fell into mine.
“Here’s another question,” said Bethie. “Are marriage and motherhood what you expected?”
For a moment, there was no sound but the hissing and snapping of the logs in the fire. “It’s boring sometimes,” Valerie Cohen finally said.
“ ’S boring all the time,” Nonie said, and hiccupped.
“We can’t say we weren’t warned,” said Arlene. Her voice was bleak. “Betty Friedan told us. She said it was going to be boring.”
“She did,” Judy said. “But did we have other choices? Real ones?”
Jo had considered that question a lot, when she was busy doing something particularly rote and unpleasant: weeding the garden, loading or unloading the dishwasher, or trying, and failing, to fold fitted sheets. She would fold, or pull, or wash, and consider how, no matter how much the bra-tossers and the National Organization for Women and the Society for Cutting Up Men had done to point out the tedium of marriage and motherhood, they hadn’t done much about offering other possibilities or smoothing other paths. The only option she could see was paying some other woman—most likely an African American or Hispanic one—to do it for her, the way her mother had, and that did not feel like progress at all.
“I feel so guilty.” Valerie’s voice was quiet. “My parents were immigrants. They came here from China with nothing. They have a dry-cleaning shop in Boston and they both worked fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, so that my brother and I could go to college.” Valerie reached across Nonie, fingers groping for the wineglass she’d placed on the ledge in front of the fireplace. “My parents could never even have imagined a life like the one I have. All of the luxury, all of the ease. I mean, my mother never even had a dishwasher.” Valerie paused.
“And yet,” Bethie prompted.
“And yet,” Valerie repeated, looking down into her wine, with her black hair falling in wings across her face. “I know it’s not as hard, or as boring, as dry-cleaning clothes was. But some days, I just feel so . . .” She shook her head. “Depleted. Like Arnold and the kids just take and take and take and there’s nothing left where I used to be.” She fisted her right hand and rested it against her heart.
“That’s it,” said Nonie, sitting up straight, so fast that her wine sloshed in her lap. “That’s it exactly.”
“Do you think the guys feel this way?” Judy still spoke like a New Yorker, all flattened vowels and rat-a-tat-tat delivery. “Does everyone feel bored or empty?”
Jo tried to adjust her position so that she could see her sister. Her bones had that delicious liquid sensation that came with a few drinks, and the living-room floor did not feel entirely solid beneath her. Outside, the snow was still falling, piling up in drifts against the darkened windowpanes, which rattled as the wind gusted, but the room was almost too warm, the air rich with the smells of spices and wine, perfume and shampoo. She could feel her thoughts coming together, ideas she’d had, then shoved away; opinions she never let herself dwell on, crystallizing and solidifying, helped along by the storm, and the closeness, and the company, and the alcohol. “I think that men go out in the world and get filled up. They get praised for their work.”
“They get paid for their work,” added Nonie.
“They get to fly,” said Arlene, perhaps thinking of her pilot husband, who’d leave his family on the ground ten days out of every fourteen.
“And they wear clothes nobody’s thrown up on, and they get to eat with both of their hands,” Arlene said. She shook her head. “Can you imagine? A whole meal where you don’t have to cut up anyone else’s chicken, or tell them to use their napkins or eat their vegetables.”
“And that’s just the husbands,” Nonie said.
“And they come home,” Jo continued. “And there’s dinner on the table. And the carpet’s vacuumed, and the bed’s made, and the blue suit that they asked you to pick up is hanging in the closet. And they say thank you, and maybe they even act like what we’re doing matters. But I’m not sure they believe it.” Jo pressed her knuckles to her lips. Judy and Valerie and Bethie were all watching her, and she bet that Nonie, with her eyes shut, was listening, too. “I think that they believe that it’s their due. That they’re people, and we’re not quite people. Like, we’re maybe two-thirds of a