Five Women Read online

“No, for both of us. There were some nice guys at the bar. I was talking to two of them. They’re going to come over to the table later. I need a next husband.”

  “You wouldn’t marry again . . . ?”

  “I’d settle for an escort at the moment,” Kathryn said. “A man to go to things with.”

  Gara winced. “That makes me feel so old. An escort.”

  “You’re confusing it with a walker. I mean a nice, heterosexual guy who wants to have fun.”

  “That’s a date.”

  “Nothing wrong with a date.”

  “I’ve given up,” Gara said. “It’s too late. I’ve forgotten how to have sex.”

  “Nobody forgets.”

  “I’m afraid to tell you.” She felt like a freak. Why not admit the truth? She trusted her friends. “I haven’t had sex in five years,” Gara said. When the words came out and she had to listen to them, she wanted to cry.

  “Five years?” Felicity gasped. “You’re kidding! Five years?”

  Kathryn did not gasp. She had not had sex in longer than that; but, of course, she didn’t care.

  Gara shrugged. The time had gone by fast and she had been occupied with much more serious things. Every day she remembered how lucky she was to be alive.

  “You haven’t been in mourning all this time for that ex-husband of yours?” Kathryn asked sternly.

  “No,” Gara said, truthfully. “But I was busy. Breast cancer is very time-consuming.”

  “But you’re well now,” Felicity said.

  “And it’s time to find you a boyfriend,” Kathryn said. “Someone attractive and intelligent, with a sense of humor, with a nice summer house . . .”

  “I have a nice summer house.” Her little place on the beach in Amagansett had been part of her divorce settlement. She had bought Carl out.

  “You’re not like me, you don’t need anything from a man,” Felicity said. “You have a great deal to offer in a relationship. Not all men want twenty-three-year-olds.”

  “You should take an ad in the personals,” Kathryn said.

  “Fifty-five-year-old woman with one tit wants to get fucked,” Gara said dryly.

  She watched as they screamed with laughter. Felicity was doubled over, tears coming out of her eyes. Gara knew their laughter was partly in shock at her forthrightness, and partly in admiration for her spirit. She had chosen to keep her cancer an almost complete secret, even from her patients, and she knew the few friends she had told wouldn’t tell. They didn’t understand her secrecy—after all, she had survived—but they honored it. She approached her situation with unexpected humor, and her friends looked upon this with awe.

  But behind the laughter was her secret realization that, without even knowing how it had happened, she had suddenly turned around to discover that she had become one of those women who’d already had her life. As a young girl she’d seen them: the widows, the mutilated, the card players. They seemed to be at the end of their lives as women, a destiny too far away to imagine. Now, except for her career, this dwindling away into invisibility did not seem so far away anymore. But it was still incredibly foreign and strange, and it felt much too soon.

  “What are you laughing about?” Eve demanded, sailing up to their table like the actress she was and glancing around to see if there was anybody in the restaurant she wanted to sit closer to. Her red hair was the color of fire, and she was wearing feather earrings and had a feather pinned in her hair, and her lipstick was almost black.

  “Hi, Eve,” Kathryn gasped, pulling herself together.

  “Anybody here?” Eve asked. She pulled out a chair and sat down. “Not so lively tonight.”

  “It’s still early,” Gara said.

  The waiter came over and Eve ordered a beer. “So how’s Russell?” she asked Felicity.

  “I have to call him,” Felicity said, making a face. She pulled the cell phone out of her bag and dialed. “Don’t sound like you’re having too much fun.” Her voice changed, became sweet, soft, and subservient. “Hi, Slugger.”

  “Great name for a guy who hits you,” Eve whispered.

  “We’re here at Yellowbird,” Felicity said into the phone. “Gara and Kathryn and Eve. That’s all. How’s the game? Uh-huh. No, I won’t be late. Okay. No. Okay.” She clicked off. “Yeech,” she said.

  “Such love,” Eve said.

  They ordered grilled chicken and salads. Billie kept a few simple items on the menu in addition to her regional dishes, for people who, like them, were always on diets. Aretha was singing on the sound system, in her gutsy voice, clear as a bell. “Chain, chain, chain, chain of fools . . .” That’s us, Gara thought, and when do we learn? She thought that with the exception of Billie, and maybe Felicity, she was the only person who really listened to the music. Everyone else considered it merely background. The restaurant was full now, and so was the bar. People were still drifting in. Little Billie had finished his homework and was playing a computer game. Soft pops and pings of cartoon mayhem floated over from his corner.

  Eve visibly stiffened. “Look who’s here,” she said, nodding at the door. She had a little smile on her face, but Gara could see she was upset.

  “Isn’t that Harvey?” Felicity said.

  He was a successful manufacturer, middle-aged and big and sexy and handsome and blooming with heat and blood, a kind of male Eve. The two of them had dated briefly, and the other women had thought they were a perfect match, but it hadn’t worked out. Looking back, it had turned out to be a flirtation and a two-night stand.

  “Hello, ladies,” Harvey said. He looked at all of them but Eve.

  “Hello, Harvey,” Eve said.

  “Ms. Bader.” And he was gone to a table in the back where some people were waiting for him.

  Eve craned around. “Does he have a date?”

  “What do you care?” Kathryn said.

  “I don’t care,” Eve said, but she sounded hurt and angry.

  Gara remembered their courtship. Eve had been in awe. His body is so warm, like a stove, she had marveled. I’ve never seen heat like that coming out of another human being. I think he’s dangerous. Eve had liked that, the sense of danger. But then it had turned out he was the one who was afraid of her, and he had avoided her like the plague.

  “I don’t know why it never worked out with him,” Eve said.

  “You do so,” Gara said. “You shouldn’t have tried to tie him up in bed.”

  Felicity giggled. Whenever Gara was up front about something, which she often was, Felicity considered it outrageous, but she loved it.

  “What was wrong with that?” Eve snapped.

  Eve liked to tie men up in bed. Most of them wouldn’t let her, but she tried all the same. When Eve had approached Harvey with her red silk scarves, he had said if there was going to be any tying up done he would do it to her, so there was none done, and after that he stopped calling.

  “It’s the power struggle,” Gara said. “You can’t try to dominate a man like him.”

  “Maybe he would have liked it,” Eve said. “You know what’s wrong with him? He can’t have a relationship. Another one of those men who don’t know what they want.”

  “He knew what he didn’t want,” Kathryn said cheerfully.

  “No, no, he has problems.”

  How nice it would be, Gara thought, to be able to blame anyone else but yourself. Most of her patients blamed themselves for everything, especially the women. They came into their sessions asking, What did I do? What you did, she often had to tell them, was you picked him. That’s what you did. Or you let him pick you.

  The salads came and they ate hungrily. “I’m so upset,” Felicity murmured. “I haven’t heard from my friend all week.”

  She referred to her lover as her “friend,” but they all knew what she meant. She had never told any of them but Gara his last name,
but they had the feeling he was someone well known. He was married too, and they had secret lunches in a pied à terre he had sublet.

  “He’ll call,” Gara reassured her. “He always does.”

  “No, this time it’s been longer than it ever was before.”

  “No, it hasn’t.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “If he wanted to see you all the time, you wouldn’t want to see him,” Gara said.

  “I suppose you’re right,” Felicity said. “But when he doesn’t call I think he’s tired of me.”

  “You’re obsessing again.”

  “I know.”

  “Why won’t you tell us who he is?” Eve said.

  “I can’t. I’ve already told you more than enough. If my husband knew I was having an affair, he would kill me.”

  “Really?” Kathryn said.

  “Probably,” Felicity said. “Russell is a very angry man.”

  “You’d better watch out,” Eve said. She was trying to sound solicitous, and perhaps she was, but Gara knew she loved the drama of it.

  “I don’t know why you need a husband and a lover,” Kathryn said. “Why don’t you get rid of both of them and start over with a man who makes you happy?”

  “If I could, I wouldn’t be neurotic,” Felicity said. “The irony of it is that my friend is what’s saving my marriage. After I see him is the only time I feel like being nice to my husband.”

  “And why is that?” Gara asked.

  “I feel a sense of power. Being wanted by two men. What do you expect after my crazy childhood?”

  “But after a certain time you just have to get off of it,” Kathryn said. “If I let my childhood bother me, I’d be a basket case.”

  “Me too!” said Eve.

  But we do, Gara thought. We keep making the same mistakes and passing them on to others. When does it stop? When can we finally put it to rest? Chain of fools . . .

  Chapter Three

  Gara’s parents called her “the miracle baby.” After two miscarriages, years of infertility and worry, and six months lying flat on her back in bed, her mother finally produced the daughter she had been waiting for. After that, they never tried to have another child. This little daughter with the big blue eyes would have everything; on her tiny shoulders would rest the fulfillment of their dreams.

  She was born in 1940. The Depression was not yet really over, the World War that would crank up the economy had not yet begun in America, although its presence in Europe hung over everything. It was not unusual to be an only child. Most of the children in Gara’s class at private school had, at the most, one sibling. People couldn’t afford more. Gara’s mother told her that only the poor, who didn’t know better, had a lot of kids. What she neglected to say was that her method of birth control was abstinence.

  By the time the baby boomers were old enough to fill the kindergartens to bursting, Gara was twelve years old and ready to graduate from eighth grade. She had always been bright and precocious, and had been skipped twice. People were moving to the suburbs in search of a better life for their children, but Gara’s parents were both second generation New Yorkers, and they had no intention of leaving the culture and autonomy of the city. Her mother couldn’t even drive. Her father was a lawyer with an office in Manhattan, and he was not eager to commute. Their six-room apartment in a 1930s Deco building was spacious and filled with reproduction English antiques. It was a good setting for Gara to receive the boys who would come courting her when she was older.

  Gara was delighted that they were going to stay, and that she would be going on to an all-girls private high school that was supposed to be very difficult academically. She was too young to date boys anyway—in fact they sort of scared her—and her main ambition at the moment was getting into college so she could have some kind of career. Her mother was a college graduate even though she was a housewife. Her college psychology books were on their living room bookshelf, and Gara had read them all. She loved reading about real people who had weird problems. Her mother hadn’t gone on to a career, but Gara could. Maybe she would be a clinical psychologist. The case histories made her think about her own family.

  Her mother, May, was a pretty woman who had let herself get much too heavy. Although she did not cook, and the food prepared by their housekeeper was mediocre at best, she ate all the time. At dinner Gara had seen her mother eat half of an entire cake for dessert. In her well-tailored dark clothes, and her corsets with their hooks and zippers, May had a chunky, tubular look. It was when she was alone at home with her daughter, walking naked to and from the bath, that Gara saw the rolls of fat cascading down her mother’s ribs, the giant dimpled thighs tapering to tiny aching feet, the cellulite, the varicose veins and broken capillaries that astonished and repelled her. Somehow she was aware, if her mother was not, that her mother had put herself into this state to stay away from sex. Gara wasn’t sure how she knew, but she did.

  Astonishingly, her mother still had beautiful breasts. They were smallish and well-shaped and didn’t sag. Women in those days wore bras that made them look as if they had two ice-cream cones on their chests. But her mother confined herself in rounded brassieres with heavy wires underneath, not to attract attention but to avoid it. Those perfect, banished breasts and the abused body seemed to Gara to be the choice she herself would have when she grew up—she could be attractive or repellent, and it was up to her, as it had been up to her mother. She could exercise and diet and not be like her mother. They had the same build; she would have those pretty breasts. They would be a start. They would be her sex appeal. She would never not have sex.

  May thought Gara was beautiful, told her so often, and lived through her vicariously. It was important to her that her daughter be at her best all the time. So at twelve, Gara had high heels, makeup (which the students were not permitted to wear at school), a permanent, shaved legs, a bra with nothing to put in it, braces on her teeth, and a mouton coat. The quest for perfection had started the day she was born, but it was only on the day of her graduation that she became fully aware of it.

  At the graduation ceremony the girls would wear evening gowns, the boys would wear suits. Gara’s gown was peach-colored. The graduates would each have their name announced and receive a diploma from the principal. It was the most grownup thing Gara had ever done. She had also won first prize in the essay contest, “What Graduation Means to Me,” and would receive an additional certificate for this.

  “Ritual and recognition,” she had written. “Acknowledgment of what we have so far achieved, and a step into the future to become who we will be.” She thought it had a nice ring to it.

  May was applying makeup to her daughter’s face—painstakingly, delicately, slowly—as if she were a child star about to go before the camera. Or as if she were a painting. Her mother was painting a picture. “We’re not allowed,” Gara said. “I’ll get killed.”

  “Just a little. You’re too pale.”

  Powder, rouge, lipstick, a touch of mascara. Gara scrutinized the mirror for any sign of a pimple or regrowth of the dreaded mustache her mother had made her have removed by painful electrolysis. She hoped no one would ever know she’d had such a disgusting thing as facial hair. She imagined the worst thing that could possibly happen to her. She would be arrested for some crime, and put into prison, and her mustache would grow back, and people would see it. She was relieved that such an event was unlikely.

  Graduation was in the school auditorium, and all the parents, siblings, and grandparents were there. Gara and the others were waiting behind the red velvet curtain to make their appearance. Her family was already sitting down front. She wondered if she and the other kids would still be friends when they went to different schools, and she also wondered if she would miss any of them. Maybe two—the others she didn’t like at all. Suddenly the principal, Mrs. Wexler, swooped down on her, glaring from behind her bifocals, gra
bbed her by the arm, and dragged her into the girls’ bathroom.

  “What’s that on your face?” Mrs. Wexler demanded. But she already knew. She wet a harsh paper towel at the sink and scrubbed off all the makeup. “Does your mother know?”

  “She did it,” Gara said. She felt relieved. She had always hated being different. She also felt humiliated and insulted because the principal, who should have treated her with respect on her graduation day, had manhandled her like an object. She also felt damp.

  “I can’t imagine how your mother could do such a thing,” Mrs. Wexler said, and pushed her back to where the others were already filing on stage to their places.

  Gara received her diploma and her award and felt happy again. She was on her way to becoming an adult. It didn’t matter that next semester she would be only a freshman, a beginner: right now she was at the top of her school, a graduate, and it was a heady feeling. She left the stage with the other kids who were all joining their proud families, who were showering them with joyful hugs, kisses, and congratulations.

  Her mother rushed up to her looking indignant. For a fat woman she could move very fast. “Who messed up your hair?” she cried.

  “My hair?” Gara touched it. “I guess Mrs. Wexler.”

  “Why?”

  “She was mad because I had on makeup, and she washed it off.”

  “That’s why you’re so pale. But she spoiled your hair,” her mother said. She smoothed it, pursing her lips.

  Say congratulations, Mom, Gara thought, but she didn’t say it. She had already learned that it was pointless to pick a fight she could never win, and she particularly didn’t feel like it today. She knew that both of her parents were proud of her academic record; congratulations were implicit. It was just that brains were not the important thing; physical appearance was. As she and her parents left the auditorium she began to wonder if she had looked really bad, and if it would show in the class picture, for ever and ever, that Gara Bernstein was the ghostly one with the terrible hair.

  * * *