them to the more active role they could play in the town's life; but they agreed that the women they had met seemed unlikely to welcome even so small a step toward liberation.
They talked about the National Organization for Women, to which they both belonged, and about Joanna's photography.
'My God, these are great!' Bobbie said, looking at the four mounted enlargements Joanna had hung in the den. 'They're terrific!'
Joanna thanked her.
''Avid shutterbug'! I thought that meant Polaroids of the kids! These are marvelous!'
'Now that Kim's in kindergarten I'm really going to get to work,' Joanna said.
She walked Bobbie to her car.
'Damn it, no,' Bobbie said. 'We ought to try at least. Let's talk to these hausfraus; there must be some of them who resent the situation a little. What do you say? Wouldn't it be great if we could get a group together-maybe even a NOW chapter eventually-and give that Men's Associa- tion a good shaking-up? Dave and Walter are kidding themselves; it's not going to change unless it's forced to change; fat-cat organizations never do. What do you say, Joanna? Let's ask around.'
Joanna nodded. 'We should,' she said. 'They can't all be as content as they seem.'
SHE SPOKE TO CAROL VAN Sant. 'Gee, no, Joanna,' Carol said. 'That doesn't sound like the sort of thing that would interest me. Thanks for ay-isking me though.' She was cleaning the plastic divider in Stacy and Allison's room, wiping a span of its accordion folds with firm downstrokes of a large yellow sponge.
'It would only be for a couple of hours,' Joanna said. 'In the evening, or if it's more convenient for everybody, sometime during school hours.'
Carol, crouching to wipe the lower part of the span, said, 'I'm sorry, but I just don't have much time for that sort of thing.'
Joanna watched her for a moment. 'Doesn't it bother you,' she said, 'that the central organization here in Stepford, the only organization that does anything significant as far as community projects are concerned, is off limits to women? Doesn't that seem a little archaic to you?'
''Ar-kay-ic'?' Carol said, squeezing her sponge in a bucket of sudsy water.
Joanna looked at her. 'Out of date, old-fashioned,' she said.
Carol squeezed the sponge out above the bucket. 'No, it doesn't seem archaic to me,' she said. She stood up straight and reached the sponge to the top of the next span of folds. 'Ted's better equipped for that sort of thing than I am,' she said, and began wiping the folds with firm downstrokes, each one neatly overlapping the one before. 'And men need a place where they can relax and have a drink or two,' she said.
'Don't women?'
'No, not as much.' Carol shook her neat red-haired shampoo-commercial head, not turning from her wiping. 'I'm sorry, Joanna,' she said, 'I just don't have time for a get-together.'
'Okay,' Joanna said. 'If you change your mind, let me know.'
'Would you mind if I don't walk you downstairs?'
'No, of course not.'
She spoke to Barbara Chamalian, on the other side of the Van Sants.
'Thanks, but I don't see how I could manage it,' Barbara said. She was a square-jawed brownhaired woman, in a snug pink dress molding an excep- tionally good figure. 'Lloyd stays in town a lot,' she said, 'and the evenings he doesn't, he Ekes to go to the Men's Association. I'd hate to pay a sitter for just-'
'It could be during school hours,' Joanna said.
'No,' Barbara said, 'I think you'd better count me out.'9 She smiled, widely and attractively. 'I'm glad we've met though,' she said. 'Would you like to come in and sit for a while? I'm ironing.'
'No, thanks,' Joanna said. 'I want to speak to some of the other women.'
She spoke to Marge McCormick ('I honestly don't think I'd be interested in that') and Kit Sundersen ('I'm afraid I haven't the time; I'm really sorry, Mrs. Eberhart') and Donna Claybrook ('That's a nice idea, but I'm so busy these days. Thanks for asking me though').
She met Mary Ann Stavros in an aisle in the Center Market. 'No, I don't think I'd have time for anything like that. There's so much to do around the house. You know.'
'But you go out sometimes, don't you?' Joanna said.
'Of course I do,' Mary Ann said. 'I'm out now, aren't I?'
'I mean out. For relaxation.'
Mary Ann smiled and shook her head, swaying her sheaves of straight blond hair. 'No, not often,' she said. 'I don't feel much need for relaxation.
See you.' And she went away, pushing her grocery cart; and stopped, took a can from a shelf, looked at it, and fitted it down into her cart and went on.
Joanna looked after her, and into the cart of another woman going slowly past her. My God, she thought, they even fill their carts neatly! She looked into her own: a jumble of boxes and cans and jars. A guilty impulse to put it in order prodded her; but I'm damned if I will! she thought, and grabbed a box from the shelf-Ivory Snow -and tossed it in. Didn't even need the damn stuff!
She spoke to the mother of one of Kim's classmates in Dr. Verry's waiting room; and to Yvonne Weisgalt, on the other side of the Stavroses; and to Jill Burke, in the next house over. All of them turned her down; they either had too little time or too little interest to meet with other women and talk about their shared experiences.
Bobbie had even worse luck, considering that she spoke to almost twice as many women. 'One taker,' she told Joanna. 'One eighty-five-year-old widow who dragged me through her door and kept me prisoner for a solid hour of close-up saliva spray. Any time we're ready to storm the Men's Association, Eda Mae Hamilton is ready and willing.'
'We'd better keep in touch with her,' Joanna said.
'Oh no, we're not done yet!'
They spent a morning calling on women together, on the theory (Bobbie's) that the two of them, speaking in planned ambiguities, might create the encouraging suggestion of a phalanx of women with room for one more. It didn't work.
'Jee-zus!' Bobbie said, ramming her car viciously up Short Ridge Hill.
'Something fishy is going on here! We're in the Town That Time Forgot!'
ONE AFTERNOON JOANNA left Pete and Kim in the care of sixteen-year-old Melinda Stavros and took the train into the city, where she met Walter and their friends Shep and Sylvia Tackover at an Italian restaurant in the theater district. It was good to see Shep and Sylvia again; they were a bright, homely, energetic couple who had survived several bad blows, in- cluding the death by drowning of a four-year-old son. It was good to be in the city again too; Joanna relished the color and bustle of the busy restaurant.
She and Walter spoke enthusiastically about Stepford's beauty and quiet, and the advantages of living in a house rather than an apartment. She didn't say anything about how home-centered the Stepford women were, or about the absence of outside-the-home activities. It was vanity, she supposed; an unwillingness to make herself the object of commiseration, even Shep and Sylvia's. She told them about Bobbie and how amusing she was, and about Stepford's fine uncrowded schools. Walter didn't bring up the Men's Association and neither did she. Sylvia, who was with the city's Housing and Development Administration, would have had a fit.
But on the way to the theater Sylvia gave her a sharp appraising look and said, 'A tough adjustment?'
'In ways,' she said.
'You'll make it,' Sylvia said, and smiled at her. 'How's the photography?
It must be great for you up there, coming to everything with a fresh eye.'
'I haven't done a damn thing,' she said. 'Bobbie and I have been running around trying to drum up some Women's Lib activity. It's a bit of a backwater, to tell the truth.'
'Running and drumming isn't your work,' Sylvia said. 'Photography is, or ought to be.'
'I know,' she said. 'I've got a plumber coming in any day now to put in the darkroom sink.'
'Walter looks chipper.'
'He is. It's a good life really.'
