My dear Camille,
on my telephone this morning there is a message I have not opened. I can see the first line of it — the machine shows you the first line whether you ask or not, the way a hostess shows you the door to the kitchen while assuring you that you needn’t go in. The first line reads: Anna, forgive me, but —
That is enough. I have received this message all my life, in different handwriting, and it always begins with an apology, because the people who ask you to be smaller are, as a rule, well brought up. I know who it is from. I know what it says. I have decided to drink my coffee first.
You will say: Grandmother, that is cowardice. No, my dear. Cowardice would be to open it at once, in my nightgown, before I have told David the weather — and to spend the day arguing with a woman who is not in the room. I have done that. I did it for about forty years. This letter is about how I stopped, and about the one sentence that did most of the damage, because it was never said by anyone but me.
The sentence is: maybe they’re right.
Notice what it is made of. Not “they are right” — I was never that obedient. And not “they are wrong” — I was never that brave. Maybe. A word with no back to it. You can lean on it for decades and never once be caught standing up for anything.