The Lobotomist's Wife
Samantha Greene Woodruff
To my husband, who has been saying “I just want you to be happy” for as long as we’ve been together
and
my mom, who has always believed that I could do anything （and never stopped hoping that someday that “anything” would be a writer）
No man chooses evil because it’s evil. He only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.
—Mary Wollstonecraft
Prologue
1952
Margaret looked around at the gaggle of friends and neighbors occupying her living room. This was quite a good turnout for her first presentation, and she knew she should be elated. But she wasn’t. All she could think about, as she tried to chat with Mrs. Millhouse, was how the skin around her stomach created bulges in the nipped waist of her favorite dress. She could barely breathe. Maybe she should have listened to her mother and worn the more forgiving canary-yellow shift that Frank had bought her. Damn Frank. She knew he was trying to be kind, to make her feel good, happy, beautiful again. Instead, she felt like he had given up on her. Did he now think of her, at only twenty-seven years old, as one of those women who needed a wardrobe designed to hide the flaws in her figure?
She looked jealously at Carolyn Carterson, her tiny waist accentuated by that pink belt. Eight weeks ago, they had both delivered babies. Yet, there Carolyn was, back in her prepregnancy clothes, her rich auburn hair curled just so. Margaret, on the other hand, had required the assistance of her mother to zip her dress. And her hair, once a lovely golden blond and soft as the silk tassels on her curtain pulls, was now dull and unable to hold a proper curl. She had pinned on a small Miriam Lewis hat to cover the mess, which she also hoped distracted from the dullness of her face. She hated to look in the mirror these days—she couldn’t escape the fact that the bright blue of her eyes, one of her best features before pregnancy （and typically made even brighter by the robin’s-egg hue of the dress she was wearing today）， had transformed into a washed-out gray. The rosy complexion that used to make her look as though she had just come in from an afternoon of ice skating had gone sallow; even with the bright red lipstick she had chosen for today, she looked ghostlike. Not Carolyn, who sparkled from head to toe as she stood by the coffee service, laughing easily. Margaret felt like a cloud of fog, darkening everything in her path.
She felt her nose begin to tingle and the tears start to form in the corners of her eyes. Not now. Oh, please, not now. She made fists and dug her sharp nails—she had barely forced herself to clip them, let alone paint them with the red polish she had purchased for the occasion—deep into her palms to distract herself from the sadness, all while smiling bigger at Mrs. Millhouse. This was not a time for melancholy. The baby was with Margaret’s mother. The older children were at school. This was her time. The beginning of the next chapter in her life, where she could be more than Frank’s wife or John, Maisy, and William’s mother again.
Lucy crossed the room and grabbed Margaret’s arm, an ear-to-ear smile plastered on her pink lips. “Mrs. Millhouse, so sorry, but I need to borrow our hostess for a moment.” Thank heaven for Lucy. She steered Margaret toward the sideboard, which was covered with a store-bought spread of sweets. Carolyn surely wouldn’t have had to buy her nibbles from a store. In the past, Margaret wouldn’t have either; she had been a wonderful baker. But that had gone along with her figure.
She shuddered as she thought about yesterday’s attempt to make a simple shortbread.
The flour everywhere. The butter that wouldn’t cream, and then, when she had finally gotten her mediocre batter in the oven, that smell, the smoke as her mother shook her awake.
“Maggie, hon, I think you need to get started!” Her best friend, Lucy, broke her from her momentary daze, and Margaret looked at the clock on the mantel. The children would be home soon. How had so much time slipped away? She wasn’t sure she could do her presentation. Why would anyone even want to listen to her?