The Vanishing Half(68)

“So tell me,” she’d said. “What’s your story?”

Stella had never been caught so squarely in the gaze of such a brilliant woman before. She fidgeted, twisting her wedding ring around her finger.

“I don’t know,” she said. “What do you mean? I don’t have a story. I mean, nothing that interesting.”

She was lying, of course, but she was startled when Peg laughed.

“Like hell,” she said. “It’s not every day a housewife suddenly decides she wants to take up math. You don’t mind if I call you that, do you?”

“Call me what?”

“A housewife.”

“No,” Stella said. “It’s what I am, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

Conversations with Peg always went like this: twisting and turning, questions sounding like answers, answers seeming like questions. Stella always felt like Peg was testing her, which only made her want to prove herself. The professor gave her books—Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem, Evelyn Reed—and she read them all, even though Blake rolled his eyes when he glanced at the covers. He didn’t see what any of that had to do with mathematics. Peg invited her to protests and even though Stella was always too nervous to stand in a crowd of shouting people, she always read about them afterward in the paper.

“What are Peggy’s girls up to this time?” Blake would ask, peeking over her shoulder at the local section. There they were, protesting the Miss America pageant, a sexist advertisement inside Los Angeles Magazine, the opening of a new slasher movie that glorified violence against women. Peggy’s girls were all white, and when Stella asked once if there were any Negro women in the group, Peg prickled.

“They have their own concerns, you know,” she said. “But they’re welcome to join us in the fight.”

Who was Stella to judge? At least Peg stood for something, fought for something. She went to war with the university over everything: paid maternity leave, sexist faculty hiring, and exploitation of adjunct labor. She argued about these things even though she had no children and had already secured tenure—she argued even though her advocating wouldn’t benefit her at all. It baffled Stella, protesting out of a sense of duty, or maybe even amusement.

Now, sitting in Peg’s office, she reached for a volume on prime numbers and said, “It’s only time off if you eventually go back.”

“Well, maybe she will,” Peg said. “On her own. You did.”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

“I didn’t have a choice,” she said. “I had to leave school. When I was her age, the only thing I wanted was to go to college. And she just throws it away.”

“Well, she isn’t you,” Peg said. “It’s unfair for you to expect her to be.”

It wasn’t that either, or at least, it wasn’t only that. Her daughter felt like a stranger, and maybe, if she was still in Mallard, she would be amused by all the ways that they were different. By all the ways her daughter reminded her of Desiree, even—she might laugh with her sister about it. Are you sure she’s not yours? But here in this world, her daughter felt like a stranger and it terrified her. If her daughter didn’t feel like she was really hers, then nothing about her life was real.

“Maybe you’re actually upset at yourself,” Peg said.

“Myself? Why?”

“All those years you’ve been talking about graduate school. Then nothing.”

“Yes, but—” Stella stopped. That was a different matter altogether. Each time she talked to Blake about applying to a master’s program, he reacted as childishly as she expected. More school? Christ, Stella, how much more school do you need? He accused her of abandoning the family, she accused him of abandoning her, both fell asleep angry.

“I mean, of course that husband thinks he can still push you around,” Peg said. “You frighten him. A woman with a brain. Nothing scares them more.”

“I don’t know if that’s true,” Stella said. Blake was still her husband; she didn’t like hearing anyone talk about his faults.

“I just mean it’s all about power,” Peg said. “He wants it, and he doesn’t want you to have it. Why else do you think men fuck their secretaries?”

Again, she regretted telling Peg how she and Blake met. Their story, romantic at the time, only became crasser over the years. She was so young, her daughter’s age; she’d never met a man like Blake before. Of course she hadn’t been able to resist his pull. Their first time in bed, she was only nineteen, along with Blake on a work trip to Philadelphia. By then, she’d learned that being a secretary was a little like being a wife; she memorized his schedule, hung his hat and coat, poured him a Scotch. She brought him lunch, managed his moods, listened to him complain about his father, remembered to send his mother flowers for her birthday. This was why he’d invited her to Philadelphia, she’d thought, until the final night of the trip when he leaned in at the hotel bar and kissed her.

“You don’t know how long I’ve been wanting to do that,” he said. “Since Antoine’s. You looked so sweet and so lost. I knew I was in trouble then. I told them, find me a girl with the nicest handwriting, it doesn’t matter if she isn’t much to look at. I hoped you wouldn’t be. I didn’t need the distraction. I’m not that sort of man, you see. But of course, the prettiest handwriting belonged to the prettiest girl. And you’ve been torturing me ever since.”