She, too, wore jeans, their bottoms flared far less extravagantly than Bethie’s, and a cotton turtleneck, green with thin blue stripes. She’d always kept her hair short, but after the babies were born she’d had her hairdresser chop it all off and style it into kind of an Audrey Hepburn–Mia Farrow crop. She had modest gold studs in her ears—with babies, you couldn’t risk the kind of grabbable earrings her sister preferred, and Jo had never liked ostentatious jewelry, but next to Bethie she felt as drab as a pigeon, a housewife with a capital H.
“Fine?” asked Bethie. “That’s it?”
“Fine is fine,” Jo said, forcing her lips into a smile. “Fine’s okay. I’m jogging.” For her birthday, Dave had gotten her Jim Fixx’s The Complete Book of Running and a pair of Nike shoes that she suspected he’d plucked off the shelf of one of the RePlay Sports stores. She’d laced up the shoes and barely made it to the end of the driveway before she realized how completely out of shape she’d become. She’d only gotten halfway around the block before doubling over with cramps, but she’d persisted, remembering how good it felt when her heart was pumping and her legs were burning and she was pushing herself farther than she thought she could go. She’d always played tennis whenever she could; she and Dave had skied and ice-skated, but she’d missed sports, and competition, and the way regular exercise made her feel. Now that the girls were in school, Jo ran five miles at a time, five days a week, racing in the Monday-night fun runs that the town held all through the summer and winning her age division more often than not. She played tennis on the town courts, and swam at the JCC in the wintertime, sharing lanes with her fellow housewives who were trying to shed the baby weight or keep the scale from creeping up as they left their twenties and thirties behind.
“Are you working?” Bethie asked.
“Just getting my toes wet.” Just as she had in every town they’d lived in for longer than a few months, Jo had put her name down on the substitute teacher list in Avondale and three neighboring towns. Most weeks she only worked a day or two, and some weeks, not at all. But it was something. She also wrote the occasional piece for the local weekly paper, the Avondale Almanac, which she knew most people read only for the classified ads. So far, she’d interviewed a ten-year-old who’d been cast as one of the orphans in the Broadway production of Annie, a married couple who bred prizewinning Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, and the town’s oldest resident, a surprisingly sharp 102-year-old who’d been eager for an audience to hear his thoughts on Jimmy Carter, whom he called “the peanut farmer.”
“And what do you do all day?” her sister asked.
Jo made herself smile. “I cook. I clean. I read. I write.”
“So you’re basically Betty Crocker,” Bethie said.
“Betty Crocker with a library card.” Jo kept her voice mild. It was the reading—that, and the exercise—that let her believe that her life was different from her own mother’s, and she needed to believe that there were differences. Sometimes, she would look up and see days that were essentially the same as her mother’s days had been, endless rounds of cooking and cleaning and laundry, of checking homework and combing hair and ferrying her daughters to soccer practice and Hebrew school. The only difference was that her mother lived in an integrated neighborhood, with African American neighbors and colleagues, if not friends, and Sarah was minutes away from a big city, with its museums and orchestras, even if she chose not to go.
So Jo read. The Bravermans subscribed to the Hartford Courant and the New York Times, which came in the morning, and the Farmington Valley Times, which arrived in the afternoon, along with Time and Life and Newsweek, the New Yorker and the Atlantic and National Geographic and Bon Appétit, from which Jo attempted the occasional ambitious recipe (usually that would result in the girls turning up their noses, Dave cheerfully urging them to try some of whatever Mommy had worked so hard to prepare, and the three of them sneaking off to McDonald’s while Jo scraped the leftovers into the sink). She kept up with current events, national and international, and most weeks she finished at least one book, sometimes two. Biographies, mostly, books about wars and dead presidents; everything