The Female Persuasion

by Meg Wolitzer

  It wasn’t just brother and sister who were close. The entire Frank family made up a kind of four-person team. They had boisterous dinners, and they played charades; all four of them were crack players. When guests came over for the evening, they were asked, “Do you want to play charades?” and if the answer was no, they were rarely invited back.

  Throughout the twins’ childhood, their overworked housewife mother, Sylvia, and tolerant, easily amused tailor father, Martin, were encouraging to both of them. They were made to feel as if what they did, the path they were on, their whole way of being in the world, was good enough. Their childhood was happy, and the transition into adulthood was meant to be happy too. But one night their parents said they needed to have a “family discussion.”

  “Let’s all sit in the living room,” said Martin. Sylvia sat beside him. It was unusual to see her just sitting there, not fussing around or pulling something out of the oven.

  Philip pointed to Faith. “She did it, not me. It was all her. I had nothing to do with it.” Faith rolled her eyes.

  “Here’s the situation,” said Martin. “You know you’re not the only ones in this house who stay up late talking. We do too. And one conversation we’ve been having late at night is about your education. We’re both so proud of you. But as your parents, we worry.”

  “What are you getting at?” Faith asked. She had a sense, almost immediately, that this was about her.

  “Every day there are terrible stories in the newspaper,” said Sylvia.

  “We used to live in a safe country,” said Martin. “But just last week in the paper I read about a man who hurt a girl on a college campus. She was walking back to her dormitory late at night. We don’t want you to find yourself in a situation like that, Faith. I don’t think we could bear it.”

  “I’ll walk places with friends at college,” said Faith. “Twos and threes, I promise.”

  “It’s not just that,” said Sylvia. Then she looked at Martin, both of them unbearably uneasy.

  “Sex,” Martin finally said, looking down. “There’s that to think about, honey.”

  Oh, don’t worry, Faith thought. I’ll definitely do that in twos.

  “There will be pressures on you,” said her father. “You’ve been very sheltered up until now, and I’m afraid you don’t know what college men might want and expect.”

  For more than a year, Faith had been quietly thinking about going away to college to study a subject like sociology or political science or anthropology. She had mentioned college once in a while, and neither of her parents had given her a sense that they wouldn’t let her leave home and go away to school. Though they had been surprisingly vague about the subject, she had somehow trusted that when the time came, it would all work out.

  “Please don’t do this to me,” she said. For she wanted exactly what her parents feared. She saw herself studying, but then putting down the book to embrace a man who would embrace her back. “I’m a good student,” she tried, her voice catching.

  “Yes you are, and we want to protect you. We want you to live at home,” said her father. “There are excellent schools in the city.”

  “What about Philip?” Faith asked.

  “Philip will go away to school,” her father said easily. Faith glanced at her brother, who looked away. “It will be good for him. Look,” he went on, “you’re different people, and you need different things.”

  Faith stood up, as if somehow towering over her sitting parents would help her cause. “I don’t want to live at home,” she said. She turned to her brother. “Tell them you agree with me,” she said to him.

  “I don’t know, Faith,” he said. “I think I should just stay out of it.”

  That night in bed, Faith cried so hard that Philip pushed aside the curtain with a screech along the rod and appeared in her side of the room in the street-lamp light. He wasn’t just her brother now; he was a male going off into the world. “Look, our folks are great,” he said. “We couldn’t have asked for a happier family. They’re kind of old-fashioned, but maybe they’re not totally wrong. You’ll get a good education. We both will.”

  They were never particularly close after that. When he went off to the University of Minnesota, he wrote her letters describing the different clubs he had joined, and, as an afterthought, the classes he was taking. “This girl I’m dating, Sydelle, she helps me study,” he said. “She’s a smart one. Not as smart as you, though,” he felt he needed to add.

  Later on, even into middle age and after, they still spoke every year on their shared birthday, though Philip was always the one to call her, never the other way around. Faith just didn’t ever feel compelled to pick up the phone and speak to him. He had gone away to college but had never become very intellectual. He’d once proudly told her that the last book he’d read was called Chicken Soup for the Realtor’s Soul. They had nothing in common anymore except a birthday.

  Faith, forced to live at home when she went to school, became a sociology major at Brooklyn College, and she loved her classes, especially the ones where everyone got to talk. She found herself accepting offers of dates from boys she met at school, though always her mother or father stayed up and made sure she got home by her Cinderella curfew. It was maddening to see one of them waiting up in the living room, yawning like crazy and looking her over when she walked in, as if to check for external signs of an intact virginity. And once, when she stayed too late at a party, her father actually showed up at the house in Flatbush. He waited for her outside under a street lamp in his coat with the collar of his striped pajamas showing underneath. She was aghast to see him, and walked home beside him wordlessly.

  In fact Faith held on to her virginity, not wanting something furtive and lurid to happen at a party or in the backseat of a Chevrolet. Sometimes Faith and a girl from her Logic of Inquiry class named Annie Silvestri went out for drinks at a bar near the school, and sat smoking Lucky Strikes and looking good. Within minutes they always received the attention of a table of guys, and there was a power to be found in that, and a power in walking away from it.

  But also, the whole idea of sex—of wanting it, wanting intimacy, wanting experiences away from your parents—soon shifted. The world was changing, her parents had said, and it kept changing further. The day President Kennedy was assassinated, Faith and her friend Annie clung together and wept into each other’s wet neck. For months it was all they could think or talk about, and throughout that time, Faith spoke more in class, wrote her college exams with a harder, more furious pen. She wanted something; sex was still part of it, but not only. Finally Faith graduated, and though her parents assumed she would get a job and keep living at home until she found someone to marry, in the spring of 1965 she sat them down in the living room—it was gratifying to be the one with news this time—and announced that she and Annie were going off to Las Vegas together. They had decided on their destination almost arbitrarily—they both wanted experience, and Vegas seemed so different from Brooklyn.

  “Absolutely not,” said her father. “We forbid it. We will cut off your funds. I’m serious, Faith.”

  “All right, if that’s what you feel you need to do,” Faith said tightly.

  Her parents didn’t go through with the threat, but she made sure never to ask them for any money. With savings from different part-time jobs over the years, Faith and Annie traveled on the 20th Century Limited to Chicago that summer, and from there they took a Greyhound bus to Las Vegas, where they were both immediately hired as cocktail waitresses at the Swann Hotel and Casino. Every night the cocktail waitresses walked the floor with their arms upraised, balancing trays, their hair swirled in matching Nefertiti beehives, smiling vaguely at all and none.

  Faith Frank at twenty-two was tall and long-waisted but also small-boned. Her face had its own contradictions, the forehead high and the nose unusually strong, nearly beakish, but in all that strength was a grea
t beauty and an unmissable intelligence and sympathy. She had large gray eyes and a cascade of long, dark, curling hair, though the styles of 1965 dictated that female hair often be kept aloft, and that it be sprayed generously and indiscriminately to hold it there. “We should buy stock in Aqua Net,” Annie said once as they got ready for an evening, in the room they shared in the unofficial cocktail waitresses’ barracks, on a side street off the Strip.

  As if making up for lost time, Faith got involved with a blackjack dealer at Monty’s. When she finally went to bed with him she was disappointed, for he sprawled upon her sluggishly, his energy so low that she thought: This is sex? This? as she lay beneath him like someone pinned by an overturned car. At work, there was the opposite problem. Faith found herself slapping off men; they didn’t really bother her so much as lightly disgust her. Because how could men who behaved like this think that women would ever like them? How could men like this even hold their heads up? Yet they did.

  One night at the casino, making the usual perambulation with her tray amid the bing-bonging and the clash of glass and the drifting web of smoke, Faith saw a smartly put-together man and woman sitting at one of the blackjack tables. They looked older than Faith but younger than almost everyone who came in there. The woman sat very close to him, whispering in his ear. He was a slender man with close-cut black hair and dark eyes. She kept whispering to him, and he nodded but seemed detached. Eventually the woman went to the powder room and the man took that opportunity to glance up at Faith. “I probably should pack it in now,” he said. “I’m down by a lot. But it’s hard to just walk away.”

  “You should. The odds are against you,” she said. This was the kind of remark she was expressly forbidden to make, and he regarded her with surprise. “I mean, I’m here every night,” Faith went on. “Basically, there should be a sign up that says ‘Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.’”

  The dealer, a rigid man in a Stetson, regarded Faith with suspicion. “What’s she saying to you?” he asked the man.

  “She is quoting literature,” he said, and then he turned back to Faith. “So what do you think I should do?” he asked.

  “I’ve already told you.”

  He smiled. “I imagine you’re full of opinions on a lot of subjects.”

  “You don’t think I’m just another girl bringing you your Scotch?”

  “No,” he said. “And you don’t think I’m just another low-level executive in the field of cookies and crackers, here in Vegas for some relaxation?”

  “Cookies and crackers are important,” Faith said. “Especially if you’re a starving person.”

  He smiled. “Well, if you’re ever starving,” he said, “come to me and I’ll feed you.” At that moment, the woman he was with materialized. He smiled with regret at Faith, then turned away from her, his hand on the small of this woman’s back. Why do they call it the small of a back? Faith suddenly wondered. What a strange word.

  Faith spent six months in Las Vegas, getting involved for a while with a trumpet player at the Sands named Harry Bell, who invited her to come see any show she wanted. During the seduction period, he invited her into the main nightclub at the Sands when no one was there; in the chilly, enormous room he took her up onto the stage, and she said, “Won’t we get in trouble?” but he said, “Nah.” Faith stood on the dark stage in this place where all the top acts had stood, and she looked out into the darkness, imagining what it might be like to have people sitting in seats looking up at you with absorption, listening hard. But she wasn’t talented, she couldn’t sing or perform in any way, and so that would never happen.

  “You look good up there,” Harry said, watching her, but Faith quickly slipped from the stage.

  In the days that followed she would sit at a table in the crowded club and wait for him, and then they would head to his apartment and go to bed together as the sky got pink above the clusters of neon. One morning, when she was in bed with Harry in his hotel room, he tapped Faith lightly on the nose and said, “You’ve got a big honker, don’t you. But you’re so sexy, you can carry it.”

  She said nothing. It hurt her, not because it was untrue—she did have a strong nose, and it did look pretty good on her. It hurt her because she had been lying relaxed with him, similar to the way her childhood dog Lucky would sometimes lie in deep sleep on her back, paws up and dipped at the wrist. Her dog, lying like that, was happy in her doggish openness. Which, Faith thought, was all she herself really wanted when she went to bed with someone. To lie exposed and free and unself-conscious.

  Yet her nose was too big, and a man had pointed it out. In bed, no less. She would never forget it.

  But what she would mostly never forget from those six months in Las Vegas was what happened there to her friend and roommate Annie Silvestri. Annie had been dating Hokey Briggs, a comedian who opened for Bobby Darin, and one night when both women were home in the barracks and had just turned out the lights to go to sleep, Faith heard crying coming from the next bed.

  “Annie, what is it?”

  Annie switched on the small lamp and sat up. Somberly she confessed, “I skipped a period, Faith. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  The next day, Hokey Briggs tensely drove the two women around from doctor to doctor, in search of someone who would perform an abortion. But it was hard to find anyone, and the one doctor who agreed wanted way too much money. Finally Annie got a name from a friend of a friend. She begged Faith to go with her, and though Faith was afraid, she said she would. At the given hour, the two women climbed into an unwashed blue Ford Galaxie that idled in front of the barracks.

  Once they were in the car, an older woman in a head scarf and sunglasses told them, “Get down,” and then started to blindfold them both.

  “No one said you were going to do this,” Annie protested as the cloth went around her face.

  “Do you want to meet the doctor or not? Come on, hold still.”

  They were driven around for a long time, and finally they were brusquely taken out of the car and helped into the back door of a building, where the blindfolds were removed. Annie was told to follow a nurse—or someone posing as one—into a treatment room.

  “Can my friend come with me?” Annie asked.

  “Sorry, honey,” said the nurse.

  Faith was actually relieved, because she was afraid of what she might see in there. She stayed in the waiting room for a long time; at one point, crying came from deep in the office. Eventually the nurse appeared and said, “Get her home and put her to bed. Take care, dear,” she added to Annie.

  The serious bleeding began in the middle of the night, accompanied by strong, stuttering cramps. In the barracks, the cocktail waitresses gathered around Annie (the rest of them thought it was just a very heavy period) but no one really knew what to do. Finally, after everyone else had gone back to sleep, Faith decided Annie had to go to the hospital. Near dawn, she walk-carried Annie into the landlord’s borrowed car, and they made their way there. In the ER, one nurse in particular gave Annie the leper treatment. “You’re going to ruin my very nice floor, Mrs. Silvestri,” she said sarcastically.

  “Is there something I can take for the cramps?” Annie asked, gasping.

  “You’ll have to ask Doctor for that,” she said. “It’s not my department.” And then, leaning closer, the nurse added, “I could have you thrown in the slammer, did you know that? I could call the police right this minute, you little harlot.” Then another nurse came into the room, and the first nurse straightened up and fussed innocently with paperwork.

  Two days later, having been transfused three times, Annie was sent home with a box of off-brand sanitary pads—“Fotex”—and a warning from an extremely young male gynecologist about “not giving it up so easily. Though of course,” he’d added, “it’s a little late in the day for that, wouldn’t you say?”

  That night, back in the barracks, Anni
e said to Faith, “I was thinking that he’s right.”

  “Who?”

  “The doctor. It is late in the day. Late to be here.”

  “What are you saying? I don’t understand.”

  “Let’s go home, Faith,” said Annie. “Please. It’s time.”

  * * *

  • • •

  What made you become the person you are today?” interviewers sometimes wanted to know over the years, asking the question as if they were the very first person to have asked it. “Was it a single thing? Was there an aha moment?”

  “Well, no, there wasn’t one in particular,” Faith always said. But she thought that maybe there had been a series of moments, and that this was the way it was for most people: the small realizations leading you first toward an important understanding and then toward doing something about it. Along the way, too, there would be people you would meet who would affect you and turn you ever so slightly in a different direction. Suddenly you knew what you were working for, and you didn’t feel as if you were wasting your time.

  Faith was living in Manhattan in 1966, sharing the tiniest of apartments with Annie on Morton Street in Greenwich Village. She and Annie were like two audience members who had arrived in the middle of a show; so much was already going on. The political protests were loud and urgent, although they had been sealed away from all that, trapped in a time tunnel when they worked in the casino, and now they had to catch up. The two women stayed roommates through different temp jobs, and through voter registration in Harlem and volunteer jobs at an antiwar organization that operated out of a storefront on Sullivan Street, where Faith typed the weekly mimeographed newsletter, A Peace of Our Mind. She attended meetings and lectures and teach-ins. The war dominated conversations, and everything was punctuated by the best music she’d ever heard. Various friends crammed into the apartment on weekends, and the place was filled with marijuana smoke. “Mary Jane, I love you so,” a boy sang as he sprawled across the shag rug of her living room. Faith was often high on grass on weekends, but never during the week, because it interfered with political strategizing, as she and Annie called it when they sat together at their tiny kitchen table and discussed how best to organize. It wasn’t that Faith had become political in some sort of moment of epiphany; it was more that the world had moved and she had moved too.