Little Children (18 page)

The feeling didn’t last long. The doorbell rang, and Bridget escorted two more women into the room, both of them in expensive floral dresses. The older one had a pretty, but somewhat leathery face and the toned legs of a tennis player.

“See,” said Bridget, presenting the younger woman to Sarah with an air of triumph. “I told you you’d have a comrade.”

Sarah tried to look pleased, but her face wouldn’t cooperate. She just hoped her smile wasn’t as stiff and phony as the one plastered on her comrade’s face.

“Nice to see you again,” said Sarah.

“What a surprise,” said Mary Ann. “We miss you at the playground.”

The two little sisters eyed each other warily across the coffee table. Sarah still hadn’t recovered from the shock of Mary Ann’s arrival and how completely it had spoiled what had been shaping up as a very nice evening. This couldn’t be the Women’s Center, not with
her
here. She felt like she’d been given a beautiful birthday present, only to have it ripped away a moment later and handed to someone else. Her only consolation was the look of raw discomfort on Mary Ann’s face. She must have realized that she’d strayed onto alien turf, that for once she was the one who was outnumbered.

“Which one of you would like to start?” asked Bridget.

“She’s the bookworm,” said Mary Ann. “Let her go first.”

“No, you go ahead,” said Sarah. “I can wait.”

Mary Ann took the measure of her audience before speaking. The ladies of the Belletristic Society were smiling at her like kindergarten teachers overseeing the year’s first installment of show-and-tell, fully prepared to be fascinated by a broken clam shell or a worn shoelace.

“Did anybody like this book?” Mary Ann screwed her face up into the look of offended disapproval Sarah knew so well. “Because I really just hated it.”

She hesitated, waiting for someone to take the baton and run with it, but the ladies seemed startled by this unexpected salvo of negativity. They didn’t look upset, exactly, but their smiles were in retreat.

“I mean, isn’t it kind of depressing?” Mary Ann continued, her voice growing in confidence, as if she were sitting at the picnic table on the playground, lecturing Cheryl and Theresa. “She cheats on her husband with two different guys, wastes all his money, then kills herself with rat poison. Do I really need to read this?”

This question was met with an uncomfortable silence. It was Laurel, Mary Ann’s sponsor, who finally ventured a response.

“There’s a lot of good descriptive writing,” she said hopefully.

The ladies nodded in vigorous agreement.

“It’s supposed to be depressing,” Josephine pointed out. “It’s a tragedy. Emma’s undone by a tragic flaw.”

“What’s her flaw?” Bridget inquired.

“Blindness,” Josephine replied. “She can’t see that the men are just using her.”

“She just wants a little romance in her life,” Jean ventured. “You can’t really blame her for that.”

“It’s about women’s choices,” Regina added. “Back then, a woman didn’t have a lot of choices. You could be a nun or you could be a wife. That’s all there was.”

“Or a prostitute,” added Bridget.

“She had a choice not to cheat on her husband,” said Mary Ann, staring rudely at Sarah.

“Mary Ann’s got a point,” admitted Laurel.

“Usually it’s the man who cheats,” said Alice. “I found it refreshing to read about a woman reclaiming her sexuality.”

“Reclaiming her sexuality?” Mary Ann repeated with disdain. “Is that a nice way of saying she’s a slut?”

“Madame Bovary is not a slut,” said Regina. “She’s one of the great characters in Western literature.”

“Hello?” said Mary Ann. “She’s sneaking off to the city every week to screw her husband’s friend.”

“I found some of the sex stuff a little cryptic.” Josephine paged through her paperback. “Like ‘Rodolphe discovered that the affair offered still further possibilities of sensual gratification. He abandoned every last shred of restraint and consideration. He made her into something compliant, something corrupt.’”

“See?” said Mary Ann. “She’s a slut.”

“Does anybody know what that means?” Josephine asked. “Do you think he’s tying her up or something like that?”

Alice leaned forward and mouthed the words, “Anal sex.”

Josephine looked horrified.

“Really?” she asked, glancing around the room in embarrassment. “Did everyone get that but me?”

“Why don’t we hold off on that for the moment,” suggested Bridget. “Let’s see what our other little sister has to say.”

Back when she was teaching, the prospect of public speaking had filled Sarah with dread. She always felt like she was faking it, unsuccessfully impersonating an authority figure. But tonight, for some reason, she felt calm and well prepared, an adult among her peers. Maybe she’d grown up in the past five or six years without realizing it. Or maybe she was just happier now than she’d been back then. She looked at Mary Ann with what she hoped was a kind of empathy.

“I think I understand your feelings about this book. I used to feel the same way myself.” She shifted her gaze around the circle, making eye contact with each of the older women. It was okay being the center of attention; it was even kind of fun. “When I read this book back in college, Madame Bovary just seemed like a fool. She marries the wrong man, makes one stupid mistake after another, and pretty much gets what she deserves. But when I read it this time, I just fell in love with her.”

Mary Ann scoffed, but the ladies seemed intrigued. Jean smiled proudly, as if to remind everyone who was responsible for Sarah’s presence at the meeting.

“My professors would kill me,” she continued, “but I’m tempted to go as far as to say that, in her own strange way, Emma Bovary is a feminist.”

“Really?” Bridget sounded skeptical, but open to persuasion.

“She’s trapped. She can either accept a life of misery or struggle against it. She chooses to struggle.”

“Some struggle,” said Mary Ann. “Jump in bed with every guy who says hello.”

“She fails in the end,” Sarah conceded. “But there’s something beautiful and heroic in her rebellion.”

“How convenient,” observed Mary Ann. “So now cheating on your husband makes you a feminist.”

“It’s not the cheating. It’s the hunger for an alternative. The refusal to accept unhappiness.”

“I guess I just didn’t understand the book,” Mary Ann said, adopting a tone of mock humility. “I just thought she just looked so pathetic, degrading herself for nothing. I mean, did she really think a man like that was going to run away with her?”

Sarah couldn’t help smiling. Just yesterday, for the first time, she and Todd had discussed the possibility of divorcing their respective spouses. Sarah had floated the subject cautiously, after he’d told her about his miserable Saturday at the beach, how he and Kathy had argued the whole time, how fragile and unhappy their marriage had become.
She’s losing patience with me
, he confessed.
I’m going to leave Richard,
she replied. And then they had made love tenderly, almost fearfully, as if trying to absorb the meaning of what they’d just told each other.

“Madame Bovary’s problem wasn’t that she committed adultery,” Sarah declared, in a voice full of calm certainty. “It was that she committed adultery with losers. She never found a partner worthy of her heroic passion.”

Mary Ann shook her head sadly, as if she pitied Sarah, but the other ladies were beaming, nodding in fervent agreement with this unexpected and thought-provoking assessment of the novel. Sarah sipped her wine, basking in the glow of their approval.
Maybe I should go back to graduate school,
she thought. Josephine raised her hand.

“Could we get back to the sex now?” she asked.

RONNIE WAS BEING A LOT MORE COOPERATIVE THAN MAY EXPECTED
. He was ready at six-thirty, shaved and showered, looking quite presentable in the beige Dockers and jungle-print polo shirt she and Bertha had picked out for him at Marshall’s. His hair was combed, and his shoes were polished. If not for his eyeglasses, which were thick and ugly and sat crookedly on his nose—May had been bugging him for years to get contacts—he would have seemed completely normal.

“You look handsome,” she told him. “She won’t be disappointed.”

“Wait’ll she hears about my criminal record,” said Ronnie, mimicking May’s bubbly tone. “That’ll really seal the deal.”

“I don’t think you need to get into that just yet. Why don’t you stick to the small talk?”

“Right. I can tell her why I don’t have a job and why my face is plastered all over town.”

“Just keep it light, honey. Chat about the weather, the foods you like to eat, your favorite TV shows. If you hit it off and start going steady, then maybe you can get into…you know, the other stuff.”

“I’ll do my best.” Ronnie clapped his hands and rubbed them together like he was eager to get down to business. “I’ll work the old McGorvey charm on her. It hasn’t let me down yet.”

May let that one pass. She couldn’t blame him for being nervous; she was nervous herself. As far as she knew, this was the first time Ronnie had ever gone on an actual date. It reminded her of the excitement that used to brighten up the house back when Carol started having boyfriends, the burst of activity when one of them came over for dinner, the heart-in-your-mouth feeling of prom night, when your little girl suddenly transformed herself into a princess. Ronnie had never had any of that. He was always hiding in his room with the door locked, doing God-knew-what.

“She’s late,” he said, squinting at the digital clock on the VCR. “Maybe she chickened out.”

“Be patient,” May told him. “She probably just hit some traffic.”

Ronnie’s personal ad had worked like a charm, drawing twenty-seven responses the first week alone. Bertha tried to take credit for the success, insisting that her addition of the word
handsome
had made all the difference, but May knew better. Ronnie had read the letters out loud, and almost all of them referred directly to the line,
I’m not perfect and don’t expect you to be, either
. There must have been a lot of men out there demanding perfection, judging from the relief the women felt at the absence of this requirement.

I’m overweight,
the very first letter began,
but I have a lot of love to give. I do hope you’ll give me a chance.
One correspondent spoke of her double mastectomy scars; another detailed her long struggle with unwanted facial hair.
I tried electrolysis, but it hurt like anything! I am currently making an effort to accept myself for who I am, and your ad made me think you might treat me with the compassion and respect I deserve.

“Jesus Christ.” Ronnie tore the letter into shreds with the thoroughness that characterized all his actions. “Just what I need. A date with the bearded lady.”

Jenny had SEVERE acne. Patricia’s cellulite was so bad she’d rather die than wear a bathing suit. Diana was suffering from female pattern baldness. Chronic foot pain made it hard for Angela to get around. Sharon had headaches that felt like dull spikes being pounded into her skull. The world was riddled with imperfections.

“It’s a freak show,” Ronnie muttered. “They should all run away and join the circus.”

May hated when he talked like that. She wanted to believe that her son was good at heart, that his own suffering had at least made him sympathetic to the suffering of others. But there was a coldness in him that scared her sometimes. One woman had included a photo of herself taken at an amusement park. She was standing beneath a Ferris wheel, holding a cloud of cotton candy on a paper cone. She would have been pretty enough, May thought, if not for the buckteeth. Ronnie held up the picture and burned the woman’s face away with the tip of his cigarette.

“There,” he said. “A little cosmetic surgery.”

In short order, he had whittled the stack of letters down to three finalists: Arlene, a divorcee with three kids, two of whom had life-threatening allergies to peanut products; Gina, “a teenager in her late thirties” with “a passion for miniature golf” and Sheila, who had been “out of circulation for too long,” and was making “a sincere effort to come out of my shell and reconnect with other people.”

Arlene was his first choice, but May talked him out of it. Life was complicated enough without having to deal with someone else’s kids. So he’d written to Gina and Sheila, identifying himself only as “R.J.,” and inviting them to give him a call, if they didn’t mind the fact that he didn’t have a car. Only Sheila took him up on the offer. She hadn’t included a photo with the letter, and hadn’t provided much in the way of physical description (
Slender SWF, 29
), so there was an added layer of suspense when the doorbell finally rang.

“She better not be a dog,” Ronnie said, stubbing his cigarette into the ashtray and rising without haste from the couch. “I’m not gonna be seen in public with some dog.”

“Ma,” said Ronnie, “this is Sheila.”

May was pleasantly surprised. The girl was no beauty, but she was attractive enough, a slightly mousy brunette of medium height wearing a sleeveless pink dress. She wasn’t heavy, exactly, just a little wide in the hips and thick in the ankles, but May didn’t hold that against her. She was “slender” the same way that Ronnie was “handsome.” But they made a nice-looking couple.

“Pleased to meet you,” said May.

“Hello,” said Sheila.

All it took was that one word for May to realize that something wasn’t quite right with her. Part of it was her voice, flat and dreamy, as if she were talking to herself, and part of it was her eyes, which were staring vacantly, but insistently, at the wall above May’s head. Also the way she hugged her purse so tightly to her stomach with both hands, as if she were walking through a bad neighborhood late at night.

“Are you cold?” asked May.

“Why?” said Sheila. “Are you?”

“No,” said May. “I thought maybe you were.”

“It’s the middle of summer.” Sheila laughed nervously, her eyes darting around the room. “Why would I be cold?”

The poor girl’s terrified,
May thought.
Maybe she recognizes him from the poster
. But when he sat down on the couch, she sat down right next to him, as if they were old friends.

“Can I get you something?” May asked. “A wine cooler, maybe?”

“Just water,” said Sheila. “This medication I’m taking gives me the dry mouth. I can hear the spit crackle when I talk.”

Ronnie winced, making a face of exaggerated disgust. May gave him a sharp look.

Sheila smiled sweetly. “When I wake up in the morning, I feel like I’ve eaten a jar of paste.”

“I’ll get you a nice tall glass of ice water,” said May.

She took her time in the kitchen, giving them a few minutes to get acquainted, but she didn’t hear any voices. When she returned to the living room they were both staring straight ahead, like strangers waiting for a bus.

This is a date,
May wanted to tell them.
You’re supposed to talk to each other
.

She handed one glass to Sheila, the other to Ronnie. Sheila drained hers in a single thirsty gulp.

“How was traffic, dear?” May inquired. She glanced pointedly at Ronnie, as if to say,
See? It’s really not that hard
.

Sheila seemed perplexed. “Excuse me?”

“The traffic? On your way over here.”

“Oh.” She nodded, but her expression remained vague. “I didn’t really notice.”

Ronnie twirled his index finger by his ear, indicating that Sheila was a little batty. He seemed pleased by the idea.

He knew,
May thought suddenly.
He must have known it from her letter.
Ronnie had a radar for that sort of thing. A feeling of unease spread through May’s body.

“Come on.” Ronnie patted Sheila on the knee. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

May followed them to the front door. She pinched Ronnie’s arm.

“You be nice to her,” she whispered.

Ronnie crossed his arms on his chest and drew back as if she’d offended him.

“When am I not nice?” he asked her.

Sheila didn’t see it coming.

As far as she could tell, the date had been a dud, and the ride home was worse. R.J. hadn’t said a word the whole time, just sat brooding in the passenger seat, encased in a bubble of his weird nervous energy, plucking repeatedly at the dark hair on his wrist. But then, when they were only a couple of blocks from his house, he spoke up suddenly, his voice clipped and urgent, striking an unexpected note of command.

“Take the next left.”

She obeyed without thinking, pulling into a small parking lot built alongside what appeared to be an elementary school, judging from the playground lit up by the beam of her headlights. It had those bucket swings, the ones that kept the little kids from falling out. The slides were made of molded plastic in bright, primary colors, and the ground around the structure was covered by some kind of spongy rubber material. It was a far cry from the playgrounds of her own childhood, rusty monkey bars embedded in cracked asphalt, metal slides baking in the sun, sharp edges and exposed screws.

“Everybody’s so careful now,” she said. R.J. stared at her like she was kind of alien life-form. She wondered if her words weren’t coming out right, if they were slurred or mechanical-sounding, or maybe she was talking too fast or something.

“Cut the headlights,” he told her.

At one time in her life Sheila had been a good conversationalist. She’d had friends. She remembered sitting with them in the high school cafeteria, laughing about silly things. She and her college roommates used to stay up till all hours, trading secrets, giggling about sex, trying to figure out the meaning of life.

But not anymore. The damn medication had fogged her brain, made it seem like everything was happening twenty feet away, on the other side of a gauze curtain. If she stopped taking it, though, everything was too close, way too bright, pressing in on her until she forgot how to breathe. That was how she’d ended up in the hospital again this past fall. She just wished there was some middle ground, something that didn’t muffle everything and make her feel like English had become a foreign language.

She and R.J. had spent the first half of dinner floundering around, trying to make conversation. But what was there to talk about? Neither one of them had a job. He wasn’t interested in sports or music, and showed no interest in travel.

“I’m broke,” he said. “Where am I gonna go?”

The sad part was, she kind of liked him. He wasn’t like the other guys she’d met through the personals, big forty-year-old babies. Joel, who asked her to squeeze his bicep and then seemed hurt when she wasn’t as impressed as he thought she should be. Gary, who went on and on about the boat he would have built if he’d had access to an unlimited amount of money. And that awful one with the beard, who kept calling her for weeks after their date, trying to convince her to upgrade her cell phone, apparently unaware of the fact that she didn’t have one.

“I’m offering five hundred anytime minutes a month. Can your current plan compete?”

R.J. didn’t have much to say, but at least he seemed smart, like there was something going on beneath the surface. He watched her with those shrewd eyes—the glasses made them seem too big, too observant—smiling in a way that seemed encouraging, but then suddenly did not. He laughed a lot, too, usually when she wasn’t trying to be funny. There were moments when she could have sworn he was emitting radio signals from the center of his forehead, beaming them right across the table.

We have a connection,
she thought.

But when the food arrived, he lost interest, stopped even trying to talk to her. She kept waiting for him to look up from his gigantic bloody steak, to say
something
, if only to acknowledge the fact that she was still sitting right in front of him.

Of course she’d panicked and started blathering about her illness, the way she always did, just to fill the silence.
That
she could talk about for hours. She told him about her first so-called breakdown, the one that came out of nowhere during her senior year in college. One day she’s normal, a sociology major on the dean’s list, and the next she’s standing naked on the quad, trying to set a pile of her clothes on fire.

“They were itchy,” she explained. “I thought they were full of bugs.”

That got his attention. Chewing slowly, he pondered her with the neutral expression of a psychiatrist.

“Maybe you just wanted to get naked,” he suggested. “Maybe the breakdown was just an excuse.”

“I wanted to kill the bugs,” she insisted. “I didn’t even realize I was naked until the police came and made an issue of it.”

R.J. flagged down the waiter and ordered dessert, apple pie and ice cream, which he shoveled into his mouth while she continued the saga of her hospitalization and treatment, the five years of relative lucidity followed by a second so-called breakdown, which was actually a very positive experience. She was about to tell him why—it was something she enjoyed talking about—when he looked up and yawned right in her face, not even bothering to cover his mouth. Then, when the check arrived, he said he’d forgotten his wallet.