by Jenna Blum
* * *
On Friday, June went to her first suburban encounter group. She’d known a lot of women who’d attended back in the city, having their consciousness raised on a regular basis; June had tried one with her friend Dominique, in an apartment near the Brooklyn Bridge. June had strongly supported the ideas in theory, but she found the experience to be kind of bullshit: a lot of unshaven people—men and women—sitting around chanting, raising their fists, and talking about sticking it to the Man, then doing mushrooms and LSD and starting a group grope. The apartment had been full of incense and roaches, and when a few of the more sentient women pulled out pocket mirrors to examine their vaginas, June had gotten up and, on the pretext of seeking the bathroom, sneaked out.
She hoped tonight’s gathering would be different; the setting certainly was. June had parked her Dodge on a tree-lined street near Glenwood Middle School—not the very best neighborhood, which was Upper Glenwood on Watchung Mountain, but quite respectable. June had gotten the address from a tab she’d torn off the flyer in the A&P—women: what happens to a dream deferred? tired of being oppressed? want equal rights? join us fridays at 7!—and the house was a white brick colonial, a Negro jockey holding a lantern at the end of the driveway; apparently women’s rights didn’t necessarily equal black rights. The street was lined with Buicks, Fords, and wood-paneled station wagons.
June traversed the brick walk, skirting a tricycle and skateboard. Taped to the screen door was a handwritten note: “Want your consciousness raised? Join us in the den!” Inside, the house was identical to several others June had visited in Glenwood: dining room to the left, living room on the right, hallway straight ahead to the kitchen. The difference here was that everything was decorated as if the owners had recently returned from safari. The rugs were zebra and leopard; bronze urns bristled with peacock feathers and spears, and there was a snarling rhinoceros head over the living room mantel. June couldn’t help frowning—not because she didn’t approve of the homeowners’ taste, although she didn’t; it was that the African vibe was all wrong for a turn-of-the-century colonial. Houses had personalities, June believed, and their decor ought to fit them; otherwise it was like sending a child into the world dressed in the wrong clothes.
She knew the den would be off the living room, and indeed she could hear voices from that direction, a babble of talk and a shout of laughter. Feeling suddenly shy, June tapped on the French door. “Hello?” she said, and a dozen faces turned in her direction. A woman in a denim jumper, rainbow knee socks, and clogs jumped up from a hassock and came over.
“Welcome to the Glenwood consciousness group!” she said, holding out her hands to June, her broad face creased in a smile. Then she stopped and squinted.
“June?” she said. “June Bouquet?”
“Yes,” said June, “although it’s Rashkin now,” and she peered back at the woman, trying to figure out who she was. Then she cried, “Frederica? Frederica Haupt? I don’t believe it!” and the two women embraced. When they separated, Frederica held June’s arms out from her sides so she could look June up and down.
“You look just the same,” she said, “I’d recognize you anywhere. Although the clothes are a little different.”
June had worn her paint-spattered decorating overalls as a preventative measure in case of a vaginal exam. “No more micro-minis for this girl,” she agreed. “And you! What . . .”
She stopped short of saying “What happened?” and instead said, “What a coincidence!” But Frederica laughed.
“Ten years,” she said, “three boys—all with big heads; that’s what happens to a girl,” and she ran her hands down the front of her dress. June smiled; the Frederica she remembered was a painter, nearly as tall as June herself, with Modigliani eyes, black hair she could sit on, and cheekbones like crescent moons. Now she was zaftig, her hair a frizzy gray halo.
Frederica took June’s arm and turned her toward the group. “Friends,” she announced, “we have with us tonight a genuine celebrity: June Bouquet—sorry, June Rashkin. She was Bouquet when I knew her, and you might recognize her: she was one of the most famous models in New York when we met, even hotter than Twiggy!”
“Ha, I wish,” said June. She gave a little wave. “Hi, everyone.”
There was a chorus of his and welcomes; the group was seated around an ottoman, most on the floor, some on folding chairs. Frederica patted the hassock she’d been sitting on, which was tufted with white fur like a woolly mammoth. “Sit, sit,” she said. “Wine? Are you hungry? There’s some cheese and crackers, and guacamole . . .”
“Wine would be great, thanks,” said June.
“So you still don’t eat,” said Frederica, perching on a couch arm next to June’s head. “Which explains why you still look like that and I look like this.”
“You look great,” said June, twisting her head to smile at Frederica. “Besides, it’s what’s inside that counts, right?”
“Hear, hear,” said a lady on June’s right, passing her a glass of white wine. She was older, about June’s mother’s age, with a severe gray bob and a clipboard. She clicked the top of her ballpoint pen. “Welcome,” she said. “Would you like to tell us what brought you here?”
“That’s our moderator, Patricia,” said Frederica. “She’s getting her sociology master’s at Glenwood State.”
“Oh, terrific,” said June. She sipped her wine. “Sorry, I’m a little nervous.”
“Take your time,” said Patricia.
“Thanks,” said June. “I guess I’m here because—well, lots of reasons. But to put it simply, I want to go back to work and my husband has some objections . . .”
She had been looking at her paint-blotched lap while she said this, but now she raised her head and saw, on the far side of the circle in the shadowy corner of the room, the giant Gregg. He was sitting on the floor, between a girl in a MS! T-shirt and a lady in a peacock chair who was as tiny as Gregg was huge. He smiled sweetly at June.
“How’s the sunstroke?” he said.
June turned to Frederica. “What’s he doing here? I thought this was a women’s lib group!”
“It is,” said Frederica, “but we welcome anyone who supports equal rights, regardless of sex. Why? Is there a problem?”
“I don’t have a problem,” said Gregg. Was it June’s imagination, or was he smirking at her? His wiry black hair was loose tonight, his tennis shirt replaced by a dashiki. He tipped his head, smiling a little pursed-lipped smile.
June started to get up. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t think this is for me.” But she felt Frederica’s hand on her back again.
“Please,” said Frederica, “just give it a chance. I know a man’s presence can be threatening, but—”
“He’s not threatening,” said June furiously, “he’s just a big lunker!”
Everyone laughed, and Gregg grinned. He said something to the tiny woman in the peacock chair—she wore big dark square glasses—and she nodded.
“I just told my mom that sounds like something my nonna would say,” Gregg said. “She doesn’t speak English.”
Patricia touched June’s hand. “If it’s not too uncomfortable for you,” she said, “I’d love for you to stay so we can explore this. It’s exactly the kind of dynamic we’ve been talking about: how sexism works both ways. Both gender groups are trying to get stronger by excluding each other, whereas in reality women need all the help they can get.”
“Right on,” said the girl in the MS! T-shirt.
Frederica swung down so she was in June’s line of vision. “Will you stay?” she asked, “and help us?” and the group said, “Stay, stay, stay!”
“All right,” said June, “but I need more wine.”
Everybody cheered, and a mother with a baby attached to her breast in a sling refilled June’s glass to the brim.
“So, June, you’ve told us why you’re here,” said Patricia. “Your husband doesn’t want you to work—which is certainly something we
’ve heard before.”
“Boo,” said the group, and the MS! girl said, “Down with the Man!”
“Yet it occurs to me,” said Patricia, turning to Gregg, “that I don’t think we’ve ever asked you. You’ve been coming to this group regularly for months now, and we welcome you, but we don’t know what brings you here.”
“That’s an easy one,” said Gregg, grinning. “None of you libbers wear bras.”
He ducked, laughing, as the women threw pillows and balled-up napkins at him, shouting “Pig!” and “Chauvinist!” and “Off with his head!”
“Okay, okay! You win. Boy, you libbers are vicious,” Gregg said and rescued a stalk of grapes somebody had thrown before they could get squashed in the rug. “Seriously, I’m here because of her,” and he tipped his head toward his tiny mother.
“As her translator?” asked Patricia.
“No, she couldn’t care less about any of this stuff. She thinks it’s a bunch of baloney—no offense.” He said something to his mother, and she raised her hands and replied rapidly in what June thought was probably Italian. Gregg grinned. “Yeah, you don’t want to know what she just said. But I brought her because I keep hoping she’ll get something out of it—that something will stick. And I started coming because my pop beats the crap out of her. And my gramps did the same thing to my nonna. And I’m tired of it,” he said. “I’m so fucking sick and tired of all the macho shit, the dick-swinging—’scuse my French. I saw enough of it in ’Nam. I see it at home. And I’m sick of what it leads to.” He stopped for breath, and the room was so quiet June could hear the hiss of the Duraflame in the fireplace. “That’s why I’m here,” he said. “Fuck the patriarchy. Equal rights for everyone.”
The group erupted in cheering and applause, and several of the women leaned over to hug Gregg. The girl in the MS! shirt was wiping her eyes; Frederica handed her a napkin off a stack of them that proclaimed, “A Woman’s Place Is in the House—and the Senate!” Gregg was smiling, accepting the petting and praise, but when he looked over at June, his face turned serious. He pushed his big glasses back up on his nose with his pointer finger and nodded. June nodded back, then gulped her wine. Through it all Mrs. Santorelli sat upright and unmoving as a queen.
* * *
The next tennis lesson was the following Monday, and it wasn’t until that morning that June decided to go. She had spent the weekend repapering the guest bedroom, using fabric instead of wallpaper—a design innovation she’d read about in House & Garden—and it had been a total disaster. The red-and-blue flower-sprigged linen June had chosen at Fabricville did what she’d hoped it would do, refreshed the room without being fussy, but the article hadn’t specified that the process would require two people, one to apply the paste and the other to smooth the cloth. June had done it all herself, or rather with Elsbeth’s assistance; her daughter had appropriated a length of linen for herself, demanding June sew it into an apron, and then stomped around the room wearing it, chanting, “I’m a princess, look at me! I’m a princess, look at me!” and tracking paste all over the carpet. June clambered up and down a ladder, arms trembling with strain, vacillating between embarrassment at having misread Gregg and anger over what he’d said on the court. So he went to an encounter group—that didn’t negate his sexist comment! He was no more feminist than—than Archie Bunker! Probably Gregg was using the encounter group to pick up chicks—like the MS! girl, whom June could imagine Gregg balling in the back of some carpeted van. Finally June sat on the gluey carpet and lit a cigarette, staring at her lumpy walls. She was putting way too much thought into this; all this time without adult company, with Peter always at the Claremont, was making her neurotic. Of course she’d go to her lesson, and the hell with what some dumb young tennis pro thought.
Yet by the time June drove up the mountain in her dress and bloomers and socks with the little balls on; by the time she’d signed in and walked Elsbeth to the kiddie pool; by the time she had applied zinc to Elsbeth’s nose and wrestled her into her bathing cap—“It hurrrrrrrrrts! It’s squeezing my head!”—and given up on persuading her out of her apron—“No, Mommy, I’m a princess!”—by the time June had left her child happily dog-paddling in a foot of water, the apron clinging to her legs, all she wanted to do was go back to bed. The morning was gray and oppressive, and she felt headachy and bloated, as though she were about to get her period. But she’d just finished a week ago. Was it maybe—the onset of the dreaded Change?
June slogged toward the courts with her racquet dragging. She was late; she could hear the balls thowcking and the women laughing. A moonball arced high above the hawthorn hedge; “Oh, shoot!” she heard Helen say, and Gregg called like an umpire, “Ooooooout!” June stood watching them scrambling around from the top of the rise, Helen and Liesel the size of Elsbeth’s Fisher-Price figures from this distance, and Gregg too—except he of course was a Fisher-Price giant. June turned and moved quickly away, crouching like a grunt in the Vietnam jungle, before they could see her.
She wasn’t quite sure what to do with herself after that; there were two moms she somewhat knew on the chairs by the main pool, watching their kids bounce off the diving board, but June wasn’t in the mood to make small talk. She waved and went into the snack bar, where a teenager served her a Tab.
June wandered out the back door and onto the path to the adult pool, clutching her greasy waxed paper cup. The sun was trying to break through now, and cicadas whirred in the trees. Past the rhododendrons and big boulders, up up up June went, until she emerged onto the terrace surrounding the adult pool and overlooking the city. She toed off her Tretorns and socks with relief, then carried her Tab to the railing. She looked down: the treetops on the side of the mountain were like broccoli at this height. It was a sheer drop. June wondered, as she sometimes did, what it would be like to step over the railing, hold on to it from the other side, let go—in the same way she sometimes thought when driving that she could, at any time, spin her wheel into oncoming traffic. It was less anything she really wanted to do than the reminder of how close they were to death, inches away, all the time. Her marriage to Peter had taught her that—what had happened to him, his wife, those poor little girls! June could hardly imagine it, although she tried to, often: Peter and Masha and his girls had been going along in their daily lives, business as usual, and suddenly history had tipped them off into the abyss. June ought to be thankful; she should be on her knees each day thanking God for what she had, which was all most women ever wanted: a handsome husband, a house, a healthy child. Safety. And she was grateful. She never forgot.
But.
June lit a cigarette and stared at the skyline. The tallest skyscrapers—the Twin Towers, the needle of the Empire State—were still hidden by smog, but June could make out the Chrysler and the offices of Midtown. Into that most impressive collection of buildings young June Bouquet had emerged in 1961, alighting from a Greyhound at Port Authority with one suitcase and a hatbox. She had been thrilled not only by the number of people but the way they all knew where they were going—and June was one of them, her arrival a point toward which her life, a conveyor belt, had carried her all along. Gerber Baby in 1942 to Little Miss Dairy Princess, ’53, ’54, ’55; Butter Queen, 1958; modeling auditions in Minneapolis in ’61. Now a porter hailed June a cab that she took to the Ford Agency, where a scout had set up her appointment; the booker took one look at June, put her suitcase and hatbox in a locker, and sent her straight to makeup. June’s first shoot, for Vogue, had been that afternoon. Finally she was on her way.
June drank her lukewarm Tab. Somewhere over there, in Central Park and photographers’ studios and Washington Square, all of that was still going on: women were hailing taxis, rushing to bookings with portfolios under their arms, wearing four-inch heels and three-inch hemlines, having their hair sprayed and eyelashes applied and bending forward to drink from straws inserted into cups that assistants held for them, all the better not to muss their lipstick. Over there, too, in the Vill
age, was Parsons School of Design, where women alongside men learned tricks of the trade that June, with her floral wallpaper cloth, could only emulate. She was an amateur, and unless she could convince Peter otherwise or did something drastic, she would remain one. But once upon a time she had been a professional, before her body had tricked her by becoming pregnant, then betrayed her by miscarrying that baby after June and Peter were already wed.
She crushed out her cigarette and turned from the railing. Somebody was coming up the gravel path toward the pool: she could hear footsteps, crunch crunch crunch. She cupped her hands around her face and bolted for the nearest shelter, the pool equipment shed: whether it was a maintenance man or a sunbathing mommy, she didn’t want anyone to see her when she’d been crying this way.
The shed was sheet metal, the size of a walk-in closet. June stood in the dark amid the sacks of crushed rock, grass seed, and mulch, trying to calm her breathing. The air was chokingly hot and smelled of fertilizer. Whoever had come up the path was going for a dip; there was a sploosh! as a body hit the water, then splashing as whoever-it-was churned back and forth. June waited, wiping her face on her tennis skirt, sweat running like oil down her body.
Suddenly the shed door opened, letting in a glare of light, and Gregg the giant was standing there. He was wearing his ubiquitous tennis headband with goggles and a Speedo; his mountainous body was more padded than June would have thought from looking at him in his clothes, with a belly and a layer of postadolescent flesh his tennis shirts had concealed. He looked as if he were still wearing one; his arms and neck were deeply tanned, but the skin of his stomach and chest was so white and sleekly plump beneath its smattering of black hair that it seemed as if it might, if stroked, squeak.