Mrs. Everything (39 page)

Both of her deliveries had been easy—a few hours of discomfort, an hour of hard contractions. When they’d sharpened into actual pain, the doctors had given her a whiff of gas, and she’d woken up with a baby in her arms. Kim was born in 1970, a quiet, watchful, owlish little girl who hardly ever cried. Thus encouraged, Jo had gotten pregnant again when Kim was just over a year old. Their prize had been Missy, who never wanted to be in her crib or her playpen and would cry lustily when deposited in either one. Missy was creeping at four months, crawling at five,
and taking her first tottering steps when she was nine months old. She started walking, Jo would say, and never stopped.

Her Avondale friends had no reason to suspect that Jo wasn’t the same as they were: a wife and a mother, no different, or less content, than anyone else on the block. They didn’t know about Shelley or Lynnette. When Dave wanted to sleep with her she’d let him. She even enjoyed it, at least some of the time, but the truth was, her girls, with their creamy skin, their milky breath, their plump limbs and gummy smiles, satisfied any need for physical intimacy that she had. For years, she hadn’t wanted sex at all, from women or men, except in a dim, distant way that seemed to have more to do with memory than desire . . . which, as far as she could tell, was about the same as her neighbors felt.

Years had passed. The girls had weaned and toilet-trained, they’d started nursery school, then kindergarten, and began to wriggle away from Jo’s embraces, or announce,
I can do it myself!
Now that Jo was finally coming out of the fog of new motherhood, she was seeing Dave differently, and finding that she had very little to say to him, and less interest in what he might want to say to her. “How was your day, dear?” she’d ask, out of habit, and he’d accuse her of being sarcastic, of not caring, of not really listening when he talked.

“Tell you what,” Bethie said, unfolding herself from her cross-legged seat at Judy’s fireplace. To Jo’s eyes, her sister’s long hair looked messy and uncared-for, and the slippers she’d brought with her to Judy’s house, purple velvet with gold embroidery, looked ridiculous, so impractical that any grown-up would know better than to buy them and would certainly not wear them in a snowstorm. “I know we’d scheduled something for later in the week, but since we’re all here, who wants to do a little consciousness-raising right now?”

Oh, God
, Jo thought, cringing.
Oh, no.
Bethie in a contained setting, at an event with an official start and an end time, was one thing, but Bethie on a night like this, Bethie unbound, was quite
another. Across the room, Jo saw, or thought she saw, Arlene and Judy exchange a smirk.

“We’re drunk!” called Stephanie from her spot on the sectional.

“That might help,” Bethie replied. “In vino veritas, right?” Jo felt her heart contract as the other women laughed, or murmured their assent.
They’re being polite
, she thought, and mentally begged her sister to sit down. Instead, Bethie stepped to the front of the room and stood on the fireplace’s ledge. Her bracelets rattled as she straightened the hem of her sweater.

“So,” Bethie said. “Who can remember the first time you realized that you were a girl?”

Silence filled the room as the women thought it over.

“I remembered the first time I saw my little brother in the bathtub,” Nonie finally said. “I ran to my mama, screaming, ‘There’s something wrong with him!’ I thought he was deformed. Like his insides were on the outside.”

Everyone laughed. Jo forced herself to breathe. Stephanie said, “When I was six, we went to my mother’s sister’s wedding, and I had this beautiful dress. All crinolines and puffy sleeves. My brothers just had short pants. They looked like babies. And I thought I looked so grown-up.” There were nods and sighs of remembrance. “Then we got to the party, and my brothers were racing all over the place, and I tried to go play with them, and my mom grabbed me. She said I had to be careful. I had to be a little lady.”

“Ah,” was all Bethie said. Jo, meanwhile, was remembering fights with Sarah, arguments about her clothes, her hair, the way she sat and how she sounded.
Why can’t you act like a lady?

“So who thinks things have changed?” asked Bethie.

There was another pause. “I got my kids
Free to Be . . . You and Me
,” Judy said. Jo nodded. She’d gotten her girls the same book. The record, too. “And it says that girls can be anything. Be a doctor, be a lawyer, be an astronaut. Then Jenny asked me, if she grows up to be an astronaut, who’s going to take care of her babies? What am I supposed to say to that?”

The women’s voices rose, overlapping and passionate. “The nanny!” Valerie called, and Steph said, “Men and women should both be raising the children,” while Nonie, who seemed a glass or two past tipsy, said, “Far as I’m concerned, men oughtta be kept as far away from kids as possible. The one time Dan tried to change a diaper, Andy rolled himself right off the changing table and got kaka all over his carpet.”

Bethie sat with her back to the fire and her knees drawn up to her chest. Jo looked at her, wondering what her sister was thinking. That she’d dodged a bullet because she’d never been married? That she was better off than all the women in the room? Was it true?

“Jo?”

Jo blinked. “What say you?” asked her sister. “Do you think men should help raise babies, or do we have to find some other way?”

Careful
, Jo told herself. She could see Nonie watching her and could feel her sister’s gaze, too. “I love being a wife and mother. But I think that ideally women should have the same options men have.”

“That’s right!” said Stephanie, just as Nonie said, “It won’t work,” and Bethie asked, “What do you mean?”

Jo smoothed her already-smooth hair. “Well, I think some women are happy staying home with kids. Or they are when their kids are little. But some women don’t want that. They’d rather work.”

“You don’t think that raising children and running a house is working?” Bethie asked, eyebrows lifted.

“Of course it is,” Jo said, feeling her cheeks flush, angry at her sister for drawing her into a trap. “You know what I mean. Work outside of the home.”

“Do any of us know anyone—any woman our age—who isn’t married and a mom?” Stephanie asked. Jo thought of all the girls she’d known in high school, all the smart young women she’d met in college, the girl who’d edited the
Michigan Daily
’s
opinion section, the girl who’d won the university’s top academic prize. The newspaper editor had gone to law school, then gotten married, and the last Jo knew, she was working part-time. The prizewinner had gotten married and had children, right after college. Just like Jo. Just like Lynnette, and Nonie, and almost every woman Jo knew.

“I’m not married or a mom,” Bethie said.

“What’s it like?” Stephanie asked, her voice full of almost childlike curiosity. “Do you feel like you’re missing out? Are you happy?”

“I am happy,” said Bethie, with her beatific smile. “But, remember, I wasn’t married first, like some of the women I live with, so it wasn’t as if I can speak about what that life was like, or if I like what I have any better. I just did what felt right for me,” she said.

Bullshit
, thought Jo, feeling childish and resentful, and convinced that Bethie was lying.
You got pregnant, you had an abortion, you spent ten years drifting around, going to rock shows and smoking dope before you landed in your commune. You fell into your life, the same way I fell into mine.

“Here’s another question,” said Bethie. “Are marriage and motherhood what you expected?”

For a moment, there was no sound but the hissing and snapping of the logs in the fire. “It’s boring sometimes,” Valerie Cohen finally said.

“ ’S boring all the time,” Nonie said, and hiccupped.

“We can’t say we weren’t warned,” said Arlene. Her voice was bleak. “Betty Friedan told us. She said it was going to be boring.”

“She did,” Judy said. “But did we have other choices? Real ones?”

Jo had considered that question a lot, when she was busy doing something particularly rote and unpleasant: weeding the garden, loading or unloading the dishwasher, or trying, and failing, to fold fitted sheets. She would fold, or pull, or wash, and consider how, no matter how much the bra-tossers and the
National Organization for Women and the Society for Cutting Up Men had done to point out the tedium of marriage and motherhood, they hadn’t done much about offering other possibilities or smoothing other paths. The only option she could see was paying some other woman—most likely an African American or Hispanic one—to do it for her, the way her mother had, and that did not feel like progress at all.

“I feel so guilty.” Valerie’s voice was quiet. “My parents were immigrants. They came here from China with nothing. They have a dry-cleaning shop in Boston and they both worked fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, so that my brother and I could go to college.” Valerie reached across Nonie, fingers groping for the wineglass she’d placed on the ledge in front of the fireplace. “My parents could never even have imagined a life like the one I have. All of the luxury, all of the ease. I mean, my mother never even had a dishwasher.” Valerie paused.

“And yet,” Bethie prompted.

“And yet,” Valerie repeated, looking down into her wine, with her black hair falling in wings across her face. “I know it’s not as hard, or as boring, as dry-cleaning clothes was. But some days, I just feel so . . .” She shook her head. “Depleted. Like Arnold and the kids just take and take and take and there’s nothing left where I used to be.” She fisted her right hand and rested it against her heart.

“That’s it,” said Nonie, sitting up straight, so fast that her wine sloshed in her lap. “That’s it exactly.”

“Do you think the guys feel this way?” Judy still spoke like a New Yorker, all flattened vowels and rat-a-tat-tat delivery. “Does everyone feel bored or empty?”

Jo tried to adjust her position so that she could see her sister. Her bones had that delicious liquid sensation that came with a few drinks, and the living-room floor did not feel entirely solid beneath her. Outside, the snow was still falling, piling up in drifts against the darkened windowpanes, which rattled as the wind gusted, but the room was almost too warm, the air rich with the
smells of spices and wine, perfume and shampoo. She could feel her thoughts coming together, ideas she’d had, then shoved away; opinions she never let herself dwell on, crystallizing and solidifying, helped along by the storm, and the closeness, and the company, and the alcohol. “I think that men go out in the world and get filled up. They get praised for their work.”

“They get paid for their work,” added Nonie.

“They get to fly,” said Arlene, perhaps thinking of her pilot husband, who’d leave his family on the ground ten days out of every fourteen.

“And they wear clothes nobody’s thrown up on, and they get to eat with both of their hands,” Arlene said. She shook her head. “Can you imagine? A whole meal where you don’t have to cut up anyone else’s chicken, or tell them to use their napkins or eat their vegetables.”

“And that’s just the husbands,” Nonie said.

“And they come home,” Jo continued. “And there’s dinner on the table. And the carpet’s vacuumed, and the bed’s made, and the blue suit that they asked you to pick up is hanging in the closet. And they say thank you, and maybe they even act like what we’re doing matters. But I’m not sure they believe it.” Jo pressed her knuckles to her lips. Judy and Valerie and Bethie were all watching her, and she bet that Nonie, with her eyes shut, was listening, too. “I think that they believe that it’s their due. That they’re people, and we’re not quite people. Like, we’re maybe two-thirds of a person.”

“Fuck ’em!” Nonie called from the floor, and lifted one fist in the air, as Arlene stirred, reflexively covering her son’s ears with her hands, the way they’d all learned to do when Nonie had more than three glasses of white wine. “We should go on strike.”

“I’ll organize,” Bethie offered. Judy suggested that they have snow day dinners once a week, where everyone brought their kids to one house to feed them, and Arlene asked if they had to bring the kids, if they couldn’t just leave the children at home and show up to enjoy themselves.

“No kids works for me,” said Nonie. “It’ll be good for Dan to be in charge. Let him see how bad I’ve got it.”

“I love my kids,” said Valerie. “Only sometimes, I wish . . .”

“I wish,” Stephanie repeated.

“I wish,” said Jo, and Arlene and Judy joined in. The fire crackled, and the wind howled. The snow fell down, and the candles flickered, then guttered out, extinguishing themselves in puddles of wax.

By midnight, almost everyone was asleep. Jo lay on the floor, between Bethie and Nonie, as the logs burned down to embers. At one point, a baby’s cries woke her, and she heard icy hailstones rattling off the windows, and Stephanie singing, “Hush little baby, don’t say a word, Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird,” as she nursed her son in the rocking chair. Jo felt deeply content, so relaxed she felt like she could sink right into the floor.
Or maybe I’m just drunk
. She was drifting off again when she heard the rustle of blankets and smelled lavender and sandalwood—
essence of hippie
, she thought. She turned on her side, and there was Bethie, lying right next to her, whispering, “Tell me what happened with Shelley Finkelbein.”

Jo closed her eyes. In 1976, she and Dave had been in Michigan for Thanksgiving. The United States was celebrating its Bicentennial, the news was full of footage of the Tall Ships sailing into New York City’s harbor, and in what felt like the truest sign of a new era, Jo and Bethie convinced Sarah to buy a new slipcover-less couch. On Thanksgiving morning, Dave was off somewhere, meeting up with a few of what seemed to Jo to be an endless supply of fraternity brothers (and having a hair of the dog, Jo suspected). Bethie was meditating in the bedroom, sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring into a candle’s flame. Sarah was stuffing the turkey and the girls were playing hide-and-seek in the backyard when there was a knock on the door. “Jo, can you get that?” Sarah called. Jo had opened the door, and there was Shelley. Her long, dark hair had been cut to shoulder length, and she’d lost weight that she hadn’t
had to spare. Her pink-and-white checked shirt’s wide collar bagged open, exposing the sharp rise of her collarbones, and her white slacks billowed around her legs. She wore a short fur coat, glossy and cocoa-brown, and there was an expensive-looking purse slung over her shoulder. She held an Olivetti typewriter in its hard-sided carrying case. Her fingernails were short, unpolished, a few of them ragged at the top, like they’d been bitten, and she’d chewed off all the pink lipstick from her lower lip.