Once you figure out that women have many lives, nothing is surprising.Women have many guises, many names: maiden names, married names, professional names, nicknames. We pile on aliases. All of us have at least one version of ourselves packed away in a suitcase under the bed. She's an escape route.

She's another edition, not quite a duplicate, maybe our self from another life. Like the moon, our unknown selves shift and tug at us, exerting forces both profound and unacknowledged. When a feeling washes over us, swells, recedes, carries us off-course, we may not be able to tell where it comes from, but oh, yes, we feel its pull.

Often we have another self because she's a part of our past. The past isn't something you can paint over and erase. The past remains, as a wooden table remains a table no matter what you varnish it with, whatever surface you apply. Hundreds of years pass and the table is placed in nearly endless rooms; it's in a kitchen for suppers of bread and cheese, in a bedroom where an infant lies on it having a diaper changed, and finally in a cellar where a matchbook is stuck beneath one leg to keep it steady. But the table can be reclaimed. Someone will see beneath the peeling blisters and cracked paint and choose to scrape it down to the oak. Patience and force will vitiate the accumulated layers, summoning back its essential strength and beauty because these, after all, have remained unchanged.