'Bobbie, you're not you any more! Can't you see that? You've become like the others!'
'Honestly, Joanna, that's nonsense,' Bobbie said. 'Of course I'm me. I simply realized that I was awfully sloppy and self-indulgent, and now I'm doing my job conscientiously, the way Dave does his.'
'I know, I know,' she said. 'How does he feel about it?'
'He's very happy.'
'I'll bet he is.'
'This stuff really works. Do you use it?'
I'm not crazy, she thought. I'm not crazy.
Jonny and two other boys were making a snowman in front of the house next door. She left Pete and Kim in the station wagon and went over and said hello to him. 'Oh, hi!' he said. 'Do you have any money for me?'
'Not yet,' she said, shielding her face against the downfall of thick flakes.
'Jonny, 1-1 can't get over the way your mother's changed.'
'Hasn't she?' he said, nodding, panting.
'I can't understand it,' she said.
'Neither can I,' he said. 'She doesWt shout any more, she makes hot breakfasts…' He looked over at the house and frowned. Snowflakes clung to his face. 'I hope it lasts,' he said, 'but I bet it doesn't.'
DR. FANCHER WAS A SMALL elfin-faced woman in her early fifties, with short swirls of graying brown hair, a sharp marionette nose, and smiling blue-gray eyes. She wore a dark blue dress, a gold pin engraved with the Chinese Yang-and-Yin symbol, and a wedding ring. Her office was cheerful, with Chippendale furniture and Paul Klee prints, and striped curtains translucent against the brightness of sun and snow outside. There was a brown leather couch with a paper-covered headrest, but Joanna sat in the chair facing the mahogany desk, on which dozens of small white papers flagedged the sides of a green blotter.
She said, 'I'm here at my husbanXs suggestion. We moved to Stepford early in September, and I want to move away as soon as possible. We've put a deposit on a house in Eastbridge, but only because I insisted on it. He feels I'm-being irrational.'
She told Dr. Fancher why she wanted to move: about Stepford women, and how Charmaine and then Bobbie had changed and become like them. 'Have you been to Stepford?' she asked.
'Only once,' Dr. Fancher said. 'I heard that it was worth looking at, which it is. I've also heard that it's an insular, unsocial community.'
'Which it is, believe me.'
Dr. Fancher knew of the city in Texas with the low crime rate. 'Lithium is what's doing it, apparently,' she said. 'There was a paper about it in one of the journals.'
'Bobbie and I wrote to the Department of Health,' Joanna said. 'They said there was nothing in Stepford that could be affecting anyone. I suppose they thought we were crackpots. At the time, actually, I thought Bobbie- was being a little overanxious. I only helped with the letter because she asked me to…' She looked at her clasped hands and worked them against each other.
Dr. Fancher stayed silent.
'I've be-un to suspect-' Joanna said. 'Oh Jesus, 'suspect'; that sounds so-' She worked her hands together, looking at them.
Dr. Fancher said, 'Begun to suspect what?'
She drew her hands apart and wiped them on her skirt. 'I've begun to suspect that the men are behind it,' she said. She looked at Dr. Fancher.
Dr. Fancher didn't smile or seem surprised. 'Which men?' she asked.
Joanna looked at her hands. 'My husband,' she said. 'Bobbie's husband, Charmaine's.' She looked at Dr. Fancher. 'All of them,' she said.
She told her about the Men's Association.
'I was taking pictures in the Center one night a couple of months ago,' she said. 'That's where those Colonial shops are; the house overlooks them.
The windows were open and there was-a smell in the air. Of medicine, or chemicals. And then the shades were pulled down, maybe because they knew I was out there; this policeman had seen me, he stopped and talked to me.'
She leaned forward. 'There are a lot of sophisticated industrial plants on Route Nine,' she said, 'and a lot of the men who have high-level jobs in them live in Stepford and belong to the Men's Association. Something goes on there every night, and I don't think it's just fixing toys for needy children, and pool and poker.
There's AmeriChem-Willis, and Stevenson Biochemical. They could be-concocting something that the Department of Health wouldn't know about, up there at the Men's Association…' She sat back in the chair, wiping her hands against her skirted thighs, not looking at Dr. Fancher.
Dr. Fancher asked her questions about her family background and her interest in photography; about the jobs she had held, and about Walter and Pete and Kim.
'Any move is traumatic to a degree,' Dr. Fancher said, 'and particularly the city-to-the-suburbs move for a woman who doesn't find her housewife's role totally fulfilling. It can feel pretty much like being sent to Siberia.' She smiled at Joanna. 'And the holiday season doesn't help matters any,' she said. 'It tends to magnify anxieties, for everyone.
I've often thought that one year we should have a real holiday and skip the whole business.'
Joanna made a smile.
Dr. Fancher leaned forward, and joining her hands, rested her elbows on the desk. 'I can understand your not being happy in a town of highly home- oriented women,' she said to Joanna.
'I wouldn't be either; no woman with outside interests would. But I do wonder-and I imagine your husband does too-whether you would be happy in Eastbridge, or anywhere else at this particular time.'
'I think I would be,' Joanna said.
Dr. Fancher looked at her hands, pressing and flexing the wedding-ringed one with the other. She looked at Joanna. 'Towns develop their character gradually,' she said, 'as people pick and choose among them. A few artists and writers came here to Sheffield a long time ago; others followed, and people who found them too Bohemian moved away. Now we're an artists-and-writers town; not exclusively, of course, but enough to make us different from Norwood and Kimball. I'm sure Stepford developed its character in the same way. That seems to me far more likely than the idea that the men there have banded together to chemically brainwash the women. And could they really do it? They could tranquilize them, yes; but these women don't sound tranquilized to me; they're hardworking and industrious within their own small range of interests. That would be quite a job for even the most advanced chemists.'
Joanna said, 'I know it sounds-' She rubbed her temple.
'It sounds,' Dr. Faucher said, 'like the idea of a woman who, like many women today, and with good reason, feels a deep resentment and suspicion of men. One who's pulled two ways by conflicting demands, perhaps more strongly than she's aware; the old conventions on the one hand, and the new conventions of the liberated woman on the other.'
Joanna, shaking her head, said, 'If only you could see what Stepford women are like. They're actresses in TV commercials, all of them. No, not even that. They're they're like-' She sat forward. 'There was a program four or five weeks ago,' she said. 'My children were watching it. These figures of all the Presidents, moving around, making different facial expressions.
Abraham Lincoln stood up and delivered the Gettysburg Address; he was so lifelike you'd have-' She sat still.
Dr. Fancher waited, and nodded. 'Rather than force an immediate move on your family,' she said, 'I think you should con-'
' Disneyland,' Joanna said. 'The program was from Disneyland…'
Dr. Fancher smiled. 'I know,' she said. 'My grandchildren were there last summer. They told me they 'met' Lincoln.'
Joanna turned from her, staring.
'I think you should consider trying therapy,' Dr. Fancher said. 'To identify and clarify your feelings. Then you can make the right move-maybe to Eastbridge, maybe back to the city; maybe you'll even find Stepford less
