Smart Women

by Judy Blume

  “Her older sister then.”

  “Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

  “I like raisins,” he said.

  Margo tried to remember how the girl on the raisin box looked, but all she could picture was a floppy red bonnet.

  “I’ve never been in a hot tub,” he said. “What’s it like?”

  “Hot,” she told him. “Some people can’t take it.”

  “I’d like to give it a try,” he said.

  “There are several hot tub clubs in town, but Boulder Springs is the best. You should call in advance. They get booked up.”

  “I was thinking more of now,” he said.

  “Now? In my hot tub?”

  “I wouldn’t mind,” he said, pulling his sweatshirt over his head.

  “Hey . . . wait a minute . . .”

  He kicked off his sandals, loosened his belt buckle, and dropped his jeans. He wore bikini underpants. Margo was suspicious of men who wore boxer shorts. Freddy had worn boxer shorts, had insisted that they be ironed. “Wait a minute . . .” she said again, as he stepped out of his underwear. She hadn’t looked directly at him as he had undressed, but she’d seen enough to know that he was tall and lean and very appealing. She’d seen that while she’d been watching him last weekend. She’d seen that while he’d been fully dressed. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  He slid into the tub, facing her. “I thought you said okay . . .”

  “No, I didn’t say that.”

  “You want me to get out?”

  “I didn’t want you to get in.”

  “Oh, I misunderstood.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “But now that I’m here, is it okay? Can I try it for a few minutes?”

  “I suppose a few minutes can’t hurt.”

  When the Jacuzzi timer went off he climbed out and reset it for another twenty minutes. But before it went off again he told her he was feeling light-headed. Margo urged him to get out quickly, before he fainted. He did, and just in time. As it was she had to wrap a blanket around him, revive him with a glass of Gatorade, and help him back to his place. It wasn’t easy getting him up the steep flight of outside stairs leading to the apartment over the garage.

  “I warned you,” she said, as he slumped onto the sofa in his living room.

  “It was worth it,” he told her.

  “You’d better take a couple of aspirin and get some sleep.”

  “Can I try it again tomorrow?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so. It doesn’t seem to agree with you.”

  “I’ll get used to it.”

  “I’ve got two kids, you know.”

  “I’ve got one.”

  “Mine are teenagers.”

  “Mine’s twelve.”

  “Mine have been away all summer, visiting their father. They’re coming home tomorrow.”

  “I’d like to meet them.”

  “Don’t be too sure.”

  “You’re very defensive about them, aren’t you?”

  “Me, defensive about my children?”

  “You have beautiful breasts,” he said.

  Margo looked down and flushed. Her robe was open to the waist. She pulled it closed. “Another piece of useful information,” she said. “Hot tubbing is not a sexual experience.”

  “I’ll try to remember that,” he said.

  “Goodnight,” she told him.

  “Goodnight, Margo.”

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, while Margo was driving to Denver to meet her children at the airport, she thought about last night and her strange encounter with Andrew Broder. She never should have let him into her hot tub. It was going to be tricky living next door to him for the next three months now. Her impulsive behavior, though she was well aware of it, continued to cause her problems.

  Didn’t I warn you?

  Okay . . . okay, so you warned me.

  Margo knew that B.B. was divorced, but unlike other divorced women, B.B. never complained about her former husband. Never said a word about how cheap he was or how miserable a father. Never talked about how he ran around with girls young enough to be his daughter or the fact that he had no sense of humor or that he was colder than a fish. Never laughed bitterly about the lack of style in his lovemaking. B.B. never shared the details of how or why her marriage to Andrew had failed and Margo didn’t feel close enough to ask. Until last May, until the day that B.B. had called Andrew a fucking bastard, Margo had never even heard B.B. say his name.

  It had probably been a mistake to arrange for him to rent the apartment in the Hathaway house. B.B. should not have asked for her help in finding him a place to live. But what’s done is done, Margo thought.

  She glanced at herself in the rearview mirror, wondering what her children would think of her new layered haircut. For years she had worn her dark hair shoulder length, parted in the middle, and blown dry, but this summer she had felt ready for a change.

  “Look,” Stan, the hair stylist, had said, assessing her, “you might as well take advantage of what you’ve got . . . good skin, nice eyes, and naturally wavy hair.”

  That’s it? Margo had thought. After forty years that’s what it comes down to?

  After her haircut she had vowed to let her hair grow back and never cut it again. But now she had to admit, it did show off her eyes.

  “We should have named her Hazel,” her father used to joke, “for those big eyes.”

  “Who knew she was going to have such eyes,” her mother would say.

  “You have unbelievably ugly eyes,” James had said, making her laugh. James had been her first lover and something about Andrew Broder reminded her of him. It could have been the way he looked directly at her or the way he laughed, heartily, without holding back.

  Margo had met James when she was seventeen. He was a tall, lanky college freshman, wildly funny, yet sweet and tender, a perfect combination. It was his wry sense of humor that kept them going during their first awkward attempts at making love and from then on their lovemaking was filled as much with fun and laughter as with passion, which wasn’t all that bad, Margo realized later. In fact, there was a lot to be said for it.

  James had died of pancreatic cancer two and a half years after they met. She had not even known that he was sick. Her mother had come across the obituary. James Schoenfeld, twenty, following a brief illness. Even though Margo and James weren’t going together anymore, hadn’t seen each other for sixteen months, his death had so affected her that she had not made love again until she and Freddy were married.

  At the time Margo could not stop thinking about the night she and James had broken up. She could not stop thinking about how she had flirted with another boy at the fraternity party, had actually slipped him a piece of paper with her phone number on it. James had consoled himself by chug-a-lugging a six-pack of Miller’s. Then he’d passed out on the floor. Margo had had no choice but to let the other boy, Roger, drive her home. The next afternoon James had come over, looking pale and acting sheepish, and he had apologized for his behavior. They’d gone for a walk to the pond, but she had not let him kiss her. “It’s over,” she’d said. “I’m not going to see you anymore.”

  “Why?” he’d asked. “That’s all I want to know. Why?”

  “I don’t know,” she’d said. “It’s just something that I feel . . . or don’t feel . . .”

  James had turned and walked straight into the pond, fully dressed, his hands over his head. She had stood on the grassy bank, yelling and screaming and laughing until tears stung her eyes. Maybe she did love him, she’d thought. But there were so many boys to love. She wasn’t ready to love just one.

  Her mother urged her not to confuse sadness with guilt. It was not her fau
lt that James had died. Her father cradled her in his arms, stroking her hair. Her sisters, one older, one younger, stood in the doorway to her bedroom, silent.

  Margo went to the funeral by herself. After paying her respects to James’s parents and his brother she asked who the small, long-haired girl was, the one who was weeping hysterically, and his brother said, “That’s Rachel. She and James were going together.”

  Margo nodded and bit her lip. James had replaced her. Well, what had she expected? She approached Rachel. “I’m Margo,” she said. “I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am.”

  Rachel stopped crying and looked at Margo. “He told me about you,” she said. “About how you were his first girlfriend. It was a long time ago, wasn’t it?”

  Not so long, Margo thought.

  “We were pinned,” Rachel said. On Rachel’s black dress was the Phi Ep pin that Margo had once dreamed of wearing.

  She still had dreams about James. James walking into the pond. She would call, “Come back, James. Let’s start over . . .” but it was always too late. She would awaken with tears on her cheeks.

  Freddy had been as different from James as any young man Margo had met. Perhaps that was why she had married him.

  She had been married to Freddy for fourteen years and had never been unfaithful, although she had certainly thought about it. After Freddy, there was Leonard, and after Leonard, her boss, Michael Benson. Then, a series of brief affairs, some lasting months, some weeks, some just the night. There had been twelve of these men, from a physiology professor at Colorado University, to a Buddhist at Naropa, to more than one construction worker. And then, this summer, for five days, there had been Eric.

  Margo kept a list of her lovers at the office, in her top desk drawer, the one that locked. She wondered if other women did the same. She wondered what her children would think if she died suddenly and they had to go through her papers. There were seventeen names on her list. Seventeen men. Not so many lovers for a divorced woman of forty, she thought. She knew some women who barhopped every weekend, picking up men for the night. They could wind up with fifty lovers in a year. She’d been divorced for five years. Multiply that by fifty and she could have had two hundred and fifty lovers by now. She laughed aloud at the idea of two hundred and fifty lovers. It seemed to her both wildly funny and grotesque, and then, terribly sad and she bit her lip to keep from crying, the idea was so depressing.

  She switched on the car radio and rolled down her window. A piece of brush blew across the highway, rested briefly on the hood of her car, then flew off. The end of summer, Margo thought.

  It had been a full summer. She’d worked long hours on a new project with Michael Benson, a complex of solar condominiums in town. She’d taken only one break, a week in Chaco Canyon, where she had gone to be alone, completely and absolutely alone for the first time in her life. It was to be a test of self. To prove—she wasn’t sure—that she could survive on her own, she supposed. But on her second day out she had met Eric, twenty years old and irresistible. Eric, she decided later, was to be the last of her impulsive sexual encounters. Because afterwards she always felt empty. Empty, lonely, and afraid.

  She would wait the next time she felt tempted and make an effort instead to find a steady man. In the meantime she would concentrate on her work, which was going well, and on her kids, who were coming home.

  She had been up early this morning to cook their favorite dish, a tangy chicken in rum sauce. She hoped it would be a happy homecoming, hoped the new school year would be an improvement over the last one. She was going to try. She was going to try to give them more time, more understanding, to be there when they needed to talk, to be less judgmental, to be the warm and gentle earth mother she had always wanted to be, yet never seemed able to pull off. This would be her last chance with Stuart. He would graduate next spring, then go off to college.

  And with Michelle, she didn’t know. She didn’t think she could take another year of hostility. Maybe when the plane landed she would find that Michelle was not on it. That Michelle had stayed in New York with Freddy and Aliza. What would she do then? Jump on the next plane to New York and drag Michelle back? She wasn’t sure. If only Michelle could understand that you don’t quit just because of rough times. That you work through your problems not by shutting out the people who love you most, but by letting them in to help and comfort you.

  Margo turned off the Valley Highway, then followed the signs to the airport. She was twenty minutes early. Good. She’d have time for a quick cup of coffee before the plane landed. Time to relax for a moment before her reentry into motherhood.

  LATER THAT NIGHT, after the welcome home dinner, Margo showered and put on the robe that her friend Clare had given to her last week for her fortieth birthday. God, the feel of the silk against her nakedness. Yards and yards of pure silk, the color of a young girl’s blush.

  “When you put it on in the morning you’re supposed to glow,” Clare had said. “That’s what the saleswoman told me, anyway. So what do you think?”

  “I think it’s not the kind of robe you put on in the morning,” Margo had said, “unless it’s the morning after . . .”

  They had laughed over that.

  There were rumors around town that Clare was part Navajo, rumors that Clare enjoyed more than anyone. And when she played it to the hilt she did look like some gigantic, exotic half-breed, with her dark, silver-streaked hair, two slashes of color accenting her high cheekbones, deeply tanned skin, and ropes of turquoise and coral wrapped around her neck. Had Margo met Clare ten years earlier she might not have taken the time to get to know her. She might have put Clare down as an oil heiress from West Texas, with an accent so offensive you couldn’t possibly get past the first sentence.

  “When I celebrated my fortieth birthday, last year,” Clare had said, “I bought myself a sheer black nightgown and a feather boa.”

  Margo was reminded that she still had a drawerful of sheer black things, left over from her time with Leonard, but she hadn’t worn them lately. Hadn’t even thought about them. Too bad.

  Leonard had been one of the reasons Margo had left New York three years ago. She’d been running away from a no-win affair with him, running away from Freddy and his new bride, and finally, running away from herself, hoping to find a new self in the mountains, and if not exactly finding one, then creating one.

  She’d decided on Boulder because of her interest in solar design and was lucky enough to land a job with a small architectural firm, Benson and Gould, based on her portfolio, a letter of recommendation from her boss in New York, and an interview that had gone very well. Later, she’d found out that Gould was spending more than half his time in the Bahamas, that Benson had a neurotic fear of responsibility, and that they had been overjoyed when she’d accepted their job offer.

  Margo moved to Boulder in mid-August and, with her half of the cash from the sale of the co-op on Central Park West, bought a house on a dirt road, tucked away against the mountainside. A funky, upside-down kind of house, with the kitchen and living room on the second floor, to take advantage of the view of the Flatirons, and the bedrooms on the first, with a hot tub outside the master, which is what really sold her. The Realtor, a woman called B.B., assured Margo that the house could only go up in value.

  Two months after Margo moved in, B.B. introduced her to Clare, who was looking for an architect to renovate her gallery.

  NOW MARGO WALKED DOWN THE HALL to say goodnight to her children. Michelle was sitting up in bed reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover. “How do you like it?” Margo asked.

  “I’m only reading it because I have to . . . it’s on my summer reading list,” Michelle said defensively.

  Margo laughed. “Not the book . . . this . . .” She twirled around the room, showing off the silk robe, keeping time to the music coming from Michelle’s stereo. It sounded lik
e Joan Armatrading, but Margo couldn’t be sure. Michelle was very into female vocalists singing about the female experience.

  “God, Mother . . . what is that thing you’re wearing?”

  “It’s a robe. Clare gave it to me for my birthday. Isn’t it gorgeous?”

  “It’s a weird gift for one divorced woman to give to another. She could have given you a painting from her gallery. We have a lot of bare white walls.”

  “I think she wanted to make it a personal gift.”

  “Yeah . . . well, it’s personal all right.”

  “So how do you like it?”

  “It’s okay, I suppose, if you’re into silks and satins.”

  “I meant the book.”

  Michelle looked up at Margo, her mouth set defiantly, ready to do battle. “I told you . . . it’s assigned reading.”

  “I know that. But you can still either like it or not like it.” Margo warned herself to stop. This conversation was going no place.

  Michelle closed the book and rested it on her lap. She gave Margo a hostile took. “It’s an interesting book . . . in an old-fashioned way.”

  In an old-fashioned way, Margo thought. That was hard to take. She remembered when she’d read Lady Chatterley. She had been in college and she’d found the sex scenes so steamy she’d locked herself in the hall bathroom and stood under the shower for an hour. “D. H. Lawrence lived in the southwest . . . in Taos. Did you know that?”

  “Of course I know that, Mother. But this particular book is set in England.”

  “Yes,” Margo said, “I know.” She approached the bed and tried to drop a kiss on Michelle’s cheek, but Michelle squirmed away.

  “Please, Mother . . . don’t be disgusting.”

  “Goodnight,” Margo said, trying to sound pleasant, trying not to let Michelle see that she was getting to her.

  “Goodnight,” Michelle answered, opening her book again. “And Mother . . . you really should do something about your breath. Have you tried Lavoris?”

  “I had chili for lunch.”