easily cheated. She saw once more that it was nearly impossible as a woman without a man to act on impulse and feel safe.
She decided to speak to Barbara Greenspan. Barbara had recommended him, and Barbara was impossible to cheat. She put the coffee cups in the sink and, showing the man to the basement, walked next door.
“I’m a bit miffed with you,” Barbara said, after agreeing to come over. “It’s been two weeks since I’ve had a minute with you. Just the occasional communication from Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm on the state of your wiring.”
Anne felt her shoulders give once more into the stoop of apology. She loved Barbara, but it wasn’t always easy, for Barbara was perennially frustrated and ready to see each of Anne’s victories as an offense. Their friendship had started in the first years she and Michael had lived in this house; Anne’s children and Barbara’s were close in age, and neither she nor Barbara was working. Both could think, lingeringly, resentfully, about their Ph.D.’s—Barbara’s in comparative literature from Stanford was even more useless, they’d both agreed, than Anne’s. Languorously, inefficiently they’d lived their mornings, letting the children stay in pajamas while they drank coffee and cleaned, bundling them up for errands or excursions in the afternoon, trading baby-sitting in the evening or hiring one baby-sitter while the four parents went out. Then Anne had got the job at the gallery, and the balance shifted. Resentment took the place of mutual complicity, apology stepped in where partnership had been. But they still had that rare, valuable thing: they knew each other’s children intimately; they could talk to each other about them, respecting each other first as women with good minds. So they got through difficult patches; they were friends. Anne loved Barbara for her dependable generosity, for her mocking wit, which, she felt, could cut through the haze she often slipped into. It was worth the hostility, because with Barbara she always felt at the edge of some thing.”
Barbara hummed with unused power like a machine left to run. She wore her hair long; it was prematurely gray, and you could see she meant her hair to be defiant, as if her mother had always told her that past a certain age women cut their hair or pinned it up. She applied for every job that came up in the town or at the college and got none of them; she bristled with hostility at every interview, and even before she got there, the fame of her rough tongue had preceded her. She was always thinking up plans for herself and her retraining. She would go to dental school; she would become a CPA. She kept saying that she had to do it soon because the median age at which academics left their wives was forty-five and she had only seven years to go with Howard.
But no one was more impossible to imagine leaving his wife than Howard Greenspan. Small, four inches shorter than his wife, looking as if he’d been born in glasses, brought up the only Jew in an Oklahoma town, and a most brilliant mathematician, he thanked fortune every day that a woman like Barbara had seen fit to marry him. He adored his wife, his children. He’d move in a minute, he said, if she could find a job she liked. But nothing ever seemed worth it to her, and so they simply went on, living in Selby next door to the Fosters.
When Anne apologized for her neglect, Barbara said quickly, “Okay, cut the Hester Prynne look. I can’t stand it. You shouldn’t listen to me, I’m jealous.”
“No, you’re perfectly right. I just need a little rope.”
“To hang yourself? Watch it, you’ve been talking to children and idiots too much today. Speaking of whom, why don’t you get Laura to sit for all the kids tonight, and Howard and you and Adrian and I will go to a movie. Adrian feels quite abandoned since you’ve taken up a productive life. He’s shifted his allegiance to me, and you can imagine what cold comfort that is.”
Anne
She decided to speak to Barbara Greenspan. Barbara had recommended him, and Barbara was impossible to cheat. She put the coffee cups in the sink and, showing the man to the basement, walked next door.
“I’m a bit miffed with you,” Barbara said, after agreeing to come over. “It’s been two weeks since I’ve had a minute with you. Just the occasional communication from Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm on the state of your wiring.”
Anne felt her shoulders give once more into the stoop of apology. She loved Barbara, but it wasn’t always easy, for Barbara was perennially frustrated and ready to see each of Anne’s victories as an offense. Their friendship had started in the first years she and Michael had lived in this house; Anne’s children and Barbara’s were close in age, and neither she nor Barbara was working. Both could think, lingeringly, resentfully, about their Ph.D.’s—Barbara’s in comparative literature from Stanford was even more useless, they’d both agreed, than Anne’s. Languorously, inefficiently they’d lived their mornings, letting the children stay in pajamas while they drank coffee and cleaned, bundling them up for errands or excursions in the afternoon, trading baby-sitting in the evening or hiring one baby-sitter while the four parents went out. Then Anne had got the job at the gallery, and the balance shifted. Resentment took the place of mutual complicity, apology stepped in where partnership had been. But they still had that rare, valuable thing: they knew each other’s children intimately; they could talk to each other about them, respecting each other first as women with good minds. So they got through difficult patches; they were friends. Anne loved Barbara for her dependable generosity, for her mocking wit, which, she felt, could cut through the haze she often slipped into. It was worth the hostility, because with Barbara she always felt at the edge of some thing.”
Barbara hummed with unused power like a machine left to run. She wore her hair long; it was prematurely gray, and you could see she meant her hair to be defiant, as if her mother had always told her that past a certain age women cut their hair or pinned it up. She applied for every job that came up in the town or at the college and got none of them; she bristled with hostility at every interview, and even before she got there, the fame of her rough tongue had preceded her. She was always thinking up plans for herself and her retraining. She would go to dental school; she would become a CPA. She kept saying that she had to do it soon because the median age at which academics left their wives was forty-five and she had only seven years to go with Howard.
But no one was more impossible to imagine leaving his wife than Howard Greenspan. Small, four inches shorter than his wife, looking as if he’d been born in glasses, brought up the only Jew in an Oklahoma town, and a most brilliant mathematician, he thanked fortune every day that a woman like Barbara had seen fit to marry him. He adored his wife, his children. He’d move in a minute, he said, if she could find a job she liked. But nothing ever seemed worth it to her, and so they simply went on, living in Selby next door to the Fosters.
When Anne apologized for her neglect, Barbara said quickly, “Okay, cut the Hester Prynne look. I can’t stand it. You shouldn’t listen to me, I’m jealous.”
“No, you’re perfectly right. I just need a little rope.”
“To hang yourself? Watch it, you’ve been talking to children and idiots too much today. Speaking of whom, why don’t you get Laura to sit for all the kids tonight, and Howard and you and Adrian and I will go to a movie. Adrian feels quite abandoned since you’ve taken up a productive life. He’s shifted his allegiance to me, and you can imagine what cold comfort that is.”
Anne
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