Women and Children First by Francine Prose

Author:Francine Prose [Prose, Francine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780394565736
Publisher: Ivy
Published: 1988-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

She reads through the list again. She puts down the phone. She thinks: I have nothing to tell him that isn’t about animals.

Electricity

ANITA SAILS THE BABY over her head. “Earth to Spaceship Bertie,” she says. “Earth to Spaceship Bertie. Can you read me?”

The baby’s laugh sounds forced, like Johnny Carson’s when he’s blown a joke. Last week she caught Bertie practicing smiles in the mirror over his crib, phony social smiles for the old ladies who goo-goo him in the street, noticeably different from his real smile. It occurs to her that the baby is embarrassed for her. Lately she’s often embarrassed for herself. This feeling takes her back fifteen years to her early teens, when she and her parents and her younger sister Lynne used to go places—Jones Beach, Prospect Park—and she’d see groups of kids her own age. At the time she had felt that being with her family made her horribly conspicuous; now she realizes that it probably made her invisible.

The house is quiet. Now since she’s back is the first time Anita can remember being in her parents’ home without the television going. She thinks of the years her father spent trailing her and Lynne from room to room, switching lights off behind them, asking who they thought was paying the electric bills. Yet he never turned the TV off; he’d fall asleep to the Late Show. Now the TV is dark, the house is lit up like a birthday cake, and her father is down in the finished basement, silenced by the acoustical ceiling as he claps his hands, leaps into the air, and sings hymns in praise of God and the Baal Shem Tov.

In the morning, when Anita’s father goes off to the bet hamidrash, the house of study, Anita and her mother and the baby watch Donahue. Today the panel is made up of parents whose children have run away and joined cults. The week Anita came home, there was a show about grown children moving back in with their parents. It reminds Anita of how in high school, and later when she used to take acid, the radio always seemed to play oddly appropriate songs. Hearing the Miracles sing “What’s So Good about Good-bye?” when she was breaking up with a boyfriend had made her feel connected with lovers breaking up everywhere. But now she hates to think that her life is one of those stories that make Donahue go all dewy-eyed with concern.

The twice-divorced mother of a Moonie is blaming everything on broken homes. “Don’t you ever become a Moonie,” Anita whispers, pressing her lips against the back of the baby’s neck. Another mother is describing how her daughter calls herself Prem Ananda, wears only orange clothes, has married a boy the guru’s chosen for her, and, with her doctorate in philosophy, works decorating cakes in the ashram bakery.

“Cakes?” says Anita’s mother. “That’s nothing. Only my Sam waits till he’s fifty-seven to join a cult. After thirty-three years of marriage, he’ll only make love through a hole in the sheet.

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