Regrets Only

There she was, my daughter’s piano teacher, beside the big blue mailbox, in this freethinking town on the edge of Chicago. Let’s call her Anna. “Hey, Anna,” I called, waving as I came up the street to the post office. “Hey,” she said, waving back. She was in her early 30s, and tall, lanky. I was in my mid-40s, and small. She was dressed in a plain, straightforward way—a white blouse, Gap chinos. Sensible shoes. I concluded early on in our friendship that, unlike me, she did not have two feather boas stored in her closet. After her life turned the fateful corner, and she hated herself, she described herself as schoolmarmish. Before that, though, when she’d felt strong, grounded by the sense that she had chosen her look and her style, she said, “I don’t like to think of myself as a female; I like to think of myself as a person.”