and is also emphasized by the use of "you." It is as if the speaker were teaching someone else what would happen based on her own experience of what has happened. This is another mark of feminist fiction--it speaks to other women and encloses them in a universal experience.
The woman in the story tries to live up to the idea of the other woman, the idea that the other woman is tougher and can accept the problems and the sharing of the male as the wife cannot: "Show him your bicep" (351). Always, though, there is this same underlying sense of irony. The affair is not presented as anything at all joyous, and instead it emerges as a chore, filled with pitfalls. The woman is aware at all times of the degree to which she is being compromised and of the lack of commitment being made toward her. The man is presumptuous about her feelings to a great degree. He is also not solicitous of those feelings and talks about his wife at the drop of a hat.
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