Subject: excerpt of short fiction story by Cassandra Jensen
“Judith, men are like dogs – you should pet only the ones you keep on a short leash, because you can never tell where the others have been rolling.”
What isn’t in a name
Excerpt of fiction: “Nomenclature,” (means a system of named used in an art or science)
My mother used to say that a name tells more about a person than would an hour spent in the same room with him. “If you ever have children – God forbid -” she would advise, “give them good, strong names. Don’t buy into this androgynous garbage. If a boy is named Leslie, you might as well put him in a dress.”
She classified my friends Susan and Margaret without ever meeting them (“A phony and a know-it-all, you mark my words ….”)
“Abigail” and “Amos” were her definition of charming names, and I often wondered why she’d call me “Judith,” an insipid moniker I’d swapped for “Judy” without delay.
“… Perhaps I should explain about my mother, for – between her occasional pearls of wisdom and the fake pearls she wore out to dinner on the weekends – not even her name would give you an accurate description. Feminism mixed with, well, misogyny was her game, and when I was a little girl she would smooth my hair and proclaim: “Judith, men are like dogs – you should pet only the ones you keep on a short leash, because you can never tell where the others have been rolling.” Indeed, only a deep fondness for the male gender could have prompted this axiom … plus the fact that Mother rarely practiced what she preached.
Take Amos, for example, who cropped up during my junior year of high school. Amos was my mother’s “soon-to-be fianc,” an impossibly dense fellow whose intellect never strayed beyond, “So, how bout them Patriots?” and “Woudja pass the beans?” Still, the mule somehow attracted women like my mother, who thought they could change him into a prize pony. …
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