope the rest of your day goes well.

Love,

Marjorie

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031323334353637383940414243444546474849505152535455565758596061626364656667686970717273747576
from: Marjorie Williams

Jersey Girls

Posted Friday, July 10, 1998, at 4:28 PM ET
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Timothy Noah writes Slate's "Chatterbox" column. Marjorie Williams is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.
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