Girls

 

Sixty pages into the novel, and our main character has yet to show up. I am growing tired of Oblonsky's dinners with his pals, with young men showing off and ice skating, of Vronsky's arrogance that he is not hurting anyone. All the while, the women go to bed alone, praying to God to let it all be okay.

And I think of Sophia Tolstoy writing these lines, not once, but eight times, late at night after everyone else has gone to bed. And I have decided that Sophie, along with Anna and Kitty, needed girlfriends.

Not Mean Girl girlfriends, or women to help her get the housework finished. She needed heart-connected, warrior women girlfriends, the kind who show up on a Friday night bearing bottles of wine and a pack of cigarettes, the kind who don't care if her daughters come in and out, eating their pistachios or overhearing an occasional curse word.

Sophie needed someone to say, Girl, you copied that damn novel eight times; If you can do that, you can anything. Then they would sit outside until 4am, beside a fire started with the first 59 pages of the novel, finally going inside to fall asleep until morning. Almost 17 gets up and turn off the lights in the house.

The next day, Sophie would wake up and go back to copying pages and doing laundry. She would fold the sheets and towels, put them away in the cabinet. But she would notice that Almost 17, rather than being traumatized by the evenings' shenaningans, is sitting at the piano with sheet music, teaching herself how to play a song.

 

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