Smart Women

by Judy Blume

  “Well, you don’t have to advertise.”

  Margo sighed and left the room.

  She did not understand how or why Michelle had turned into this impossible creature. Margo would never voluntarily live with such an angry, critical person. Never. But when it was your own child you had no choice. So she kept on trying, kept hoping for the best, kept waiting for the sweetness to come back.

  She passed the bathroom that separated her children’s bedrooms and stopped in front of Stuart’s closed door. She knocked.

  “Yeah?” Stuart called over the latest album from the Police.

  “Just wanted to say goodnight,” Margo said.

  “Yeah . . . okay . . . goodnight . . .”

  Margo had been speechless when she had first seen Stuart at the airport that afternoon. It wasn’t just the haircut, but the clothes. A Polo shirt, a sweater tied over his shoulders, a tennis racquet in one hand, a canvas duffel in the other. He looked as if he’d stepped right out of some Ralph Lauren ad in the Sunday Times. She’d had to suppress a giggle. She wasn’t sure if she was glad or sorry that her son had turned into a preppie over the summer.

  “Where’d you get all the new clothes?” Margo had asked him, driving back from Denver.

  “Dad took him shopping . . . to East Hampton,” Michelle said.

  “I can talk for myself, Mouth,” Stuart said. “And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with taking a little pride in the way you look. Even Mother has a new haircut.”

  “I noticed,” Michelle said.

  Before Margo had a chance to ask Michelle what she thought of it, Stuart said, “I want to get my college applications in early. Dad said he’ll take a week off in October and we’ll do the tour and interviews together.”

  Margo felt a pang. She’d always thought she would be the one to take him to his college interviews. She had saved a week of vacation for just that purpose.

  “I’m thinking of applying to Amherst, early decision.”

  “Why Amherst?” Margo asked.

  “You know Dad’s friend, Wally Lewis?”

  “Yes.”

  “He went there . . . and he said he made contacts at school that have lasted a lifetime.”

  Margo felt nauseated. This was too much. “Really, Stuart,” she said, “you’re beginning to sound exactly like your father.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Stuart asked. “He is my male role model, you know. Besides, it’s time to think about my future. I’ve grown up a lot this summer, Mother.”

  MARGO WENT UPSTAIRS to the kitchen, and poured herself a glass of brandy. She wished she didn’t feel so alone. She wished she had an ally in her own home. “Here’s to you, kid,” she said, toasting herself. “You’re going to need it.”

  2

  WHAT A CASE HER MOTHER WAS, running around in that robe that looked as if it belonged on some ancient movie star, Michelle thought. And expecting Michelle to admire it or something. God! Michelle did not understand what was wrong with her mother. But ever since last winter she had been impossible. Whatever Michelle said Margo took in the wrong way. So naturally she wasn’t going to tell Margo the truth about the robe.

  On the plane, flying home today, Michelle had hoped that this school year would be better. She had vowed to try—no more towels on the bathroom floor, no more unwashed dishes left in the sink, no more sarcasm. She had hoped that Margo would like her better this year and treat her as a human being, recognizing the fact that she had feelings too. But after just a few hours together they were right back to where they had left off before the summer.

  Michelle tried to pinpoint the exact time of the change, but she couldn’t. It wasn’t the end of one of her mother’s love affairs, which was always an intense time around the house, with Margo weeping all over the place, then putting on a big, phony smile for the sake of the children. Also, at the end of an affair Margo tended to appreciate her kids more and to show them a lot of attention and affection.

  Like after Leonard.

  Leonard had been her mother’s first boyfriend after the divorce. The only trouble was, he was married, with three kids, two girls and a boy—Anya, Deirdre, and Stefan. Dumb, asshole names. They used to phone all the time. His wife, Gabrielle, put them up to it. They used to phone and cry and say, Please give us back our Daddy. They said it to Michelle and she was only eleven then. How was she supposed to understand what was going on? His kids were younger. They called every week, sometimes twice a week. Please give us back our Daddy. We miss him. We need him. Michelle would have been glad to give him back. But he wasn’t living with them. He had a place on Gramercy Park. Your Daddy doesn’t live here, she told his kids. Call him at his office.

  One time his wife, Gabrielle, came to their apartment, took a gun out of her purse, waved it around, and threatened to kill Margo. It turned out that the gun, which had scared the shit out of them, wasn’t real. But it had looked real. And that had been it. The next day Margo decided to leave New York and move to Boulder.

  Leonard came out to Colorado one time. Just passing through, he had said. On my way to San Francisco. Just wondered how you were getting along? They were getting along just fine, thank you, Michelle thought. And that had been the last they’d seen of Leonard.

  No, it wasn’t the end of an affair. Besides, Michelle kept mental notes of who her mother was sleeping with, so that she would be prepared in case of a disaster, but for the past school year there hadn’t been anyone special. No one bringing his kids over for Sunday supper, no hour-long phone calls in the middle of the night, no one appearing in the kitchen unexpectedly in the morning. As far as Michelle could tell, her mother had just been sleeping around this year and not that often either. So it wasn’t sex. And it wasn’t money or work either. There was a time, right after the divorce, when money and work were Margo’s number one problems, but not now.

  Michelle rolled over in bed and felt the beginnings of a lump in her throat. She was scared out of her mind that if she couldn’t make peace with Margo, Margo would ship her to New York, to Freddy and his Sabra wife. Well, let Margo try it. Michelle would ran away. Then Margo would be sorry she’d been such a bitch lately.

  She hated it when people told her she looked just like her mother. People were always telling kids they looked just like this parent or that one. It was all such bullshit! If Michelle could look like anyone she knew it would not be her mother, it would be B.B., this big-time Realtor in Boulder. When B.B. walked into a room, people noticed. Michelle wished that people would notice her that way. A lot of the time Michelle felt invisible.

  When they had first moved to town Michelle used to babysit for B.B.’s bratty kid, Sara. B.B. was going out with this movie producer from L.A. and they had some of the most intense fights. They would come storming into the house around midnight and B.B.’s face would be all puffy from crying and twice she had black eyes and she would race into her room and slam the door and then he—his name was Mitch—would pay Michelle and drive her home and he never said anything, except goodnight and thank you very much and B.B. will phone you to make arrangements for next weekend. He wore brown loafers without socks winter and summer and left his shirt unbuttoned so that you could see the hair on his chest, which was black and curly and extremely disgusting.

  Michelle had never told her mother about B.B. and Mitch and their fights. She was afraid that if Margo knew she wouldn’t let Michelle sit for them anymore. And she never told B.B. or Mitch about the time that Sara bit her on the shoulder because she made Sara turn off the TV and go to bed. And everyone knows the human bite is far more dangerous than the bite of an animal.

  Michelle saw B.B. driving around town all the time. She drove a BMW 528i. She had dark red hair, like an Irish setter’s, hanging down to her shoulders. Her skin was very white and she was tall and thin and Michelle wondered if
maybe she was anorexic, like Katie Adriano, this girl in her class who always vomiting. Probably B.B. wasn’t because she ate out a lot and anorexics don’t like restaurants.

  B.B. had a slight overbite, but on her it looked good. Michelle knew about teeth because her father was a dentist. Frederic Sampson, D.D.S.—a Professional Corporation. Michelle liked the idea of her father being a professional corporation. It made her feel secure, as if her father owned General Motors or something.

  But she hated her father for having insisted that she spend another summer at Camp Mindowaskin. “You have to keep in touch with your own kind,” he had told her. “You can’t grow up thinking everyone is like . . .”

  “Like what?” Michelle had asked.

  “Like the people in Boulder.”

  “What’s wrong with the people in Boulder?”

  “Nothing is wrong with them, exactly . . . but there’s more to life than . . .”

  “Than what?”

  Her father had sighed heavily.

  Her experience as a camp waitress had been a disaster. This was her last summer there, no matter what. She was going to be seventeen, for God’s sake. She was old enough to make her own decisions about how to spend her summer. And she was sick of those little bitches calling her The Pioneer just because she lived in Colorado. She might have turned out like them if her parents hadn’t been divorced and her mother hadn’t moved her away.

  And it wasn’t any better after camp, when she went out to Bridgehampton to spend two weeks with her father and Aliza. Two weeks of being talked at by her father, when all she wanted was for him to love her the way she was. At dinner the conversations centered around tennis and why, after nine years at camp, Michelle still couldn’t serve. Oh, love me, Daddy . . . please love me . . . never mind my serve. Tell me that you’re proud that I’m your daughter. That I’m just right . . . that no matter what you’ll always love me . . .

  But that was not the way it was. He loved Aliza now. He was interested in Stuart and his college applications, but not in Michelle. She was nothing to him. Nothing but a pain in the ass. She reminded him of Margo. She heard him say so to his friend, Dr. Fritz. “Every time I look at her,” he’d said, “I see Margo.”

  “You’ve got to fight those feelings, Freddy,” Dr. Fritz had told him.

  “I’m trying,” her father had said. “But it’s not easy.”

  Michelle had been eleven when her parents were divorced. At the time she had wanted to die. But she got over it. Then, less than two years later, her mother had told her they were moving away.

  “Moving where?” Michelle asked.

  “To Colorado,” her mother answered.

  “Colorado?”

  “Yes . . . to Boulder.”

  “Boulder . . . you mean where Mork and Mindy live?”

  “Mork and Mindy who?” her mother said.

  Michelle had laughed. Her mother was so out of it.

  All her friends in New York thought she was really lucky to be moving to the town where Mork and Mindy lived. They said maybe she’d get a job working on their show. They said maybe she’d even get to be a regular and then they’d be able to see her on TV every week. She promised to get Mork’s and Mindy’s autographs for every one of them.

  But when they got to Boulder, Michelle found out that Mork and Mindy hardly ever came to town. They filmed most of their shows in California. She didn’t blame them. Boulder was a big zero. It was just this little college town in the middle of nowhere. It couldn’t compare to New York City. And Michelle hated her mother for ruining her life. But she got over that too. And now she even liked it here, especially in winter, when the mountains were covered with snow.

  THAT ROBE HER MOTHER was wearing tonight was such a joke! The idea of it made Michelle laugh into her pillow. But then the lump in her throat started again and this time it wouldn’t go away, no matter how hard Michelle swallowed. She didn’t understand the lump in her throat any better than she understood her mother. She didn’t understand why she cried herself to sleep every night either.

  3

  B.B. CONCENTRATED ON the sound of her breathing and the rhythm of her feet as she ran along the road. She did three miles each morning before breakfast. Then she showered, dressed, and was at her office by nine. She ran not just for the physical exercise, but to clear her head. It was a time for solving problems, a time for making decisions. Her body was as trim and firm as it had been when she was twenty, but she felt better now. She supposed one day she would have to face growing old, the way her mother was facing it now, but it seemed very far away. She breathed deeply, reminding herself not to gulp air. Sometimes she gulped and became bloated. She checked her watch as she rounded the corner. She’d gone two in eighteen-four. Not bad, B.B., she told herself.

  She hadn’t always been called B.B. She’d been named Francine Eloise Brady by her Jewish mother and her Irish father in Miami, in 1940. All her life she had been Francie to her family and friends and Francine to everyone else. Then she married Andrew and had taken his name—Broder. She thought she would be married for the rest of her life, but in twelve years it was over.

  She left Miami a month before the divorce was final. She left with Sara, who was six years old, with two suitcases, and with thirty-two thousand dollars in cash, which she had earned selling real estate. She left in the Buick at four in the morning and drove west, away from Florida, away from the ocean, away from reminders that she’d once had another life, a life she could not get back.

  She headed for Colorado because the year before she had seen an article in Architectural Digest about restored Victorian homes in Boulder. She remembered the color of the sky and the snowcapped mountains in the distance, which seemed as far from anything she had known as possible. When she arrived she checked into the Boulderado Hotel and two days later she bought her own small Victorian house on Highland. A week after that she went to work for the agency through whom she’d bought the house. And after a year she had opened her own agency. Francine Brady Broder—Elegant Homes. People around town began to call her B.B. because of her double last names. She didn’t mind. She thought it had a snappy sound to it.

  SHE RAN UP HER DRIVEWAY and paused at the car, checking her pulse. Lucy came up to her and licked her legs. B.B. patted Lucy on the head, then went inside to the kitchen.

  “Hi, Mom . . . table’s all set,” Sara said. “Did you have a good run?”

  “Yes, I could have kept going. I didn’t even feel tired.”

  “Did you know that female athletes sometimes have trouble getting pregnant?”

  “Really?” B.B. said, washing her hands at the kitchen sink.

  “Yes,” Sara said, popping an English muffin into the toaster. “I read about it. They get too thin and their periods stop. All that exercise isn’t good for their reproductive organs.” Sara drained her glass of orange juice and poured another. “So you should be careful, just in case.”

  “In case what?”

  “In case you want to have more children.”

  “I’m forty, Sara. I’m not about to have any more children.”

  “You never know,” Sara said. “Jennifer’s mother is forty-one and she just had a baby.”

  “Well, I’m not going to have any more babies.”

  “Okay . . . fine. I just thought you should know.”

  “Thanks for the warning. Do you want scrambled eggs or fried?”

  “Fried . . . so the yolks don’t run.”

  “Hand me the frying pan, would you?” B.B. said, putting up the kettle.

  “Do you remember your first day of junior high, Mom?” Sara asked.

  “Yes . . . I was so scared I couldn’t eat a bite of breakfast and my mother made me carry a buttered roll in my book bag. I flushed it down the toilet in the Girls’ Room.
”

  Sara laughed. “I’m not that scared. Besides, all my friends from Mapleton will be with me and Jennifer’s in my homeroom.”

  “You’re braver than I was.”

  After breakfast B.B. brushed Sara’s hair, which was thick and honey-colored, like Andrew’s. “A braid or a ponytail?” B.B. asked.

  “A braid,” Sara said.

  When B.B. finished her hair, Sara collected her new notebook and pencils. They walked to the front door together. “Goodbye . . .” B.B. said, “I love you.”

  “And I love you,” Sara answered.

  “For how long?” B.B. asked.

  “For always and forever.”

  “That’s how long I’ll love you too.”

  B.B. gave Sara a hug, then went back to the kitchen and put the breakfast dishes in the sink to soak.

  UNTIL LAST SPRING B.B.’s life in Boulder, aside from Mitch, had been peaceful and rewarding. Then, in May, the letter from Andrew had come. B.B. had arrived at her office a few minutes later than usual that day because she had taken extra time dressing. She had invited Clare and Margo to join her for lunch at The James to discuss an intriguing real estate deal. A twenty-acre parcel of land outside of town had come on the market and if she could interest Clare in putting up half the cash, she was ready to make an offer. It was the perfect site for passive-solar cluster housing, a concept she knew appealed to Margo. She was prepared to offer Margo a piece of the action in exchange for her architectural services. She admired Margo’s work. It had a class feeling, even when it was just a remodeled garage.

  Miranda, B.B.’s secretary, had brought in the morning mail before noon and B.B., thumbing through it, had stopped when she’d come to the letter from Andrew, marked personal.

  They never wrote. All communication between them regarding Sara was handled through his attorney in Miami and hers in Boulder. So what was this?