Before I had gotten married, I had seen these women all the time, been in their weddings, attended their housewarming parties, endured their baby showers. As I sat in the chilly ballroom, looking around me at the women hovering and chatting between the tables, I felt like a visitor from another planet. They had all managed to perfect the look I never could, until they were one undifferentiated mass: untanned white skin, smooth, chin-length hair, sweater sets and slim skirts. We all worked so hard to look exactly like each other, and though no one ever would have spoken the words, it was clear that anyone different—in race, religion, taste, opinion—was Not Allowed.
Being around them, I felt a little shabbier, a little chunkier, a little frizzier. This was the way it had always been with those girls and me—especially Ashley. I couldn’t even blame her, or resent her, really—it was nothing she did. It was just that she was a litany of all the things I wasn’t—petite and pretty and well put together and efficient and so very normal, and I had always been galumphing and sloppy and uncomfortably different. Maybe if I had gone to public school, or if my mother hadn’t been so wedded to the Garden Society and the country club and all the markers of polite society, I could have been different. I could have found a group of friends whose presence didn’t make me think less of myself, didn’t make me ache to be someone else, coating me with a thin layer of self-loathing that made my skin greasy in the humid summers. It seemed so unfair to have been born into this life and not have been given the tools to mine it properly.
“If I can have your attention.” Ashley was standing on the stage, tapping the microphone with one French-manicured finger. A spray of forsythia behind her set off her yellow sweater perfectly. “Attention, ladies. Thank you so much for coming today.”
Ashley gave a smoothly polite introduction to the speaker, a local author who took the podium and droned endlessly. There’s something about ballrooms that sucks the personality out of everyone at a microphone. As she spoke, the servers darted in silently with our salads, the dressing in tiny silver cups on the side, of course. I picked out the dried cranberries and contemplated flicking them at Ellen O’Connor, who was wearing an angora sweater the exact color of the berries and might not even have noticed their addition.
“Jesus, what a bunch of bullshit,” Sharon whispered loudly, walking up from behind us and throwing herself into the empty chair next to mine. She tossed her purse underneath the table, making it shudder. I rescued the coffee cup I had balanced at the edge only to have it spray three tiny, perfect, milky drops across the hemline of my dress. Of course.
“Hi,” I whispered back, stilling the table and putting my coffee cup back. Sharon handed me her glass of water and I dabbed some on my skirt. “I didn’t know you were in the Ladies Association.”
“Occupational hazard. These ladies have houses to buy and sell, and they are rich. What’s your excuse? You don’t even live here.”
“Peer pressure.”
“Yeah, well, if I were on vacation I certainly wouldn’t be spending my time dealing with these bitches,” Sharon said. She turned to the table of our classmates and flashed them a hundred-watt smile, as though she hadn’t just called them all bitches, and then folded her arms and turned toward the speaker, slouching in her chair like we were back in geometry class and she was daring the teacher to call on her.
I looked over at the table where the women from Country Day were sitting, at Ashley and Ellen and Emma and Audrey. I’d gone to dances and on school trips with them. We’d worked on school projects together. We’d been in the same sorority in college, and after graduation we’d attended one another’s weddings and met up for brunch in groups.
And now, looking at them, I felt—emotionless. I wasn’t angry, I held no childhood grudges, I didn’t think they were bitches. They were perfectly nice, most of them. Instead, as I watched Ashley and Audrey sip at their unsweetened iced tea and dip just the tips of their forks into the salad dressing before spearing a single, wretched lettuce leaf, I felt an unfamiliar surge of sympathy. I had always been focused on the litany of ways I didn’t meet the demands being forced on me. But I had never stopped to consider that every other woman in this room was being asked to fit the same mold, and just because they made it look easy on the outside didn’t say anything about how it felt on the inside.
And it broke my heart that we would never be able to talk about it, that none of us would ever be able to break through the rules and traditions and ossification in order to have an honest conversation. The thought gave me a heavy ache in my heart, and I wanted to stand up, to burst through the ballroom doors and run out into the sunlight, break free of every tender silk ribbon holding all of us prisoner to some outdated, uncomfortable set of values I couldn’t imagine any of us agreeing to. But I couldn’t do that. It wouldn’t look right. Turning toward my own plate, I lifted my fork and dipped the tines into the dressing.
six
MARGIE
1924