“They're giving me a thousand options,” he said. “I'll be an owner, Frankie, without even having to put any money up!” And he started talking about investing our savings in his fledgling company's stock, too, once they'd set up an employee stock-purchase plan. But what about the kids' college fund? What about the mortgage and the groceries and the doctor bills? How would we pay them if the company failed and we were left with no savings to live on while Danny found another position? What if the company was a smashing success but the treasurer absconded to Brazil with all the cash? But to question Danny's decision would make him think I lacked confidence in him. And besides, he'd already quit.
WE LAUGH NOW at how nervous I was before our first Miss America party that September, the first time we moved beyond meeting up at the park on Wednesday mornings. I hurried to finish my curtains and cleaned my kitchen so you could have eaten off the cabinet floor under my sink, I swear, and I even considered painting my shutters, though in truth I was liking the pink more and more. That evening, I set up a bar on the kitchen counter and put out snacks, and I sent Danny off with Mags and Davy for hot dogs and ice cream at the Dairy Queen, with instructions not to return until the children were fast asleep in the backseat of the car.
Danny wasn't the least bit disappointed to miss the pageant himself. Funny, isn't it? No fellow I'd ever known would sit through a beauty contest; the gawking at beautiful women was done by us girls.
Ally was the first to ring my bell that evening. I'd seen no signs of her child the week after we met: no tricycle left in the circle of pine trees, no Ally hurrying her little one to the car, no playmates knocking at the door. There might have been toys in the backyard, but it was wrapped up in a high wooden fence you couldn't see over or through, and that had seemed to me to mean something, too. But Ally had turned up the following Wednesday with the hand of two-year-old Carrie in her grasp. Ally's husband must have fetched their daughter from the park while I was putting my kids down for their naps that first week, I supposed, for a doctor's appointment or some father-daughter something, because Ally and Carrie—a quiet little thing with Ally's dark wavy hair, her chipmunk cheeks—arrived at the park again the next Wednesday, and the next.
Within minutes, Kath and Linda and Brett had arrived at my door, too, and we were settling into my family room with potato chips and sour-cream dip and popcorn made in a pan on the stove, and with gin and tonics or vodka gimlets or, for Kath, a sidecar—not that far evolved from Anna Page's bourbon straight out of the bottle. We felt awkward outside the familiar surroundings of the park, though, unwilling even to take the first chip from the bowl. We started talking about who we would root for, with Bert Parks not even on the TV yet.
What was on was special coverage from outside the pageant, hundreds of women picketing like autoworkers without a contract: girls in tidy dresses or skirts and blouses, wearing shoes like we wore, their hair styled like ours. Four hundred women walking up and down the Atlantic City boardwalk, from Florida and from Wisconsin and from California just like the girls inside putting on their makeup and gowns, except that these girls were carrying signs and some were swinging bras like lassos and chanting slogans as they dumped mops and steno pads and girdles into a big trash can.
“Can you imagine not wearing . . .” Ally asked, not saying brassiere, a word she spoke aloud only in the lingerie section, and even then she blushed.
I thought of Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's, in that black dress with the long black gloves, the five-strand pearls and the tiara in her hair, the extravagant cigarette holder. That dress would have needed a strapless bra, and why would she bother, with nothing for a bra to hold up? And in the movie she'd left her husband behind forever to start a wild life in New York, and I'd loved her for it, and I'd sort of imagined doing something that dramatic myself. Still, I couldn't imagine doing what these real women were doing, leaving their husbands or boyfriends for one day to try to point out that women weren't just for gawking at.
Linda pulled an issue of McCall's from my coffee table and, keeping an eye on the protesters and awaiting the start of the pageant, flipped to an article about the balance of power in marriages. “So here's the fifty-dollar question,” she said. “Are you the dominator or the dominatee?” And we leaned over the magazine, reading “The Sexual Wilderness” together, glad of the excuse to ignore those girls on the TV.
“The spouse who handles the money has the power?” Brett said. “That's definitely me.”
“I'm the wily old gal who foists the money worries off on her husband,” Kath said.