Free Away from Home by Rona Jaffe Page B

giving her pleasure. But it was impossible to imitate a pleasure she had never known.
    When they returned from their honeymoon and moved into Neil’s apartment Margie purchased a blender to make the banana daiquiris and furtively bought a book about the art of married love. She bought the book on Forty-second Street and Broadway, terrified that someone she knew might come upon her and discover the shameful purchase which as much as admitted that things were not going as they should. The book, a modern one, told her that woman’s delight was overrated in other books and that it was not necessary to enjoy love-making every time. Every time! Margie thought. There were no stage directions for imitation. It was about this time that she began to look carefully into the eyes of her married girlfriends when they lunched at Schraffts, trying to find out their secret, certain that she was alone with hers. Sometimes, ripping at the paper doily delicately with her fingertips, she almost asked a question that might give her away, and then stopped in time.
    One day she had lunch with her matron of honor, Sue, who had been married for a year. Sue had accomplished what they call “marrying well,” and she looked it in her new, expensive dress and alligator handbag. It was also a love match, and Sue was much envied among her friends.
    “We’re trying to have a baby,” Sue said. “You know, I’ve been making up names for imaginary children for years. I’m dying to have one.”
    “You’ll probably be a wonderful mother,” Margie said.
    Sue sighed and stirred her soda with the straws. “I’m getting so tired of trying,” she said quietly.
    For a moment the significance of what her friend was saying did not quite get through to Margie, and then suddenly it hit her with the force of a physical blow. Tired of trying! But what you did when you were “trying” was supposed to be that wonderful lost trip away from the world. Margie opened her lips, almost ready to confide, to pour out all the bewilderment and fear of loneliness, and then she closed her mouth so tightly that she gritted her teeth. She would die rather than confess a failure that would point disgrace to Neil, imply disloyalty to him and their bond together. She scooped up the bits of paper doily she had torn and deposited them in the ashtray. “I hate doilies,” she said vehemently. “They’re so messy .”
    It was at the beginning of her second year of marriage that Margie began to have strange, disturbing sensations, a burning and fluttering, a shortness of breath. She first noticed it in the spring, when she and Neil went to the Memorial Day dance at the country club. She was dancing with the husband of one of her friends, a young doctor who had been away in Ohio doing his internship in a hospital there, and had just returned with his wife and child to set up his practice in New York. He was a little older than Neil, but he looked younger, almost collegiate. Margie had seen him only once before, at her friend’s wedding, and now she realized for the first time that he was a very attractive man. There was a kind of intimacy and joy in the way he danced with her, nothing actually forward and yet there was a complete awareness of her as a pretty woman. A few brave couples were dancing on the terrace, although the late May night was chilly, and Margie and her partner were among them. It was dark, and she could hear the sound of the wind in the trees and the soft shuffling of feet on cement above the music that came out through the opened French doors.
    “Cold?” he whispered, smiling down at her.
    “No.”
    Suddenly Margie felt a weird fluttering constricting her heart. Her lips seemed to swell, to burn, to fill with the pulsing of her warm blood. For a moment she had the wild impulse to reach up and kiss this man full on the mouth. She pulled away from him with a violent physical effort and shivered.
    “You are cold,” he said. “Come on, we’ll go inside.