The Stepford Wives

by Ira Levin

  Herb and Gary turned and smiled. ‘Hello, Joanna,’ they said, and Gary said, ‘How are you?’ Herb said, ‘Is Walter here too?’

  ‘Fine. No, he isn’t,’ she said. ‘I just came over to talk with Kit. Good game?’

  Herb looked away from her, and Gary said, ‘Very.’

  Kit, beside her and smelling of Walter’s mother’s perfume, whatever it was, said, ‘Come, let’s go into the kitchen.’

  ‘Enjoy,’ she said to Herb and Gary. Gary, biting into his sandwich, eye-smiled through his glasses, and Herb looked at her and said, ‘Thanks, we will.’

  She followed Kit over the plastic-shield vinyl.

  ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ Kit asked.

  ‘No, thanks.’ She followed Kit into the coffee-smelling kitchen. It was immaculate, of course – except for the open dryer, and the clothes and the laundry basket on the counter on top of it. The washer’s round port was storming. The floor was more plastic shield.

  ‘It’s right on the stove,’ Kit said, ‘so it wouldn’t be any trouble.’

  ‘Well in that case …’

  She sat at a round green table while Kit got a cup and saucer from a neatly filled cabinet, the cups all hook-hung, the plates filed in racks. ‘It’s nice and quiet now,’ Kit said, closing the cabinet and going toward the stove. (Her figure, in a short sky-blue dress, was almost as terrific as Charmaine’s.) ‘The kids are over at Gary and Donna’s,’ she said. ‘I’m doing Marge McCormick’s wash. She’s got a bug of some kind and can barely move today.’

  ‘Oh that’s a shame,’ Joanna said.

  Kit fingertipped the top of a percolator and poured coffee from it. ‘I’m sure she’ll be good as new in a day or two,’ she said. ‘How do you take this, Joanna?’

  ‘Milk, no sugar, please.’

  Kit carried the cup and saucer toward the refrigerator. ‘If it’s about that get-together again,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid I’m still awfully busy.’

  ‘It isn’t that,’ Joanna said. She watched Kit open the refrigerator. ‘I wanted to find out what happened to the Women’s Club,’ she said.

  Kit stood at the lighted refrigerator, her back to Joanna. ‘The Women’s Club?’ she said. ‘Oh my, that was years ago. It disbanded.’

  ‘Why?’ Joanna asked.

  Kit closed the refrigerator and opened a drawer beside it. ‘Some of the women moved away,’ she said – she closed the drawer and turned, putting a spoon on the saucer – ‘and the rest of us just lost interest in it. At least I did.’ She came toward the table, watching the cup. ‘It wasn’t accomplishing anything useful,’ she said. ‘The meetings got boring after a while.’ She put the cup and saucer on the table and pushed them closer to Joanna. ‘Is that enough milk?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, that’s fine,’ Joanna said. ‘Thanks. How come you didn’t tell me about it when I was here the other time?’

  Kit smiled, her dimples deepening. ‘You didn’t ask me,’ she said. ‘If you had I would have told you. It’s no secret. Would you like a piece of cake, or some cookies?’

  ‘No, thanks,’ Joanna said.

  ‘I’m going to fold these things,’ Kit said, going from the table.

  Joanna watched her close the dryer and take something white from the pile of clothes on it. She shook it out – a T-shirt. Joanna said, ‘What’s wrong with Bill McCormick? Can’t he run a washer? I thought he was one of our aerospace brains.’

  ‘He’s taking care of Marge,’ Kit said, folding the T-shirt. ‘These things came out nice and white, didn’t they?’ She put the folded T-shirt into the laundry basket, smiling.

  Like an actress in a commercial.

  That’s what she was, Joanna felt suddenly. That’s what they all were, all the Stepford wives: actresses in commercials, pleased with detergents and floor wax, with cleansers, shampoos, and deodorants. Pretty actresses, big in the bosom but small in the talent, playing suburban housewives unconvincingly, too nicey-nice to be real.

  ‘Kit,’ she said.

  Kit looked at her.

  ‘You must have been very young when you were president of the club,’ Joanna said. ‘Which means you’re intelligent and have a certain amount of drive. Are you happy now? Tell me the truth. Do you feel you’re living a full life?’

  Kit looked at her, and nodded. ‘Yes, I’m happy,’ she said. ‘I feel I’m living a very full life. Herb’s work is important, and he couldn’t do it nearly as well if not for me. We’re a unit, and between us we’re raising a family, and doing optical research, and running a clean comfortable household, and doing community work.’

  ‘Through the Men’s Association.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Joanna said, ‘Were the Women’s Club meetings more boring than housework?’

  Kit frowned. ‘No,’ she said, ‘but they weren’t as useful as housework. You’re not drinking your coffee. Is anything wrong with it?’

  ‘No,’ Joanna said, ‘I was waiting for it to cool.’ She picked up the cup.

  ‘Oh,’ Kit said, and smiled, and turned to the clothes and folded something.

  Joanna watched her. Should she ask who the other women had been? No, they would be like Kit; and what difference would it make? She drank from the cup. The coffee was strong and rich-flavoured, the best she’d tasted in a long time.

  ‘How are your children?’ Kit asked.

  ‘Fine,’ she said.

  She started to ask the brand of the coffee, but stopped herself and drank more of it.

  Maybe the hardware store’s panes would have wobbled the moon’s reflection interestingly, but there was no way of telling, not with the panes where they were and the moon where it was. C’est la vie. She mooched around the Centre for a while, getting the feel of the night-empty curve of street, the row of white shopfronts on one side, the rise to the hill on the other; the library, the Historical Society cottage. She wasted some film on streetlights and litter baskets – cliché time – but it was only black and white, so what the hell. A cat trotted down the path from the library, a silver-grey cat with a black moon-shadow stuck to its paws; it crossed the street toward the market parking lot. No, thanks, we’re not keen on cat pix.

  She set up the tripod on the library lawn and took shots of the shopfronts, using the fifty-millimeter lens and making ten-, twelve-, and fourteen-second exposures. An odd medicinal smell soured the air – coming on the breeze at her back. It almost reminded her of something in her childhood, but fell short. A syrup she’d been given? A toy she had had?

  She reloaded by moonlight, gathered the tripod, and backed across the street, scouting the library for a good angle. She found one and set up. The white clapboard siding was black-banded in the overhead moonlight; the windows showed bookshelved walls lighted faintly from within. She focused with extra-special care, and starting at eight seconds, took each-a-second-longer exposures up to eighteen. One of them, at least, would catch the inside bookshelved walls without overexposing the siding.

  She went to the car for her sweater, and looked around as she went back to the camera. The Historical Society cottage? No, it was too tree-shadowed, and dull anyway. But the Men’s Association house, up on the hill, had a surprisingly comic look to it: a square old nineteenth-century house, solid and symmetrical, tipsily parasolled by a glistening TV antenna. The four tall upstairs windows were vividly alight, their sashes raised. Figures moved inside.

  She took the fifty-millimeter lens out of the camera and was putting in the one-thirty-five when headlight beams swept onto the street and grew brighter. She turned and a spotlight blinded her. Closing her eyes, she tightened the lens; then shielded her eyes and squinted.

  The car stopped, and the spotlight swung away and died to an orange spark. She blinked a few times, still seeing the blinding radiance.

  A police car. It stayed where it was, about thirty feet away from her on the other side of the street. A man’s voice spoke softly inside it; spoke and kept speaking.

  She waited.

  T
he car moved forward, coming opposite her, and stopped. The young policeman with the unpolicemanlike brown moustache smiled at her and said, ‘Evening, ma’am.’ She had seen him several times, once in the stationery store buying packs of coloured crêpe paper, one each of every colour they had.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, smiling.

  He was alone in the car; he must have been talking on his radio. About her? ‘I’m sorry I hit you with the spot that way,’ he said. ‘Is that your car there by the post office?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I didn’t park it here because I was—’

  ‘That’s all right, I’m just checking.’ He squinted at the camera. ‘That’s a good-looking camera,’ he said. ‘What kind is it?’

  ‘A Pentax,’ she said.

  ‘Pentax,’ he said. He looked at the camera, and at her. ‘And you can take pictures at night with it?’

  ‘Time exposures,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, sure,’ he said. ‘How long does it take, on a night like this?’

  ‘Well that depends,’ she said.

  He wanted to know on what, and what kind of film she was using. And whether she was a professional photographer, and how much a Pentax cost, just roughly. And how it stacked up against other cameras.

  She tried not to grow impatient; she should be glad she lived in a town where a policeman could stop and talk for a few minutes.

  Finally he smiled and said, ‘Well, I guess I’d better let you go ahead with it. Goodnight.’

  ‘Goodnight,’ she said, smiling.

  He drove off slowly. The silver-grey cat ran through his headlight beams.

  She watched the car for a moment, and then turned to the camera and checked the lens. Crouching to the view-finder, she levered into a good framing of the Men’s Association house and locked the tripod head. She focused, sharpening the finder’s image of the high square tipsy-antennaed house. Two of its upstairs windows were dark now; and another was shade-pulled down to darkness, and then the last one.

  She straightened and looked at the house itself, and turned to the police car’s faraway taillights.

  He had radioed a message about her, and then he had stalled her with his questions while the message was acted on, the shades pulled down.

  Oh come on, girl, you’re getting nutty! She looked at the house again. They wouldn’t have a radio up there. And what would he have been afraid she’d photograph? An orgy in progress? Call girls from the city? (Or better yet, from right there in Stepford.) ENLARGER REVEALS SHOCKING SECRET. Seemingly diligent housewives, conveniently holding still for lengthy time exposures, were caught Sunday night disporting at the Men’s Association house by photographer Nancy Drew Eberhart of Fairview Lane …

  Smiling, she crouched to the viewfinder, bettered her framing and focus, and took three shots of the dark-windowed house – ten seconds, twelve, and fourteen.

  She took shots of the post office, and of its bare flagpole silhouetted against moonlit clouds.

  She was putting the tripod into the car when the police car came by and slowed. ‘Hope they all come out!’ the young policeman called.

  ‘Thanks!’ she called back to him. ‘I enjoyed talking!’ To make up for her city-bred suspiciousness.

  ‘Goodnight!’ the policeman called.

  A senior partner in Walter’s firm died of uremic poisoning, and the records of the trusts he had administered were found to be disquietingly inaccurate. Walter had to stay two nights and a weekend in the city, and on the nights following he seldom got home before eleven o’clock. Pete took a fall on the school bus and knocked out his two front teeth. Joanna’s parents paid a short-notice three-day visit on their way to a Caribbean vacation. (They loved the house and Stepford, and Joanna’s mother admired Carol Van Sant. ‘So serene and efficient! Take a leaf from her book, Joanna.’)

  The dishwasher broke down, and the pump; and Pete’s eighth birthday came, calling for presents, a party, favours, a cake. Kim got a sore throat and was home for three days. Joanna’s period was late but came, thank God and the Pill.

  She managed to get in a little tennis, her game improving but still not as good as Charmaine’s. She got the darkroom three-quarters set up and made trial enlargements of the black-man-and-taxi picture, and developed and printed the ones she had taken in the Centre, two of which looked very good. She took shots of Pete and Kim and Scott Chamalian playing on the jungle gym.

  She saw Bobbie almost every day; they shopped together, and sometimes Bobbie brought her two younger boys Adam and Kenny over after school. One day Joanna and Bobbie and Charmaine got dressed to the nines and had a two-cocktail lunch at a French restaurant in Eastbridge.

  By the end of October, Walter was getting home for dinner again, the dead partner’s peculations having been unravelled, made good, and patched over. Everything in the house was working, everyone was well. They carved a huge pumpkin for Halloween, and Pete went trick-or-treating as a front-toothless Batman, and Kim as Heckel or Jeckel (she was both, she insisted). Joanna gave out fifty bags of candy and had to fall back on fruit and cookies; next year she would know better.

  On the first Saturday in November they gave a dinner party: Bobbie and Dave, Charmaine and her husband Ed; and from the city, Shep and Sylvia Tackover, and Don Ferrault – one of Walter’s partners – and his wife Lucy. The local woman Joanna got to help serve and clean up was delighted to be working in Stepford for a change. ‘There used to be so much entertaining here!’ she said. ‘I had a whole round of women that used to fight over me! And now I have to go to Norwood, and Eastbridge, and New Sharon! And I hate night driving!’ She was a plump quick-moving white-haired woman named Mary Migliardi. ‘It’s that Men’s Association,’ she said, jabbing toothpicks into shrimp on a platter. ‘Entertaining’s gone right out the window since they started up! The men go out and the women stay in! If my old man was alive he’d have to knock me on the head before I’d let him join!’

  ‘But it’s a very old organization, isn’t it?’ Joanna said, tossing salad at arm’s length because of her dress.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ Mary said. ‘It’s new! Six or seven years, that’s all. Before, there was the Civic Association and the Elks and the Legion’ – she toothpicked shrimp with machine-like rapidity – ‘but they all merged in with it once it got going. Except the Legion; they’re still separate. Six or seven years, that’s all. This isn’t all you got for hors d’oeuvres, is it?’

  ‘There’s a cheese roll in the refrigerator,’ Joanna said.

  Walter came in, looking very handsome in his plaid jacket, carrying the ice bucket. ‘We’re in luck,’ he said, going to the refrigerator. ‘There’s a good Creature Feature; Pete doesn’t even want to come down. I put the Sony in his room.’ He opened the freezer section and took out a bag of ice cubes.

  ‘Mary just told me the Men’s Association is new,’ Joanna said.

  ‘It’s not new,’ Walter said, tearing at the top of the bag. A white dab of tissue clung to his jawbone, pinned by a dot of dried blood.

  ‘Six or seven years,’ Mary said.

  ‘Where we come from that’s old.’

  Joanna said, ‘I thought it went back to the Puritans.’

  ‘What gave you that idea?’ Walter asked, spilling ice cubes into the bucket.

  She tossed the salad. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘The way it’s set up, and that old house …’

  ‘That was the Terhune place,’ Mary said, laying a stretch of plastic over the toothpicked platter. ‘They got it dirt cheap. Auctioned for taxes and no one else bid.’

  The party was a disaster. Lucy Ferrault was allergic to something and never stopped sneezing; Sylvia was preoccupied; Bobbie, whom Joanna had counted on as a conversational star, had laryngitis. Charmaine was Miss Vamp, provocative and come-hithery in floor-length white silk cut clear to her navel; Dave and Shep were provoked and went thither. Walter (damn him!) talked law in the corner with Don Ferrault. Ed Wimperis – big, fleshy, well tailored, stewed – talked television,
clamping Joanna’s arm and explaining in slow careful words why cassettes were going to change everything. At the dinner table Sylvia got unpreoccupied and tore into suburban communities that enriched themselves with tax-yielding light industry while fortressing themselves with two-and four-acre zoning. Ed Wimperis knocked his wine over. Joanna tried to get light conversation going, and Bobbie pitched in valiantly, gasping an explanation of where the laryngitis had come from: she was doing tape-recordings for a friend of Dave’s who ‘thinks ’e’s a bleedin’ ’Enry ’Iggins, ’e does.’ But Charmaine, who knew the man and had taped for him herself, cut her short with ‘Never make fun of what a Capricorn’s doing; they produce,’ and went into an around-the-table sign analysis that demanded everyone’s attention. The roast was overdone, and Walter had a bad time slicing it. The soufflé rose, but not quite as much as it should have – as Mary remarked while serving it. Lucy Ferrault sneezed.

  ‘Never again,’ Joanna said as she switched the outside lights off; and Walter, yawning, said, ‘Soon enough for me.’

  ‘Listen, you,’ she said. ‘How could you stand there talking to Don while three women are sitting like stones on the sofa?’

  Sylvia called to apologize – she had been passed up for a promotion she damn well knew she deserved – and Charmaine called to say they’d had a great time and to postpone a tentative Tuesday tennis date. ‘Ed’s got a bee in his bonnet,’ she said. ‘He’s taking a few days off, we’re putting Merrill with the DaCostas – you don’t know them, lucky you – and he and I are going to “rediscover each other”. That means he chases me around the bed. And my period’s not till next week, God damn it.’

  ‘Why not let him catch you?’ Joanna said.

  ‘Oh God,’ Charmaine said. ‘Look, I just don’t enjoy having a big cock shoved into me, that’s all. Never have and never will. And I’m not a lez either, because I tried it and that’s no big deal. I’m just not interested in sex. I don’t think any woman is, really, not even Pisces women. Are you?’

  ‘Well I’m not a nympho,’ Joanna said, ‘but I’m interested in it, sure I am.’