Free My Dearest Friend by Nancy Thayer Page B

scheduled by the college’s calendar, and really it had been a very fine way to live. And so
safe.
The parents taught during the day and the children went to school (until they went off to prep school, which was also scheduled and safe). The parents read or worked on their courses in the evenings and the children did their homework. The entire family went together to the college’s celebrations of Christmas and graduation and then for two weeks in the summer to the same rented wooden seaside house on Cape Cod; oh, theyhad lived a repetitive life of harmony and balance and serenity—my God, Alexander Pope would have loved it. Jack had lived a neoclassic life!
    He hadn’t even fought very much with his sister. Diana was two years younger than he was and they had always been chums. Still were. He had always liked having Diana around with her stuffed animals and baby dolls and later with her nail polish and hair rollers, in the same way he had liked having Carey Ann around during the first year of their marriage: women seemed to be so much more optimistic about their control over the world than men. They seemed always so certain that they could arrange things to their satisfaction. If nature—fate—gave them straight hair, they could make it curly. If nature gave them curly hair, they could make it straight. They could paint their fingernails or not, and have babies or not, they could go into a room and put the furniture where they liked it and then they’d call friends on the phone to tell them what they’d just done or were planning to do and the entire world settled down and fit its bulging boisterous bulk into the delineated limits the women painted with their polish and their plans. Men were supposed to go out and fight the world, explore it, poke at it, but women got to soothe and tame and restrain it, and then sit down and relax in it. There was no use talking about “women’s lib,” “men’s lib”; that’s the way it really was. When it came right down to it, the truth of the matter was that Carey Ann was not responsible for getting the money that paid for the food and the mortgage and the heat. Jack was. The truth of the matter was that Carey Ann didn’t have to arrange her home to please anyone else, but Jack had to arrange his office to suit his boss, and he had to do it in the right way, so that he wouldn’t anger the man who had the power eventually to give him tenure or not. He could not have said some brilliant rebellious obscenity and stalked, Prince-like, out of the office and onto his motorcycle and off into the sunset, because he was responsible for his family. Although this was the life that, after all, he had chosen. Not only chosen, it was the life he had craved all through his childhood. He couldn’t help it, he was by nature, if not by fantasy, a family man.
    When he pulled into the driveway of the A-frame, he noticed that Carey Ann’s white convertible was gone, and immediately a wave of pleasure swept over him—followed quickly by a seizure of guilt. But he so seldom had any time alone in his house, it was never quiet in his house, and he was really tired and still a little upset from the episode with Hudson.
    He wrestled Prince into the house and into the anonymity of his study under thestairs, then headed for the kitchen. He really needed a beer. Or a vodka and tonic. With some pretzels.
    But when he opened the refrigerator, he found that there was no beer. Or tonic. He searched through the cupboards and then through the cardboard boxes (Carey Ann still hadn’t unpacked much). The refrigerator held some canned pears and half a gallon of whole milk and some Popsicles and some eggs, and that was all.
    Perhaps Carey Ann had gone to the grocery store. He hoped so. He walked around the house, stepping over Alexandra’s toys. What a messy child she was. He stood a moment looking out the great glass window down at the valley. Now he wished Carey Ann were home. He was lonely. He really