UNTIL THAT EVENING AND MY CONVERSATION WITH ASHLEY on the staircase, I don’t think I fully grasped the extent to which hysteria was a psychic wound that we as women still bore; a wound inflicted from centuries of our symptoms, our instincts about our own bodies, our pleasures and afflictions, always being the first to be discounted and discredited, even by other women. Even by our own daughters, as the case may be. It was a wound that we still carried, because we could, at any moment, have an entire history called upon to silence us in a word, in an instant. And in the eyes of my family, of those who loved me most, I was now the hysterical subject.

I was the woman in Ancient Greece with a womb wandering through my guts like a feral dog for having sexual desire, or anxiety, or depression, or whatever other feeling was inconvenient for my husband. I was the melancholy woman prone to demonic possession and witchcraft. I was the woman sent to the Alpine sanatorium, when my husband no longer wanted to deal with me complaining about his mistresses. Too much sex. Not enough sex. Too much female seed becomes venomous if not released through regular climax, don’t you know. Too much menstrual blood. Not enough menstrual blood. If I was living a hundred years ago, less even, I think it’s entirely possible I would have been subjected to electroshock therapy for hearing The Hum, and maybe a hysterectomy fifty years before that. And I have the feeling that Paul would have very lovingly and supportively allowed it.