sounds of silence; Placid expressions, brooding souls.

Byline: Stacey D'erasmo

A winter day, 1975. I was fourteen. Sitting on the mocha wall-to-wall carpet in our Maryland ranch house, leafing through Vogue, what did I know about anything? Not much, though I often had occasion to write it all down, at length, in my journals, which copiously recorded interlocking webs of relationships with people whose faces I now barely remember. Probably I was listening to Carly Simon's Anticipation while I turned the glossy pages, or maybe to my latest acquisition, the first record I ever bought myself, Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark. I was enjoying dominion over the entire living room, having locked my younger sister, and the dogs and cat, out of the house, which I sometimes did before our parents got home from work. My sister had given up knocking and was now kicking slush off the carport roof.

I turned a page. Four women: one rather severe in black, and three draped in what looked to me like gray drapery over a bed, all in white, with long white curtains behind. Nothing else in the room. None of them were wearing brightly colored tube tops or beige platforms or white carpenter pants, which were then the fashion at my school. You couldn't see any of their hair, and their faces, I could tell, were long, interesting, odd. They didn't look at all like Carly Simon, who, on the cover of Anticipation, wore a thrillingly see-through midi skirt and had great feathered hair. The severe one in black at the back of the room looked sort of haunted. Was she supposed to be a ghost? Her name, Vogue's caption said, was Jean Muir, this was "Jean and her chums," and the photo was taken in "the bedroom of her all-white London flat." What was a flat? I knew what chums were, but there was something about these women, and whoever Jean Muir was, that stopped me. They were so strange, like long birds, and the expressions on their interesting European faces above their peculiarly voluminous dresses-no transparent midi skirts for them-were deep, still.

Obviously, they were thinking. They were feeling. Even my fourteen-year-old self could see that they had inner lives; you could practically see their inner lives hovering around them, like spirits, and the entire photograph, if not the world, had stopped to record just that, the moment of whatever mysterious, rich thing Jean and her chums felt. They were, as a group, suffused with a glamour that was new to me: the glamour of interiority. So deep and forceful were these women's inner lives that they had apparently blown all the other furniture out of the room-except the bed, so that the chums could rest.

I, of course, had no trouble understanding this, since to be fourteen is to believe that your own interiority, if revealed, would immediately blow all the furniture out of the room. Already it had blown my sister and all the pets outside. ("We're cold," called my sister through the window. I ignored her.) But I had never in my life seen a picture of it like this, seen it given such weight and authority and chic. My favorite dress at the time was a clinging polyester sort of wrap number, black with thin, zinging diagonal stripes in rainbow colors. When I wore it with beige nylons and platform shoes-to see Godspell at the Kennedy Center, for instance-I felt like the epitome of sex. These women in the flat, however, all covered up, seemed already to know about sex and something beyond sex as well-some larger, darker, inherently feminine quality that was intelligent ...