by Lisa Alther
Each morning we got up at seven. While Ira did fifteen minutes of chin-ups and push-ups and running in place, while he showered and shaved, I cooked his breakfast: two fried eggs over easy, two strips of bacon, two slices of buttered toast with jam, orange juice, and coffee. He proudly remarked that he had eaten the exact same breakfast every morning for fifteen years. At 7:50 he was out the door and into his red fire chief’s car on his way to his office on Main Street. Here he spent the morning selling either Sno Cats or Honda trail bikes, depending on the season. He also investigated insurance claims and discussed convertible versus renewable policies. Like a lung surgeon who owns a tobacco farm as a tax write-off, Ira got his customers both coming and going — sold them his machines, then sold them insurance policies covering what could happen on these machines.
As the bell on the steeple of the Community Church chimed twelve, he walked in the door for his lunch of Campbell’s tomato-rice soup and a bologna and cheese sandwich on Wonder Bread and coffee. At 12:50 he returned to his office for more discussions — of participating versus nonparticipating policies, of decreasing term and endowment policies, minimum deposit plans, variable-life plans, double indemnity, waiver of premiums, and guaranteed insurability riders.
While Ira was assisting the males of Stark’s Bog with their financial planning, I ironed his shirts. He liked them ironed a certain way, folded just so. I patted them fondly as I folded. I scrubbed his toilet bowl. I waxed his floors. It was a huge house — a great hulking antique stone colonial, built by his forebear Father Bliss, whose brooding portrait hung over the parlor mantel. The family resemblance was appalling: Father Bliss had the same wide alarmed eyes, the same flaring nostrils, the same gleaming cheekbones and high forehead as Ira himself. Only the hair was different. Ira’s was dark and curly and hung down over his forehead. Father Bliss’s was tied back in a ponytail, a Colonial hippy. Father Bliss had been a Scottish stonemason, had come to Vermont because of the marble and granite quarries being opened up, had built stone houses around the state, including the one of which Ira and I were now custodians. He had also carved gravestones. Some of his remarkable productions stood in the small family plot out back — angels with round faces and hollow haunting eyes, enough to frighten anyone back from the shores of the Styx. Ira had grown up in this house. His father had been a farmer. Upon retirement he and Ira’s mother had sold half their acreage to buy a luxury condominium in Boca Raton. The developers of the Bliss farm, Pots o’ Gold, Inc., from Brooklyn, were building an Authentic Vermont Village in a nearby meadow, complete with prefab covered bridges and sugar shacks.
Ira’s ancestral manse was so vast and rambling that there was no end to the housework. As soon as I had dusted and polished my way through the antique pine furniture to the end of the ell, it was time to return to the formal parlor and start all over again, under the stern gaze of Father Bliss. In short, my married lot was harsh and tediously predictable. I loved it. I adored knowing exactly what I would be doing for the entire upcoming month. I wallowed in the luxurious knowledge of where Ira was at each moment, whom he was with, what my assignments were. I had tasted freedom at the Free Farm. It had killed Eddie, had nearly killed us all. I preferred my new life in this antique stone cage.
As the church bell chimed five, Ira would stride in. We ate dinner at six on the nose — steak or chops or a roast, potatoes, bread, pie and coffee. After dinner, Ira would take a cigar from a silver box on the sideboard. He would pour a shot glass of brandy. With his penknife, he would carefully cut off the round tip of the cigar. Then he would place the other rounded end in his mouth and suck at it and twirl it for a while. Finally, he would dip this end in the brandy and then fit on a silver cigar holder. Lighting it, he would draw deeply and settle back in his rush-seated armchair.
‘Are you happy with me, Ginny?’ he’d ask anxiously each evening. ‘Please tell me if you’re not. How will I know if you don’t?’
‘Ira, I couldn’t be happier,’ I’d reply. ‘I love our life together.’ And I did.
‘So do I,’ he’d assure me. ‘It’s so wonderful having you here. I’ve been so lonely.’
At seven-thirty Ira left for his meeting for that evening. (I envied him all his meetings, begrudged them to him: He would have so many entries in his obituary, and I would have none.) If it were a night marked on the calendar for sex, Ira and I would watch an hour of television. Then we would march upstairs and get on with it.
‘What am I doing wrong?’ he would ask, bewildered. ‘Believe me, Ginny, I’ve never had this problem before. As unhappy as my first wife must have been, I know I satisfied her sexually.’
‘It’s my problem, not yours,’ I’d comfort him, as he lay with his head on my chest. ‘But I really don’t see why I have to have an orgasm. I mean, I’m perfectly happy just watching you have one.’ The truth was, I was afraid of having an orgasm. With Eddie, I had lost all track of time on such occasions, had penetrated into a realm in which Eternal Present reigned. All sorts of weird things had gone on. I didn’t want anything to do with that stuff anymore. I loved knowing exactly what time it was, what minute of what hour. I didn’t want to make time stand still, or the earth move, or any of the rest of it. I wanted to stay firmly in touch with this world, fully in command of my senses.
‘But I feel inadequate just using you to come into. Men want women to experience the same joy they’re experiencing.’
‘I don’t see why. They’ve gotten along just fine for centuries without worrying about their women’s joy quota. Why now?’ I didn’t see how I could explain that I was burnt-out emotionally, that I wanted only peace and quiet and an orderly life from him. After all, he was a modern male, believed in equal orgasm for equal effort. How could I persuade him just to use me and not fret about it?
But Ira was inconsolably distressed that I wasn’t scaling the heights. ‘Ginny, I’m not making you happy,’ he’d insist after dinner, drawing on his cigar and studying my face anxiously. I decided to try to accommodate him, as a gift on our first anniversary. So one Wednesday night in March, after fifty-eight minutes of excessively imaginative foreplay and approximately 212 thrusts, I faked it. I gasped and groaned and shuddered and heaved, like Olivia de Havilland in the last throes of doomed childbirth in Gone With the Wind.
For good measure, I whispered fervently in his ear, ‘Oh Ira, I’m so happy. Thank you.’
He rolled over and switched on the light, beaming with delight. Then he leaned down and studied my chest, poking my flesh with his finger. He looked up, no longer beaming, his sensitive lips quivering. ‘You just pretended, Ginny. You lied to me.’
I opened one eye in the midst of my Academy Award-winning swoon and stared at him. How had he known? ‘How can you say that?’ I asked, more as a genuine question than as a protest.
‘Your chest. Women have red rashes on their necks and chests after orgasm.’
Shit. “Not all of them do, I bet.’ I would have to speak to my make-up man.
‘But you did fake it, didn’t you?’
I nodded yes guiltily. ‘I was just trying to please you, Ira.’
‘Jesum Crow, Ginny, a man doesn’t want to be defrauded into his pleasures! Please don’t do that again.’
‘I won’t. I’m sorry, Ira. And I will try harder to have a real orgasm.’
‘I should hope so.’
By now we were well into our second spring of connubial delights. Bulldozers had appeared in the field outside the kitchen window. They were grading roads for the chalet section of the Pots o’ Gold Vermont Village. Ira was now playing golf and/or riding his trail bike on Saturdays during the time he had devoted to snowmobiling in the winter. Trout season was also upon us. I spent three days making sixteen apple pies for Ira to take to his family’s fishing shack in the nearby mountains. He was going for the first week of the season with eight assorted male relatives. He confessed that he used up all his vacation time each year in this fashion — a week during trout season, a week during bird s
eason, a week during buck season, and a week during ice fishing season. In addition, he went for two weeks each year with his National Guard unit to Camp Drum in upper New York State. If I should want to go on a trip, I’d have to go alone. But if I did, what would his family say? But I was perfectly content in Stark’s Bog.
Because of Ira’s meetings and sporting events and job, I was finding myself with free time on my hands, even with that mausoleum of a house to clean. Consequently, I made a momentous decision: I would join the surprise shower circuit.
I had tried very hard to switch from high profile to low profile, for Ira’s sake. I had packed away my army fatigues, my lumberjack shirt, and my olive air force parka, my Sisterhood Is Powerful T-shirt, my combat boots. I had gone to St. Johnsbury and had bought some polyester pantsuits and jersey tops. I had unbraided my hair and now wore it pulled back and tied with a scarf. But people still crossed to the other side of the street when they saw me coming. At least they couldn’t see the butterfly tattooed on my hip that Eddie had loved to nibble and kiss. Even so, only Ira’s popularity prevented my being carried out of town on a rail.
At the weekly Wheelers ‘n’ Reelers square dances in the school gym, I would wander blindly, tripping and stumbling, through the intricate figures in my crinolined skirt and puffy scoop-necked blouse. The other dancers would push and pull me into position. The men in their cowboy boots and western shirts and string ties seemed to me to seize my hands for a promenade with great reluctance. The women, their full skirts swirling as we performed our ‘Birds in a Cage’ maneuvers in mid-circle eyed me with distaste. And each time Rodney was compelled to do-si-do with me, he would scowl back over his shoulder, his folded arms held high, and would snarl, ‘Don’t forget: I’m onto you, Mrs. Bliss.’
I would fall into Ira’s arms with relief when it was time for him to swing me as his corner lady. He would hold me tightly against his chest and would study my face. ‘Are you having fun, Ginny? Isn’t this great stuff?’
‘Wonderful!’ I’d gasp gaily, twirling off to another do-si-do with Rodney.
But Angela, Ira’s younger sister, had befriended me. She had been to secretarial school in Albany before relenting and returning to marry her high school boyfriend and live happily ever after. She would always say reassuringly, ‘Jesum Crow, Ginny, I saw hippies a lot worse than you in Albany.’
Angela was a big gun on the surprise shower scene and among the Tupperware party set. (Actually, the two groups were one and the same.) She also happened to be refreshment chairman of the Women’s Auxiliary of the Stark’s Bog Volunteer Fire Department. In short, Angela was my In.
I started out modestly by attending a Tupperware party at Angela’s split-level ranch on the opposite edge of town. Fifteen women of different ages were there. Angela had warned them in advance so that they wouldn’t blanch too noticeably as I walked through the door. Several of the less socially hardy had left in a huff. Those who remained behaved admirably, there being an awkward silence of only three and a half minutes upon my arrival. I smiled a lot to indicate my unimpeachable good will, and I talked as little as possible, intent upon mastering the jargon and discerning the sanctioned topics for conversation first. These turned out to be as follows: 1) the weather; 2) one’s children; 3) cooking; 4) the weather. I had no children, and clearly none of the assembled were into soybean casseroles. But vis a vis the weather, I snatched the ball and ran with it.
‘Gee, mud season is really hanging on this spring, isn’t it?’ I asked a large gray-haired woman with a wart on her nose.
‘Yes, it is,’ she agreed, startled to be addressed by a reformed Soybeaner on such a harmless topic.
‘Some weather for May, huh?’
‘A-yup.’
‘I keep waiting for some sunshine,’ I confessed.
‘Hmmm,’ she replied noncommittally. Could the same sun that shone on Soybean People possibly be the one that shone on Stark’s Boggers? she appeared to be asking herself.
‘Do you think it’s unusually cool this spring?’
“Well — don’t know. Could be.’ She glanced around the room at her friends, fearful that they might think she was conversing voluntarily with this subversive.
‘Maybe we’re skipping spring and moving right into summer!’ I laughed weakly.
She looked at me with distaste.
Undaunted, I said, “Yup, sure looks like we’re due for a gorgeous summer after this rotten spring.’
Just as I was exhausting my variations on this theme, our area Tupperware representative, a svelte young woman in a navy pantsuit and a blond bouffant such as I hadn’t seen since the Bloody Bucket, stood up and welcomed us and began her pitch designed to raise our kitchen consciousness.
‘Now, girls,’ she began urgently, ‘I know you’ve all been waiting to hear about the grr-eat new Tupperware products that have just come out, designed as always to help today’s busy homemaker. So I won’t waste another minute!’
A dizzying succession of plastic bacon keepers, cauliflower crispers, bowls and canisters and molds swirled from hand to hand. Each woman was inspecting them with the eye of an expert jeweler for cut diamonds, turning them this way and that, making remarks to neighbors.
‘Yes, girls,’ the Tupperware lady continued, ‘this is exactly why we sell our kitchen-tested products on the unique home party plan, so that all the outstanding features can be demonstrated right in the comfort of your own living room. Treat your Tupperware as you would your hands, and it will give you a long life of faithful service, and open up whole new worlds of food economy and flavor…’
By the end of the ‘party,’ everyone in the room had committed herself to dozens of plastic objects. Except me. I had bought nothing. I was overwhelmed with all the things my kitchen lacked. How had I managed to get meals on the table to date? Angela assured me as I departed in a daze that I hadn’t wrecked my chances on the Tupperware circuit simply through failing to buy, that I could make up for this lapse in manners at the next party.
Soon after this Angela got me invited to a surprise shower for one of Ira’s cousins, who was about to marry a local boy. Our unfortunate victim, Wanda Bliss, sauntered into our web of deceit (which we had woven in her very own television room) wearing rollers the size of bedsprings. She squealed with terror and tried to dash out when she saw three dozen of her closest friends and relatives bobbing up from behind couches and chairs. Her mother forced her to return. Chagrined, but pretending to smile, she opened the mountain of gifts and passed them around. Mine was a tin serving tray with wooden handles, and with a picture of a covered bridge and “Vermont, The Green Mountain State’ painted on it. Everyone passed it on as though it were the meal tray from a plague patient when she read the card saying that it was from me.
I was sitting next to Angela, taking mental notes on proper surprise shower conduct. A box came by. Angela looked in and sighed with envy. She turned around to a middle-aged woman and whispered covetously, ‘Don’t you just love it, Aunt Clare? It’s impossible to find a decent bureau scarf these days. Don’t you agree, Ginny?’
Pleased to be included, I replied, ‘I know what you mean.’
A pair of hollow-stemmed champagne glasses etched with frosted bride and groom silhouettes came by, followed closely by plastic place mats with a Kodachrome Vermont landscape and a psalm printed on each. Angela leaned across me and demanded, “Will your family eat squash, Jean? I can’t get Bill to touch it!’
Jean allowed as how Hal would leave her on the spot if she ever dared to serve squash on his dinner plate.
‘Ira hates squash, too,’ I offered companionably.
Several stacks of sheets and towels later, Angela said out of the corner of her mouth, ‘You should have seen Jimmy the other day, Bernice. He got Bill’s razor and lathered up his face and shaved himself! At five and a half!’
‘Five and a half! Goodness, don’t they grow up fast?’
‘I know. They act so big, and then they get all tired out and come
crawling up on your lap wanting to be babied.’
‘Isn’t it the truth?’ confirmed Bernice. ‘Well, baby them while you can, Angela honey, because it passes so quickly.’
By the conclusion of this shower, I had decided that elopement had a lot going for it. Angela told me as we left that she was pretty certain that, after a few more showers, she would be able to get me voted into the Women’s Auxiliary, especially since Ira was the president of the fire department. Perhaps she could even get me in in time to work on the fashion show.
‘What does the auxiliary do?’
‘Oh, we mostly clean up the room after meetings. Pick up the bottles and stuff. Sometimes we make refreshments for the meetings.’
‘I’d like that,’ I assured her.
‘I’ve thought about our little problem, Ginny,’ Ira said one night in bed.
‘What problem?’ I wasn’t aware that we had any. For me, everything was peachy. That day I had been voted into the Women’s Auxiliary. Unanimously, Angela said. Except for Jean, and what could you expect from a woman like that?
‘The fact that I’m not satisfying you sexually.’
‘Oh but you are!’
‘Please, Ginny. I’ve asked you not to lie about it.’
‘But I don’t want to be satisfied. Or rather I don’t mind not being. In other words, I am satisfied by the state of our sex life.’
‘No, you’re not. I’ve thought about it a lot. And I’ve figured out what the trouble is.’
I looked at him expectantly. To have problems solved before you’d even acknowledged their existence was the height of luxury.
‘You’re used to a very exciting life, Ginny — Boston and all your…different friends.’