“My diaphragm,” I said, and there was a brief but perfect stillness to him then, him shrugging off his concern about using birth control, one he never voiced in bed.
“Let's make a baby,” he whispered. “Let's make a Robert and we'll call him Bobby. Let's make a cute little Madeline who will grow up to be as beautiful as her mom.”
But I wasn't ready for another baby, for morning sickness and the overwhelming tiredness that had been bad enough with Maggie and almost unbearable with Davy, when Maggie was already underfoot. And I wanted to steal the quiet of that morning for myself. Your dream is in reach, Danny, I wanted to say, but what about mine?
He was already lifting my nightgown, though, kissing my breasts. My body was responding even as my mind was thinking What would you do if you were Risa Luccessi? and reaching for the next few words that I'd had, the start of the second sentence, the thought that had already dissipated in the morning exchange, leaving me with a question that had no answer, no little bit of ankle, no enticing glimpse of leg.
WHEN I RECEIVED the first positive response to my query letter the second Tuesday in January, my thrill was overrun with panic by the time I got to the agent's bold, blue-ink signature. Before I knew it I'd revised two chapters entirely, screwing up the pagination. I was frantically retyping the whole thing when Danny got home late that night, and yes, he was happy for me, but I'd imagined him more excited. I'd imagined him not caring one whit about his dinner, which, by the time he got home, was three shriveled new potatoes, a pile of dried peas, and a hard lump of chicken left forgotten in the oven. I'd imagined him wrapping me up in a great big hug and calling me “the future famous novelist, M. F. O'Mara” again, saying we ought to open a bottle of champagne.
The next morning, though, the Wednesday Sisters made up for Danny's restraint. They all wanted to touch the letter, as if it were literary spring water from the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes.
“So, what in the world is a jiffy bag?” I asked. “And what does ‘on exclusive’ mean?”
By late afternoon, I was standing at the post office window handing over my manuscript, not completely retyped but with two page 34s labeled A and B as Danny had suggested. And even as I pushed Davy's stroller toward home I was holding my breath, sure that at any moment the phone would ring and my literary life would begin.
Minutes turned into hours, days, and weeks, though, my initial euphoria dipping to cautious optimism, souring into apprehension, then rotting almost immediately into massive, Oreo-eating dread. Perhaps the manuscript was so bad that the agent was not even going to grace it with a rejection, too concerned any further correspondence with me might taint him.
WHEN ERICH SEGAL'S Love Story was serialized in the Ladies' Home Journal starting that February, Kath insisted we'd be fools not to read it. “It's the biggest publishing sensation in a thousand blue moons, y'all. Don't you think we can learn something from this year's May Queen?” She, like the critics, for all the fault they found with the novel, thought it charming. “It's like the bad boy we all fell for at school,” she said. “You know you should not even be talking to this fella, he's got a reputation and so does any girl seen with him, but he's charming your bobby socks off and the next thing you know you're unzipping your own skirt without him even having to ask.”
Like nearly everyone in America, we did read it, and we argued about every aspect of it, from the story (Oliver Barrett IV defies his wealthy father to marry poor Jenny Cavilleri, only to watch her die) to the prose (“‘It skips from cliché to cliché with an abandon that would chill even the blood of a True Romance editor,’” Linda quoted from a Newsweek review) to the cover, loud red and green and blue letters against a white background (half the copies at Stacey's already looked dirty from people handling it, Ally said, a comment Kath would remember later, about the impracticality of white covers). I was the only one who swallowed the book whole, reading it in one late-night sitting and bawling at the end, having neither the English literature background to call out its flaws nor any idea whether poor Radcliffe music majors really called rich Harvard boys “Preppie,” or whether Harvard hockey stars really called their fathers “sir.”
“So, what makes it work?” Kath said.
“How can anyone possibly care about this nonsense when hundreds of women are conducting sit-ins at Ladies' Home Journal?” Linda said. “When Harvard College and Newsweek magazine are being sued for sex discrimination—and with more to come, mark my words.” Leaving me imagining Linda holding the book physically away as she read it. Leaving me wondering if any of us could bear to read Love Story if Jenny had left behind not just her husband but also two sons and a daughter under the age of ten.