All Fours

“I stood holding the note with that funny little abandoned feeling one gets a million times a day in a domestic setting. I could have cried, but why? It’s not like I need to dish with my husband about every little thing; that’s what friends are for. Harris and I are more formal, like two diplomats who aren’t sure if the other one has poisoned our drink. Forever thirsty but forever wanting the other one to take the first sip. You go. No, you go ahead! No, please, after you.”

The narrator’s use of the passive voice to describe her emotions conveys her feeling of entrapment in her home and family life. She doesn’t completely claim her frustration, sadness, and upset as her own, instead using indirect pronouns to describe her emotional experience; she isn’t yet ready to admit to her domestic claustrophobia.

“By morning the idea had taken hold. Why fly to New York when I could drive and finally become the sort of chill, grounded woman I’d always wanted to be? This could be the turning point of my life. If I lived to be ninety I was halfway through. Or if you thought of it as two lives, then I was at the very start of my second life. I imagined a vision quest-style journey involving a cave, a cliff, a crystal, maybe a labyrinth and a golden ring.”

The cross-country trip to New York affords the narrator an opportunity to discover herself and pursue personal freedom. However, her fantastical, mythical regard for the adventure foreshadows the ways in which her expectations fail to align with reality once she begins the drive, thematically introducing her Journey Toward Self-Discovery.

“After Sam fell asleep I forced myself to walk into Harris’s bedroom in nothing but high heels. The heels help me just do it, like ripping off a Band-Aid. Once I mutated (from intrinsically and eternally alone to sucking on another person’s body), our weekly sex felt great, and by the time Harris was giving me my fourth orgasm I was sex’s biggest fan, a total convert—sex is essential for a healthy relationship! But after the afterglow I withdrew into my native state and got started on dreading the next time—which wouldn’t be for two and a half weeks.”

The narrator’s controlled manner of engaging in sexual intimacy with her husband conveys her unrealized desire for sexual exploration, experimentation, and freedom. She finds little joy in sex with Harris because it’s as planned and orderly as the rest of their predictable marital life together.