Original Sins

by Lisa Alther

  “The jacket stays as it is,” Harold snapped. “Coffee please, Emily. Cream, no sugar. Joe?”

  The first Friday Justin was away, Maria had a women’s fancy dress party. She greeted guests at her door in a maid’s uniform, black with ruffled white apron, carefully helped everyone out of her fur or coat, then hurled each wrap into the hall corner, where it flopped to the floor.

  Emily put a cigarette in her long tortoise-shell holder, drew on it, and looked around. Most of the women she knew at least by sight. The women’s group was out in full force. Women were wearing flappers’ dresses, rayon dresses with padded shoulders from the forties, wedding dresses. Sammie wore only a girdle, a fox boa, and high red boots with spurs. She kept tugging at the girdle and announcing through clenched teeth, “This girdle is killing me!” Elaborate hairdos, gobs of makeup. A dozen brands of perfume mingled in the air. Emily was wearing a long pink bridesmaid dress from Corinne’s wedding to a Lowell. She stood by herself and watched. There was nothing wrong with this scene. She was determined not to get into a twit and start seeing these nice women as merely missionaries and consumers of political fads. They were her friends and potential friends. Just because she was straight and committed to her marriage was no reason not to enjoy them.

  Lou came over and they embraced. A record of sixties’ songs was playing, and they began dancing to “Mustang Sally.”

  “Remember how we used to drive Joan crazy talking about my natural rhythm?” asked Lou.

  “Weren’t we terrible?”

  “Wasn’t she terrible?” said Lou. “You know, Emily, that hurt me real bad when you turned on me freshman year.”

  “I’m sorry, Lou. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  “Shit, none of us did back then.”

  “Meaning we do now?”

  “Getting there.”

  Getting there, wondered Emily, thrusting her hip sideways. “… ride, Sally, ride …,” wailed the roomful of women.

  Maria was by now stripped down to support hose, white nurse shoes, bloomers, and a Merry Widow long-line bra. Emily felt nostalgic looking at the bra. The Ingenues had called them Iron Lungs. She’d worn one to the Plantation Balls and the KT Formals. Maria glided and elbowed her way through the dancers, prancing and joking with women on all sides, several of whom had been or still were her lovers.

  Lou and Emily wandered into Maria’s bedroom, which she’d turned into a photography studio with a Victorian settee and a vase of feather dusters, backed by a velvet drape. Two women in high-necked Edwardian dresses were being photographed. They struck poses in their prim dresses, most involving shoving hands up each other’s skirts or grabbing breasts, while sitting with their backs and necks rigid, their eyes straight ahead and their lips pursed like stern schoolteachers.

  Emily contrasted this party to the scene she’d return home to. She’d pay the babysitter; look in on Matt and kiss him and tuck him in; climb between cold sheets and lie there, grateful to be alone if poor Justin and his un-together head were the alternative. Meanwhile, these women would be going off to do God knew what to each other.

  She was close to thirty now. She had some grey hair, and her breasts and belly were starting to sag. She was about to reach her maximum sexual capacity, according to Justin, who’d read it in Playboy. Yet sex for her had become merely another household task, like taking out the garbage. The last time she was in Newland, her mother had said, “The thing about your generation is that you’ve never grown up. When I was your age, I had three children. I was running this house and Ruby and a yard boy, entertaining for your father.” As Emily saw it, they’d grown up too fast. At the age when her parents were dancing to Tommy Dorsey, Emily and Justin were marching on Washington. They hadn’t seen how they could bring children into such an inadequate world, so they set out to remake it first. Maybe it was childish to think this was possible. But in any case, lots of people Emily knew were just now entering the adolescence they’d missed out on. And she could see their point, as she watched the raucous dancing to Booker T and the M.G.’s. Women were bumping, grinding, thrusting their arms pistonlike into the air, and shouting with laughter. She wanted to get out there and play, too.

  She tried to tell herself that most of these women didn’t have children, but there were Lou and Maria bumping with the best of them.

  “… yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yes indeed! All I really need … Good loving! …”

  Maria grabbed her for a slow song. Embarrassed, Emily said, “What’s the politically acceptable way for women to slow dance?”

  “No one leads,” she said, putting a hand around Emily’s waist and one on her shoulder. Emily did the same, and Maria taught her a slow swaying step that involved pushing against each other with upper thighs. She barely caught the words: “… after all these years of trying, self-denying, and lonely waiting …”

  The dancing stopped while two women in wedding dresses, one pregnant, were married by a woman in a blue doctoral gown and cap and hood. Afterward they embraced with mock desperation. One tossed a vibrator to the waiting bridesmaids. As they ran the gauntlet, everyone threw handfuls of Quaker Puffed Rice.

  As Emily was leaving, Maria and she kissed on the mouth, Maria studied her, frowning. All the way home Emily could think only of the fact that there had been no beard.

  The next morning Emily marched back and forth through the apartment, abandoning cigarettes and cups of coffee. Matt scurried after her, dragging toys. The Great Ear carried on a conversation about the likelihood of there being tadpoles in the Hudson. But the rest of her was locked in a silent dialogue: This is a big mistake. It is the last thing I need. It would be so inconvenient socially. How would I explain a woman lover to my friends and family? They’d feel they’d have to invite her places with me, and then they’d be uncomfortable.

  She knew she was in deep trouble when Amy Vanderbilt took over.

  Making love to a woman. Bad enough. But making love to anyone besides her husband was shocking. When she was growing up, every adult had been coupled. If someone was unhappy, no one knew it. When Doctor Borgard divorced his wife of twenty years to marry his nurse, the town talked about nothing else for weeks.

  Monogamy: If her sex drive were released from it, what would happen? It was possible it would prove uncontainable. Maybe she’d lust after everything in sight. Broomsticks and doorknobs and gear shifts. No energy for her work or her child. No time to eat properly, or get enough sleep. Her health would begin to fail …

  She looked in the bathroom mirror. Her face was wrinkled like an old oil painting. She was on her way to dying, and she hadn’t thoroughly lived.

  All right. Take a lover, she told herself. But how about some nice man? Why do you have to make yourself a pariah as well as an adultress? Packs of dogs will snap at your heels. Gangs of small children will throw large stones. Why are you doing this?

  Because I want to, came the answer.

  But you’ll ruin your safe neat orderly life.

  Fuck it, came the reply.

  She took Matt to the Museum of Natural History. On the way to his old friends, the dinosaurs, they passed her old friends in their glass cases—models of the ape men and early humans. Neanderthal Man, Java Man, Peking Man. She reflected that this, after all, was what sex used to be about—keeping the race going. Natural selection had ensured that a situation least likely to be enjoyable would prevail: Those strains survived in which males were able to pump the maximum amount of sperm into females. This occurred when males ejaculated quickly without bringing the female to orgasm. Perpetually turned on, she would demand unending ejaculations.

  Obviously the race didn’t need assistance in reproducing itself these days. But Scarsdale Man was stuck with this inherited physiology. Justin and she had it calculated to the thrust: the kind and amount of foreplay, the precise speed and angle that triggered orgasm for each. It had become a hygienic routine, like brushing teeth to remove plaque.

  As she watched Matt studying the huge carca
sses, she recalled that Justin and she hadn’t always been so efficient. Sometimes in the winter they’d borrow a cabin in the Adirondacks and spend several days rolling around naked under bearskins by a fire. Many weekends they’d been in bed all day long discovering new ways to release each other. Rather than studying piles of old bones in museums. Their lovemaking had become efficient when they’d had to fit it in around naps and feedings and babysitters. This was nobody’s fault. Routines and responsibilities were what parenthood was about. But they left little space for passion. Like a genie being released from the bottle of domestic duty, her attraction to Maria was taking on a life of its own.

  After Matt was asleep, she put on a nightgown and robe and set a stack of records on the stereo. She sat on the couch reading a manuscript, with a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of wine. At some point she realized she’d smoked half the cigarettes and drunk most of the wine, and was only on page fourteen.

  Someone was singing “Shenando.” She listened and was soon weeping.

  “… oh Shenando, I long to see you. / Far away, you rolling waters …”

  She kept thinking she’d escaped from the goddam place, but at the least excuse, longing for it would flare up like residual malaria in her bloodstream. Continuity, Stability, Loyalty, the values that growing up in that lush green valley had bred into her—these were important over the long haul. Maria and that bunch, they were butterflies. They darted from place to place, cause to cause, person to person, leaving in their wakes unfulfilled commitments. They weren’t serious people. Maria would make love with her, and the next day she’d be off. So what was the point in shaking up Justin and Matt (and herself)?

  On the other hand, why not do something just for fun, or just out of curiosity? Who’d be harmed? Probably Justin wouldn’t care. He might even be relieved. And how could it harm Matt if his mother were having fun?

  Another record fell. Tammy Wynette’s voice filled the room: “Stand by your man …”

  She lit another cigarette, guzzled some wine and listened—about the brave wife waiting for the return of her carousing husband. Was Justin carousing at his meditation center? Did one carouse at a meditation center? What if he were? Justin had caroused from time to time, but he always came back to the Great Ear in the end. That was how men were. And how were women? A Real Woman waited with Patience and Loyalty. This was her role. And by God, she’d fulfill it! These were the values she’d been raised with, and they were admirable!

  She smashed out her cigarette and marched into Matt’s room. He slept so soundly, his hair damp and rumpled, his fists clenched. When she kissed his flushed cheek, he grunted, flung out an arm and turned over. Emily vowed she’d never do anything that might threaten his home life.

  She hollowed out a nest among her blankets and pillows. As she lay with her head swimming from the wine, her hand sought her clitoris, and she moaned, trying to pretend it was Justin’s hand rather than Maria’s.

  In the morning, hung over, she walked with Matt through Riverside Park. White, water-inflated prophylactics from midnight matings in the bushes quivered in the murky Hudson.

  “What are those?” Matt demanded, as they leaned on the railing.

  “Let’s not go into it.”

  “But what are they, Mom?”

  “Dead fish or something. Hell, I don’t know. Leave me alone.”

  “Fish,” Matt decided. “Look at those funny fish,” he ordered the man next to him.

  “Oh, do come on!” Emily dragged him away, aware of her missed opportunity to advance his sexual education. The less anyone knew about any of it, the better.

  After lunch she read Matt a book about a family of anthropomorphic frogs who lived in a pond in Central Park. Then Matt went to play in his room, and Emily put on some records and gazed at the Times. Why they had to make the damn thing so thick was beyond her. People in other parts of the globe got through Sundays without four-inch-thick bundles of newsprint. She squinted through her hangover at the headlines of the latest atrocities. She suddenly reflected that you become an adult once you stop assigning human characteristics to animals à la Walt Disney and began assigning animal characteristics to humans. The paper dropped into her lap as she tried to figure out what had come over her yesterday. All that yearning and renunciation. What nonsense.

  The record changed, and a woman began singing the slow song Maria and she had danced to. She recalled abruptly what yesterday’s seizure had been about. “… I’ve been waiting so long for another song …”

  The phone rang. It was Maria inviting her to supper.

  “I don’t know if I can. Justin’s away.”

  “Oh yeah, I forgot. Well, bring Matt along.”

  “He’s got to get up early for the day-care thing. I’ll see if I can find a sitter and call you back.”

  “Hey, are you OK?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. Why?”

  “I don’t know. You sound a little weird.”

  “I’m just hung over.”

  “While the cat’s away, and like that?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  Emily sat down on the couch. She could call back and say she couldn’t find a sitter. On the other hand, Maria was a close friend, and Emily couldn’t avoid her indefinitely.

  No, the whole notion was ridiculous. She’d been high on wine the night she’d danced with Maria, and again last night. She was lonely with Justin gone, and that was all. The loneliness was perching wherever it could, like a vulture on a tree branch. She wasn’t reared to make love with women, and she wasn’t reared to be unfaithful to her husband—it simply wasn’t her. It was out of the question.

  A Honey Sweet record came on, and she found herself listening intently.

  “A woman needs a man to hold …”

  Garbage! Wasn’t this what she’d left Newland to get away from? Sally trapped in that little wooden box in the mill village, poaching onions, with Pampers in her pockets, and teething rings through her buttonholes. Yet was Emily’s life different except in external detail? She too spent all her time doing only what other people wanted, never consulting herself to find out what she might want. She marched to the phone and called the sitter.

  It was a long supper that included two bottles of wine. They discussed the headlines, did a postmortem of the party, and avoided looking each other in the eye. Emily knew the first move, if there was to be one, was hers. It was a point of pride with Maria not to seduce her straight friends. What if she’d misunderstood and Maria wasn’t interested? Maria would reject her, she’d be humiliated, her sex life would be set back decades. Or Maria would accept, but be surprised and detached. For the first time Emily understood some of the agonies of men. Why hadn’t she stayed home with a good book?

  “Well,” said Emily. “… guess I’d better be going … baby sitter … beauty sleep … work tomorrow …”

  “Oh. Yes. Right. Fine. Let me get your coat.”

  As Maria got up, Emily put her hand, trembling, on Maria’s knee. They both looked at it as though it were a dying fish.

  “Hmmm.” Maria sat back down.

  “Damn it, I don’t know how to do this.”

  “You’re doing just fine.” Maria picked up Emily’s hand in both hers. “But this is the last thing in the world I want.”

  Emily’s heart collided with her stomach. She withdrew her hand, unable to look at Maria. “You’re not … attracted to me?”

  Maria retrieved her hand. “I’m very attracted to you. But I’m terrified.”

  “You terrified?”

  “Well, it looks as though your plate’s pretty full.”

  Emily removed her hand. “It feels empty to me.”

  Maria reclaimed the hand. “It’s just that the cook’s on vacation. But he’ll be back, and I don’t want to be responsible for shaking up your life.”

  “You flatter yourself.” Emily laughed. “I promise I wouldn’t fall in love with you, Maria, and get all mushy. I know you’d hate that.”

 
“Emily, everyone starts out thinking she’s fallen for someone who just ‘happens’ to be a woman. Or that she’ll just have a piece of female flesh on the side, and that it’s no big deal. But it usually becomes a big deal. It’s not something to go into lightly. It involves a lot more than the sex of the people you sleep with.”

  “Jesus, you make it sound like Saul on the road to Damascus.” Emily removed her hand. “Ah, shit, Maria, you’re right, I know that much about myself. I can’t keep things casual. When you grow up in a small town, you try to turn each encounter into a unique interpersonal experience.”

  “That isn’t exactly what I meant. What happens is, you turn yourself into an outsider. You’re no longer playing by society’s rules, so how you perceive those rules and the people who abide by them starts shifting. It can be very heavy.”

  “But I’ve been an outsider all my life.”

  They sat in silence.

  “Why is this stuff always so awkward?” inquired Maria.

  “Is it? I wouldn’t know.”

  She nodded.

  “I don’t know, it sounds as though this isn’t fated to happen, Maria. But you should know how appealing I find you.” Emily stood up, relieved.

  “And me you, darling.” Maria stood up, also looking relieved. They embraced. They kissed. The kiss went on and on. Emily found her hand of its own accord touching Maria’s breast. A breast filling her shameless hand, the stiffening nipple nuzzling her palm …

  Harold walked into her office and informed her he was switching companies. His projects here were being dropped. Emily stared at him. When editors left, they usually asked their secretaries to go with them. Emily noticed he was avoiding such an invitation. He muttered something about asking around to see if anyone here was looking for a “girl” and walked out. She tried to tell herself maybe he wasn’t allowed a secretary at the new place, or one was already there.

  She followed him into his office. “What about Maggie’s book?”

  “What about it?”

  “Is it being dropped?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t know. Guess you’d be glad?”