“Brutes! How can you girls be such brutes?” They cried. We cried, too, because we felt they were saying we were wrong. We felt foul and fatherly and frightened of ourselves. We tried to make ourselves small. We were coiled up but we were not broken. And we knew our mothers’ idea of goodness was not measured by morals but by how much noise we made. And we quickly grew tired of trying to be good in their way.”
