The following is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in an entirely fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Mary T. McCarthy
Cover design by Georgia Morrissey
eISBN 978-1-940610-29-0
Published in 2014 by Polis Books, LLC
60 West 23rd Street
New York, NY 10010
www.PolisBooks.com
CONTENTS
Copyright
Title Page
Dedication
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
January
February
Acknowledgments
About the Author
For the Wearers
“She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom.”
The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
April 2012
“It’s throat-numbing spray,” she grinned mischievously. “For blowjobs.”
Eva Bradley, a petite woman in her early forties with neatly bobbed black hair, wore her standard issue corporate attorney Ann Taylor black pantsuit and brightly colored scarf du jour. She’d taken a small box from her Coach purse, removed a brown bottle, and placed it in the middle of the coffee shop’s table with a dramatic, near jazz-hands-level flourish.
The small glass bottle landed—thonk—in the middle of the monthly invitation, accidentally hitting a bullseye on the standard giant red letter “A” watermarked on the page.
“But he knows where she’s goin’ as she’s leavin’
She’s headed for the cheatin’ side of town.“
-Lyin’ Eyes, The Eagles
Monthly meeting of the Scarlet Letter Society.
Zoomdweebies Café
Friday, April 6, 2012
5:30 a.m.
“The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread.”
-The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Lisa always printed out the invite, which featured the same book quote at the bottom and a different song lyric each month. Scarlet Letter Society membership was exclusive, right now limited to only three women: Eva, Maggie and Lisa. The club bore the name of the literary bible of adultery: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s A Scarlet Letter.
Glancing at the mysterious bottle, Maggie laughed. Next to her Lisa gaped, widening her chocolate-brown eyes; wrinkles instantly rippled like the international symbol for ‘bacon’ across her bewildered forehead.
Maggie Hanson, who owned the vintage clothing shop next door to the café where the women met, picked up the box. “Comfortably Numb,” she read in her thick Boston accent, still smirking. “Well, that’s a good a name as any for a blow job spray. Says here, ‘the refreshing spritz contains a mild numbing element to coat the back of the throat, suppressing gag reflex during oral sex.’”
Eva picked up the bottle, adding in a sing-songy ad-jingle voice, “Discreet enough to take with you wherever you go! Doubles as a breath freshener!”
“Where the heck are you going?” said local bakery owner Lisa Swain, looking completely stupefied as she glanced at the flavor on the package: Chocolate Mint.
“It comes in flavors?” she asked, her usually pale face beet red against her light blonde hair.
Eva smiled. “Of course. Like at the dentist!”
Maggie raised her eyebrows at Lisa and told her, “You know, this stuff works better when guys use it.”
Eva rolled her eyes. “Is that what all your gay best friends tell you?”
Maggie replied, “No, smarty pants. I mean if you spray it on your man’s fundangles, it takes him longer to come. Also, his junk is now a chocolate mint lollipop. Everyone’s a winner.”
“I planned on using it for an upcoming meeting in DC,” said Eva sheepishly, a sexy twinkle in her eye.
Maggie nodded knowingly. “Hopefully not during the meeting, ya big whore. Let me guess,” she said. “Late night meeting with your intern, Ron?”
Lisa chimed in, “Honestly, Eva, I can’t believe you’re sleeping with someone who was born in the 1980s. He was named after Ronald Reagan, for the love of God! And you were in high school then!”
“Technically, I was only in 8th grade when he was born.” Eva blushed. “I mean, it’s not like I’m old enough to be his mom or anything.”
Maggie added, “Yeah, unless you were one hell of a slutty 8th grader. Did they have chocolate mint blow job spray back then, Mrs. Robinson?”
All three ladies laughed. Lisa took a sip of her iced coffee drink and pointed out,
“I picked a really awkward day for a mint mocha latte.”
“Good morning, Tara!” said Zarina Harandi, owner of Zoomdweebies, the popular indie bookshop café in Keytown, Maryland, the state’s second-largest city.
“So happy to be here.” said Tara. “I was looking for a copy of the new Stephen King book, and then, of course, the Baltimore Sun.”
“Of course,” said Zarina, walking across the worn wood floors. The shop was painted in 80s classic bright yellow to match its vintage pride and joy, a Ms. Pac Man arcade game.
“You never have to worry about the battery dying on these,” said Tara.
“True,” said Zarina. Her mother Kate had opened this shop after her dad, an Iranian immigrant, died six years before. Kate founded the shop because, she said, “Women need a place to circle their wagons-even if their wagons come in the form of minivans.” Kate was an 80s girl to the max, thus the inspiration for the shop name, Zoomdweebies, a reference to the Judd-Nelson-as-John-Bender character from the 1985 John Hughes film The Breakfast Club.
“And not surprisingly, I’ll have my usual,” said Tara, smiling. Zarina knew that was a double shot espresso iced latte with skim milk and a shot of vanilla.
“Coming right up,” said Zarina.
“What would this town do without your shop?” said Tara. “I don’t want to live in a world where you can’t still walk somewhere to buy a book, coffee and a paper.”
“Me either,” said Zarina. She’d finished college the year before, returning home to run the coffee shop when her mom began working as a professor at the local university. Not knowing what she wanted to do with her Journalism degree, she figured running Zoomdweebies was as good an idea as any for the moment.
Besides, she liked it here. Her seemingly quiet personality allowed her to fade into the background to a point where people forgot she was there. But huddled over a laptop at a small desk in the corner of the shop behind the counter in-between making avocado and brie wraps and nonfat chai lattes? Like the janitor in The Breakfast Club, she heard and saw everything.
Tara thanked Zarina for the coffee and settled into a cozy, worn red velvet chair to read her paper. Zarina knew Tara only had a short time before she had to go pick up her preschooler.
Next to Tara, Pretty in Pink played silently on a vintage TV and VHS player. “Wonder whatever happened to Jake Ryan after that movie?” Tara pondered when she saw it playing. “Bet he’s still hot.” The shop played an endless series of 80s movies on VHS: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Stripes, Ghostbusters, Sixteen Candles, Caddyshack, and the stacks went on and on. Kate found the entire VH1 series of “I Love the 80s” and had it converted backwards from digital into VHS tapes by some local hipster geek who told her, “Excellent choice in formats, dude.”
Tara and the shop’s other regular customers loved the movies playing in the background, often turning up the vol
ume to watch a scene or two. It was always the cool people who gathered around to watch the Carl Spackler “Cinderella story” scene from Caddyshack and asked to turn the volume up. Those were the customers she wanted as regulars, not the uptight, pantyhose-wearing mothers who demanded Airplane be turned off when Captain Oveur asks Joey if he’s ever seen a grown man naked.
Those bitches can go to Starbucks, Zarina had thought.
All kinds of people came into the café. As a journalist, Zarina kept a notebook to write character sketches for future stories. There was a husband and wife who stopped by every Tuesday morning and ordered exactly the same thing. Only they’re on their way to marriage counseling, thought Zarina. There was a teenage boy who came in at the same time after school every day, buying only a bag of Mystery flavor Air Heads. He’s only here because he hopes the blonde lacrosse player will come in with her friends to giggle over skim mochaccinos.
And there were the moms. Although occasionally there was the lone mom like Tara, who came in to actually read a book and get some peace and quiet while her kids were at school, most of the moms travelled in gaggles, like geese. There were PTA moms (the most annoying; the way they yammered on about cookie dough fundraisers and teacher appreciation donuts made Zarina’s head spin), save-the-planet moms (cloth diapers, raw organic homemade baby food), and brand new moms (dark circles and sweatpants) just trying to have human contact with someone other than a newborn.
Thinking of the early morning visit of the adulteresses, Zarina smiled at the thought of someone like Tara overhearing a conversation about blow job spray.
“’Adultresses’ seems like an outrageously old-fashioned word to use,” Zarina thought, as she cleaned the espresso maker, “but what else is there to call them? The Women Who Cheat on Their Husbands? MILFs?” Some would say ‘sluts’ or ‘whores’ in a more serious way than the club members, who used the terms jokingly. “Maybe it’s best to just call them what they call themselves, in honor of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous novel,” Zarina decided. They’re simply known as “The Scarlet Letter Society.”
“I don’t know what I’d do if Ron and Charles found out about each other,” whispered Eva after the gathering at the coffee shop. “Not to mention if my husband found out about my two lovers. Ugh.”
The worn oval sign reading Wings Vintage Clothing creaked on its iron hinges as the women entered Maggie’s downtown shop, its name chosen as a tribute to her favorite piece of literature, Erica Jong’s revolutionary 1973 book Fear of Flying. Maggie had even gone so far as to name her first daughter Erica (her other daughter’s name, Lilith, also reflected a healthy sense of feminism.)
“Well it’s plenty to worry about, hussy,” laughed Maggie. She tossed her unruly reddish-brown curls, always bordering on disheveled and frizzy, over her shoulders. The two had been friends for years and shared the comfortable conversation style reserved for sisterhood and rare relationships between women.
Eva absentmindedly dusted the top of a vintage frame containing a piece of antique handmade needlework that served as another nod to the shop name: “My child, I wish you two things. To give you roots, and to give you wings.”
“I need advice,” declared Eva. “Everything is just so complicated, and I honestly feel like my life is spinning way out of control. Have you ever felt that way?”
Maggie smiled, a glint in her green eyes. “Yeah, once upon a time, I guess I did.”
Eva replied, “Well, what did you do? I feel like my whole life is a circus, and I’m a terrible ringleader.”
Maggie turned to face Eva. “You just gotta learn how to keep all the balls in the air.”
“There are just so many balls!” said Eva. Both women laughed. “Now help me pick out something vintage and fabulous to wear to my meeting next week.”
Maggie picked out a few vintage 40s dresses and sent Eva into a dressing room. Eva modeled; everything always looked amazing on her. Maggie rang up the purchase, sending Eva on her way with a hug, some reassurance to take one day at a time, and an A-line navy dress that looked stunning on her petite frame.
As she put the dress into a bag, a certain smell triggered a long ago memory. After Eva left the shop, Maggie sat in a trance-like state, remembering.
Frost formed on the insides of the two-room efficiency apartment window. Maggie was locked inside alone on one of many nights when her mother, a waitress at a nearby bar, couldn’t afford a sitter. Maggie didn’t even remember her own mother’s name, only that she’d run home to check on her only child during fifteen-minute breaks, smelling of stale cigarettes and beer. Like a choppy scene from a horror movie, the images flickering and jerky and too quick, then too slow, then too quick, Maggie thought of nights where her mother tucked her into bed, leaving a flashlight on the nightstand in case she had to use the bathroom. The electric bill hadn’t been paid. The smell. That familiar smell, from the hourglass-shaped glass bottle with the gold bow. Her mother would spray that Estee Lauder (a gift, somehow Maggie knew it had been a gift… but from who?) on her to hide the bar smells before she climbed into bed with Maggie; they’d slept in the same bed to stay warm.
The jingle of the shop door’s bell jolted Maggie back into the moment, her face flushed and hands sweaty. Her heart was beating faster and her head was pounding as she reached for the pills in her purse.
“Daymares?”
It was Dave, Maggie’s first husband, who knew she called her daytime trances “daymares” since they reminded her of nightmares.
Maggie’s face softened when she saw Dave: bearded, tall, corduroy and flannel-clad. He walked over and hugged her.
Eva couldn’t get the lyrics to “Lyin Eyes” out of her head ever since Maggie had sent the invite to that month’s Scarlet Letter Society meeting. The line “she’s so far gone, she feels just like a fool” played in her head after she left Maggie’s shop and headed over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge toward her mother’s Matthew’s Island cottage on what James Michener called “the calmer waters of the Eastern Shore” of Maryland.
Her phone rang as she finished crossing the bridge, and “Call from Ron” appeared on her car dashboard screen. She answered it on the steering wheel of her Mars Red Mercedes SLK 350 Roadster.
“Eva Bradley,” she crooned in a fake professional tone as she answered the phone.
“Ms. Bradley, this is your intern Ron. I’m calling to let you know that your meeting next Thursday morning meeting needs to be rescheduled due to a conflict with the client.”
“Ron, you’re my only intern at the moment. You don’t have to introduce yourself. You can call and tell that particular client to gargle my balls, because this is the third time she’s canceled.”
A moment’s pause. “Er, Ms. Bradley, I’m not sure the phrase ‘gargle my balls’ is one that the madam Fortune 500 executive is used to hearing…”
Eva laughed. “I’ve been hanging around Maggie too much. Well, I’ll leave it to you to phrase that in a more diplomatic way, then, Ron. In the meantime, I demand to know why your body is not underneath mine right now.”
“Ms. Bradley, are you driving?”
“Yes, Ron, I am.”
“Well then, the answer is that I wouldn’t want to wreck a perfectly gorgeous piece of German machinery. I will, however, be happy to fill your empty appointment slot on Thursday morning since your client canceled.”
“In that case,” replied Eva, blushing slightly despite herself and snickering, “you can thank that bitch of a client for me.”
Eva hung up the phone, smiling at the way her body tingled just hearing her young lover’s voice. He made her happy. Her husband Joe, a department head physician at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, worked virtually 24-7. Her twin boys Calvin and Graham were fourteen, started high school this year, and were hormonal and smelly and awful. She loved her family like crazy, but escaping from them seemed to be all she ever wanted to do—which of course brought on guilt, because she was raised Catholic, and if anyone could send you on an all
-expenses paid mom-guilt trip to the moon and back any day of the week, it was the Catholics.
She had somehow managed to position herself to be a forty-one-year-old woman who was cheating on both her forty-five-year-old husband and her fifty-three-year-old lover with her twenty-eight-year-old intern. Her sex drive aside, it was Eva’s workaholism that really drove her. Her career as a corporate attorney was both successful and demanding, and she often wondered if all the steam she put into the corporate machine during her long workweeks was exactly the steam she was blowing off with her various creative sexual outlets.
Suddenly the phone rang again.
Without looking at the dashboard, Eva purred, “How may I help you?” in a seductive voice.
“EEE-vah?” asked her husband, Joe. Her name was pronounced “ee-vah” though people often mispronounced it “Ay-va.” When Joe thundered the word, the first half sounded like it was being shouted in a capital letter: EEE-vah.
Eva was snapped back into her reality like a branch in a thunderstorm. She unknowingly shifted her driving position. Where she had been reclining back into her leather seats, sunroof open, hair blowing in the wind, she now sat upright, straightened and stiffened. “Hey Joe,” Eva replied, trying to sound casual. “What’s up?”
“What’s up is that your sons just got busted behind the school football field bleachers drinking beers.”
Eva winced at the way Joe referred to their sons when they were in trouble, as “your sons.” When they made state championship teams in lacrosse, he called them “my boys.”
Joe continued. “Apparently you didn’t answer your cell phone, so the Vice Principal Ken Tracey called me to let me know they were suspended for three days. And that was after I spent fifteen minutes convincing him that they shouldn’t be expelled. So fortunately, they will make it through at least their first year of high school.”
Eva cringed. Dreaded, ever-present mommy guilt immediately flared up. Somehow, it was her fault. She traveled too much and the boys were acting out in rebellion. Now they would do terribly in high school and then not get into good colleges. And all of that was because their mother was a wine-drinking, career-obsessed sex freak and their father worked all the time.
The Scarlet Letter Society Page 1