That was my cousin's way. Sometimes she was careless with my feelingsnot in
cruelty, but in the innocent way that beautiful girls sometimes have, as if
being thoughtful were a skill they had never needed to learn. But when she did
think of me, her sweetness, completely unmeasured, would fill me with shame.
"But I'm so happy!" she cried, as if her face weren't already telling me
this. "And he's so handsome!" She fell back onto the bed, clutching her heart.
"He looks just like Rhett Butler, don't you think?"
I sighed in mock exasperation. "He looks nothing like Rhett Butler, for
heaven's sakes. For one thing, he's blond."
Anneke waved this detail away with her bandaged hand.
"And he has blue eyes. And no mustache." I rose and brought the glass of
milk from the dresser over to her night table. "All right. He's handsome. But
frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."
Anneke laughed and sat up. "You'll be an aunt! And the war will be over
soon, and then you can visit."
Stranger than fiction, blending tragedy and farce, How to Create the Perfect Wife is an engrossing tale of the radicalism, and deep contradictions, at the heart of the Enlightenment.
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