The Book Club

“Let’s just say that, like Scrooge, I finally woke up and decided it was time to heed the spirits and change.”

“Well,” Annie replied with brows raised. “Whaddya know?” She swooped over to pick up her coffee cup and raise it in a toast. “Here’s to change, sweetheart.”

Eve picked up her cup and raised it, smiling bravely despite the shivering inside at the prospect of what felt to her like jumping off a cliff.

“God bless us, everyone,” she said, praying fervently.

Five

Before she had married she thought she was in love. But the happiness that should have resulted from this love had not come; she must have deceived herself she thought. Emma sought to learn what was really meant in life by the words “happiness,” “passion,” and “ecstasy”—words that had seemed so beautiful in books.

—Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

January 7, 1998

Doris stood in the foyer of her redbrick colonial home and waited for the Book Club to arrive. A pure, sensual pleasure embraced her as she glanced around her house, making a last-minute check that all was in proper order. It was the first Book Club meeting of the year and she wanted everything to be perfect. The sparkling crystal wineglasses were set out on the Sheraton side table beside the bottles of wine: white, chilled, and red, opened to allow time to breathe—something she’d learned from her father. On the large dining table that had once been her mother’s, she’d draped snowy white linen and lined her grandmother’s crisp damask napkins in an intricate pattern that she’d admired once in a magazine. Someone could photograph this table and put it in a magazine, she thought with a shiver of pride.

And the ladies would be sure to admire the clever arrangement of fresh flowers and greens, cut from her own shrubs that very morning. She’d read somewhere how women of culture and breeding always had their clippers handy, and from that date on she’d hung a pair on a gros-grain ribbon beside her back door.

Her pièce de résistance, however, were the French appetizers that she’d spent hours researching, shopping for and preparing. She had to make something French, of course, because this month’s book was Madame Bovary, a classic that she’d insisted they read after feigning astonishment that no one in the Book Club had actually read the book.

In fact, she herself had never read it, but she’d go to the grave with that secret—and her SAT scores. She’d heard of it, of course, and seen the movie—the old version with Jennifer Jones that everyone knew was the best. Now she’d never have to pretend again because she’d read the novel at last and enjoyed it thoroughly.

Even if she was furious at the character of Emma Bovary. How could she throw away a perfectly good life and husband for the sake of her uncontrolled passion? Doris could feel her heart rate zoom and her breath shorten just thinking about it. What did it matter if Emma had “bliss” or “passion” or “ecstasy”? These had little to do with virtues that were the hallmarks of respectability. Indeed, even womanhood. Virtues such as patience, self-discipline, self-control, chastity, adaptability to others. Yes, especially that. Qualities that her mother had, that her grandmother had, that were instilled in her as a child by example not by name. Emma was, in her opinion, selfish and immoral. She deserved to die.

Well, she thought, stroking her neck, that might be a bit harsh. It was easy to sympathize with Emma’s romantic nature, especially at first. All new brides dream of a perfect marriage with love and passion in the moonlight, husbands on pedestals, pretty curtains on the windows, fringed lampshades, no other bride’s bouquet before hers. She certainly had.

But Emma went too far when she grew bored and forsake her duty, especially to her child. What mother could forgive Emma the desertion of her child! And though her husband may have been a bit dull and plodding, he wasn’t all that bad. Men were men, Doris decided, brushing away the uncomfortable image of her own husband with that phrase.

Emma Bovary should have settled with what she had. She’d settled, hadn’t she? Why, most women settled, dug in, called upon those womanly virtues, and made it work. And Doris was champing at the bit to make that statement tonight.

The Pennsylvania tall clock chimed seven times. Doris shook away her musings and glanced in the magnificent Viennese mirror in the foyer, smoothing her strawberry-blond hair that fell neatly to her double chin, but not too stiffly. That was one of her mother’s cardinal rules: Always make it look effortless. And, Treat your family like guests and your guests like family.

She thought of the Book Club as family—an extended family. With them she wasn’t the wife of the flamboyant builder and architect, R. J. Bridges, or the mother of eighteen-year-old Bob Jr. and fourteen-year-old Sarah. She wasn’t the PTA president or the chairwoman of the Children’s Welfare League. With these four women, some of whom she’d known for over twenty-five years, she was just Doris. With them, especially after a few glasses of wine, Doris might surprise even herself with comments on a book or an issue or a secret that just popped out like a bubble. With the Book Club, Doris always felt uncensored. They weren’t her judge and jury, they were her peers. Her friends.

Friends. A stab of disappointment coursed through her as she recalled that Eve Porter had sent her regrets and would not be coming tonight. How could Eve do that to her, she wondered, hurt? She could understand Eve’s not attending meetings at other women’s houses the past few months; she even forgave her for skipping the Christmas party. After all, hadn’t her mother said, Never bring your problems to a party? It was unforgivable to make things awkward for the hostess and Doris knew Eve was only being sensitive. But not to come to her Book Club meeting?

You just didn’t do that to a friend. Ever since Tom’s passing, the only person Eve had depended on was Annie Blake. It was as though all the years of close friendship the two of them had shared—their children playing together, shopping, hair appointments, taking turns for twelve years being room mothers for the girls—had been tossed aside.

The doorbell rang, and like Pavlov’s dog, a smile sprang to her face. She took measured, graceful steps to the front door.

It was Annie Blake. Lately she had a physical reaction to Annie, usually a sucking in of the stomach. Annie seemed to be everything she was not, to have all she did not. Doris held her smile in place by force of the virtue of self-discipline.

“Annie, how nice to see you. Won’t you come in?” She heard the tension in her own voice, saw Annie’s eyes search the room beyond her shoulders, then glaze over when Annie realized that she was the first one here and thus compelled to make polite chitchat. Doris bristled, feeling somehow dismissed in her own home.

“Let me pour you a glass of wine.”

“Thanks,” Annie replied, shaking off her coat. “I could really use one.”

“Oh?” Doris took Annie’s coat, fingering the cashmere wool with quiet envy. “Why is that?”

“It’s been a hell of a day. What is it about the New Year that makes women want to change their lives—and be in a hurry to do it? Is it the New Year’s resolutions? My phone’s been ringing off the hook and poor Lisa is at her wit’s end.”

Lisa, Doris knew, was Annie’s secretary. Again, she felt a slight shudder of insecurity in the presence of this dynamic woman who had such things as her own secretary. That was inconceivable to Doris. She herself had never wanted to work “outside the home,” as she put it. In fact, she thanked God daily that she was wealthy enough not to have to. Yet, there was a worldliness about professional women that intrigued her.

“Red or white?”

“White. Hope it’s cold. I’m parched.”

“But of course.” She made it sound like the French, mais oui!

Following Annie’s long strides into the dining room, Doris surveyed her sleek crepe wool pantsuit in a rich chocolate-brown that slid along her toned, well-exercised body. Her cream-colored silk blouse had the top three buttons left open against her long, slim chest in a sexy insolence that irritated Doris. She thought Annie looked foolish—at her age.

No one could ever say that she didn’t dress her age, or know what was appropriate, in dress, style and manner. Her figure might not be as slender as it once was, but she wasn’t a girl anymore, was she? And she didn’t dress like one, not like Annie who wore the same clothes as Doris’s college-aged daughter. Everyone knew children were embarrassed to see their mothers dress too young or sexy.

Still, a frown deepened in her plump, pinkened cheeks as she caught sight in the mirror of the rounding bulges at her own hips and belly that the belt of her expensive ice-blue silk dress seemed to accentuate. Her heart withered knowing instinctively that Annie wouldn’t be caught dead in a dress like this. Her daughter would call it an “old lady” dress.

“Oh, these are real cute,” Annie exclaimed with enthusiasm at seeing the several elegant trays filled with the appetizers Doris had slaved over. “What are they?”

Doris approached the table with a proprietary air. “They’re canapés,” she replied, enunciating carefully and establishing her superiority at knowing such things.

Annie’s eyes flashed with amusement and something else that Doris refused to acknowledge as pity. “No, I mean, what’s in them? Is that shrimp or crab? I’m allergic to crab.”

Doris blanched but smiled again and replied through thin lips, “Crab.”

Doris watched as Annie reached for a spinach quiche and nibbled it in mincing bites while looking around the room with thinly disguised boredom.

“Have you seen Eve?” began Doris. “She’s not coming tonight, you know.”

“I know,” Annie confirmed, dabbing her mouth with one of Doris’s grandmother’s damask napkins as though it were paper. “I tried to drag her over, but you know Eve when she’s got her back up.”

“Well, I hardly think she’d need to be dragged over to my house. She’s been here many times, for many years.”

“Oh, it’s not that,” Annie replied quickly.

Doris was pleased to see her retreat. Eve was her friend, after all.

“She has to be dragged anywhere,” Annie continued.

“You know how she’s been lately—isolated. She’s got to snap out of it.”

Doris raised one brow. “That’s an interesting way to describe a woman’s period of mourning. I’d always assumed a year was appropriate.”

Annie skipped a beat and when she spoke again, her normally low voice dropped an octave. “I wasn’t referring to mourning. Perhaps you haven’t noticed that Eve’s been having a hard time of it. She’s not herself and I’m worried about her.”

“Depressed? Our Eve?” Doris tsked. “She’s just going through a bad spell. She’ll be fine.” She reached out to pat Annie’s arm in a condescending manner.

Annie held herself erect. “I know she will. I’ll see to it.”