"Suzette Haden Elgin - Only A Housewife" - читать интересную книгу автора (Elgin Suzette Haden)

good
income. He was in splendid health, he knew he was not bad looking, he was
proud
of the strong tall body that never failed him and that could certainly have
brought some sensible woman night after night of bliss. . . . What was the
matter with them all, turning him down one after another?

"It's your cursed tongue, Joro," his father was forever telling him. "Women
are
choosy -- and rightly so. They can't go out, the way a man can, and get away
from their husbands; they have no choice but to stay inside the house. And if
he
is pompous and arrogant and unkind, if he takes pleasure in making them
miserable, what are they to do? For women, my foolish thoughtless son,
marriage
is a life sentence. Naturally they are careful who they choose to share that
sentence with! And naturally they don't want someone like you -- always
tormenting them, always making them cry, always yelling and pounding and
sneering and stomping about! Why would they? They're not idiots, you know,
just
because they're female!"

And why did my mother want YOU, old man? Joro always thought, listening to
this
tiresome song that he knew by heart. Why would any woman want YOU, you
weakling?
He had seen his father, hundreds of times if he had seen him once, going out
into the night and any sort of weather on his mother's foolish errands. Did
the
woman want a peach? Caleb Belledarien would be delighted to go get her one,
never mind what he might have been doing when the fancy took her. Did she want
a
bolt of silk? Did her heart cry out for a flowered scarf? A book? A music box?
Whatever it was, Caleb would smile at his spoiled woman and touch her cheek,
the
silly old fool, and out he would go with a smile on his stupid face with its
straggly beard never properly trimmed, to do her ladyship's bidding!

It wasn't going to be like that for joro. When he married, he would be the
authority in his household, let his wife be Someone of the One Hundred Towers
and Turrets and Gazebos. He would rule there, and she would do what he wanted.
His father knew nothing about women, that was his problem. Because he had
found
a woman who was willing to take him in for her own purposes, to use him like a
servant, to provide her with children . . . children that he had to earn a
living for, not her . . . he fancied himself an authority on the subject of
wives and marriages. Joro knew better. Caleb was besotted, that was what he
was;
he was no more than a woman's plaything, though he thought himself such a
wonder. It would have been amusing if Joro had not been forced to live with