Well Behaved Wives
Amy Sue Nathan
Well-behaved women seldom make history.
—Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
SEPTEMBER 1962
PART 1
ETIQUETTE LESSONS
Chapter 1
RUTH
The heat from the hair dryer helmet burned Ruth’s scalp, but the contraption’s noise drowned out the beauty parlor chatter around her.
Fair trade, she thought.
Nevertheless, she smiled at her new mother-in-law across the aisle, and Shirley Appelbaum smiled back. Ruth was right where Shirley wanted her—and Ruth knew it. Primped, captive.
Now the woman was eying Ruth’s lap.
This? Ruth wondered. The magazine? She held it up so Shirley could see the cover.
A frown flitted across her mother-in-law’s perfectly lipsticked mouth. Darn, Ruth had forgotten to swipe some on her own lips from the tube Shirley had not so subtly left on the guest bathroom counter. Shirley shook her head. An imperceptible shake, almost like a twitch. She dipped her chin again toward Ruth’s chair.
Did Shirley want her to stand? Were they finished? Was Ruth’s chair back too far, or not enough, or too upright, or was she committing any of the other apparently egregious breaches of propriety she had seemed prone to since she and Asher had moved in with her in-laws a week ago?
Shirley looked at Ruth’s legs, then widened her eyes and grimaced as if she had been pinched—for just a bare second; couldn’t have anyone seeing it, of course. Her mother-in-law looked like a particularly intense bug—with freshly polished nails.
Oh! Ruth glanced around the room and crossed her legs to match every other woman under the shop’s dryers. She was sitting wrong.
According to Shirley’s glances and eye rolls during the last week, Ruth did a lot of things wrong. That time Ruth shouted to Asher from downstairs when she’d forgotten something she needed in the attic. （“Oh my,” Shirley had whispered in a manufactured titter. “It’s not a fish market, dear.”） Or when Ruth dared to open the newspaper before her father-in-law had come home, occasioning an ostentatious refolding of every page into its original bundle by Shirley, as Ruth apologized. （“Not to worry, dear—I’ll tidy it right up.”） She failed to jump up from the table to fetch extra sauce or seconds for Asher. （“He’s worked hard all day; it’s the least we could do.” Shirley said this with an understanding smile as she pushed herself up to wait on her perfectly grown and able son.）
Ruth couldn’t fault her mother-in-law’s kindness—Shirley was never anything but kind, gracious . . . poised. Proper in all the ways that Ruth apparently fell short. But was Ruth really supposed to be a picture-perfect paragon of demureness and servitude, simply because she now had a ring on her finger? She used to hold a pen in that same hand, writing briefs for her law degree.
Ruth mimicked Shirley by licking her pointer finger and turning the McCall’s page as if she had been reading. Shirley nodded and tapped her dryer, then flicked her fingers at Ruth. Shirley, whose stylist had already finished with her, patted her hair. It looked perfect in its light-brown beehive, the way it had when she’d walked in, which Ruth gathered was the point. Continuity reigned. Didn’t all this sameness grow tiresome?
Shirley flicked again. The other ladies across from Ruth flicked.
Ah! The universal symbol for “turn off your dryer.”
Ruth pushed back the oven-like hood, exposing hair on tight rollers. After a brush out and a heavy application of lacquer, her hair would feel like a helmet. Good God, what a lot of effort for something that served no useful purpose. “Yes?”
Shirley smiled—a real one this time. “Oh, my dear, it’s just lovely. You’re lovely.”
Ruth was surprised to feel a flowering warmth in her chest. “Thank you, Shirley,” she answered, suddenly pleased she’d agreed to her mother-in-law’s suggestion that they visit her beauty parlor. Ruth had thought it was yet another of Shirley’s attempts to make her fit in better in this exclusive neighborhood of Wynnefield . . . but maybe she really just wanted to spend more time together.
Ruth didn’t mind that at all. She couldn’t have asked for a better family than her dad and four brothers, but she had to admit that growing up without a mother in a family of rough-and-tumble boys had made her long sometimes for the kind of maternal pride and warmth shining in Shirley’s eyes right now. When her mother-in-law reached out a hand, Ruth immediately took it, returning her squeeze.
They’d be okay. Everything was going to work out just fine.
“I know what you need, dear,” Shirley said.
“You do?”
Shirley nodded. “Indeed. I talked to Asher and he agrees. There’s a . . . well, a get-together of sorts of some of the girls your age in town, and I thought it might be a perfect opportunity for you to make some friends here in Wynnefield and settle in a bit more. Trying to fit into a brand-new city must be as sudden and shocking for you as it was for Leon and me to find out our only son had gotten himself a brand-new bride!”
Oy gevalt. Here we go again. Few conversations had passed since she and Asher had temporarily moved into Shirley and Leon’s guest quarters without some mention of Shirley’s disapproval and hurt at their secret elopement. And since when did Asher talk to his mother about Ruth behind Ruth’s back?
Ruth pushed away the flare of irritation. She’d promised Asher she’d do her very best to get along with his parents—and she wanted to. Really, she did.
She smiled. “Well, that sounds nice. Let me know when they’re getting together and maybe I’ll drop by.”
“Oh no, dear—that’s not quite how it’s done. Why don’t I just get you all signed up for the lessons?”
Ruth raised her daughter-in-law antennae. “Lessons?”
Shirley stood, meticulously squaring the magazine she’d been reading on top of the stack on the table beside her dryer. “Well, think of it more as a refresher course for young housewives . . . putting the final polish on the silver. Nothing you don’t already know, of course, but won’t it be nice to brush up while getting to know some other housewives your age?”
Ruth didn’t know whether her instinctive cringe was from dread at what kind of “polish lessons” her mother-in-law would rope her into, or from being lumped in with the other housewives. This was 1962, the world had changed, and she was going to be a lawyer, for goodness’ sake—if things went according to plan. “Brush up on what, Shirley?” she asked, forcing her tone to remain neutral.
“Oh, we call them etiquette lessons—silly, isn’t it? But really it’s just the simple common niceties we can all stand to improve on, don’t you think?”
Etiquette lessons. Oy vey. Her mother-in-law wanted to send her to charm school.
After a broiled flounder dinner, Ruth cleared away plates of escaped Le Sueur peas and scraped baked potato skins. She was glad to help, to earn her keep even, but the way Asher and his father were expected to just sit there flustered her. Ruth had grown up on New York’s Upper West Side in a fourth-floor walk-up, and her father had divided household chores among his five children in a rotation based on their ages, not their sexes. Jacob Cohen was like that. Just. Impartial. Egalitarian.