Bobbie found a live one. “At least she is compared to the rest of these clunks,” her voice rasped from the phone. “Her name is Charmaine Wimperis, and if you squint a little she turns into Raquel Welch. They’re up on Burgess Ridge in a two-hundred-thousand-dollar contemporary, and she’s got a maid and a gardener and—now hear this—a tennis court.”
“Really?”
“I thought that would get you out of the cellar. You’re invited to play, and for lunch too. I’ll pick you up around eleven-thirty.”
“Today? I can’t! Kim is still home.”
“Still?”
“Could we make it Wednesday? Or Thursday, just to be safe.”
“Wednesday,” Bobbie said. “I’ll check with her and call you back.”
Wham! pow! slam! Charmaine was good, too goddamn good; the ball came zinging straight and hard, first to one side of the court and then to the other; it kept her racing from side to side and then drove her all the way back—a just-inside-the-liner that she barely caught. She ran in after it, but Charmaine smashed it down into the left net corner—ungettable—and took the game and the set, six-three. After taking the first set six-two. “Oh God, I’ve had it!” Joanna said. “What a fiasco! Oh boy!”
“One more!” Charmaine called, backing to the service line. “Come on, one more!”
“I can’t! I’m not going to be able to walk tomorrow as it is!” She picked up the ball. “Come on, Bobbie, you play!”
Bobbie, sitting cross-legged on the grass outside the mesh fence, her face trayed on a sun reflector, said, “I haven’t played since camp, for Chrisake.”
“Just a game then!” Charmaine called. “One more game, Joanna!”
“All right, one more game!”
Charmaine won it.
“You killed me but it was great!” Joanna said as they walked off the court together. “Thank you!”
Charmaine, patting her high-boned cheeks carefully with an end of her towel, said, “You just have to get back in practice, that’s all. You have a first-rate serve.”
“Fat lot of good it did me.”
“Will you play often? All I’ve got now are a couple of teen-age boys, both with permanent erections.”
Bobbie said, “Send them to my place”—getting up from the ground.
They walked up the flagstone path toward the house.
“It’s a terrific court,” Joanna said, toweling her arm.
“Then use it,” Charmaine said. “I used to play every day with Ginnie Fisher—do you know her?—but she flaked out on me. Don’t you, will you? How about tomorrow?”
“Oh I couldn’t!”
They sat on a terrace under a Cinzano umbrella, and the maid, a slight gray-haired woman named Nettie, brought them a pitcher of Bloody Mary’s and a bowl of cucumber dip and crackers. “She’s marvelous,” Charmaine said. “A German Virgo; if I told her to lick my shoes she’d do it. What are you, Joanna?”
“An American Taurus.”
“If you tell her to lick your shoes she spits in your eye,” Bobbie said. “You don’t really believe that stuff, do you?”
“I certainly do,” Charmaine said, pouring Bloody Mary’s. “You would too if you came to it with an open mind.” (Joanna squinted at her: no, not Raquel Welch, but darn close.) “That’s why Ginnie Fisher flaked out on me,” she said. “She’s a Gemini; they change all the time. Taureans are stable and dependable. Here’s to tennis galore.”
Joanna said, “This particular Taurean has a house and two kids and no German Virgo.”
Charmaine had one child, a nine-year-old son named Merrill. Her husband Ed was a television producer. They had moved to Stepford in July. Yes, Ed was in the Men’s Association, and no, Charmaine wasn’t bothered by the sexist injustice. “Anything that gets him out of the house nights is fine with me,” she said. “He’s Aries and I’m Scorpio.”
“Oh well,” Bobbie said, and put a dip-loaded cracker into her mouth.
“It’s a very bad combination,” Charmaine said. “If I knew then what I know now.”
“Bad in what way?” Joanna asked.
Which was a mistake. Charmaine told them at length about her and Ed’s manifold incompatibilities—social, emotional, and above all, sexual. Nettie served them lobster Newburg and julienne potatoes—“Oi, my hips,” Bobbie said, spooning lobster onto her plate—and Charmaine went on in candid detail. Ed was a sex fiend and a real weirdo. “He had this rubber suit made for me, at God knows what cost, in England. I ask you, rubber? ‘Put it on one of your secretaries,’ I said, ‘you’re not going to get me into it.’ Zippers and padlocks all over. You can’t lock up a Scorpio. Virgos, any time; their thing is to serve. But a Scorpio’s thing is to go his own way.”
“If Ed knew then what you know now,” Joanna said.
“It wouldn’t have made the least bit of difference,” Charmaine said. “He’s crazy about me. Typical Aries.”
Nettie brought raspberry tarts and coffee. Bobbie groaned. Charmaine told them about other weirdos she had known. She had been a model and had known several.
She walked them to Bobbie’s car. “Now look,” she said to Joanna, “I know you’re busy, but any time you have a free hour, any time, just come on over. You don’t even have to call; I’m almost always here.”
“Thanks, I will,” Joanna said. “And thanks for today. It was great.”
“Any time,” Charmaine said. She leaned to the window. “And look, both of you,” she said, “would you do me a favor? Would you read Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs? Just read it and see how right she is. They’ve got it in the Center Pharmacy, in paper. Will you? Please?”
They gave in, smiling, and promised they would.
“Ciao!” she called, waving to them as they drove away.
“Well,” Bobbie said, rounding the curve of the driveway, “she may not be ideal NOW material, but at least she’s not in love with her vacuum cleaner.”
“My God, she’s beautiful,” Joanna said.
“Isn’t she? Even for these parts, where you’ve got to admit they look good even if they don’t think good. Boy, what a marriage! How about that business with the suit? And I thought Dave had spooky ideas!”
“Dave?” Joanna said, looking at her.
Bobbie side-flashed a smile. “You’re not going to get any true confessions out of me,” she said. “I’m a Leo, and our thing is changing the subject. You and Walter want to go to a movie Saturday night?”
They had bought the house from a couple named Pilgrim, who had lived in it for only two months and had moved to Canada. The Pilgrims had bought it from a Mrs. McGrath, who had bought it from the builder eleven years before. So most of the junk in the storage room had been left by Mrs. McGrath. Actually it wasn’t fair to call it junk: there were two good Colonial side chairs that Walter was going to strip and refinish some day; there was a complete twenty-volume Book of Knowledge, now on the shelves in Pete’s room; and there were boxes and small bundles of hardware and oddments that, though not finds, at least seemed likely to be of eventual use. Mrs. McGrath had been a thoughtful saver.
Joanna had transferred most of the not-really-junk to a far corner of the cellar before the plumber had installed the sink, and now she was moving the last of it—cans of paint and bundles of asbestos roof shingles—while Walter hammered at a plywood counter and Pete handed him nails. Kim had gone with the Van Sant girls and Carol to the library.
Joanna unrolled a packet of yellowed newspaper and found inside it an inch-wide paintbrush, its clean bristles slightly stiff but still pliable. She began rolling it back into the paper, a half page of the Chronicle, and the words WOMEN’S CLUB caught her eye. HEARS AUTHOR. She turned the paper to the side and looked at it.
“For God’s sake,” she said.
Pete looked at her, and Walter, hammering, said, “What is it?”
She got the brush out of the paper and put it down, and held the half page open with both hands, reading.
Walter stopped hammering and turned and looked at her. “What is it?” he asked.
She read for another moment, and looked at him; and looked at the paper, and at him. “There was—a women’s club here,” she said. “Betty Friedan spoke to them. And Kit Sundersen was the president. Dale Coba’s wife and Frank Roddenberry’s wife were officers.”
“Are you kidding?” he said.
She looked at the paper, and read: “‘Betty Friedan, the author of The Feminine Mystique, addressed members of the Stepford Women’s Club Tuesday evening in the Fairview Lane home of Mrs. Herbert Sundersen, the club’s president. Over fifty women applauded Mrs. Friedan as she cited the inequities and frustrations besetting the modern-day housewife …’” She looked at him.
“Can I do some?” Pete asked.
Walter handed the hammer to him. “When was that?” he asked her.
She looked at the paper. “It doesn’t say, it’s the bottom half,” she said. “There’s a picture of the officers. ‘Mrs. Steven Margolies, Mrs. Dale Coba, author Betty Friedan, Mrs. Herbert Sundersen, Mrs. Frank Roddenberry, and Mrs. Duane T. Anderson.’” She opened the half page toward him, and he came to her and took a side of it. “If this doesn’t beat everything,” he said, looking at the picture and the article.
“I spoke to Kit Sundersen,” she said. “She didn’t say a word about it. She didn’t have time for a get-together. Like all the others.”
“This must have been six or seven years ago,” he said, fingering the edge of the yellowed paper.
“Or more,” she said. “The Mystique came out while I was still working. Andreas gave me his review copy, remember?”
He nodded, and turned to Pete, who was hammering vigorously at the counter top. “Hey, take it easy,” he said, “you’ll make half moons.” He turned back to the paper. “Isn’t this something?” he said. “It must have just petered out.”
“With fifty members?” she said. “Over fifty? Applauding Friedan, not hissing her?”
“Well it’s not here now, is it?” he said, letting the paper go. “Unless they’ve got the world’s worst publicity chairman. I’ll ask Herb what happened next time I see him.” He went back to Pete. “Say, that’s good work,” he said.
She looked at the paper and shook her head. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “Who were the women? They can’t all have moved away.”
“Come on now,” Walter said, “you haven’t spoken to every woman in town.”
“Bobbie has, darn near,” she said. She folded the paper, and folded it, and put it on the carton of her equipment. The paintbrush was there; she picked it up. “Need a paintbrush?” she said.
Walter turned and looked at her. “You don’t expect me to paint these things, do you?” he asked.
“No, no,” she said. “It was wrapped in the paper.”
“Oh,” he said, and turned to the counter.
She put the brush down, and crouched and gathered a few loose shingles. “How could she not have mentioned it?” she said. “She was the president.”
As soon as Bobbie and Dave got into the car, she told them.
“Are you sure it’s not one of those newspapers they print in penny arcades?” Bobbie said. “‘Fred Smith Lays Elizabeth Taylor’?”
“It’s the Chronic Ill,” Joanna said. “The bottom half of the front page. Here, if you can see.”
She handed it back to them, and they unfolded it between them. Walter turned on the top light.
Dave said, “You could have made a lot of money by betting me and then showing me.”
“Didn’t think,” she said.
“‘Over fifty women’!” Bobbie said. “Who the hell were they? What happened?”
“That’s what I want to know,” she said. “And why Kit Sundersen didn’t mention it to me. I’m going to speak to her tomorrow.”
They drove into Eastbridge and stood on line for the nine o’clock showing of an R-rated English movie. The couples in the line were cheerful and talkative, laughing in clusters of four and six, looking to the end of the line, waving at other couples. None of them looked familiar except an elderly couple Bobbie recognized from the Historical Society; and the seventeen-year-old McCormick boy and a date, holding hands solemnly, trying to look eighteen.
The movie, they agreed, was “bloody good,” and after it they drove back to Bobbie and Dave’s house, which was chaotic, the boys still up and the sheepdog galumphing all over. When Bobbie and Dave had got rid of the sitter and the boys and the sheepdog, they had coffee and cheese-cake in the tornado-struck living room.
“I knew I wasn’t uniquely irresistible,” Joanna said, looking at an Ike Mazzard drawing of Bobbie tucked in the frame of the over-the-mantel picture.
“Every girl’s an Ike Mazzard girl, didn’t you know?” Bobbie said, tucking the drawing more securely into the frame’s corner, making the picture more crooked than it already was. “Boy, I wish I looked half this good.”
“You’re fine the way you are,” Dave said, standing behind them.
“Isn’t he a doll?” Bobbie said to Joanna. She turned and kissed Dave’s cheek. “It’s still your Sunday to get up early,” she said.
“Joanna Eberhart,” Kit Sundersen said, and smiled. “How are you? Would you like to come in?”
“Yes, I would,” Joanna said, “if you have a few minutes.”
“Of course I do, come on in,” Kit said. She was a pretty woman, black-haired and dimple-cheeked, and only slightly older-looking than in the Chronicle’s unflattering photo. About thirty-three, Joanna guessed, going into the entrance hall. Its ivory vinyl floor looked as if one of those plastic shields in the commercials had just floated down onto it. Sounds of a baseball game came from the living room.
“Herb is inside with Gary Claybrook,” Kit said, closing the front door. “Do you want to say hello to them?”
Joanna went to the living-room archway and looked in: Herb and Gary were sitting on a sofa watching a large color TV across the room. Gary was holding half a sandwich and chewing. A plate of sandwiches and two cans of beer stood on a cobbler’s bench before them. The room was beige and brown and green; Colonial, immaculate. Joanna waited till a retreating ballplayer caught the ball, and said, “Hi.”
Herb and Gary turned and smiled. “Hello, Joanna,” they said, and Gary said, “How are you?” Herb said, “Is Walter here too?”
“Fine. No, he isn’t,” she said. “I just came over to talk with Kit. Good game?”
Herb looked away from her, and Gary said, “Very.”
Kit, beside her and smelling of Walter’s mother’s perfume, whatever it was, said, “Come, let’s go into the kitchen.”
“Enjoy,” she said to Herb and Gary. Gary, biting into his sandwich, eye-smiled through his glasses, and Herb looked at her and said, “Thanks, we will.”
She followed Kit over the plastic-shield vinyl.
“Would you like a cup of coffee?” Kit asked.
“No, thanks.” She followed Kit into the coffee-smelling kitchen. It was immaculate, of course—except for the open dryer, and the clothes and the laundry basket on the counter on top of it. The washer’s round port was storming. The floor was more plastic shield.
“It’s right on the stove,” Kit said, “so it wouldn’t be any trouble.”
“Well in that case …”
She sat at a round green table while Kit got a cup and saucer from a neatly filled cabinet, the cups all hook-hung, the plates filed in racks. “It’s nice and quiet now,” Kit said, closing the cabinet and going toward the stove. (Her figure, in a short sky-blue dress, was almost as terrific as Charmaine’s.) “The kids are over at Gary and Donna’s,” she said. “I’m doing Marge McCormick’s wash. She’s got a bug of some kind and can barely move today.”
“Oh that’s a shame,” Joanna said.
Kit fingertipped the top of a percolator and poured coffee from it. “I’m sure she’ll be good as new in a day or two,” she said. “How do you take this, Joanna?”
“Milk, no sugar, please.”
Kit carried the cup and saucer toward the refrigerator. “If it’s about that get-together again,” she said, “I’m afraid I’m still awfully busy.”
“It isn’t that,” Joanna said. She watched Kit open the refrigerator. “I wanted to find out what happened to the Women’s Club,” she said.
Kit stood at the lighted refrigerator, her back to Joanna. “The Women’s Club?” she said. “Oh my, that was years ago. It disbanded.”
“Why?” Joanna asked.
Kit closed the refrigerator and opened a drawer beside it. “Some of the women moved away,” she said—she closed the drawer and turned, putting a spoon on the saucer—“and the rest of us just lost interest in it. At least I did.” She came toward the table, watching the cup. “It wasn’t accomplishing anything useful,” she said. “The meetings got boring after a while.” She put the cup and saucer on the table and pushed them closer to Joanna. “Is that enough milk?” she asked.
“Yes, that’s fine,” Joanna said. “Thanks. How come you didn’t tell me about it when I was here the other time?”
Kit smiled, her dimples deepening. “You didn’t ask me,” she said. “If you had I would have told you. It’s no secret. Would you like a piece of cake, or some cookies?”
“No, thanks,” Joanna said.
“I’m going to fold these things,” Kit said, going from the table.
Joanna watched her close the dryer and take something white from the pile of clothes on it. She shook it out—a T-shirt. Joanna said, “What’s wrong with Bill McCormick? Can’t he run a washer? I thought he was one of our aerospace brains.”
“He’s taking care of Marge,” Kit said, folding the T-shirt. “These things came out nice and white, didn’t they?” She put the folded T-shirt into the laundry basket, smiling.
Like an actress in a commercial.
That’s what she was, Joanna felt suddenly. That’s what they all were, all the Stepford wives: actresses in commercials, pleased with detergents and floor wax, with cleansers, shampoos, and deodorants. Pretty actresses, big in the bosom but small in the talent, playing suburban housewives unconvincingly, too nicey-nice to be real.
“Kit,” she said.
Kit looked at her.
“You must have been very young when you were president of the club,” Joanna said. “Which means you’re intelligent and have a certain amount of drive. Are you happy now? Tell me the truth. Do you feel you’re living a full life?”
Kit looked at her, and nodded. “Yes, I’m happy,” she said. “I feel I’m living a very full life. Herb’s work is important, and he couldn’t do it nearly as well if not for me. We’re a unit, and between us we’re raising a family, and doing optical research, and running a clean comfortable household, and doing community work.”
“Through the Men’s Association.”
“Yes.”
Joanna said, “Were the Women’s Club meetings more boring than housework?”
Kit frowned. “No,” she said, “but they weren’t as useful as housework. You’re not drinking your coffee. Is anything wrong with it?”
“No,” Joanna said, “I was waiting for it to cool.” She picked up the cup.
“Oh,” Kit said, and smiled, and turned to the clothes and folded something.
Joanna watched her. Should she ask who the other women had been? No, they would be like Kit; and what difference would it make? She drank from the cup. The coffee was strong and rich-flavored, the best she’d tasted in a long time.
“How are your children?” Kit asked.
“Fine,” she said.
She started to ask the brand of the coffee, but stopped herself and drank more of it.
Maybe the hardware store’s panes would have wobbled the moon’s reflection interestingly, but there was no way of telling, not with the panes where they were and the moon where it was. C’est la vie. She mooched around the Center for a while, getting the feel of the night-empty curve of street, the row of white shopfronts on one side, the rise to the hill on the other; the library, the Historical Society cottage. She wasted some film on streetlights and litter baskets—cliché time—but it was only black-and-white, so what the hell. A cat trotted down the path from the library, a silver-gray cat with a black moon-shadow stuck to its paws; it crossed the street toward the market parking lot. No, thanks, we’re not keen on cat pix.
She set up the tripod on the library lawn and took shots of the shopfronts, using the fifty-millimeter lens and making ten-, twelve-, and fourteen-second exposures. An odd medicinal smell soured the air—coming on the breeze at her back. It almost reminded her of something in her childhood, but fell short. A syrup she’d been given? A toy she had had?
She reloaded by moonlight, gathered the tripod, and backed across the street, scouting the library for a good angle. She found one and set up. The white clapboard siding was black-banded in the overhead moonlight; the windows showed bookshelved walls lighted faintly from within. She focused with extra-special care, and starting at eight seconds, took each-a-second-longer exposures up to eighteen. One of them, at least, would catch the inside bookshelved walls without overexposing the siding.
She went to the car for her sweater, and looked around as she went back to the camera. The Historical Society cottage? No, it was too tree-shadowed, and dull anyway. But the Men’s Association house, up on the hill, had a surprisingly comic look to it: a square old nineteenth-century house, solid and symmetrical, tipsily parasolled by a glistening TV antenna. The four tall upstairs windows were vividly alight, their sashes raised. Figures moved inside.
She took the fifty-millimeter lens out of the camera and was putting in the one-thirty-five when headlight beams swept onto the street and grew brighter. She turned and a spotlight blinded her. Closing her eyes, she tightened the lens; then shielded her eyes and squinted.
The car stopped, and the spotlight swung away and died to an orange spark. She blinked a few times, still seeing the blinding radiance.
A police car. It stayed where it was, about thirty feet away from her on the other side of the street. A man’s voice spoke softly inside it; spoke and kept speaking.
She waited.
The car moved forward, coming opposite her, and stopped. The young policeman with the unpolicemanlike brown mustache smiled at her and said, “Evening, ma’am.” She had seen him several times, once in the stationery store buying packs of colored crepe paper, one each of every color they had.
“Hello,” she said, smiling.
He was alone in the car; he must have been talking on his radio. About her? “I’m sorry I hit you with the spot that way,” he said. “Is that your car there by the post office?”
“Yes,” she said. “I didn’t park it here because I was—”
“That’s all right, I’m just checking.” He squinted at the camera. “That’s a good-looking camera,” he said. “What kind is it?”
“A Pentax,” she said.
“Pentax,” he said. He looked at the camera, and at her. “And you can take pictures at night with it?”
“Time exposures,” she said.
“Oh, sure,” he said. “How long does it take, on a night like this?”
“Well that depends,” she said.
He wanted to know on what, and what kind of film she was using. And whether she was a professional photographer, and how much a Pentax cost, just roughly. And how it stacked up against other cameras.
She tried not to grow impatient; she should be glad she lived in a town where a policeman could stop and talk for a few minutes.
Finally he smiled and said, “Well, I guess I’d better let you go ahead with it. Good night.”
“Good night,” she said, smiling.
He drove off slowly. The silver-gray cat ran through his headlight beams.
She watched the car for a moment, and then turned to the camera and checked the lens. Crouching to the viewfinder, she levered into a good framing of the Men’s Association house and locked the tripod head. She focused, sharpening the finder’s image of the high square tipsy-antennaed house. Two of its upstairs windows were dark now; and another was shade-pulled down to darkness, and then the last one.
She straightened and looked at the house itself, and turned to the police car’s faraway taillights.
He had radioed a message about her, and then he had stalled her with his questions while the message was acted on, the shades pulled down.
Oh come on, girl, you’re getting nutty! She looked at the house again. They wouldn’t have a radio up there. And what would he have been afraid she’d photograph? An orgy in progress? Call girls from the city? (Or better yet, from right there in Stepford.) ENLARGER REVEALS SHOCKING SECRET. Seemingly diligent housewives, conveniently holding still for lengthy time exposures, were caught Sunday night disporting at the Men’s Association house by photographer Nancy Drew Eberhart of Fairview Lane …
Smiling, she crouched to the viewfinder, bettered her framing and focus, and took three shots of the dark-windowed house—ten seconds, twelve, and fourteen.
She took shots of the post office, and of its bare flagpole silhouetted against moonlit clouds.
She was putting the tripod into the car when the police car came by and slowed. “Hope they all come out!” the 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.