Life & Wisdom Quote by Phyllis McGinley

Sisters, in McGinley’s telling, aren’t noble archetypes; they’re a blur of steam, vanity, privacy, and sudden obligation. The line lands because it treats a domestic cliché with the precision usually reserved for big public dramas. “Always drying their hair” isn’t just a habit, it’s a ritual of becoming: the in-between state where a girl is neither child nor fully legible adult, locked away to rehearse her own image.

The locked door matters. It signals a rare claim to sovereignty inside the family machine, a small barricade against siblings, parents, noise. At the mirror, “shoulders bare,” the pose is both intimate and performative: she’s alone, yet already auditioning for an outside world that will read her body and hair as cues. McGinley catches the awkward choreography of self-fashioning - “trying this way and that” - as if identity can be adjusted like a part in the hair.

Then comes the snap back to duty: she “fly importunate down the stair to answer the telephone.” “Importunate” gives the motion a nagging quality, a push from the household’s needs. The telephone, that mid-century nerve ending, yanks her from private rehearsal into public availability. One moment she’s curating herself; the next she’s a runner, a responder, a conduit.

McGinley writes from a period when femininity was policed through domestic routine, yet she doesn’t sermonize. She catalogs the comedy and constraint of girlhood in a single breath: the bathroom as sanctuary, the mirror as editor, the ringing phone as reminder that your time - and even your solitude - is never entirely your own.