“Are you all right, honey?” It was a voice coming from behind the closed door of the stall next to the one Joan had just vacated.
“Yes,” said Joan. “I’m fine. Thank you.”
A brief hesitation followed by, “Are you pregnant, dear?”
Joan laughed. “If I am, call the national news station.”
The woman in the stall did not laugh. “It’s the drink then,” she said.
Joan looked at her face in the mirror. Her mascara and lipstick were smeared. She had a coffee dribble stain on her white cashmere sweater that she was sure Chaz and everyone she had passed on the way to the bathroom had seen. Her face was ashen. “Yes,” said Joan. “It’s the drink.”
CHAPTER 22
Joan, who had won two hundred dollars that morning and not had one sip of vodka in the process, was humming when Ellie approached the table. “I’m not sure I’ve ever heard you hum,” said Ellie.
Joan looked up and smiled at her friend. “No?”
“And if I have, it was definitely not Bachman-Turner Overdrive.”
Joan laughed. “‘Takin’ Care of Business’ is definitely in my top ten,” she said. “What’s going on with you?”
“Not much,” said Ellie, shedding her coat and sitting across the table from Joan. “Chris pulled a muscle in his back shoveling snow over the weekend, which means I’ve again got a child living at home.”
Joan shook her head. “Aren’t they the worst? Stephen comes running to me when he’s got a splinter.”
Ellie laughed now. “We’ve done the cold packs, the heating pad, the ibuprofen, the massages. I think I’ve pulled something in my back taking care of his.” Joan smiled. “I know it’s painful. I haven’t had back issues, and I hear they are awful—and so I feel for him. I do. But the neediness level is off the charts. I mean, this guy was an athlete. He should know how to take care of himself, right?”
“Why take care of yourself if you can get someone else to do it for you?” asked Joan.
“Hey, I meant to tell you that I’m glad you suggested we squeeze in two lunches this month, even though we’re off schedule. I think it means a lot to Alice.”
“I think so, too.”
“Before she gets here, I’ve got something to tell you,” said Ellie, leaning in toward Joan, who mirrored Ellie’s movement. “Alice is moving forward with buying a gun.”
Joan sat back. “Shit.”
“Wait a minute,” said Ellie, tilting the left side of her face toward Joan, as a mother might when making a listen up point to a child. “She’s doing research. She’ll take lessons. She’s getting all kinds of advice about how, when, and if to use a firearm. She’s not taking this lightly. And I’m only telling you because I know how you feel about it. But you might want to take it down a notch because you and I haven’t been through what she’s been through.”
Just as their server was filling their water glasses, Alice strode up to the table. “Hey,” said Joan, making eye contact with Alice. “You look really good. How’s the head?”
“Clearer,” said Alice, hanging her coat on the back of her chair. “And the headaches are less intense.”
“I’m so glad,” said Joan.
Alice looked at Joan for a moment before shifting her gaze to Ellie. “You told her,” she said.
“Told her what?” Ellie picked up the menu and looked at the lunch specials.
Alice looked back at Joan. “You told her about the gun.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” said Joan. “She told me about the gun. Now sit down, and you tell me about it.”
Alice sat down in the chair next to Ellie, her back rigid against the wood slats it barely touched. “I’m just about ready to purchase a Glock 42; it’s a semiautomatic pistol,” said Alice. “I’m going to learn how to use it, and I’m going to carry it on my body when I feel like I need protection. End of story.”
Joan picked up her menu, but she didn’t open it. “It sounds like the beginning of the story to me.”
Alice picked up her menu, but stared at Joan. “If you think I’m receptive to an uninformed discussion about guns today, you’re wrong. Every once in a while, Joan, you’re wrong.”
“Why are you so defensive about this?” asked Joan. “Why are you so angry?”
Alice dropped her menu, her eyes wide open and a vein visible now on her left temple. “Are you kidding me?”
“Hey, hey, Alice,” said Ellie. “It’s okay. It’s okay. We’re friends here. We’re supporting you.” She looked at Joan.
“Yeah, well, one of you is supporting me a whole lot more than the other.”
Joan had never been very good at backing down from an argument that mattered to her. She could easily keep silent when it didn’t matter, which was often the case with whatever topic arose at Howard family get-togethers. They discussed interesting things—local and national politics, sports contests, ethical questions—but in a low-stakes, jocular way. No one switched sides or was perceptively moved by these discussions. Everyone’s mind was made up and firm; the conversation was just that, conversation. Joan participated in these family chats, but she didn’t fervently express her opinion, simply because it didn’t really matter. Whether or not Alice bought a gun did matter, not only to Alice, but also to Joan. She made eye contact with Alice. “I understand what happened to you. . . .”
“No!” said Alice, her voice rising. “No, you don’t understand what happened to me—unless, of course, you’ve had a near-rape experience and haven’t shared it with us.”
“I understand what happened to you,” Joan started again, “was extremely upsetting. I understand you were terrified. And I understand your need to feel protected, to stop this from ever happening again. What I don’t understand is how you know you’re ready to take someone else’s life.”
“Joan,” said Ellie. “Alice isn’t talking about taking someone else’s life. She’s talking about taking lessons, getting a permit, and buying a gun.”
Joan sipped her water. “Same thing.”
“It most certainly is not the same thing,” said Alice. “There are many gun owners who never fire their weapon.”
“And there are many who do,” said Joan, “like the trained police officers we continue to hear about in the news who fire their weapons at people who have nothing in their hands but a cell phone or a toy gun or an imaginary knife. Now if a trained police officer does that—let’s call it panicking—what do you think a frightened housewife is going to do when she comes face to face with danger?”
“With a gun, Alice will be less frightened,” said Ellie.
Joan turned her attention to Ellie. “So you’re totally okay with this? This is because you’ve got three rifles in your house, and you think owning guns is a great idea? This is because you think there’s no way Alice could shoot someone unless she absolutely had to? What makes you so sure this is a good idea?”
“And what makes you so sure it isn’t?” asked Ellie.
Joan opened her mouth to retort just as their server approached the table. The women, who had each glanced at the menu and had a vague idea of what they wanted to eat, quickly ordered. “I’ve made my best argument,” said Joan. “Accidents happen all the time. Parents take their children to firing ranges, and somebody ends up dead. Children find guns in their homes when their parents’ backs are turned and shoot themselves. Just the other day, in the newspaper, there was a story about a four-year-old boy, in Alaska, I think, who was shot by his mother’s gun when it fell out of its holster and fired. A misguided, mentally unstable high school student shoots his rival in physics class.”
“Let’s not cheapen what James Shulz did by turning this into a discussion about him,” said Alice.
“It is a discussion about James Shulz!” said Joan. “It’s a discussion about what happens each and every day in a world that tolerates—no, encourages!—every Joe and Jill to protect themselves, to assert themselves with guns. You’ve got to tell me, Alice, that owning a gun scares you a
s much as not owning one. If you can tell me that, we have more common ground than you think we do.”
Alice leaned in toward Joan. “Of course I’m scared,” she said. “I’m crazy scared. But I am resolved. I will do whatever I need to do to not experience what I experienced ever again.” She leaned back in her chair. “Linda tells me . . .”
“What does Dave tell you?” Joan interrupted.
“Wait,” said Ellie. “I want to hear what Linda had to say.”
Alice looked at Ellie. “Thank you,” she said. “As I was saying, Linda tells me she knows two women at school who carry guns.”
“Why?” asked Joan, in as measured a voice as she could manage.
Their server carried a large circular tray on her shoulder. She lowered it onto a stand several feet from the table and then carried Joan’s grilled cheese on homemade sourdough, Alice’s Cobb salad, and Ellie’s French onion soup to the table, and set them down. “Be careful,” she said to Ellie. “The soup is hot.”
“Why?” asked Alice. “Because one of the women was raped after a party, and the other one, who Linda says comes from a misogynistic neighborhood in South Boston, carried a gun all through high school for protection.”
Ellie blew on the spoon of soup she held three inches from her mouth. “Boy, I’m not so sure allowing guns on college campuses is a good idea,” she said.
“What?” asked Alice. “You think it’s okay to carry a gun in the, what, real world, but it’s not okay to carry a gun on a college campus?”
Ellie chewed the melted Swiss cheese in her mouth. “There’s a difference,” she said. “College campuses are populated primarily by eighteen- to twenty-two-year-olds. They think they are adults, but they are most decidedly not. They are immature. They routinely make bad decisions. And they drink too much alcohol, which leads to even more bad decision making.”
“What she said,” said Joan, biting into her grilled cheese.
“What recourse does a young woman have when she’s been raped by a classmate?” asked Alice. “Joan, you’ve told us all about the news you’ve been digesting, so I’m sure you’ve also heard about the lack of response to women telling their college administrators that they’ve been raped, after being drugged, by the captain of the football team and six of his best buddies.”
Joan nodded her head in agreement with what Alice was saying. “It’s a problem,” said Joan. “It’s a big problem. But dead football team captains are also a problem. When is it okay to take someone else’s life?”
Alice forked a cube of chicken into her mouth. “It’s okay when you feel like your life, your person, is in danger.”
“It may be all right at that very second,” said Joan, “when you pull the trigger. But then you have to live the rest of your life questioning, justifying your actions as a killer.”
Alice looked at her phone, which had just buzzed. “It’s a text from Linda,” she said. “She’s going to a Women in Power meeting on campus tonight after dinner.”
Joan swallowed the bite of sandwich in her mouth. “Have you told Dave about any of this?”
Alice looked down at her salad. “No,” she said. “And I don’t plan on doing it anytime soon.”
MARCH
CHAPTER 23
Ellie pulled her car into the parking lot of the dog park just before Diana drove in. They parked next to each other, waved, and then got themselves and their dogs out of their cars. Buffy and Lily, Diana’s mixed breed puppy, sniffed at each other and then bounded, Lily chasing Buffy, to the gate.
“She is adorable,” said Ellie. “You must be thrilled to have a dog again. But how do you get anything done with a puppy in the house?”
“I don’t,” said Diana, smiling, opening the gate. “We play for at least an hour at the end of the workday—and we play most of the day at the store. We are definitely fast friends.”
“How old is she?”
“She’s three months old,” said Diana. “I’ve had her for one month.”
“And you’re loving it?”
“I am,” said Diana, choosing the path on the right, the longer loop. “Now that I live alone, she’s good company.”
The women walked several steps without speaking. The snow was gone, but the ground was still frozen. The dogs ran ahead, on the path and off the path and into the wooded section that buffered the park from the street. The entire park was surrounded by chain-link fencing, but most of it was hidden from view, giving the impression of wide-open country rather than suburban planning. All the dogs seemed to care about was that they were free to run unencumbered.
“It’s so funny that I haven’t run into you around town,” said Ellie, initiating conversation, breaking the quiet between them.
“Well, I haven’t been here that long,” said Diana. “I moved here from West Hartford about a year ago. And I’ve been pretty focused on the store.”
“Why West Hartford, and why here?”
“We lived in West Hartford because my husband, my ex-husband, works in Hartford. He’s an insurance agent, and I was a dutiful housewife.”
Ellie called to Buffy, who had taken Lily to the stream for a drink. The dogs ran back toward their owners. “What is it about the word dutiful that implies reluctance?”
Diana laughed. “I was reluctant! I loved being a mom—I still do—but I didn’t like everything that went along with being Phil’s wife. I am not a good corporate spouse. I’m not good at schmoozing. I am not good at polite but irrelevant conversation. I frustrated Phil because I was not like the other executives’ wives. I didn’t dress like them. I didn’t act like them. I didn’t always do as I was told.” Buffy approached Ellie, who gave her a piece of kibble from her pocket. Buffy then ran back to where Lily was standing, waiting for her companion. “Aren’t you smart,” said Diana.
“Not at first,” said Ellie. “The first few times I brought Buffy here, she chose playing with the other dogs over me. I had the hardest time getting her to come to me, getting her to get back in the car. She comes pretty well now that I have treats in my pocket.”
Diana reached into her pocket and held up a piece of kibble. “I’m starting early,” she said. She called Lily, who came to her only after she squatted and held the kibble in an outstretched hand.
They continued walking. “I’m envious of your independence,” said Ellie. “I feel like I’ve lived my entire life doing what others have thought was best for me.”
“Oh, it hasn’t always been that way,” said Diana. “As I said, I was very dutiful for many years. I became less so when I uncovered who I was and what I wanted.”
Ellie stopped and looked at Diana, who had stopped and was looking at her. “Is ‘uncovered’ a therapy word?”
Diana laughed. “Oh yes,” she said. “It took me two years to even say that word.”
“Well, it rolls off your tongue very nicely now.”
“Why, thank you.”
They rounded the corner to the far meadow, where the dogs were frolicking in the tall, brown grass. “What did you uncover?” asked Ellie. When Diana said nothing for several steps, Ellie said, “I’m sorry. That’s your business, not mine.”
Diana shook her head. “It’s okay,” she said. “I brought it up. And I hardly ever bring it up, so it must be something I want to tell you.”
“Only if you want to,” said Ellie, slowing their pace, looking at the side of Diana’s face.
Diana stopped and faced Ellie. “I’m gay,” she said. “That’s why Phil and I are divorced. That’s why I’m doing this pet store endeavor on my own. That’s why I’m alone and need a puppy for company.” Diana started walking again, and Ellie followed her, even though she was suddenly having a hard time lifting her feet. Her legs felt like they had doubled in size and weight. For several minutes, the women said nothing. When they turned the next corner and were, again, surrounded by woods, they were met by two women with black Labrador retrievers. Diana told them how beautiful the dogs were, and the women, in turn, compl
imented the good looks of Buffy and Lily. Ellie, typically friendly with everyone she met, couldn’t find any words to say—they were all swirling around in her mind, sweaty and bumping into one another in the presence of this brave woman who had just confessed she was gay. Was that what it was, a confession?
“Are you okay?” asked Diana, when the other women and their dogs had left them and she and Ellie still hadn’t moved, hadn’t spoken.
“Yes,” said Ellie.
“I’ve upset you?”
“No, no,” said Ellie, refocusing, looking into Diana’s eyes. “You haven’t upset me; you’ve inspired me.”
“I have?”
“If I can ask,” said Ellie, “how and when did you know that you were gay? When did you discover this?”
“Hmmm,” said Diana. “That’s a good question. On one level, I think I’ve always known that I was different from other girls, from the elementary school girls who chased the boys around the playground and from the high school girls who pushed themselves up against the male athletes. My romantic crushes, in junior high and high school, were on girls as often as they were on boys, probably more on girls. In college, I had a relationship with another woman, and it was very satisfying, until she broke my heart by dumping me for a guy.” Ellie nodded her head, continuing to process the information Diana was sharing while encouraging her new friend to continue. “And then I followed suit and dated a man, Edward was his name. He was very scholarly and not much interested in sex with me—so we were perfectly matched. If I had to guess, I’d say that Edward was gay, too.”
They started walking again, back toward the near meadow, back toward their cars. “Then what happened?” Ellie asked.
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