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My Name, Thérèse Terry Ehret

What would it be like if I had been born Alice? I have not, even yet, learned to love my name, which is not Alice. Mine, Thérèse, is a name that one cannot love unless one speaks with a French accent and is open to the possibility of revenge.

If I had been born with a wide open, sunny name like Alice, or a quiet, generous name like Mary, or a fierce, untamed name like Barbara, what conversations would I have had with myself on evenings late in summer when there is only enough light left in the sky to mark the boundaries you are losing? Had I lived on a sensible city street in a town big enough to include the number 36 instead of an avenue with the romantic lake-country sound of Valley View, what self would have accompanied me when I washed my hands or stood long at the window so that the familiar world once again looked familiar?

My given name has waved from me like a little ribbon all these years! I hardly think of it belonging to me. I've chosen instead the symmetry of the 5 letters beside the 5 letters, all angles and blocks of the other name I have adopted. Not my real name, because that was reserved for ceremony, or anger, or the Catholic correctness of Sister Josepha Thérèse, its two accent aigu and accent grave cast over the twin eyes of the internal e's like two French eyebrows raised in surprise or question. My name, formal, unpronounceable, troubled and erotic like the heroine in a 19th century novel, has been there 49 years, another self walking slowly toward me from the other end of my life. Sometimes I've caught a glimpse of her far ahead where the path bends into sight. Sometimes she vanishes and I hear of her only as a voice calling me in the middle of the day, say when I'm about to explain the several uses of the semicolon, or shift gears at an intersection, or select nectarines in the fluorescent aisles of the grocery. A voice, sharp with disappointment or impatience, pronouncing my given, unpronounceable name like someone calling a child back from play. The name I have almost forgotten I own, except that it appears on my checks and credit cards and on the telephone when someone who's found me on a list hopes I will contribute to their cause.

I have never let that name near anything I loved.

I suspect it is she, Thérèse, knitting in the corner of my room the names for the things I haven't done, like a list of aristocrats destined for the guillotine. She lies beside me, a murderous lover, twisting a knife inside my heart till I confess how small and jealous my love can be. She stands like a saint, her head veiled, her eyes full of roses, her arms lifted to heaven, while I am here still, obedient to gravity and hunger, unable to lift my foot even onto the first rung of the ladder.