stood still for a moment, her eyes closed. Pearl did that sometimes in the middle of a conversation if she needed to collect her thoughts.
Opening her eyes, Pearl said, “Your parents would kill me. But you’re not children anymore. And better, I guess, that you hear this from me. All right, sit.”
As always, when Pearl was about to enlighten us regarding the adult world, she sat on her love seat—which, thanks to her prosperity, she’d had recovered with rich rose brocade upholstery—and lit a cigarette. I sat next to her, and Barbara took the chair.
“You’re right, I can’t marry Bert, but it’s not because of Zayde. Darlings …” Pearl glanced from one of us to the other, meeting our eyes. “Bert is married already. He has a wife in Mexico.”
“Won’t she give him a divorce?” Barbara adopted the cool, sophisticated tone of movies in which things like this took place, while my mind reeled. An avid reader and movie-goer, I knew such things happened. But they happened to Anna Karenina or Jean Harlow, not to my aunt Pearl.
“In Mexico, in his village, people don’t get divorced,” Pearl said. “And I wouldn’t want him to divorce her.”
“Do they have children? … I don’t mind,” Barbara said.
Ah, but didn’t I know what it was like to be desperately in love with a man who belonged to someone else?
“Four children,” Pearl said.
I let out a small sob.
“I’m sorry, darling.” Pearl said. “You didn’t know your auntie Pearl was such a terrible person.”
Now I was crying too hard to speak. All the rationalizations I’d made about free love crumpled, and I saw the tawdriness of everything I’d been doing—betraying Barbara and, even worse, being so pathetically in love with Danny Berlov that I was willing to be his girl on the side. No stranger to self-criticism, I knew how it felt to be embarrassed or ashamed over something I’d done, but this was the first time I truly loathed myself.
Pearl hugged me and stroked my hair, at first apologizing—and, as I kept weeping, asking “Elaine, what is it? Is something else the matter?”
I found my voice then; I would have died before I let her suspect I had my own reason for tears. “It’s just sad that you can’t get married.”
“Oh, no, it’s not. Really,” Pearl said. “I’m an idiot, I should have explained better. I don’t want to marry Bert.”
“But you love him,” Barbara said.
“Love.” Pearl sighed. “The two of you, sixteen years old, you should listen to all the love songs they play on the radio and think you’re in heaven when a boy takes you in his arms on the dance floor. Just know that when you get older, it will be different. Bert is a very sweet man. But darlings, I don’t want to be any man’s wife.”
“You married Uncle Gabe,” Barbara said.
“And I found out that not every woman likes being married. To have a man telling you what to do, even what to think! Keeping you awake all night with his snoring. Sulking if you don’t make your kugel with the exact number of raisins his mother put in hers.”
Despite the cloud of misery that surrounded me, I was captivated by this revolutionary idea. I realized I had seen plenty of examples of unmarried women who, as far as I could tell, led fulfilling lives—Pearl, Mollie, many of my teachers. But no one had ever stated it outright: not every woman likes being married. And although Mollie always remained my model for activism, it was Pearl I would think of when the feminist movement came along.
My mind also buzzed with the reverberations of snoring, which forced me to consider what else went on when a man and woman shared a bed. Barbara and I had figured Pearl and Bert “did it,” but it was different when I’d expected them to get married. Suddenly, things I had observed between Pearl and Bert—the clingy sweater she’d worn the night of the earthquake, the intimate looks he gave her as his baritone caressed the lyrics of a song—became a peek at the scary-thrilling mystery of grown-up sexual desire.
“What if a husband wouldn’t allow me to work?” Pearl was saying. “Or he tried to take over my business and run it himself?”
“Bert wouldn’t do that,” Barbara said.
“Oh, chiquitas,” Pearl said; it was what Bert called us sometimes. “You never really know a man until you let him put a ring on your finger. Then he thinks he owns you. I’m happy with