She Matters Read Online Free Page B

Judith and Liza right away, and we moved as one to sit in the last pew, we still-whole daughters, each with two parents. How is she, have you talked to her, we said in low asides. I did last night, I left minestrone, I took some groceries over . This was our benediction in the face of our friend’s pain. Our radiant, optimistic Patricia had crossed over, fatherless. She’d lost big. The eulogies began, and we stopped our talk, watched her closely. I realized we were going to lose, too. She guided us.
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    Once, after Patricia gave a reading—I wasn’t thirty yet, she wasn’t forty—I asked for a copy of the piece, and read it many times, marveling at tricks I wished to try. She used to come to my readings, sit in front, cheer afterward her unabashed cheer. In the next years, motherhood’s inescapable assignments and the struggles of our marriages made us forget writing, how we had first studiedeach other, enjoyed each other and connected. Now our husbands earned most of our incomes, our independence thinned by their money, trumped. Something had happened to us. And Mark and Christopher, they also were writers, and we said to each other how proud we were, how jealous. We wanted what they had, their selfish time, their closed doors and concentration, their bodies ignored by the babies. We knew something of writer unions that other friends didn’t get, the artist husband, the artist wife vying for praise, for success, wanting to outdo each other, pretending not to want that. A room of one’s own, we often said, if only. After the first babies, Patricia and I stopped talk of our writing, that sacrifice a greater sorrow than the dozen others parenthood demanded. We washed out each other’s sippie cups, dropped off library books. At the Monday gatherings we could look at each other over the heads in need of a shampoo and bemoan our loss without a word. At least the kids are worth it! We love them so! And then we could say, but only to each other, we could whisper, Maybe they aren’t worth it. What about me, where have I gone?
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    Patricia’s back. I see her at the high school, her enormous smile visible at a distance. We stop and hug in the hallway, read each other’s faces.
    â€œHow are you?” she says in her way. I feel such good relief. She’s frazzled by the move, not quite at home yet.
    â€œCan you believe this,” we say, “they’re sophomores !” We compare the kids’ schedules, which we’re holding in our hands, and see they have two classes together. We’re thrilled, imagining their rediscovery, and then we laugh at ourselves, our enthusiasm, because we know we must resist urging them to be friends. Such alchemy is private and unplanned.
    â€œHow are you?” she asks again, and I tell her about the book I’m writing—my friendships with women.
    She glows. “I’ve almost finished my novel.”
    Together, our voices warm and matched, we are saying, “When can I read it?”

Young.

Women Are Like This
    H ere’s my home of women, blood’s beginnings: I share a bunk bed with my sister. We live on the fourth floor of an apartment building on the Upper East Side. Even though it’s east of Park Avenue, what my mother calls the unfashionable side, the monthly rent is an “astronomical” $400. My mother tells us we deserve this, having stayed in the residential hotel after we left our father. His parents pay the child support, and she has money for the rent, and for coats and chokers at Bonwit Teller, and for restaurants along Third Avenue, where she knows the owners and the maître d’s, men’s names her special song. She drove a taxi, briefly, and had a small part in someone’s movie, but she doesn’t work. She doesn’t go anywhere. The grandparents also pay for private school, the pediatrician and dentist, the Cape Cod