When she started at Sarah Lawrence, she knew her parents did not expect her to finish. Nobody cared whether a girl like her graduated from college, a boy once told her, not even Emma Willard girls. She knew girls from school who would, but she knew he would say they were not like her. She did not know whether she should argue about that, so she did not.
She was barely twenty when it looked like Hargess Aird might propose. She had thought to dodge it, but the war brought a new urgency. Her father told her their marriage might improve Harge's draft number. At school, the girls swooned over his good looks, and his solid prospects. Well, she had better make her peace with it. She liked Harge well enough, she supposed, and she knew what her father expected.
After they married, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Mr. Aird told Harge that it would look poorly to stay home, so he did not. Carol quickly found that she liked the freedom the war afforded; she could fret over her husband from a distance, without him being home to set the kind rules that her parents, now, could no longer impose. All the girls had a young man serving overseas—boyfriend, husband, or pen-pal. Only a few had a job, and just for fun. Women could get those now, with the men away. On weekends, sometimes, the girls goofed around trying on dungarees. What Harge didn't know wouldn't hurt him. She and Abby shared a laugh a few years later, when LIFE magazine ran a photo spread: Teen girls wearing men's plaids and denims.
She also took a little job at a store, just to have something to do. Not for long, she knew, but something for now. She surprised herself by liking it and learning so much so quickly. The customers—women, with their husbands away—liked giving her their orders.
Harge had not been back for long when he told her to quit the shop. His father had said that it wouldn't look well to let his young wife work. Mr. Aird could handle their finances until Harge got on his feet. The future was arranged, he said, so get started on your family. The war had delayed the natural sequence too long already. Carol was nearly 25 and not getting any younger.
It's like playing house, she said to Abby once, like being newlyweds again!
Abby had shown up out of the blue, at the stable one day, where she and Harge liked to ride. Abby had kept her job, even after the GIs came home, but they had dropped her work to part-time. Still, the other girls had all resigned, one by one, as marriage proposals and first-borns arrived. You'll understand once you get married, Carol said to her. She did not understand the look Abby gave her, or Abby's laughter, which was as if at something she didn't find funny.
Often Harge stayed late to meet with clients in the City. Abby came on days off and some weeknights after work. When Carol called Abby the day she realized she had skipped her period, they decided not to tell Harge until they knew, for sure. Sometimes it doesn't take, Abby had said. Best wait. And they had.
Harge did what Harge always did when she told him—called his parents, then went out with the boys. Carol spent the evening alone with Abby, the two of them planning baby names together. Harge had reeked of scotch and cigars when he got home. When he touched her, Carol whispered something about the baby, and pushed him away.
After the baby came, Abby helped Carol care for Rindy while Harge stayed late in the City.
A man's man, Carol's father called Harge. She supposed so, if that meant a man who never spoke to his wife about anything substantial, as if she didn't have a single thought in her head. Well, she told Abby, I have my hands full here. And every magazine repeated the promise: a woman would find her best self in motherhood. It took two years before Carol started to wonder whether she would ever get herself back.
By accident, luck, or design, she had not conceived a second child. She was glad they had Rindy, she told Abby, but she was not sure she could handle losing control of herself like that again. Sometimes it wasn't possible to do that for someone else, she had said when Abby raised an eyebrow.
I think that's that, she overheard Harge tell his father.
His parents stopped asking.
She needed something to keep herself busy, she told Harge one weekend. A four-year-old took so much less time. She wanted "a little project," an antiques venture. It would mean so much to her.
On weekends, Abby started joining her for car trips, looking for finds. When Abby found she could earn as much selling antiques as she had as an entomologist, they started running the store together full time. Nobody takes a woman seriously in science these days, Abby had said bitterly to Carol.
At first, Harge had complained that she should spend more time at home, with him and with Rindy. Once Abby came on full-time, Carol had kept most weekends to play the role of doting wife and mother. She played the role well, she thought, because she had some of life's salt during the week, when Harge hardly knew how she might spend her time.
The whole thing seemed harmless enough. What could happen? Just two childhood girlfriends scouting antiques. She remembered a rumor, once, about a girl at school, but it had seemed unsporting.
Later, after something did happen with Abby, Carol asked about the rumor, which no longer seemed so inconceivable.
After the third time, the time when Harge nearly caught them, she told Abby it could not happen again. It did, but even if it hadn't, everything had already changed—everything she knows about how her body can respond, how to go slow at first and fast only later, the feeling of slender fingers, the feeling of being inside, of hearing a woman's breath get fast and shallow.
Around Harge, she began to withdraw. She hardly knew him anyway, she felt, with spending all of his time in the world of men, even taking his free time at his father's club. Whatever time he spent at home, he spent with Rindy, who she felt Harge and the Airds liked better than they liked her. But, she reasoned, they had never really liked her. She had been only accidental encounter at a friend's debut. At the Aird's home for suppers, she felt a mutual distrust. She had heard Mr. Aird tell his son that the brokerage might take Carol's little shop as a sign of financial or marital distress. It was he who said that the shop was a fine indulgence, but only if it improved the marriage. It was a line Harge later repeated to Carol, when he observed that it had done nothing of the sort. That was the end the shop.
Carol had thought to tell him he couldn't do such a thing, but she knew that he could. He had, before he told her, already called the lawyer and canceled the lease. For a moment, she imagined she might convince him that she could do better managing the business and being at home. Yes, he had said, because she would no longer have the shop. That night, Carol slept in the other bedroom, the bedroom that she now kept as her own. Away from Harge.
She still found moments to share with Abby, but the sex had lost its intensity, and she had concluded that something too frank in Abby's makeup, the very thing that allowed the affair to start, meant that she did not want it to continue. For a time, though, every kiss still represented a rebellion.
Once, Harge set a sort of trap, coming home early to see if she was with a man. He found only Carol in the kitchen and Abby upstairs in the bath, but he was not at ease. That night, they had argued, with him insisting that she no longer stay over at Abby's. While he was saying it, he already knew that she would. She knew, at that moment, that she would never have an interest in him again.
Sometimes, though, he would insist.
A man had needs. A married woman had already consented. Sometimes, when she drank too much, he took advantage. She hated him for it. Hated herself for allowing herself to be vulnerable to it.
He also insisted that she keep up appearances. For his reputation. His career.
At parties, and in the City, she occasionally noticed other women. Of course she noticed other women. Once, when she had far too much to drink, she had admitted as much to Abby. A friend gave Abby the address to a club on MacDougal Street in the Village.
It was the second most illicit thing Carol had ever done.
She had found it terribly exciting, and for a moment imagined that it had reignited her interest in Abby. Perhaps Abby had hoped so as well. They danced—together, then with other women—and Carol knew then, for the first time, that others shared those same perversions of desire. She knew, too, that she could find someone for a tryst. Someone other than Abby. She saw, though, how little she resembled those women. She lived nothing like them. She found the styling so alien to her nature. She did not like the way the gallant butches looked at her. The way the femmes would not. Carol had known, in an instant, the role she would have to play. She did not want to play that role. She had not come so far to play it, but instead to stop playing one.
They had gone, again, a second time, and Carol understood, thoroughly, that she did not fit and did not want to fit. It did not appear to be any way to live. She had felt depressed on the way home, despite Abby's enthusiastic chatter and the phone number Abby had in her pocket.
Months later, at a charity gala, Carol had felt a woman's gaze linger for longer than it should. She found her on the veranda later in the evening. Asked for a cigarette. Found herself speaking in a sort of code she had not realized she knew how to speak.
They had arranged to meet for lunch. Another time, for tennis. The woman's husband was a business colleague of her husband, and the two men were happy to see their wives socialize.
Carol had gone to bed with her once. She knew, then, what she wanted: a woman's softness and curves, her hair spilling on her thighs, the breathy, sibilant yes! that nearly brought on her own climax.
Carol and the woman had talked about their marriages. She told Carol she did this sometimes, went to bed with a woman, when she needed something different, a release. Of course she intended to stay married, she had told Carol. How else did a respectable woman live?
She knew, then, that was not what she wanted. She wanted someone she could talk to. Someone like Abby, but, she sometimes sighed to herself, not no-nonsense, no-mystery Abby.
Carol resolved not to see the woman again, but she did, because … who else?
Briefly, she again considered Abby, but by then Carol was no longer so naïve. She understood that it would be cruel. Abby had not stopped hurting from before.
So she flirted. Men or women. She was a beautiful woman, she knew, both well dressed and well off. People liked to flatter her. She knew this, played with it as she flirted. She knew nothing would come of it, but she continued it because it made her feel alive. At least she could pretend.
Was that all there would be from then on, pretending?
If sex was on offer—surely, sometime?—she would not turn it down, but Carol knew she would have to find her rewards in motherhood. The prospect did not encourage her. Always, though, she thought of Rindy. What would become of her child if Carol did anything more than pretend? How many "Aunt Abby's" could one child have before the grandparents caught wind? Before the husband reached a dangerous level of anger? Would he put her in a hospital?
She had found some freedom in shopping. She took advantage of any occasion to shop, for shopping brought her into the City. New faces, among whom she could be anybody, for a time. She had perfected a particular sort of stare, one she had learned could be taken back with a quick, whimsical laugh. Young men greedy for a sale flirted with her without shame. She sometimes found herself wondering whether they thought she would ever say yes.
She would not say yes.
Not to them.