Superior Women

by Alice Adams

  However, Peg is holding a blank sheet of paper, undoubtedly the only person in the room with no numbers, not one written down. She is scared: will anyone see? Will they ask for all the papers at the end, with names? If she cheated, how would they know? Would a representative of the company call Cameron, or Cornelia? Well, of course not—or would they?

  The next question saves her, or so Peg believes, for a while. Patsy asks, “Have you written to your mother this week?”

  And Peg has! She wrote her mother a postcard yesterday, explaining why she hadn’t written before, children home sick with colds, would write soon. But do postcards count? Should she ask? No, of course they count; what Patsy said was, “Written to your mother.” No need to ask. She writes the first number on her paper. Ten.

  Then Patsy giggles, so that Peg knows, as everyone must know, that she is going to say something dangerous. “Now, girls,” she says. “Tell me, have you kissed your husband this week? And you do know what I mean when I say kiss. Not some peck at the door.” And again, the dangerous giggle.

  Of course Peg knows what she means, of course everyone does, and in the quickest possible upward glance Peg is able to see that everyone in the room is writing down a number, of course they all are, and so does she: how could she not? And in a sensible, appropriate way, she reassures herself: no one, no one could possibly call Cameron on the phone to check on such a thing. “Mr. Sinclair, we’re from Prettyware, and we’re running a check on your wife. Would you mind telling us if it’s true that you and she ‘kissed’ this week? Oh, you didn’t? You don’t, not anymore? Well, that’s quite strange, Mr. Sinclair, she certainly said—well, she’s lied. Your wife has cheated in the Prettyware contest.”

  Well, no one could possibly have such a conversation with Cameron, that was ridiculous. Still, as she writes the large TEN, under the other TEN that she got for the postcard to her mother (which very likely she did not deserve either), Peg is chilled with fear. Her stomach does not feel right; she would give a lot to get out of that room, out of all that Early American brightness.

  Patsy clears her throat, and she sighs in an audible way, thus announcing that the next question will be innocuous, idle. “Now, girls,” she says, “if any of you have spanked a child this week, and that includes slapping, any hitting at all, you have to take ten points off your score.”

  Several sounds of protest arise from certain corners of that room, but they quickly subside as several people mark a line through one of their tens. Peg’s quick look catches them at it, but she can’t tell how many people. It looks like about half the girls there. Less than half hit their children?

  And for Peg the question was not innocuous; yesterday she slapped Candy at breakfast—Candy and Carol, her twins, now seven and too old to be slapped; it was terrible, it made her sick all day, sickly waiting for Candy to come home from school, and sick with worry, worrying that Candy might not come home, had been frightened away. It was so unfair; poor Candy had only been whining and saying she didn’t want to go to school. Not eating her breakfast. But the thought of Candy at home all day, whining like that, when there were both baby Kate and Rex already at home with colds, and Cornelia out sick—well, Peg slapped Candy, and said she had to go to school; she was not sick. A light slap, not hard at all; still, it made Candy scream and scream, barely stopping in time to wash her face and get on the school bus. It was terrible—Peg’s hand shakes as she makes a line through the Ten that she just put down, the lying ten, saying that she and Cameron had “kissed.” So that all she has left is the ten for a card to her mother, just a card, when she should have written a letter.

  But if she did not have that ten her score would be a zero, or would it be a minus number? It is hard to figure out, as she knew and feared that it would be. She needs Cornelia.

  “Girls.” Patsy’s voice is as deep as she can make it, probably. “Now, girls, this last is a very important question. So important that I want you all to close your eyes, as you think about your answer. Also, you will not want anyone else to know what you put down. Now girls, have any of you, this week, kissed someone else’s husband? And I do not mean your father. If you have, subtract ten points.”

  Relief, or perhaps some stranger and stronger emotion makes Peg break out into a sudden and quite uncontrollable laugh; although her eyes are obediently closed she can hear her own laugh, the old loud jolly-Peg laugh that so many people, like Megan, at college, always disliked.

  Looking up, Peg sees on Patsy’s face an expression of the very purest dislike, even rage. But then Patsy changes her face back into a smile, almost, as she says, “Well, it takes all kinds, I guess. I’m so glad I was able to amuse you.” It is clear that she thinks that Peg has somehow spoiled the game, and everyone else is looking at Peg as though they thought that too.

  It is a horrible moment; Peg feels hot blood flooding up into her face, into her brain, and her stomach also seems to rise. From the top of her throat she manages to say, “I’m sorry, something just struck me.”

  But by then no one is looking at her, or listening; they are all looking at Prettyware Patsy, who is explaining that fifty is the top possible score: will everyone with a fifty raise her hand?

  Several people do, and if they cheated no one will ever know—Peg is suddenly sure of that. Several more people got forty, all girls who iron their husbands shirts and kiss a lot and do not hit children and write to their mothers, maybe long letters every day, even. Who do not kiss other husbands, or who, if they did, would not think there was anything funny involved.

  At last, in the confusion of people going up to the front to get their prizes, no one looking at her anymore, Peg is able to escape; she sneaks out the back of the room, knowing the floor plan as she does, and she finds a hall, leading as she knew it would to an outer door.

  She drives home slowly, too early, wondering what there would have been by way of refreshments. What everyone else is eating.

  22

  Although she is not sure what she would have expected, Megan is still vastly surprised, arriving at Janet and Adam Marr’s White Plains house. In the first place, she thinks, why White Plains? She has visited them before this in a variety of rented houses (they seem to move a lot; “our wandering Jew complex,” Adam calls it) but in places that seemed somehow more plausible: Wellfleet and Provincetown, Westhampton, Westport. But now they have bought this staggeringly large house in White Plains.

  With all Adam’s new money and splashy success, three Broadway hits in two years, Megan would have expected a big house, of course, but this house is remarkably large, even for Adam’s fantasy standards. Set far back from the street (North Broadway: could Adam have chosen a house for its street’s name?) its dark wings spread out onto what can only be called grounds, acres of immaculately tended green lawn (a Henry James, English lawn, thinks Megan) with ancient sweeping trees. In one corner there is a clump of formal shrubbery surrounding a birdbath, and leading up to the house is a formally patterned brick walkway.

  Megan now feels silly, walking up all that way, with her suitcase. She had the cabdriver let her out at the entrance, but as she approaches the house she sees that there is a circle in the driveway where he could perfectly well have turned around (where anyone else’s cab would have driven up and turned around). Drawing closer, walking slowly, she sees too that the “grounds” are far more extensive even than she saw at first; past the porte cochere and the parking circle there are what look to be an orchard and a garden. There must be at least three or four acres, in the middle of this expensive suburb.

  The house is fronted with a very long porch; at one end a long swing hangs, with a table and some chairs. But no person is in sight. Megan begins to wonder about the wine she brought, a Beaujolais; in Paris they considered Beaujolais a real step up from their usual vin ordinaire—but in White Plains, in this house? Not to mention her clothes: could Adam and Janet, conforming to their house, possibly have begun to dress for dinner?

  Surprising they are
still such good friends, really—Megan and Adam and Janet have not seen each other for over a year, the last time being a not terribly successful encounter at an after-theater party, at someone’s hyperchic upper East Side apartment. Adam was drunk, and noisily abusive to almost everyone there; he was taking them all on, and perhaps in self-defense Janet got drunk too, and sick. Megan felt worse than out of place; she was wretchedly sorry that she had come at all. In what she had thought was a good new dress, she was somehow never introduced to anyone, and still too shy to do much about introducing herself. She felt nearly invisible—an unwilling witness to an ugly scene.

  This weekend, then, is to make amends for that admittedly bad evening, and for the lapse of time since. (Adam even wrote an apologetic letter, out of character for him, but it was funny and bright and very warm, making fun of himself as a novice drunk, “an arriviste mick,” he said.)

  Crossing the porch, Megan still sees no one around, and she wonders: could they possibly be away? Could she have come on the wrong weekend? Almost wishing that this would turn out to be the case, she goes up to the bright white front door; she lifts and lets fall the heavy gleaming brass knocker.

  The door opens, and she is confronted with an enormous white starched apron, really immense; for a moment the apron is all that Megan sees. Also, the woman wearing the apron is so black it is hard to see her face, in that cavernous, shadowed entrance hall. Automatically introducing herself, Megan also extends her hand, but then as quickly retracts it, having registered the stark contempt on the other woman’s face.

  The black woman says, “They was expecting you. I’ll take your bag,” and she snatches it from Megan’s hand, and begins a slow march toward the staircase.

  Clearly Megan is supposed to follow, and she starts to do so, but suddenly, swooshing down the banister of those impressive stairs there comes a small boy who plummets to her feet. It is Aron, of course, much taller and thinner than a year ago, with Janet’s dark pretty face.

  He squats there on the floor near Megan’s feet, looking up at her, not smiling.

  She is not sure how to approach him, being unused to children, and generally shy with them. She says, “Hi, Aron.”

  Aron smiles; it is Janet’s sweet tentative smile. He stretches his head toward her, and then he bites her leg, fairly hard, so that Megan cries out, “Jesus!”

  “Aron! Aron, goddamn it, I’ve told you—” It is Janet, from the top of the stairs, then running down them and just not colliding with the big black woman, who has not even turned around during Megan’s exchange with Aron, but who now says, “You, Aron. You come on upstairs with me.”

  “Oh, thank you, Elvira, how good of you,” Janet says, all in a rush, and then, “Oh, Megan, I’m so sorry, honestly, what a welcome.”

  But Aron has begun to scream, and so most of what Janet says is lost.

  Janet picks him up. (How strong she is, Megan thinks; small Janet—and he is kicking.) She hands him up to Elvira, who is coming down the stairs toward them, scowling.

  “Megan, you met Elvira?” Janet asks. Elvira’s scowl deepens, as she turns to Megan, presumably in acknowledgment. “Elvira saves my life,” says Janet, and, to Aron, “Aron, you can do some fingerpaints till dinnertime.”

  Janet is in her old familiar blue jeans and an old shirt, but in these odd circumstances, this White Plains mansion, with a big black maid and a small biting child, she still looks strange and unfamiliar to Megan.

  The two women kiss a little awkwardly, and Janet asks, “Do you want to go up to your room? Oh no, let’s have a cigarette first. God, doesn’t that sound familiar?” She laughs as she leads Megan into a small, rather dark room; leaded windows, diamond-paned, do not supply much light.

  The furniture there too is dark and stiff, small-scaled; Megan supposes that they bought the furniture along with the house, they cannot have chosen such stuff. The walls are lined with glassed-in bookcases, and the books are old and dark, leather-bound, and probably unread. Megan and Janet sit down on a sofa that feels like horsehair.

  “Shit, where are my cigarettes?” Janet reaches into her pockets.

  “Here, I have some.”

  In a familiar way they light up, draw in. They lean back.

  “I just feel so terrible about that biting,” Janet says. “He does it all the time. He bites anyone, but especially any new person. It’s so embarrassing at the playground, his biting the other children. The mothers scream, and one old cunt even said something about tetanus shots. Honestly.”

  “It really didn’t hurt,” is all that Megan can think of to say, which is not quite true: small Adam has very sharp teeth, that is clear. “I was mostly surprised,” she adds.

  “It makes me feel so terrible,” repeats Janet, hopelessly. And then, in a pondering way, “It’s as though I’d bitten someone myself, you know? I feel guilty in just the same way.” She stares at Megan, with the inward look of someone digesting a remarkable piece of self-knowledge.

  Megan ventures, “Don’t mothers always feel guilty about what their kids do?” Sinkingly (selfishly) she hopes that they are not going to spend much of the weekend in long talks about Aron, Aron’s “problems.”

  “Not this guilty,” Janet assures her. “I must really be identified with him, in some very sick way. I wonder if I should call Dr. Bilding. We’re seeing a psychiatrist, of course, Aron and I.” She has brought this out in a brave, somewhat defiant voice. “Of course Aron thinks he’s just a friend that we go to see.”

  “Oh, really?” is all that Megan can think of to say to this.

  “But why would he bite you?” Janet muses; it was not a question. “I mean, if he’s acting out for me. I’m sure I don’t want to bite you. I have almost no hostile feelings toward you, I’m almost sure.”

  “Oh, Janet.” In spite of herself Megan has begun to laugh, Janet having finally sounded too ridiculous.

  For a moment, with a tiny frown, Janet stares at her, and then with a giggle she says, “Oh, you’re right! It gets crazy, it all goes around in a circle—” She giggles again, until she begins to cough, turning red and choking a little, with tears in her eyes.

  They are both still laughing when from outside the house comes the sudden, violent noise of a fast-raced car, crushing crushed rocks, unbelievably loud; it could be heading right into the house, from the sound of it.

  Immediately sobering, Janet exclaims, “Oh fuck, that’s Adam. And Jesus, I’m not even dressed, or anything.”

  She gets to her feet, and for a minute Megan believes that Janet means to rush upstairs, to start dressing or whatever she feels that she was supposed to be doing. But something prevents her (it could have been an expression on Megan’s face); she sits down again, saying, “Well, shit. I’ve had a busy day too.” But in an agitated way she reaches for Megan’s Chesterfields; she extracts and lights another cigarette.

  Adam is somewhat heavier but splendidly turned out, in blue blazer and bright regimental-striped tie. He bursts into the small dark room, exuding energy; almost simultaneously he manages to scowl at Janet and to turn an enormous grin on Megan, like a searchlight.

  By custom Adam and Megan do not kiss. Instead he hits her on the shoulder, with a force that implies affection, some possible sexual challenge, and a disciplinary sternness, a keeping of Megan in her place. The grin makes his eyes seem to slant downward at their outer corners, giving him a warm-clown look, although even grinning his mouth is tautly controlled.

  “Christ, Janet, you’re not even dressed, and it’s almost dinner,” he shouts. And then, “Old fat Megan, but shit, you’re thin, you’ve lost your boobs. Go home, why do you think I invited you here, you dumb cunt?”

  Megan finds herself grinning foolishly in turn, in sheer unreasoning affection; she simply likes Adam, even his outrageousness—despite a number of negative judgments.

  “Where’s the kid?” Adam then asks Janet, but he turns to Megan before Janet can answer, saying, “You met my son the Jewish intellectual? He’s plann
ing to grow up and persecute me. His father the mick. He’s just like his mother, a chip off the old cunt.” Another grin, this one a little mean, as he turns back to Janet.

  She tells him, “Aron bit Megan.”

  “Well, if that isn’t cute. Or is it what you and that high-priced headshrinker call oral aggression? Which of course he must get from me, I’m a very orally aggressive person. Anally too, as a matter of fact. And phallic. Honestly, Megan, old fellow mick, the amount of Jewish bullshit that goes on in this house, it’s enough to choke a horse.” All that was said half-jocularly, Adam in performance. In a more direct and serious way he addresses Janet, “They’ve got dinner under way in the kitchen? They know we’ll be eight?”

  “Eight? But I thought—”

  “I know I said seven. But I think Sheila’s coming by later.”

  Janet looks at Adam, and seems to flush. Limply she says, “Oh.”

  “Well, old Megan, how do you like this spread?” Adam asks then—a rhetorical question. “Isn’t it something? Did you see Elvira? The most hostile living nigger. A single-handed revenge on white exploitation. She may lead the revolution. I think she’s good for Aron, a living lesson in the true nature of womanhood.” And then, “Some old friends of yours are coming for dinner. You remember Price, and Lucy? And someone you wouldn’t know, but he’s just getting big in state politics. Henry Stuyvesant. He’s bringing a rather dull woman, though, rich broad named Connie something, I don’t know why he sees her.”

  Having been put off by his name—she assumed him to be one of the new “social” people with whom Adam is increasingly involved—too tall, nearsighted Henry Stuyvesant is a pleasant surprise to Megan. He seems instantly likable, kind and intelligent, a little shy, slightly awkward. And if he is rich, or social, those are not important facts about him, as they surely were with George Wharton, or even more with Lavinia’s husband, Potter Cobb (of course).