Polly felt camaraderie with the young marrieds. They all knew now the great secret of sex and what it was like to see a man around the clock. They wouldn’t discuss that, of course, but they communicated it in the new way they sat and moved, as if their bodies had been unlocked. It was a code tapping out messages within their conversation about who had seen whom, been to whose wedding, and had dinner with each other. Like Polly, the girls had been encouraged to be gay creatures, and to laugh at life and themselves. They laughed in many registers as the afternoon passed.
Then, suddenly, Helen Vaughn began weeping. She bent forward and wailed.
Carol, being the hostess, went to her first and quickly, and the others followed. They all huddled around, worrying their necklaces.
“What is it? Are you sick?”
Helen shook her head. She bawled, and everyone pulled back an inch. They’d never seen a friend act this way.
“Do you want to lie down?” Carol asked.
Helen pitched herself out of the chair, and Carol waved to three of the guests to vacate the sofa. Helen flung herself along its whole length. The women couldn’t help but notice that the blue velvet showed off her red hair perfectly. Helen’s beauty was outside the normal range, a bit New York for their crowd. She wept loudly for a while longer while they all huddled and waited. What could be so dire? Nothing bad, they hoped, nothing really bad.
Virginia Monroe leaned down next to her, and touched her back. “Helen, we are all your friends.”
Everyone confirmed this in small murmurs. Helen kept on weeping. Carol asked someone to go to the kitchen for a wet towel. Polly began to go, but Mary McClain was quicker.
Helen couldn’t cry forever. She simply couldn’t. The thought traveled around the group telepathically. They wanted to help, but her behavior was out of their realm. This wasn’t fair to Carol. They shot her bracing glances.
“Helen, would you like to lie down in a bedroom?” Carol asked.
Abruptly Helen sat up. “I want a divorce!” she wailed. “I made a mistake!”
Virginia settled on the sofa next to Helen. Polly maneuvered for a chair across from them. She could barely breathe.
“Why don’t you start from the beginning?” Virginia said.
Helen wiped her eyes and blew her nose. Her delicate skin had thinned to a translucent rosy membrane. She looked up and gave a weak, unconvincing smile, ran her fingers through her hair. But tears began again, though less violently. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t expect it to be like this.”
“Like what?”
Polly clutched her chair as if she were about to be in a car wreck.
“So… so much like a prison. And so permanent.”
Virginia opened her mouth, but closed it again. Carol picked up the hot water pot and set it back down.
Helen brushed beneath her eyes and crossed her hands in her lap. It had been all right for a while after the honeymoon. Then without even noticing she began to change. She had moments when she felt as though she wasn’t in her own life. She had the sensation of watching herself say things and go places, as if she were eavesdropping on a woman who wasn’t even interesting. It was disconcerting, to say the least. Helen raised her eyebrows, trying to joke, but the small returned smiles of the group were belied by worried eyes. A current ran in every direction around the room, connecting all of them. The sensation, Polly later told Agnes, was one of those movements of soul that showed you what had been missing. Everyone had surely had that same odd feeling of being two feet away, watching her own performance, but no one had dared notice it. Once named, though—they listened, uncomfortable and rapt.
Helen had a few weeks of walking around the city—she and Chauncey lived just off Rittenhouse Square—counting the slabs of gray pavement and running the tip of an ungloved finger along the sharp rims of ivy leaves frozen without recourse against Colonial brick walls. When they went to parties, she felt as though she were tracking in a clod of earth blown up to a full-sized brown smudge that distracted the hostess with thoughts of remedy rather than repartee, and imposing work rather than play on the other guests. When they were alone, Chauncey disintegrated from being a whole man into mechanical parts. When he ate, his teeth clicked against his fork, and when he took off his pants at night, he scratched the strange hairy seedpods that were his thighs. He spent hours shining his shoes and paring his fingernails, staring at them with great concentration—or did he only spend a minute, but it seemed like hours to her? In a movie theater she was aware during the whole hour and a half of his viperous arm, sometimes around her shoulders, sometimes rubbing his own leg until she wanted to be sick.
What was happening? Why didn’t she recognize him anymore? Wasn’t it way too soon to be disenchanted? She was a newlywed! So why did she want to eat chocolate before breakfast, and spend her afternoons either at the zoo or at the library researching Benedict Arnold’s tunnel to the river under Strawberry Hill, or standing outside Catholic churches defying whatever eldritch powers that lived inside to suck her through the doors? Why did she feel as though she were hearing everything from deep underwater, and seeing everyone as if they were wearing a mask? Nothing felt right, or real. Nothing made sense. The girl she’d been, that hearty, positive creature, so game and full of fun—she’d been scraped away, like kernels off a cob. Most confounding of all, she’d stopped laughing. She recognized situations and sentences that would have made her laugh before, but the impulse had vanished. She remembered her old self with a sense of homesickness. She didn’t want to have children with him. Or do anything to attach herself further. He wanted to buy a house, but she found flaws in every house they saw.
She was doing all she could to sabotage the marriage, and Chauncey noticed nothing. But wasn’t love bothered by everything? People thought it was the opposite, a comprehensive besottedness that smoothed all wrinkles; but Helen said she thought real love was always upset. She didn’t mean irritated by the roommate problems of married life; that was to be expected. She meant the deep disturbance caused by vulnerability and attachment. It was quite awful to care about somebody, it left you naked and needing things you never knew existed. She’d felt that, at first, but she was alone in it. She didn’t bother Chauncey, and that was horrible! They were friends. But she had friends. She swept her hand in a semicircle, indicating everyone in the room.
“So I am ruined,” she concluded. She reached for a blue velvet pillow and held it to her front. “Who is Chauncey speaking to when he talks? Not me.”
“Now, now,” Virginia said, “of course he’s talking to you. You have a case of the newlywed blues, that’s all. It’s perfectly normal.”
“That’s right,” Carol chimed. “It’s the adjustment. Sleeping in your own cozy bed all your life and then suddenly—a man!” She hadn’t meant to be funny, and was startled at the rain of laughter she inspired. Everyone needed to laugh.
“It is normal,” they all concurred. Normal as the sun rising and falling. Normal as liking baby animals. Normal as Friday afternoons at the orchestra! She was adjusting to marriage, that was all.
“So you have all felt this way?” Helen asked, wishing for it to be true. She looked around hopefully. “Is it nothing?”