There was Marty—a doctoral candidate in literature at NYU, brilliant and funny, whom we’d met one day at a free concert on Rutherford Place. There was Karen—a receptionist at the Museum of Modern Art, who wanted to be a painter, and who had attended Parsons with Marjorie. There was Rowan, who was a gynecologist—which we all found terribly impressive, and also useful. There was Susan—a grade-school teacher with a passion for modern dance. There was Callie, who owned the flower shop around the corner. There was Anita, who came from money and never did anything at all—but she did get us a pirated key to Gramercy Park, so we appreciated her forever.
There were more women, too, who came and went out of my life. Sometimes Marjorie and I would lose a friend to marriage; other times we would gain a friend after a divorce. Sometimes a woman would move out of the city, sometimes she would move back. The tides of life came in and out. The circles of friendship grew, then shrank, then grew again.
But the gathering place for us women was always the same—our rooftop on Eighteenth Street, which we could access from the fire escape outside my bedroom window. Marjorie and I dragged a bunch of cheap folding chairs up there, and we would spend our evenings on the roof with our friends, anytime the weather was fine. Summer after summer, our little group of females would sit together under what passes for starlight in New York City, smoking our cigarettes, drinking our rotgut wine, listening to music on a transistor radio, and sharing with each other our big and small concerns of life.
During one brutally airless August heat wave, Marjorie managed to haul a big stand-up fan up onto our roof. This she plugged into my kitchen outlet, using a long industrial extension cord. As far as the rest of us were concerned, this made her a genius at the level of Leonardo da Vinci. We would sit in the artificial breeze of the fan, lifting our shirts to cool our breasts, and pretending that we were at a beach somewhere exotic.
Those are some of my happiest memories of the 1950s.
It was on the rooftop of our little bridal boutique that I learned this truth: when women are gathered together with no men around, they don’t have to be anything in particular; they can just be.
Then in 1955, Marjorie got pregnant.
I’d always feared it was going to be me who ended up pregnant—the smart bet would have been on me, obviously—but poor Marjorie was the one who got hit.
The culprit was an old married art professor, with whom she’d been having an affair for years. (Although Marjorie would have said that the culprit was herself, for wasting so much of her life with a married man who kept promising that he would leave his wife for her, if only Marjorie would “stop acting so Jewish.”)
A bunch of us were on the rooftop one night when she told us the news.
“Are you sure?” asked Rowan, the gynecologist. “Do you want to come into my office for a test?”
“I don’t need a test,” said Marjorie. “My period is gone, gone, gone.”
“Gone, how long?” said Rowan.
“Well, I’ve never been regular, but maybe three months?”
There’s a tense silence that women fall into when they hear that one of their own has become accidentally pregnant. This is a matter of highest gravity. I could feel that none of us wanted to say another word until Marjorie had told us more. We wanted to know what her plan was, so that we could support it, whatever the plan may have been. But she just sat there in silence, after dropping this bomb, and added no further information.
Finally, I asked, “What does George have to say about this?” George, of course, being the anti-Semitic married art professor who apparently loved having sex with Jewish girls.
“Why do you assume it’s George?” she joked.
We all knew it was George. It was always George. Of course it was George. She had been infatuated with George since she was a wide-eyed student in his Sculpture of Modern Europe class, so many years earlier.
Then she said, “No, I haven’t told him. I think I won’t tell him. I just won’t see him anymore. I’ll cut it off from here. If nothing else, this is finally a good excuse to stop sleeping with George.”
Rowan cut right to the chase: “Have you considered a termination?”