Miranda, the 'Sleeping Beauty,' is a young girl introduced to the senseless violence of men when Billy shatters the head of her doll. She is unable to tell her mother the truth of how the doll broke because Billy threatened her, an incident that sets the tone for her interactions with men throughout her life. As an adult, Miranda is married to Bert, someone she met in college and 'needed' to marry because he belittled her often enough that she became convinced that her sense of self could only be defined by him. At a party, he publicly insults what she has made of her life and leaves into the cold night - the host hands Bert's jacket off to Miranda and urges her to do the 'wifely' thing and follow him so he does not freeze. But Miranda realizes that Bert is full of nothing but uncomfortable truths and frequent interruptions - in his eagerness to compartmentalize the things around him, he has never bothered to truly understand his wife. Now home alone, Miranda reflects upon the boys she has known throughout her life: the ones that passed dirty notes in school, those who ridiculed her, and those who lost their temper too often. She thinks about the time she told her mother she was going to marry Bert, and the discussion devolved into war - how even in marriage, there are sides that one must pick. She realizes that she is still being treated as though she's a child, and she wonders when she will get to be a woman. The self-definition she had hoped to achieve through Bert's company has not materialized, and Miranda is left with her unfulfilled hopes. It is in this state of mind that she begins to fall into the 'Sleeping Beauty' metaphor, where she becomes a nameless, faceless beauty to be conquered, a disruption to the normal order of things. In her youth, her father nearly jeopardized his marriage by wanting to stay with 'the Beauteous Blonde,' but Miranda prevented this. She now sees herself as that 'Beauteous Blonde,' and on the other side of the 'battlefield' are men collectively gathered to send forth a hero that they consider worthy of 'having' her. In the midst of this, Miranda realizes that she has begun to look at herself with the male gaze, and coupled with her husband's other failings - the neglect, the disinterest, the rough edges of his character and their resultant incompatibility - she decides that their marriage is over.
The next morning, Bert sits desperately at the doorstep, somehow aware of the realization to which she has come. He begs her to reconsider, hoping that having a child might save their marriage, but she just laughs.