The Wrong Kind of Woman

by Sarah McCraw Crow

  Patty, Dad’s new wife, was the opposite of Mom, super smiley and okay with whatever Dad said. When Sam had called Mom from outside the subway to say he’d be home in a little while, but was going to make a quick stop at Dad’s, she’d been quiet for a minute.

  Of course, Mom had said. I don’t want you to get too—She’d paused. Never mind, just give them my best, okay?

  In the elevator, unhappiness jabbed at him. He didn’t want to see Dad with a baby, the whole idea was preposterous, but he forced himself to trudge down the hall, which smelled of other people’s cooking because so many people lived here. Dad’s door was propped open; Sam knocked and went through.

  In the tiny kitchen, Dad was setting bagels on a platter, cream cheese and lox on another plate, and he came forward, platter in hand, hugging Sam with his free hand. Dad wasn’t a big hugger, so that was a surprise. Dad smelled like always, but a little sweaty too, like he hadn’t had a shower.

  The apartment had only modern furniture—plasticky translucent chairs and a small glass dining table, and a weird couch with no arms—but it was cluttered, a basket of diapers on the floor, laundry in another basket, tiny soft pajamas draped over one of the translucent chairs. The apartment was a one-bedroom, and Sam wondered where they kept the baby.

  From the couch under the window, Patty called a hello. The baby lay on Patty’s lap sleeping, his tiny hands clasped under his tiny chin. Patty wore a baggy blue top, and she looked awful, her skin too shiny, dark circles under her eyes. She turned her face up for a kiss.

  “Hi, Patty.” Sam handed her the bookstore bag. “That’s for the baby. I’m sorry it’s so small.”

  “Oh,” Patty said. “I’m sure it’s lovely. Thank you, Sam.” She leaned forward to call to Dad. “Sam brought a gift, Harry.”

  “Great!” Dad’s voice was so hearty and fake that Sam had to hold in a laugh.

  “Go wash your hands and you can hold the baby,” Patty said.

  He did so, then scooted in next to her on the couch. It was an uncomfortable couch, kind of stiff, the seat part too wide, and he leaned back a little, trying to get himself situated. Baby Adam had a head full of black hair, which seemed a little weird, and he asked about it.

  “It’s falling out already, see?” Patty said. “Pretty soon he won’t have any left.”

  “Is that okay?” Sam asked. “Is he okay?”

  “Sure, it’s fine.”

  “That’s like you, Sam, remember?” Dad said, taking a seat across from him. He bit into a sesame bagel.

  “How would I remember that?” Sam said.

  “From photos, dumbass—”

  “Harry,” Patty said. “Is that necessary?”

  “Sorry, Sam, I’m a little tired.”

  “That’s okay,” Sam said, surprised at Dad’s quick apology.

  Patty handed him a clean diaper. “Put that on your shoulder.” She lifted the sleeping baby up, her arms cradled underneath. “Here you go.” The baby rested against his chest now, soft head leaning on his shoulder. His own big hand covered the baby’s entire back. Baby Adam made a sighing sound, but he didn’t wake up.

  “Just like that,” Patty said. “See, you’re a natural.”

  Sam’s eyes teared up, shit, he was going to cry. Patty’s eyes were shiny too. “Isn’t he a sweet little thing?” she said. “He’s just got his days and nights mixed up, that’s all. He wants to be awake all night.”

  “Tell me about it,” Dad said. “We’re all exhausted. I don’t remember it being like this.”

  “That’s because Adele probably had a baby nurse.” Sam heard the edge in Patty’s voice.

  “You’re right, sweetheart, there was a baby nurse. Irish woman. Man, she was something. Very bossy, kept sending me away, barely let me see the baby—barely let me see you, Sam. Then Adele’s mom came for a month. Yeah, they kept sending me away, sending me back to the office.”

  Baby Adam snuffled, moving his little head from side to side, as if he needed to wipe his tiny nose on Sam’s shoulder, then let out a bleat of a sob. Sam turned Patty’s way, not sure what to do. Patty reached over, gently lifting the baby up and back into the crook of her arm.

  “Just going to feed him now.” Patty and the baby disappeared into the bedroom, which left him alone with Dad. Sam got up to get a bagel.

  “How’re you doing, Sam?” Dad said, after Sam sat back down. “I’m sorry it’s been a while. This has been—” he threw an arm out to indicate the messy apartment “—a lot. And there’s just a whole lot of crap at work right now.” Dad did look pretty tired, the lines from mouth to nose deeper than usual.

  “Yeah,” Sam said. “Everything’s fine, school’s fine.” He wanted to tell about Elodie, and he even wanted to tell about the jazz band’s tribute concert last week, how together they’d sounded, for once. Too many things to tell. “The baby seems good,” he said. “Healthy, right?”

  “Right,” Dad said. “He’s a good baby. Like you were. Except you didn’t have your days and nights mixed up like Adam.” He leaned close, lowered his voice. “Patty’s a little emotional, but that’s to be expected, I guess. I’m too old for this.”

  Dad asked him how his classes were going, so he talked about Weissman’s class, how he’d gotten a lot more proficient with the mainframe and had been part of a group that sent a message from one computer to another, from Clarendon down to IBM headquarters in Armonk. He didn’t mention the project with Jerry or the cipher he’d made for Elodie.

  “Huh,” Dad said. “IBM, huh? So it’s a class about the computer?”

  “It’s a math class, but with a computing component. For my major.”

  “Huh,” Dad said again.

  Sam waited for Dad to make one of his usual cracks about worthwhile majors and crap majors, and striking out and doing things on your own, the way Zayde Waxman had done.

  “I always knew you were really smart,” Dad said, and he swatted Sam on the knee, which caused Sam’s half-eaten bagel to slide off the plate and onto the floor.

  “I always wanted to go to college,” Patty said, from the bedroom doorway. Baby Adam was on her shoulder, asleep again, conked out as if he’d been kept awake for days. She smiled down at Sam. Now she’d probably tell him to make the most of college, that these were the best years of his life, the way grown-ups always did.

  “I don’t even know what to say to that,” Dad said.

  “You don’t need to say anything, it’s not a comment about you,” Patty said. “Make the world a better place, Sam. I know you can do it.”

  * * *

  Virginia took her time cleaning up after dinner. As she scrubbed the casserole pan and stacked the clean dinner dishes, she considered her coworker Jeannette, her ease and lightness as she moved around the reference room. In her pantsuits and color-block dresses and short layered hair, Jeannette was youthful, but she showed the same authoritative yet cheerful manner with everyone. Jeannette wasn’t cowed by the sharp demands of endowed professors like Frank Randolph (at the reference desk, Virginia had hidden behind a stack of books when he’d come in looking for an antique book of maps, not wanting to face him). And Jeannette wasn’t irritated by the silliness of the boys’ questions, or the way some of them draped themselves across the desk, trying to flirt with this nice young librarian, hoping she might offer to do their research for them.

  “I love finding out new things, don’t you?” Jeannette had said. “Any time someone asks me how to find something, I learn something too. Yesterday it was Darwin and barnacles, a little while ago banknotes and coinage in colonial America. Now tell me more about Miss Peale, what you’ve got so far.”

  Virginia had told Jeannette about writing to Professor Kimball at Harvard, how she’d described this new research thread, Sarah Miriam Peale’s portraits. But she didn’t have the confidence to declare that this, this, was worth her while and everyone
else’s. To study Miss Peale’s influences—Copley, obviously, and the old masters, Rembrandt, though the old master pictures would have been copies—and her place as a working artist in a prosperous young America. But what had allowed Sarah Peale her own confidence? Sarah Peale had said, Here I am, hire me, I know what I’m doing as well as my male cousins, as well as my father and my famous uncle. Sarah Peale’s sister was also a portraitist. Maybe Sarah and her sister hadn’t known any better, had just gone charging ahead.

  She rinsed the percolator, filling it with coffee grounds for tomorrow, then crossed the hall into the den to draw the curtains. Rebecca slouched on the couch, watching The Brady Bunch just as she used to do every Friday night. It made Virginia feel tender for her daughter, but to say anything would wreck the moment, so she just sank down to watch TV too.

  Carol Brady was supposed to be a widow, Mike Brady a widower, though you’d never know it. The two were flat and undamaged, twinkly with wry humor. Maybe that was because they’d each found their perfect counterpart. Or maybe that’s because they’re made of cardboard, Oliver would say. On the screen, Mike, Carol, and daughter Jan were in Mike’s home office, Jan crying about a disastrous day at school.

  The Partridge Family, which came right after The Brady Bunch, was more of the same. Until now, Virginia hadn’t noticed that Shirley Partridge was alone, widowed or divorced. Shirley Partridge too was wry, eye rolling, full of witty quips, and all her kids bouncy and cheerful. No one was drunk. No one was angry. Whatever the problem of the week was, it was cute and solvable.

  During the ads, Virginia reminded Rebecca about the women’s meeting. Rebecca half listened, eyes on the screen, watching the cheerful, singing McDonald’s workers. Those goddamn women’s libbers, Virginia’s dad would have said, if he’d lived long enough to read about the marches, the movement.

  Was she a women’s libber? Long ago, at Smith, she’d felt she belonged. The girls came from all over, from New England, but also California, Texas, Wisconsin, and Virginia. “Virginia from Virginia” or “V from V,” her freshman hall mates called her.

  Senior year, other girls had lined up teaching jobs, and two were going home to work in their families’ businesses, a newspaper in Pennsylvania, a bank in Ohio. Two were headed to grad school in education. And one brilliant girl, their valedictorian, to medical school. Virginia was none of these things. She’d thought about art history, had sent away for information about graduate programs, but she wasn’t sure, the way everyone else was. At last she went forward with grad school; she’d just keep doing what she’d been doing these four years. If she’d had the certainty and confidence of a Sarah Miriam Peale back then, where would she be now?

  Maybe when Rebecca got to college everything would be different. No more white gloves at dinner and on dates. Coed colleges everywhere, coed dorms, coed bathrooms. No grouchy, suspicious housemothers looking to keep all the boys out, out, out.

  “Why are you looking at me like that,” Rebecca said, eyes on the TV.

  “Oh, nothing. Just thinking about college, how different it will be for you from how it was for me.”

  “Well, duh, Mom, of course it will be different. You went to college a long time ago.”

  “In the olden days, right?”

  “Uh-huh. When everything was black-and-white.”

  * * *

  The evening of the meeting, Virginia waited with Helen and Lily. They’d decided—well, Louise had decreed—that it would be best to run an informational meeting with expert speakers, the woman who’d started the health collective in Boston, and later branch out into smaller discussion groups. Virginia had been relieved and irritated in equal measure—relieved because the idea of hosting such a meeting felt a little embarrassing, and irritated because Louise sometimes acted imperiously, like the Louise that Oliver used to complain about.

  After Louise had reserved the largest Clarendon classroom, they’d all worried that no one would show up. Helen had spoken with one of the exchange girls, who’d said she and a couple of others wanted five minutes to talk about their own project, something about coeducation. And Virginia had told Jeannette, who’d suggested making a flyer—that was what the college kids did, didn’t they?—so Virginia had typed up two notices, pinning one on the bulletin board outside the library’s stacks, and one at the town library.

  Tonight the room felt too big and echoing, more auditorium than classroom. Virginia checked the snack table, where they’d set out oatmeal cookies, popcorn, chips, punch. She pushed the napkins around, restacked the cups, as if a good-looking snack table would guarantee a successful meeting. Louise was still outside waiting for the speakers, who were driving up together from Boston, one from the Boston chapter of NOW, the other from the Boston Women’s Health Collective.

  At last two women came through the door, women Virginia had never seen before. Helen steered them to the sign-up sheet. Then Jeannette! Virginia had to give her a hug, she was so glad that someone she knew had shown up. Next, four exchange girls. They must have called on friends at other schools, because a minute later there was a whole clump of them, twenty-five or thirty.

  And then Eileen and Gerda. Virginia went to greet them. Eileen let out a high-pitched giggle, and said Paul didn’t have any idea that she was here tonight, and that she couldn’t stay long.

  “Does it matter?” Gerda asked.

  Virginia imagined Oliver’s reaction. He’d be peeved, disapproving. Or maybe, like Eileen, she wouldn’t have told him where she was going tonight. She pointed out the snack table to her neighbors, and when she looked again at the rows of chairs, she saw that the classroom was nearly three-quarters full. And still a few more women came through the door.

  Virginia made her way to the front row. Louise was seating the speakers at a table at the front of the room, and she nodded at the four of them.

  Louise stood next to the speakers’ table, waiting for the room to quiet down. She thanked everyone for coming out on a rainy night. “We’re at the start of something big here, and we’re happy to introduce some wonderful speakers.” She read the National Organization for Women’s mission statement, and asked the group to welcome NOW’s Boston representative.

  The NOW woman wore a maxiskirt with a blouse tucked into it, her long hair pulled back in a low ponytail and granny glasses that slipped down her nose, an old-fashioned look. Virginia chided herself; appearance wasn’t what mattered, yet it was still the thing she noticed first.

  “Let’s have a show of hands,” the NOW woman said, smiling out at the group. “How many of you have applied for a mortgage? Not you young college women, but the householders among us.” Hands went up here and there, and the NOW woman waited a beat. “How many applied without a husband?” The hands disappeared.

  “How often do we talk about how difficult, sometimes impossible, the banks make it for a woman to get a mortgage, a loan, even a department-store credit card, without a husband’s signature and approval? That’s right, we don’t talk about it. Yet we all know it.”

  The NOW woman began to talk about the differences in men’s and women’s salaries, how a woman with a graduate degree earned only as much as a man with an eighth-grade education. The audience groaned. “We’re nearly three-quarters of the way through the twentieth century, but women are trapped in a nineteenth-century world.”

  As she described NOW’s platform and the rights the group were calling for, the woman’s voice took on the cadence of a chant. Virginia sensed the exchange students in the rows behind her getting to their feet, as the rest of the audience clapped with enthusiasm. She felt the zing and spirit of all the energy in the room; her hands burned from clapping and she began to feel like she was part of something.

  The second speaker, older, plump, with short curly hair, stood up and waited for her handouts to be passed from one person to the next. Stapled-together pages, Boston Women’s Health Collective: A Guide. There weren
’t enough handouts, so people had to share, leaning in together to look.

  “We think it’s time for a new movement of woman-centered care,” the speaker said. “The patriarchy has done women terribly wrong, teaching us all the wrong lessons and giving us the wrong kind of care. From an early age, we’re taught not to value our own bodies and our own capabilities.” Virginia peered at the Health Collective’s booklet on Helen’s lap, and got a glimpse of hand-drawn illustrations, female and male reproductive systems.

  “One of our goals is to help women stop feeling shame about their bodies,” the speaker was saying. “Here’s a simple exercise. You can try it here, in the restroom, or in your own bedroom at home. Learn what your own genitalia look like—yes, you can do it,” she said, as gasps and giggles rippled around the classroom. “You simply take a hand mirror or even a compact, and examine yourself. Taste your own secretions.” Another series of drawn-in breaths and suppressed laughs.

  Virginia felt her temples and chest warming, felt the urge to laugh out loud. She stared up at the wall clock so as not to burst out laughing.

  “If anyone wants to see herself, I’ve set some hand mirrors on the table over there.” The speaker pointed to her left.

  A young woman squeezed past her friends and made her way to the table, smiling back at the other young women as if she were accepting their dare. She picked up a mirror and left the classroom, using the mirror to wave at her friends. The girls buzzed and whispered, and a few more followed the first one out of the classroom.

  Helen elbowed her. “Oh, good Lord, they’re going to do it right in here,” she whispered. Virginia followed Helen’s gaze to the far side of the room, where three or four of the girls had gone to sit on the floor, and were now pulling jeans down and skirts up. They sat cross-legged or with knees up, bending over and gazing at their own private parts with compact mirrors. They were laughing, enjoying themselves, comfortable in their self-imposed nakedness. Near the back, someone had left the room, the door banging shut.