In those days, those days which exist for me only as the most elusive memory now, when often the first sound you'd hear in the morning would be a storm of birdsong, then the soft clop of the hooves of the horse hauling a milk wagon down your block, and the last sound at night as likely as not would be your father pulling up in his car, having worked late again, always late, and going heavily down to the cellar, to the furnace, to shake out the ashes and damp the draft before he came upstairs to fall into bed -- in those long-ago days, women, my mother, my friends' mothers, our neighbors, all the women I knew -- wore, often much of the day, what were called housedresses, cheap, printed, pulpy, seemingly purposefully shapeless