The Book Club

“Thank God they’re gone,” R.J. said with a grunt as he strode into the library. Her husband always made a powerful entrance; it was ingrained in him like a whorl in a slab of hardwood. “Couldn’t stand another moment of that damn squealing.”

Doris bristled. “We do not squeal. We were simply laughing and talking.” She picked up the tray of appetizers in a huff.

“Leave that. I’m hungry.” When she put the tray back onto the coffee table, he poked around them with his index finger, then pointing to the canapés he asked, “What are they?”

Doris narrowed her eyes and thought suddenly of Annie Blake. She and R.J. were a lot alike. Blunt, bold, beloved by all—and shrewd.

“Crab.”

He frowned in distaste and reached for the quiche, picked one up and tossed it in his mouth like a peanut. “These are pretty good,” he said with his mouth full. “What was all that caterwauling about?”

“Oh, R.J.,” she exclaimed, deaf to the insult, “it’s wonderful. Eve’s back in the group. I knew she wouldn’t miss a meeting at my house. She’s too good a friend. You should’ve seen Annie’s face,” she said smugly. “I could tell she didn’t know she was coming. What did she think? Eve and I’ve been friends for years. We live only a few blocks apart. We raised our children together, for heaven’s sake. Remember how Sarah and Bronte liked to wear the same thing every day? And how they got braces at the same time? One just doesn’t forget that kind of friendship. I’ll never understand women like Annie Blake. She thinks she’s so superior just because she’s a lawyer.”

“She’s a damn good lawyer.”

“Well, she should know enough to dress her age.” R.J. glanced at her, smirked and swirled the ice in his glass of Scotch. “She looks pretty good, if you ask me.”

Doris knew that look in his eye and suddenly felt as if she’d absorbed a wallop in the solar plexus, the KO punch that dropped her to her knees. All the success she’d felt earlier drained like blood, leaving her pale and shriveled.

“You should do some exercise,” he continued, popping another quiche into his mouth. “Join the club. Now, don’t get huffy. You want to look good too, don’t you?”

She looked at his tall, muscular trim body that had survived years of football, then handball and now golf. “I wasn’t aware that I didn’t look good.”

“Come on, you’ve put on twenty pounds at least.”

It was thirty. Doris sucked in her stomach and hunched her shoulders. “Who would I be losing weight for? I like the way I am. I’m not pretending to be twenty any longer.” Then, seeing something in his eyes that was somewhere between disgust and resignation, she hastened to add, “But I’ll think about it. It’d be good for my health to walk more. And now that the holidays are over, I suppose I should start a diet. To lose these few extra pounds.”

He’d already stopped listening to her and was walking toward the television.

Doris tightened her lips against the banshee’s howl in her chest, fought for control, then turned her back and left the room in a silent fury. He hadn’t really listened to her in years. He hadn’t paid a compliment to her like he’d just paid to Annie in years. He hadn’t approached her in years, not sexually, not the way a man approached a woman he was attracted to. Not the way a man should feel about his wife. Certainly not the way she’d read about in books.

Turning her head before climbing the stairs, she saw him bend over to insert one of those movies into the VCR. A lump formed in her throat that she couldn’t swallow down, a craw full of anger and hurt and shame that he sought pleasure alone, with a movie, rather than in her own, lonely bed. She’d assumed it was impotence; she’d read that about men his age but didn’t dream of ever asking him about it, even though the magazines always said that she should keep open the lines of communication. It was just too embarrassing, even to say the words: impotence, sex, orgasm. She felt a shudder of revulsion at the thought of saying, even whispering, those words to him. She didn’t even know what a G-spot was much less where to find it.

But she was curious…oh so curious.

Grasping the railing until her knuckles whitened, she watched as her husband, her lover, stretched out to grab another handful of her artful French canapés, then ease his broad fifty-four-year-old backside into his favorite leather chair, swinging the library door shut with his free hand.

Doris’s head slumped and she felt very old as she slowly climbed the broad staircase to her room. As she brought one foot over the next, she recalled the arguments Annie and the rest of the group had raised in defense of Emma Bovary. Annie was passionate, as usual, in her defense of Emma, claiming she had remained true to her dreams until the end, even if those dreams were unrealistic, superficial. Midge had said how sad it was that women were so often betrayed by their dreams.

“And the men they loved,” Gabriella had added.

It was Eve’s heartfelt statement, however, that rang true with the Club, eliciting nods of agreement and sighs of sympathy—even from Doris.

“We shouldn’t be so quick to judge or condemn. If Emma had had one true friend, someone who could steer her straight, and who she could pour her heart out to, then I really believe she’d have pulled through.”

“She should’ve been in a Book Club,” Gabriella said to a chorus of agreement. “She needed to talk to women.”

“Yeah,” added Midge, nodding. “But instead she depended on men for all her happiness and look what happened to her.”

Everyone had laughed, except Doris. Now, however, as she entered her bedroom and stood before the immense California king-size bed that was big enough for even large R.J. and plump Doris to sleep in and still not touch all night long, Doris started to laugh. It came out as high, choking sounds in her throat, then altered to a low keening wail that would not be controlled.

Eve sat down at her kitchen table and slowly sipped the hot milk she’d prepared. She didn’t know if it was an old wives’ tale that hot milk helped you to sleep but she thought it was worth the try. Since Tom’s death, she’d hardly had a decent night’s sleep, waking up several times a night in a sweat of panic. If this didn’t work she was going to try Prozac. She took another long sip when the phone rang.

“Just wanted to make sure you got home okay.” It was Annie, and Eve knew she was really asking how she’d handled her reentry to the club.

“Sure, thanks. But really, Annie, it’s only a few blocks.”

“So, what’d you think?”

“I thought you and Doris were going to duke it out on the Oriental rug.”

“I wish. I love a good fight. Besides, she’s such a know-it-all. She likes to ram her opinions down our throats.”

“Doris feels things very intensely. She has strong opinions about everything.”

“So does R.J. It’s beyond me how she and that husband of hers can live together.”

“It’s a big house.”

Annie laughed.

“It was great to be back.”

“It was great to have you back. Everyone was saying so.”

Eve smiled, knowing it was true. “Annie? You know when I was talking about how great it was to have a friend to pour one’s heart out to? How it saves one’s sanity?” She paused, her eyes crinkling at the thought. “Well, I was talking about you.”

There was a pause. Then came Annie’s voice, much subdued. “Ditto.”

Six

When a condition or a problem becomes too great, humans have the protection of not thinking about it. But it goes inward and minces up with a lot of other things already there and what comes out is discontent and uneasiness, guilt and a compulsion to get something—anything—before it is all gone.

—John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

The alarm clock went off at 7:00 a.m., clicking on Annie’s favorite easy rock station. She grumbled, rubbed her eyes and automatically reached over to grab for the thermometer and stick it in her mouth. The house was veiled in a damp, chilled gray, prompting her to tug the comforter higher over her shoulders while she lay on her back and waited. Annie hated February and she didn’t need a weatherman to tell her a storm was blowing in. It was the kind of morning that made Annie want to cuddle up and stay in bed with a good book.

John yawned loudly beside her, sleepily patted her bare thigh with his long fingers, then rose in a swoop in a beeline for the bathroom. Every morning it was the same; while she lay in bed with a thermometer stuck in her mouth, he’d shower, shave, then make coffee. When did their lives become so routine, she wondered? She knew the answer—since she’d started her campaign to have a baby.

She pulled the thermometer out of her mouth and squinted her eyes at the itsy-bitsy numbers that seemed to be getting harder to read these days. Surprise shifted her mood and her mouth eased to a grin as she brought the thermometer close to her nose.

This morning they’d break the damn routine! There was a definite rise. Sitting up, she reached over to the bedside table and grabbed the pad of paper that charted her ovulation for the past six months. She had a dozen books that showed graphs and charts of what ovulation should look like. No definite pattern had become apparent, which was driving her crazy, but this month even a dummy in science like herself could see a clear dip-rise of her body temperature.

“John!” she called out, thrilled at the first clear sign of ovulation she’d had so far in this grueling ordeal. “Get your butt back in this bed. Look! I’m ovulating!”

John ducked his head out from the bathroom. Half his face was covered with shaving cream but over the white his brows scowled. “Now?”

She heard the irritation in his voice and it nettled her. “Hey, I don’t plan these things. But take a look. It’s a beauty. I’m talking textbook case here. We’ve got to do it.”