I was the only woman on my street who had never had a<br >Cuisinart or a hysterectomy. Or even an affair. I felt there<br >was something wrong with me. When I mentioned my<br >anxiety to my friends and family， they all agreed that<br >thel;e was.<br > S~eral winked knowingly: "You re thirty-eight-and<br >neither you nor Bert has ever-c mon， you re kidding."<br >Our doctor advocated hysterectomies as a routine pro-<br >cedure; that "damned thing" would be causing me trouble<br >soon. But I had gone to see him for poison ivy， and I<br >decided major surgery wasn t called for. My friend Judy<br >said， "Why don t you just get a Cuisinart? You ll love it."<br > "No I won t，" I said. "I ve just had the kitchen redone.<br >For the first time in my life it s<br >thinking of having it sealed off."<br >completely clean and I m<br > "Then you d better get a college degree."<br > /That was the other thing I didn t have that most of my<br >friends were "into."<br > I thought of all those paintings and drawings stacked in<br >the basement; the ones I d done while the children were<br >small. I d never taken them to a dealer or even entered<br >them in a show， but had always vaguely thought of them<br >as leading to a career-someday in the future.<br > "I just threw all my old magazines and clippings away<br ><br >