Slamming the door, Wendy threw herself onto the bed and wept at the injustice. Tonight was supposed to be her night. She waited eighteen long years to garner an invitation to the exclusive gala, and this was her year, but her father had spoiled her plans once again.
She reached for her phone, prepared to text her friends a boiling rant of profanity about how smothering her parents could be, but her screen opened to her social media, and she was bombarded with pictures of her peers dressed for tonight’s event.
“Fuck my life.” She tossed the phone aside, unable to stomach her friends’ joy without being eaten alive by her own jealousy.
The soft wrap of her mother’s knuckles preceded the creek of the door. “Wendy, darling, he didn’t do it on purpose.”
Of course, her mother would defend her father. “He knew how much this night meant to me,” Wendy argued, her makeup smearing on the chenille pillowcase.
“Obviously, he didn’t, or he would have secured the ticket.”
“I told him, Mother! It’s all I’ve talked about for months. He never listens to anything I say!”
Her mother pressed a comforting hand on her back. “Your father’s a busy man. He has a lot on his plate.”
Wendy sat up, the chiffon sleeve of her ivory gown drooping off her shoulder as a curl spiraled free of her French twist. “He knew what tonight meant to me, and he purposely forgot so I couldn’t go. He hates that I’m eighteen now.”
Her father was a numbers man, invested in finance and deeply rooted in classical education. He never forgot a date. Nor did he ever overlook an opportunity. This ball would have muddled his control of her future, and he couldn’t bear the thought, so he intentionally spoiled her plans by not procuring the correct number of tickets. A calculated lie if she’d ever seen one!
“Father lies when it suits him. If you weren’t so enchanted by his charm, you’d see that he’s as cunning as a pirate when he wants to be.”
Mother scoffed. “Lies? Pirates? Really, Wendy. If you want to be treated like an adult, you must start acting like one. Your father is not out to ruin your life.”
“He wants to control everything.”
“Enough.” Her mother stood, her shimmering sage gown a beautiful taunt that pierced Wendy’s heart with envy. “Your father’s doing everything he can to secure you a decent engagement.”
“You mean he’s trying to control my future just like he controls my life now!” How had modern times turned so incredibly old-fashioned where women were concerned? “Did either of you ever think I might want more than a secure marriage and to start a family? What about my dreams? What about love?”
“You should be grateful for his guidance. Your father is a wise man who knows a great deal about how the world works.”
“If he thinks guiding me toward a man like Peter Pangbourne is wise, then I question his judgment. Not all fortunate men are wealthy in morals, Mother. Peter is far more duplicitous than Father sees.”
“The Pangbournes are a good family with strong values, darling. You should be grateful such a prosperous match is even on the table.”
She was never escaping this prison. Years after her brothers John and Michael left the nursery, she remained confined by the whimsical, childish trappings—caged in a place designed to keep her innocent.
At eighteen, she was as unchanged as the fixtures in the starlit sky where the constellations never shifted and the masculine planets orbited freely. Girls deserved more than to exist as a backdrop to stars, but decades of advancements in equal rights were somehow being washed away. Scrubbed out by the men who needed to feel superior and rinsed clean by the women who blindly stood by such men. There was a quiet resistance, but it was fading, and every day, Wendy felt less and less in control of her future.
A tear rolled from the corner of her eye as a sense of hopelessness consumed her. Numerous books on the shelves boasted of adventures she’d never know. She was a confined bird, clipped at the wings, with an unsatisfied hunger to explore.
She dreamed of soaring over distant oceans and breathing in the petrichor of foreign soil as rain and mist rolled onto the remote shores. She longed to stand clad in buffalo leather amidst the wildest jungles, to know the exact color of the sunset over the Mojave Desert, and to feel the heat of the Egyptian wind racing through her hair as the sandy heat roughly kissed her skin.
Eighteen years old, and she knew nothing of independent adventures or kisses of any kind. She only knew the constricting confinement of being a girl and all the expectations that suppressed her desires for something wild.
It happened so subtly, the shift from unbound innocence to confinement. With the budding of her breasts came polite correction and refinement her brothers’ had never experienced. They knew little of decorum and etiquette, yet their female counterparts suffered such outdated catechisms as if meekness were a rite of passage to the next stage.
But why would any woman seek the approval of a self-proclaimed superior man? Wouldn’t that only undermine her independence further?
Every time Wendy was told to cross her legs or sit up straight, a rage burned inside of her. When she was ordered to stop climbing trees and taught to speak in a softer voice, the confinement took her breath away—no oxygen to feed the flame of injustice, and she’d ignorantly conformed until she turned into someone unrecognizable to herself.
Propriety and traditional grooming shaped her in ways that hinted her authentic self was wrong, and that created shame and pressure to conform. Proper society stripped away individuality, stating tenacity was suddenly too forward. They praised familiarity and condemned the alternative, using stigmatized terms like Prima donna, extra, bratty, or diva when all of those things used to mean a woman knew her value and had the courage to expect more.
Regardless of her personal dreams, Wendy slowly started to look like every other young woman in her parents’ social circles. Uniform and conventional. They praised her uniqueness as a child, then stifled it as a teen. She never strived for conformity, but she achieved it all the same. Now, as an adult, she wore the constant constriction of values that were not hers.
Why? Because she allowed it to come to this. She stood silently as their traditional ideals cinched tighter and tighter around her life. Little by little, she adapted to the suffocation, making herself smaller, quieter, and less disruptive as she eventually learned how not to breathe. They squeezed out anything unrefined until she didn’t know how to exist any other way.
“What is it that men are so afraid of?”
