young policeman called.
'Thanks!' she called back to him. 'I enjoyed talking!' To make up for her city-bred suspiciousness.
'Good night!' the policeman called.
A SENIOR PARTNER IN WALter's firm died of uremic poisoning, and the records of the trusts he had administered were found to be disquietingly inaccurate.
Walter had to stay two nights and a weekend in the city, and on the nights following he seldom got home before eleven o'clock. Pete took a fall on the school bus and knocked out his two front teeth. Joanna's parents paid a short-notice three-day visit on their way to a Caribbean vacation. (They loved the house and Stepford, and Joanna's mother admired Carol Van Sant.
'So serene and efficient! Take a leaf from her book, Joanna.')
The dishwasher broke down, and the pump; and Pete's eighth birthday came, calling for presents, a party, favors, a cake. Kim got a sore throat and was home for three days. Joanna's period was late but came, thank God and the Pill.
She managed to get in a little tennis, her game improving but still not as good as Charmaine's. She got the darkroom three-quarters set up and made trial enlargements of the black-man-and-taxi picture, and developed and printed the ones she had taken in the Center, two of which looked very good. She took shots of Pete and Kim and Scott Chamalian playing on the jungle gym.
She saw Bobbie almost every day; they shopped together, and sometimes Bobbie brought her two younger boys Adam and Kenny over after school. One day Joanna and Bobbie and Charmaine got dressed to the nines and had a two-cocktail lunch at a French restaurant in Eastbridge.
By the end of October, Walter was getting home for dinner again, the dead partner's peculations having been unraveled, made good, and patched over.
Everything in the house was working, everyone was well. They carved a huge pumpkin for Halloween, and Pete went trick-ortreating as a front-toothless Batman, and Kim as Heckel or Jeckel (she was both, she insisted). Joanna gave out fifty bags of candy and had to fall back on fruit and cookies; next year she would know better.
On the first Saturday in November they gave a dinner party: Bobbie and Dave, Charmaine and her husband Ed; and from the city, Shep and Sylvia Tackover, and Don Ferrault-one of Walter's partners-and his wife Lucy.
The local woman Joanna got to help serve and clean up was delighted to be working in Stepford for a change. 'There used to be so much entertaining here!' she said. 'I had a whole round of women that used to fight over me! And now I have to go to Norwood, and Eastbridge, and New Sharon! And I hate night driving!' She was a plump quickmoving white-haired woman named Mary Migliardi. 'It's that Men's Association,' she said, jabbing toothpicks into shrimp on a platter. 'Entertaining's gone right out the window since they started up! The men go out and the women stay in! If my old man was alive he'd have to knock me on the head before I'd let him join!'
'But it's a very old organization, isn't it?' Joanna said, tossing salad at arm's length because of her dress.
'Are you kidding?' Mary said. 'It's new! Six or seven years, that's all.
Before, there was the Civic Association and the Elks and the Legion'-she toothpicked shrimp with machinelike rapidity-'but they all merged in with it once it got going. Except the Legion; they're still separate. Six or seven years, that's all. This isn't all you got for hors d'oeuvres, is it?'
'There's a cheese roll in the refrigerator,' Joanna said.
Walter came in, looking very handsome in his plaid jacket, carrying the ice bucket. 'We're in luck,' he said, going to the refrigerator. 'There's a good Creature Feature; Pete doesn't even want to come down. I put the Sony in his room.' He opened the freezer section and took out a bag of ice cubes.
'Mary just told me the Men's Association is new,' Joanna said.
'It's not new,' Walter said, tearing at the top of the bag. A white dab of tissue clung to his jawbone, pinned by a dot of dried blood.
'Six or seven years,' Mary said.
'Where we come from that's old.'
Joanna said, 'I thought it went back to the Puritans.'
'What gave you that idea?' Walter asked, spilling ice cubes into the bucket.
She tossed the salad. 'I don't know,' she said. 'The way it's set up, and that old house…'
'That was the Terhune place,' Mary said, laying a stretch of plastic over the toothpicked platter. 'They got it dirt-cheap. Auctioned for taxes and no one else bid.'
The party was a disaster. Lucy Ferrault was allergic to something and never stopped sneezing; Sylvia was preoccupied; Bobbie, whom Joanna had counted on as a conversational star, had laryngitis. Charmaine was Miss Vamp, provocative and come-hithery in floor-length white silk cut clear to her navel; Dave and Shep were provoked and went thither. Walter (damn him!) talked law in the comer with Don Ferrault. Ed Wimperis-big, fleshy, well tailored, stewed-talked television, clamping Joanna's arm and explaining in slow careful words why cassettes were going to change everything. At the dinner table Sylvia got unpreoccupied and tore into suburban communities that enriched themselves with tax-yielding light industry while fortressing themselves with two- and four-acre zoning. Ed Wimperis knocked his wine over. Joanna tried to get light conversation going, and Bobbie pitched in valiantly, gasping an explanation of where the laryngitis had come from: she was doing tape-recordings for a friend of Dave's who 'thinks Vs a bleedin'
'Enry Iggins, 'e does.' But Charmaine, who knew the man and had taped for him herself, cut her short with 'Never make fun of what a Capricorn's doing; they produce,' and went into an around-the-table sign analysis that demanded everyone's attention. The roast was overdone, and Walter had a bad time slicing it. The souff16 rose, but not quite as much as it should have-as Mary remarked while serving it. Lucy Ferrault sneezed.
'Never again,' Joanna said as she switched the outside lights off; and Walter, yawning, said, 'Soon enough for me.'
'Listen, you,' she said. 'How could you stand there talking to Don while three women are sitting like stones on the sofa?'
SYLVIA CALLED TO APOLOGIZE – she had been passed up for a promotion she damn well knew she deserved-and Charmaine called to say they'd had a great time and to postpone a tentative Tuesday tennis date. 'Ed's got a bee in his bonnet,' she said. 'He's taking a few days off, we're putting Merrill with the DaCostas-you don't know them, lucky you-and he and I are going to 'rediscover each other.' That means he chases me around the bed. And my period's not till next week, God damn it.'
'Why not let him catch you?' Joanna said.
'Oh God,' Charmaine said. 'Look, I just don't enjoy having a big cock shoved into me, that's all. Never have and never will. And I'm not a lez either, because I tried it and that's no big deal. I'm just not interested in sex. I don't think any woman is, really, not even Pisces women. Are you?'
'Well I'm not a nympho,' Joanna said, 'but I'm interested in it, sure I am.'
'Really, or do you just feel you're supposed to be?'
'Really.'
'Well, to each his own,' Charmaine said. 'Let's make it Thursday, all right? He's got a conference he can't get out of, thank God.'
'Okay, Thursday, unless something comes up.'
'Don't let anything.'
'It's getting cold.'
'We'll wear sweaters.'
SHE WENT TO A P.T.A. MEETING. Pete's and Kim's teachers were there, Miss Turner and Miss Gair, pleasant middle-aged women eagerly responsive to her questions about teaching methods and how the busing program was working out. The meeting was poorly attended; aside from the group of teachers at the back of the auditorium, there were only nine women and about a dozen men. The president of the association was an attractive blond woman named Mrs. Hollingsworth, who conducted business with smiling unhurried efficiency.
She bought winter clothes for Pete and Kim, and two pairs of wool slacks for herself. She made terrific
