Mrs. Everything

by Jennifer Weiner

  Jo was careful to sip her wine slowly. She rarely allowed herself more than a single drink at parties. Alcohol made her joints feel loose and her body warm and elastic. It also lowered her inhibitions, and the last thing she wanted was to do anything that would arouse the suspicions of the ladies of Apple Blossom Court.

  She was always so careful. Careful not to evince any special interest when the Stonewall riots were in the news. Careful not to pay too much attention to news reports about the Gay Pride marches and parades that were popping up in New York and Philadelphia. Careful not to look too long at any of the neighborhood ladies, even though those ladies were permitted to cheerfully leer at their friends’ husbands, as well as Mark Shanley, the muscular teenager with long, frosted-blond hair who mowed all of their lawns, shirtless, in a pair of cut-off jean shorts. She was careful not to ever be the first to volunteer to rub sunscreen on someone’s back in case anyone should notice and think that her eyes, or even worse, her hands, were lingering longer than normal. She did not let herself daydream about a night like this one, with snow falling outside and a fire burning inside and Nonie Scotto a little tipsy and no husbands in sight.

  The kids were fed. The babies were diapered and put to bed in Judy’s playpen. The dirty plates were cleared away. More bottles of wine were opened. At nine o’clock, when Kim started to rub her eyes, Jo led her up to Jenny Pressman’s bedroom and made her a nest of pillows and blankets on the floor. Missy had insisted that she wasn’t tired, but twenty minutes after her sister went up, she fell and banged her head on the arm of the couch and came running to Jo in tears. Bethie pulled her into her arms to kiss it better. “See, isn’t the fire pretty?” she asked. Missy nodded, with her head resting against Bethie’s shoulder. Jo reached out her arms. Bethie handed Missy over, and Jo stroked her daughter’s wavy hair, feeling the exact moment when Missy’s body went boneless with sleep. She gave her daughter a kiss on her temple, feeling emotion sweeping through her, almost bringing tears to her eyes. Had she ever loved anyone as much as she loved her girls? “What’s that big brain thinking about?” she would ask Kim at breakfast, or at night, tucking her in, and Kim would say, “the person who figured out that horses could pull things,” or “why do we cook food?” or “do you think dolphins can talk to each other?” And Missy was so fearless, flinging herself at the soccer ball or the hockey puck, barreling toward the goal, with her legs and arms permanently scraped and bruised. Jo felt so connected to them. When they cried, she cried; when Missy scored the winning goal or Kim won first prize in her age group in the statewide science fair, she was as proud as she’d ever been of any of her own accomplishments. She loved them. More than that, she admired them. They would be better than she was: stronger and smarter, more capable and less afraid, and if the world displeased them, they would change it, cracking it open, reshaping it, instead of bending themselves to its demands.

  Jo got Missy upstairs and settled next to her sister. Judy had a battery-powered radio in the kitchen, and every half-hour she’d turn it on to hear the latest news, then come out and stand in front of the fireplace to make reports. The governor had declared a state of emergency and ordered nonessential personnel to stay off the roads. The snow was still falling fast, with forecasters predicting that the region might get up to thirty-six inches. “I think we’re all in for the night,” Judy said.

  When the last of the children had fallen asleep, the women arranged blankets and pillows for themselves on the floor. They spoke ruefully about the diets they were breaking as they nibbled brownies and drank Judy’s hot buttered rum. Every once in a while one of them would say something about checking on her house. “I should at least get the walkway shoveled,” Stephanie said. “What if Mike comes back?”

  “He c’n shovel it himself, can’t he?” Nonie asked. Her accent had become more pronounced with each glass of wine she’d enjoyed. She lay on her side on the carpet, basking like a cat in the fire’s warmth.

  “I guess,” Stephanie said. Lucas, her baby, was asleep in her arms, scooched up with his head in the crook of her shoulder and his bottom sticking out. He gave a little whistle each time he exhaled, and Stephanie jiggled him up and down in a movement that Jo remembered becoming as natural as breathing when her own girls were small.

  “Everything was delicious,” said Jo, when Judy finally sat down. “Delicious,” Bethie agreed, in her breathy murmur, as she drifted in from the kitchen. Her sister never walked anywhere these days, Jo thought. Bethie drifted, like she was a puff of milkweed, blown this way and that by the wind.

  “Good food, plenty of drinks, the kids are all sleeping, and no ‘Honey, can you grab me a beer?’ ” Judy said.

  “Amen, sister,” Nonie drawled.

  “Think of it,” Judy said, stifling a hiccup against the back of her hand. “All those men out there, realizing, on the same night, for the first time in their adult lives, that they can survive without someone fetching their beer and asking how their days went.”

  Jo turned her face away. For the early years of their marriage, she had asked Dave about his day, and she’d genuinely cared about his answers. In those early years, she and Dave got along; they enjoyed each other’s company, and the sex, while not fantastic, was at least okay. After he’d decreed that they were financially secure enough to start trying for babies (the babies that he had assumed, without asking, that Jo wanted), she’d thrown away her diaphragm. She’d worried that she would hate being pregnant, that she would despise such a physical, visible confirmation of heterosexuality, and the way that her body would literally become a vessel, in service to the baby she was growing. To her surprise, she’d loved it. She’d barely had a moment’s sickness, and had woken up every day feeling well rested, with her heart pumping strongly, ready to bound out of bed and accomplish everything on her list. Her hair grew thick and glossy, the whites of her eyes were so white that they shone, her skin glowed, just like the books said it would, and she never experienced swollen feet or heartburn or any of the common aches and pains she’d heard other pregnant women complain about. During her first pregnancy, with Kim, at some point every day she’d find a few minutes to lie in bed, one hand on her belly, feeling the skin thinning and stretching drum-tight, noticing her breasts getting bigger and the dark line of pigmentation stretching from her belly button to her pubic bone. She felt like a piece of fruit, something exotic and delicious, ripening in the sun, and she’d been certain, both times, that the baby would be a girl.

  All through her pregnancies, Dave had been loving, thoughtful, and solicitous. At night, Jo would lie on the couch, legs stretched out in her husband’s lap, and Dave would rub her feet with castor oil—something Bethie had recommended, after some homeopathic healer she’d met had told her about it—and he’d tell her about his day, doing his expert imitations of his manager at the bar where he was working, a fat, wheezing, balding man named George Toddhunter, or the bartender, Gus, a preening college boy with feathered hair and John Lennon glasses who’d published a pair of book reviews in the local newspaper and fancied himself a novelist. They’d watch the news, sitting close on the plaid couch that they’d bought secondhand, and eventually, Jo would heave herself erect—“I am heaving myself erect,” she’d announce—and fix dinner, which would typically be one of her mother’s recipes, or some one-pot or one-pan dish from a recipe she’d found in one of the women’s magazines to which she now unironically subscribed. Dave would set the table, Jo would clear it, he would wash the dishes and she’d dry, and she’d usually be snoozing on the couch before prime time, waking up only long enough to brush her teeth, splash water on her face, and get herself to bed. She’d sleep for long, luscious, uninterrupted hours, and wake up in the morning, stretching her arms over her head, feeling gravid, and heavy, and perfectly content.

  Both of her deliveries had been easy—a few hours of discomfort, an hour of hard contractions. When they’d sharpened into actual pain, the doctors had given her a whiff of gas, and she’d woken up with
a baby in her arms. Kim was born in 1970, a quiet, watchful, owlish little girl who hardly ever cried. Thus encouraged, Jo had gotten pregnant again when Kim was just over a year old. Their prize had been Missy, who never wanted to be in her crib or her playpen and would cry lustily when deposited in either one. Missy was creeping at four months, crawling at five, and taking her first tottering steps when she was nine months old. She started walking, Jo would say, and never stopped.

  Her Avondale friends had no reason to suspect that Jo wasn’t the same as they were: a wife and a mother, no different, or less content, than anyone else on the block. They didn’t know about Shelley or Lynnette. When Dave wanted to sleep with her she’d let him. She even enjoyed it, at least some of the time, but the truth was, her girls, with their creamy skin, their milky breath, their plump limbs and gummy smiles, satisfied any need for physical intimacy that she had. For years, she hadn’t wanted sex at all, from women or men, except in a dim, distant way that seemed to have more to do with memory than desire . . . which, as far as she could tell, was about the same as her neighbors felt.

  Years had passed. The girls had weaned and toilet-trained, they’d started nursery school, then kindergarten, and began to wriggle away from Jo’s embraces, or announce, I can do it myself! Now that Jo was finally coming out of the fog of new motherhood, she was seeing Dave differently, and finding that she had very little to say to him, and less interest in what he might want to say to her. “How was your day, dear?” she’d ask, out of habit, and he’d accuse her of being sarcastic, of not caring, of not really listening when he talked.

  “Tell you what,” Bethie said, unfolding herself from her cross-legged seat at Judy’s fireplace. To Jo’s eyes, her sister’s long hair looked messy and uncared-for, and the slippers she’d brought with her to Judy’s house, purple velvet with gold embroidery, looked ridiculous, so impractical that any grown-up would know better than to buy them and would certainly not wear them in a snowstorm. “I know we’d scheduled something for later in the week, but since we’re all here, who wants to do a little consciousness-raising right now?”

  Oh, God, Jo thought, cringing. Oh, no. Bethie in a contained setting, at an event with an official start and an end time, was one thing, but Bethie on a night like this, Bethie unbound, was quite another. Across the room, Jo saw, or thought she saw, Arlene and Judy exchange a smirk.

  “We’re drunk!” called Stephanie from her spot on the sectional.

  “That might help,” Bethie replied. “In vino veritas, right?” Jo felt her heart contract as the other women laughed, or murmured their assent. They’re being polite, she thought, and mentally begged her sister to sit down. Instead, Bethie stepped to the front of the room and stood on the fireplace’s ledge. Her bracelets rattled as she straightened the hem of her sweater.

  “So,” Bethie said. “Who can remember the first time you realized that you were a girl?”

  Silence filled the room as the women thought it over.

  “I remembered the first time I saw my little brother in the bathtub,” Nonie finally said. “I ran to my mama, screaming, ‘There’s something wrong with him!’ I thought he was deformed. Like his insides were on the outside.”

  Everyone laughed. Jo forced herself to breathe. Stephanie said, “When I was six, we went to my mother’s sister’s wedding, and I had this beautiful dress. All crinolines and puffy sleeves. My brothers just had short pants. They looked like babies. And I thought I looked so grown-up.” There were nods and sighs of remembrance. “Then we got to the party, and my brothers were racing all over the place, and I tried to go play with them, and my mom grabbed me. She said I had to be careful. I had to be a little lady.”

  “Ah,” was all Bethie said. Jo, meanwhile, was remembering fights with Sarah, arguments about her clothes, her hair, the way she sat and how she sounded. Why can’t you act like a lady?

  “So who thinks things have changed?” asked Bethie.

  There was another pause. “I got my kids Free to Be . . . You and Me,” Judy said. Jo nodded. She’d gotten her girls the same book. The record, too. “And it says that girls can be anything. Be a doctor, be a lawyer, be an astronaut. Then Jenny asked me, if she grows up to be an astronaut, who’s going to take care of her babies? What am I supposed to say to that?”

  The women’s voices rose, overlapping and passionate. “The nanny!” Valerie called, and Steph said, “Men and women should both be raising the children,” while Nonie, who seemed a glass or two past tipsy, said, “Far as I’m concerned, men oughtta be kept as far away from kids as possible. The one time Dan tried to change a diaper, Andy rolled himself right off the changing table and got kaka all over his carpet.”

  Bethie sat with her back to the fire and her knees drawn up to her chest. Jo looked at her, wondering what her sister was thinking. That she’d dodged a bullet because she’d never been married? That she was better off than all the women in the room? Was it true?

  “Jo?”

  Jo blinked. “What say you?” asked her sister. “Do you think men should help raise babies, or do we have to find some other way?”

  Careful, Jo told herself. She could see Nonie watching her and could feel her sister’s gaze, too. “I love being a wife and mother. But I think that ideally women should have the same options men have.”

  “That’s right!” said Stephanie, just as Nonie said, “It won’t work,” and Bethie asked, “What do you mean?”

  Jo smoothed her already-smooth hair. “Well, I think some women are happy staying home with kids. Or they are when their kids are little. But some women don’t want that. They’d rather work.”

  “You don’t think that raising children and running a house is working?” Bethie asked, eyebrows lifted.

  “Of course it is,” Jo said, feeling her cheeks flush, angry at her sister for drawing her into a trap. “You know what I mean. Work outside of the home.”

  “Do any of us know anyone—any woman our age—who isn’t married and a mom?” Stephanie asked. Jo thought of all the girls she’d known in high school, all the smart young women she’d met in college, the girl who’d edited the Michigan Daily’s opinion section, the girl who’d won the university’s top academic prize. The newspaper editor had gone to law school, then gotten married, and the last Jo knew, she was working part-time. The prizewinner had gotten married and had children, right after college. Just like Jo. Just like Lynnette, and Nonie, and almost every woman Jo knew.

  “I’m not married or a mom,” Bethie said.

  “What’s it like?” Stephanie asked, her voice full of almost childlike curiosity. “Do you feel like you’re missing out? Are you happy?”

  “I am happy,” said Bethie, with her beatific smile. “But, remember, I wasn’t married first, like some of the women I live with, so it wasn’t as if I can speak about what that life was like, or if I like what I have any better. I just did what felt right for me,” she said.

  Bullshit, thought Jo, feeling childish and resentful, and convinced that Bethie was lying. You got pregnant, you had an abortion, you spent ten years drifting around, going to rock shows and smoking dope before you landed in your commune. You fell into your life, the same way I fell into mine.

  “Here’s another question,” said Bethie. “Are marriage and motherhood what you expected?”

  For a moment, there was no sound but the hissing and snapping of the logs in the fire. “It’s boring sometimes,” Valerie Cohen finally said.

  “ ’S boring all the time,” Nonie said, and hiccupped.

  “We can’t say we weren’t warned,” said Arlene. Her voice was bleak. “Betty Friedan told us. She said it was going to be boring.”

  “She did,” Judy said. “But did we have other choices? Real ones?”

  Jo had considered that question a lot, when she was busy doing something particularly rote and unpleasant: weeding the garden, loading or unloading the dishwasher, or trying, and failing, to fold fitted sheets. She would fold, or pull, or wash, and consider how
, no matter how much the bra-tossers and the National Organization for Women and the Society for Cutting Up Men had done to point out the tedium of marriage and motherhood, they hadn’t done much about offering other possibilities or smoothing other paths. The only option she could see was paying some other woman—most likely an African American or Hispanic one—to do it for her, the way her mother had, and that did not feel like progress at all.

  “I feel so guilty.” Valerie’s voice was quiet. “My parents were immigrants. They came here from China with nothing. They have a dry-cleaning shop in Boston and they both worked fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, so that my brother and I could go to college.” Valerie reached across Nonie, fingers groping for the wineglass she’d placed on the ledge in front of the fireplace. “My parents could never even have imagined a life like the one I have. All of the luxury, all of the ease. I mean, my mother never even had a dishwasher.” Valerie paused.

  “And yet,” Bethie prompted.

  “And yet,” Valerie repeated, looking down into her wine, with her black hair falling in wings across her face. “I know it’s not as hard, or as boring, as dry-cleaning clothes was. But some days, I just feel so . . .” She shook her head. “Depleted. Like Arnold and the kids just take and take and take and there’s nothing left where I used to be.” She fisted her right hand and rested it against her heart.

  “That’s it,” said Nonie, sitting up straight, so fast that her wine sloshed in her lap. “That’s it exactly.”

  “Do you think the guys feel this way?” Judy still spoke like a New Yorker, all flattened vowels and rat-a-tat-tat delivery. “Does everyone feel bored or empty?”

  Jo tried to adjust her position so that she could see her sister. Her bones had that delicious liquid sensation that came with a few drinks, and the living-room floor did not feel entirely solid beneath her. Outside, the snow was still falling, piling up in drifts against the darkened windowpanes, which rattled as the wind gusted, but the room was almost too warm, the air rich with the smells of spices and wine, perfume and shampoo. She could feel her thoughts coming together, ideas she’d had, then shoved away; opinions she never let herself dwell on, crystallizing and solidifying, helped along by the storm, and the closeness, and the company, and the alcohol. “I think that men go out in the world and get filled up. They get praised for their work.”