Book Group

SARAH AND JEAN WERE THE FIRST GUESTS TO ARRIVE AT THE JULY meeting of the Bellington Ladies’ Belletristic Society. The gathering was being held in a townhouse on Waterlily Terrace, a small development of six attached units sharing a grassy yard and a fenced-in swimming pool. The complex felt far more pleasant and secluded than Sarah could have imagined from its location, just off a busy street leading into Bellington’s downtown business area.

Their host, Bridget, was a bright-eyed, squat-bodied woman in an African-print mumu; her haircut looked like it had been administered by a blind barber working with toy scissors. She hugged Jean, then moved on to Sarah without missing a beat, closing her eyes and purring with pleasure as she gathered the younger woman into the lumpy cushions of her body.

“So good to see you,” she murmured, as if Sarah were a long-lost member of her family. “We’re looking forward to your insights.”

She led them into her living room, an airy, art-filled space lit solely by the evening sun, which filtered in through floor-to-ceiling glass doors opening onto a tiny patio. Kitchen chairs supplemented the regular furniture, creating an intimate circle around a coffee table brimming with wine, cheese, fruit, and crackers.

“So how are you liking the new place?” asked Jean.

“I love it,” said Bridget, who was having some trouble opening a bottle of white wine. “It already feels like home.”

“Did you just move in?” Sarah asked. “It doesn’t feel like it.”

“February.” Bridget grimaced as she extracted a crumbling cork from the neck of the bottle. “My husband passed away last fall.”

“I’m sorry.”

Bridget gave a philosophical shrug. “It was such a relief to escape from that stuffy old house.” She filled three glasses with chardonnay and handed two of them to her guests. “I could hardly breathe in there.”

Trying to ignore the flecks of cork floating in her glass, Sarah sipped her wine and thought of her own mother, still living in the musty old house on Westerly Street, the last holdout on the block. She didn’t know any of her neighbors anymore, and spent entire days locked up like a fugitive from justice, the windows shut, the shades pulled down. She talked about soap opera characters as if they were real people, and wondered why her plants kept dying.

“Maybe I’ll move here,” said Jean. “If something happens to Tim, I mean.”

“We’re all widows on Waterlily Terrace.” Bridget smiled, as if this were somehow a comical idea. “Four of us were schoolteachers, Ellen was a social worker, and Doris was a housewife. She has a degree from Smith, though.”

“Do you get along?” asked Sarah.

“Most of the time. There’s been some tension this summer about the pool. There’s a heater, but I don’t like to use it. The cold water is so much more invigorating.”

“Especially when you’re skinny-dipping,” Jean added knowingly.

Bridget laughed. “I don’t even wear a bathing cap. I’m such an outlaw.”

Jean looked around, surveying the cozy interior of the townhouse with a wistful expression.

“Must be nice, not having to clean up after anyone.”

“And eating whatever you want.” Bridget smeared a generous quantity of goat cheese on a Swedish cracker that looked like a rectangle of stiffened burlap. “My late husband, Art, God rest his soul, thought it was his mission in life to keep me thin.” Bridget looked down, contemplating her plumpness with affection. “Does this look like a body that was meant to be thin?”

Jean dipped a carrot spear in a bowl of hummus. There was a barely perceptible edge in her voice.

“So how was Provence?”

Bridget flashed Jean a quick look of sympathy.

“Heavenly. I didn’t want to come back. In my heart of hearts, I believe I’m actually a French peasant.”

“She went with Regina and Alice,” Jean explained to Sarah. “You’ll meet them later on.”

“We’re going back next year,” Bridget told Jean. “This time you’ll have to come.”

Jean turned to Sarah. “Tim wouldn’t let me go. He said it was too expensive.”

“Life’s too short,” Bridget huffed. “What’s the old fart saving his money for? A silk-lined coffin?”

“The super-premium cable package.” Jean didn’t sound like she was joking. “He’s going to die right there on that recliner, switching back and forth between that A&E biography of Churchill and an infomercial for a stain remover.”

“Art was big on exercise shows.” Bridget smiled sadly. “Not that he ever exercised.”

“I’ve never lived alone,” said Jean. “Not even for a day.”

“It can get lonely,” Bridget allowed, though it sounded to Sarah like she was just trying to cheer Jean up. “But that’s the nice thing about a place like this. There are always people around if you want some company. Doris and I are taking a ceramics class. You should join us.”

“Maybe I will,” said Jean.

Bridget shifted her attention to Sarah.

“Jean says you have a Ph.D. We’re honored that you decided to join us.”

“I don’t actually have a doctorate,” Sarah explained, sorry to disappoint her. “I did all the coursework, but I never wrote my thesis.”

Bridget shrugged this off as a mere technicality.

“I’m so curious,” she said. “Did you like the novel?”

“It’s complicated,” Sarah began. “I had such a strong reaction that it doesn’t seem right to just say I liked it or I didn’t like it, you know what I mean? It just goes way beyond that.”

Bridget seemed pleased by this response. She reached across the table and squeezed Sarah’s hand.

“I think we’re going to get along just fine,” she said.

The doorbell rang. Bridget set down her glass and extracted herself with some difficulty from the deep indentation she’d made in the couch.

“Drink some more wine,” she said, caressing Sarah’s shoulder on the way to the door. “We find the conversation’s livelier that way.”

Jean flashed Sarah an I-told-you-so look as she refilled their glasses.

“See?” she said. “Aren’t you glad I dragged you here?”

For weeks now, on their nightly walks, Jean had been bugging Sarah about Madame Bovary. Had she obtained a copy of the Steegmuller translation? Had she started reading it yet? Had she given any thought to the five discussion questions each “little sister” had been asked to contribute to the meeting?

Until a couple of days ago, the answer to all these questions had been a resounding no. Because she felt like she was being rail-roaded—to the best of her knowledge, she had never actually agreed to be Jean’s “little sister”—Sarah had avoided the novel for as long as possible, in the hope that an unexpected circumstance would arise and free her from the obligation: Maybe Richard would get sent on a last-minute business trip, or Lucy would catch a cold; maybe she herself would go blind or get run over by a bus.

It wasn’t just the book group she dreaded; it was the book itself. She had read Madame Bovary in college, for a seminar called Sexism in Literature, which cataloged the multifarious strategies male writers had used throughout the ages to oppress and marginalize their female characters. Emma Bovary was Exhibit A—right up there with Ophelia and Isabelle Archer—a dreamy, passive, narcissistic figure enthralled by paralyzing bourgeois notions of “love” and “happiness,” utterly and indiscriminately dependent upon men to rescue her from the emptiness of her useless life. To make matters worse, she turned her back on the empowering consolations of sisterhood: She had no female friends, mistreated her servant girl and wet nurse, and neglected her poor little daughter.

Even if Sarah had been inclined to revisit this depressing material, it wouldn’t have been easy. Despite its racy subject matter, Madame Bovary was densely written and slowly paced; like any nineteenth-century novel, it placed serious demands upon the reader’s time and concentration. Ever since she’d begun her affair with Todd, Sarah had developed some sort of adult-onset attention deficit disorder. She’d pick up the newspaper and get maybe two paragraphs into an article before finding herself completely at sea, the words on the page dissolving into a fantasy of travel, just herself and Todd, no children, complete freedom—two lovers laughing on a crowded bus in India, sipping champagne in a first-class train compartment in Europe, barreling down the interstate in a red convertible, singing along with the radio. She’d turn back to the paper and reread the same two paragraphs, only to be waylaid by a daydream of grocery shopping, cruising down the aisles of Bread & Circus with Todd at her side, filling a cart with organic produce, fresh pasta, free-range chicken, sinful desserts, Australian wine. She’d force her attention back on the paper with a feeling of growing annoyance—what did she care about a shark attack in Florida, rolling blackouts in California, George W. Bush’s love affair with his Texas ranch? All she wanted to think about was hiding in the balcony of an old-fashioned movie palace, Todd’s hand inching up her thigh as the calvary charged across a Western landscape. Finally, she just tossed aside the paper and turned on the TV, which seemed so much more accommodating of her fantasy life, and not nearly so judgmental.

Knowing that she was no match for Flaubert, she’d resigned herself to winging it at the meeting, skimming the novel for an hour or two, scrawling down a handful of boilerplate questions, keeping her mouth shut during group discussion. But then something happened on Saturday morning that put her in a serious funk. In an effort to distract herself, she picked up Madame Bovary and discovered an entirely different novel from the one that existed in her memory.

“What does your wife look like?”

Todd seemed surprised by the question, at least partly because he was licking Sarah’s navel when she asked it.

“My wife?”

“The woman living in your house?” Sarah said, attempting to make a joke out of a subject that had become a source of obsessive speculation on her part. “The one you sleep with every night?”

“What does she look like?” Todd repeated skeptically.

“I’m just curious, that’s all.”

After several evasive maneuvers, Todd attempted to describe Kathy as if she were a criminal suspect—five-nine, straight brown hair, brown eyes, no visible scars or tattoos—but Sarah remained unsatisfied.

“Is she pretty?”

He gave the matter some serious consideration, as if it were open to debate. Sarah found this encouraging.

“I guess so,” he said. “Objectively speaking.”

“Is she a knockout?”

“We’re married. I don’t think about her like that.”

“What about other guys? If they saw her walking down the street, would they think she was hot?”

“Depends on the guy, I guess.”

“Do you have a picture?”

In a transparent attempt to distract her, Todd kissed her from the base of her throat down to her sternum. With a gentle tug on her bikini top, he freed her left breast, flicking his tongue playfully at her nipple, waking it from its afternoon slumber.

“Come on,” she persisted. “You must have one in your wallet.”

“Jesus.” Todd looked up in bewilderment. “Why is this so important to you?”

Sarah felt a warm flush of shame surging into her face. She knew it was a bad sign, this jealousy she was feeling toward a woman she’d never met, who’d never done anything to hurt her.

“I don’t know,” she confessed, wondering if she was about to burst into tears. “I wish it wasn’t.”

Todd pressed a finger to his lip, shushing her as if she were a small child. Looking straight into her eyes, he slipped his other hand inside the waistband of her bikini bottom and reached between her thighs, cupping her gently from below, exerting a slight upward pressure. It always came as a shock when he touched her down there, the pleasure of it so much more intense than she’d anticipated. She opened her legs to give him room.

“She’s a knockout,” he confessed, slipping one finger inside of her, then another, making her gasp out loud. “But beauty’s overrated.”

At the time, Sarah barely registered the comment, giving herself up to the strong sensations flooding her body. Later that night, though, it came back to her: Beauty’s overrated. He’d meant it to be comforting, but at three in the morning it had precisely the opposite effect. He had a beautiful wife, a knockout, and she was sleeping beside him right now, their legs intertwined beneath the covers. And where was Sarah? Wide-awake in the dark, listening to the wheezy, tedious breathing of the man she no longer considered her husband. Beauty’s overrated. Only someone who took his own beauty for granted could have been able to say something so outrageously stupid with a straight face.

Richard liked to sleep in on the weekends; he was still in bed when Sarah left the house on Saturday morning, leaving Lucy in front of the TV with a big bowl of dry Cheerios for company and instructions to wake Daddy if she needed anything.

“Mommy has to run some errands,” she said.

Her first stop was Starbucks, a journey back in time she preferred to avoid whenever possible. For years after she stopped working there, just a glimpse of that tasteful beige-and-maroon interior—the bags of featured coffee, the shelves full of upscale accessories, the customers lined up like addicts at a yuppie methadone clinic—could throw off her whole day, stirring up a sediment of bad memories that otherwise lay dormant in her mental attic, covered by several protective layers of dust. (She used to feel the same way about her old high school, devising all sorts of elaborate detours to keep from having to lay eyes on it.) But she’d slept badly and was suffering from a low-level headache that only a serious dose of caffeine could cure.

“Vente house,” she said to the girl at the register, a punky earth mother with a jet-black pageboy and a tongue stud.

“Vente house,” the girl repeated a moment later, sliding the gigantic paper cup across the counter.

“Don’t worry.” Sarah smiled in rueful solidarity. “You won’t work here forever.”

“It’s not that bad,” the girl said, eyeing Sarah with suspicion, as if she were some sort of troublemaker.

Todd’s address, Sarah had learned from the phone book, was 24 Angelina Way. She found the place without much difficulty and parked across the street in front of Number 19, in what felt to her like an unobtrusive patch of shade beneath a maple tree. Sipping her coffee and listening to NPR’s Weekend Edition, she settled back in her seat and stared at the house where her boyfriend lived.

It was nothing special, what would have been an average-sized colonial if it hadn’t been divided into two mirror-image condos, powder blue with pale yellow trim. Instead of a lawn there was a large driveway sloping down to a two-car basement garage. On either side of the driveway, cement walks led to the respective entrances, identical except for the fact that one said 24 and the other 26. The higher number also sported a decorative straw hat on the door.

Sarah shouldn’t have been surprised to find Todd living in a duplex with a beat-up Toyota on his side of the driveway—she knew that his wife supported the family with some kind of low-paying work as a documentary filmmaker for public TV—but the house just didn’t fit into her idea of his stature in the grand scheme of things. He carried himself like a natural aristocrat, a person for whom nice things came as easily as good looks. In some fundamental way, it didn’t make sense that someone as unremarkable as she was should be living in a bigger house and a better neighborhood than Todd.

It wasn’t an awful house, not by a long stretch. It had skylights and scalloped woodwork over the front doors and windows, the sort of small touches that marked it as a “quality home,” modest though it was. Maybe it felt right for them to be living there at that particular point in their lives. Maybe it was even romantic in a way, to be a young family together, sharing burdens, moving up in the world. Years from now, Todd and Kathy would be able to drive Aaron down Angelina Way and say, There’s the old condo, can you believe we ever lived like that? Sarah had skipped that particular phase of life, moving straight from a shared apartment with annoying roommates into a mini-Victorian full of furniture from Pottery Barn, and she couldn’t help resenting Kathy for the fact that she got to suffer with Todd through their lean years, creating a history they could look back on with pride and maybe even a touch of nostalgia.

Unless he leaves her, she thought, her chest swelling with a strange feeling of lightness, as if hope were helium. Unless he leaves her to be with me.

It wasn’t the first time she let herself consider this scenario, of course, but it was the first time she’d let herself believe it was a real possibility. He could divorce Kathy. He could marry me. I could divorce Richard. Todd could marry me. She kept extending the sequence, playing out the permutations, imagining the logistics involved to the best of her ability—the lawyers, the custody battles, the financial arrangements, the emotional trauma—until Todd startled her by stepping out the front door, hugging a picnic cooler to his chest, his brow furrowed with worry. He can divorce her. He carried the plastic box down the steps and placed it in the trunk of the Toyota. I can divorce him. It took all of the self-restraint she possessed to stay inside the car, to keep herself from running over to him and shouting out the wonderful news.

We can divorce them and marry each other!

He made three trips in all—beach umbrella, toy pail and shovel, two canvas totes, a football—and had just shut the trunk when Aaron emerged from the front door, looking serious and oddly unfamiliar without his jester’s cap, and joined his father by the car. Kathy stepped out into the sunlight a moment later. She was barefoot, wearing tight blue jean shorts, a black bikini top, and Italian movie star sunglasses, looking taller, thinner, and more glamorous than Sarah had let herself imagine in her worst self-loathing insomniac nightmare. She was one of those girls, the ones from high school who made you stick your finger down your throat after lunch, the ones who made you look in the mirror and cry.

Kathy stood on the porch for a long time, giving Sarah a fair chance to contemplate her folly. She interlaced her fingers overhead and tilted her lithe torso from side to side. Then she spread her arms wide and yawned, the way people do when they’re sleepy but happy, and ready to embrace the day.

“Okay, boys,” she called out. “Let’s get moving.”

Sarah felt herself deflating, a Thanksgiving Day float pierced by an arrow. Oh God. Her dream of happiness suddenly seemed cruel, a joke she’d played on herself. He’ll never leave her. She barely managed to hold herself together until Todd and his family had backed out of the driveway and headed off down the street. Not for me. She covered her mouth politely with one hand, as if she were coughing instead of sobbing. Not for anybody like me.

 

Long after she’d stopped crying, Sarah sat in the parked car on Angelina Way, wondering how she was going to get through the next two days. Weekends were brutal under the best of circumstances, forty-eight-hour prison stretches separating one happy blur of weekdays from the next. But this one was going to be unbearable, now that she’d be able to torment herself with the thought of Todd spending every second of it in the company of his gorgeous wife—at the beach no less—while she was stuck at home with the panty sniffer.

Richard was sitting on the front lawn with Lucy when she pulled into the driveway, and just the sight of him filled her with disgust—his pleated shorts and Italian sandals, the polo shirt with the collar turned up as if it were 1988 on Nantucket, his little potbelly. They were having a tea party around a red-and-white-checkered tablecloth, along with one of those hideous American Girl dolls and a stuffed frog named Melvin (both the doll and the miniature ceramic tea set were gifts from Richard’s mother, a woman who still believed that “dainty” and “ladylike” were the conditions to which all little girls should aspire). He looked up from the game as she approached, a demitasse of nothing raised halfway between a saucer and his mouth, his pinky sticking out with a primness that didn’t seem satirical.

“Where were you?” he asked, his face artfully blank, no hint of accusation in his voice. Ever since the incident in his office, he’d been a lot less imperious around the house, a little more considerate of his wife and child.

“I had some things to do.”

“You could have left a note. I didn’t know if you were coming back in fifteen minutes or two hours.”

You’re lucky I’m back at all, she thought. She looked from Richard to Lucy, smiling as if touched by the sight of them.

“Well, I’m glad to see the two of you having so much fun. I think you needed a little father-daughter bonding time.”

He nodded, as if to concede her the round.

“It’s been wonderful,” he said. “But I was hoping you could take over in a few minutes. I have some work to do for that Chinese restaurant. The presentation’s next week.”

“Could you do it later?” she said. “I need a little time to myself.”

“Sarah.” She could hear the irritation creeping into his voice. “This is a big account.”

“Spend the day with your daughter,” she snapped. “It won’t kill you.”

“I don’t think this is fair,” he spluttered. He seemed genuinely baffled, as if Sarah had no business in life beyond taking care of Lucy and making things convenient for him. “Is there something particular you need to do?”

She only had to hesitate a second or two.

“I joined a book group,” she told him. “We’re reading Flaubert.”

Based on the name alone, Sarah had developed a completely erroneous impression of the Ladies’ Belletristic Society. She’d expected it to be stuffy and pretentious, fatally suburban, a garden club nightmare of watercress sandwiches and polite snobbery, well-preserved matrons in golf visors and pearls who used the word darling as an adjective.

Instead, the atmosphere inside Bridget’s condo was warm and welcoming, full of laughter and intellectual curiosity. Over here an informed conversation about the films of Mike Leigh. Over there an impassioned discussion of third-world debt relief. Despite the age of the members—the “ladies” were in their sixties and seventies—Sarah sensed a collective vibrancy in the air that seemed vaguely reminiscent of something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

As the only little sister present—everyone kept assuring her that another was on the way—Sarah found herself in great demand. Jean ushered her around the room like a visiting celebrity, introducing her to each new arrival: Regina, a tall bony woman with a hearing aid and an owlish smile; Alice, whose iron gray hair only emphasized the uncanny youthfulness of her face; and now Josephine, plump and frumpy, with a tight helmet of curly hair and mismatched orthopedic splints on her forearms.

“Oh no,” said Jean. “Don’t tell me you got carpal tunnel.”

“Repetitive stress,” Josephine replied with a sigh. “Too much typing.”

“She’s writing a novel,” Jean explained to Sarah. “She always said she would.”

Josephine gave a rueful nod. “Only forty years behind schedule.”

“This is Sarah, my neighbor,” said Jean. “She’s a literary critic.”

“In my dreams,” said Sarah. “In real life I’m the mother of a three-year-old girl.”

“An adorable three-year-old girl,” added Jean.

Josephine stared at Sarah for a long moment. There was something probing in her gaze, but tender too, as if she were attempting to move beyond conversation into some more intimate realm.

“She won’t be three forever, honey. When she goes to school, you can get back to your work.”

“My work,” said Sarah. The words felt good in her mouth. She just wished she knew what they referred to.

“Don’t be like me.” Josephine reached for Sarah’s hand and gave a feeble, but still somehow encouraging squeeze. “Don’t let your whole life go by.”

Before Sarah could reply Josephine was besieged by concerned friends peppering her with questions and medical advice. Regina recommended acupuncture. Alice said she should try dictating her novel into a tape recorder. Bridget said she hoped Josephine’s grip was strong enough to support a wineglass. Jean said she knew lots of people with similar injuries who had complete recoveries, no disability whatsoever.

“You just have to be patient,” she said.

And all at once, it came to Sarah: It was like being back at the Women’s Center. For the first time since she graduated from college, she’d managed to find her way into a community of smart, independent, supportive women who enjoyed each other’s company and didn’t need to compete with one another or define themselves in relation to the men in their lives. It was precisely what she’d been missing, the oasis she’d been unable to find in graduate school, at work, or even at the playground. She’d searched for it for so long that she’d even come to suspect that it hadn’t actually existed in the first place, at least not the way she remembered it, that it was more a product of her romantic undergraduate imagination than anything real in the world. But it had been real. It felt like this, and it was a huge relief to be back inside the circle again.

The feeling didn’t last long. The doorbell rang, and Bridget escorted two more women into the room, both of them in expensive floral dresses. The older one had a pretty, but somewhat leathery face and the toned legs of a tennis player.

“See,” said Bridget, presenting the younger woman to Sarah with an air of triumph. “I told you you’d have a comrade.”

Sarah tried to look pleased, but her face wouldn’t cooperate. She just hoped her smile wasn’t as stiff and phony as the one plastered on her comrade’s face.

“Nice to see you again,” said Sarah.

“What a surprise,” said Mary Ann. “We miss you at the playground.”

 

The two little sisters eyed each other warily across the coffee table. Sarah still hadn’t recovered from the shock of Mary Ann’s arrival and how completely it had spoiled what had been shaping up as a very nice evening. This couldn’t be the Women’s Center, not with her here. She felt like she’d been given a beautiful birthday present, only to have it ripped away a moment later and handed to someone else. Her only consolation was the look of raw discomfort on Mary Ann’s face. She must have realized that she’d strayed onto alien turf, that for once she was the one who was outnumbered.

“Which one of you would like to start?” asked Bridget.

“She’s the bookworm,” said Mary Ann. “Let her go first.”

“No, you go ahead,” said Sarah. “I can wait.”

Mary Ann took the measure of her audience before speaking. The ladies of the Belletristic Society were smiling at her like kindergarten teachers overseeing the year’s first installment of show-and-tell, fully prepared to be fascinated by a broken clam shell or a worn shoelace.

“Did anybody like this book?” Mary Ann screwed her face up into the look of offended disapproval Sarah knew so well. “Because I really just hated it.”

She hesitated, waiting for someone to take the baton and run with it, but the ladies seemed startled by this unexpected salvo of negativity. They didn’t look upset, exactly, but their smiles were in retreat.

“I mean, isn’t it kind of depressing?” Mary Ann continued, her voice growing in confidence, as if she were sitting at the picnic table on the playground, lecturing Cheryl and Theresa. “She cheats on her husband with two different guys, wastes all his money, then kills herself with rat poison. Do I really need to read this?”

This question was met with an uncomfortable silence. It was Laurel, Mary Ann’s sponsor, who finally ventured a response.

“There’s a lot of good descriptive writing,” she said hopefully.

The ladies nodded in vigorous agreement.

“It’s supposed to be depressing,” Josephine pointed out. “It’s a tragedy. Emma’s undone by a tragic flaw.”

“What’s her flaw?” Bridget inquired.

“Blindness,” Josephine replied. “She can’t see that the men are just using her.”

“She just wants a little romance in her life,” Jean ventured. “You can’t really blame her for that.”

“It’s about women’s choices,” Regina added. “Back then, a woman didn’t have a lot of choices. You could be a nun or you could be a wife. That’s all there was.”

“Or a prostitute,” added Bridget.

“She had a choice not to cheat on her husband,” said Mary Ann, staring rudely at Sarah.

“Mary Ann’s got a point,” admitted Laurel.

“Usually it’s the man who cheats,” said Alice. “I found it refreshing to read about a woman reclaiming her sexuality.”

“Reclaiming her sexuality?” Mary Ann repeated with disdain. “Is that a nice way of saying she’s a slut?”

“Madame Bovary is not a slut,” said Regina. “She’s one of the great characters in Western literature.”

“Hello?” said Mary Ann. “She’s sneaking off to the city every week to screw her husband’s friend.”

“I found some of the sex stuff a little cryptic.” Josephine paged through her paperback. “Like ‘Rodolphe discovered that the affair offered still further possibilities of sensual gratification. He abandoned every last shred of restraint and consideration. He made her into something compliant, something corrupt.’”

“See?” said Mary Ann. “She’s a slut.”

“Does anybody know what that means?” Josephine asked. “Do you think he’s tying her up or something like that?”

Alice leaned forward and mouthed the words, “Anal sex.”

Josephine looked horrified.

“Really?” she asked, glancing around the room in embarrassment. “Did everyone get that but me?”

“Why don’t we hold off on that for the moment,” suggested Bridget. “Let’s see what our other little sister has to say.”

Back when she was teaching, the prospect of public speaking had filled Sarah with dread. She always felt like she was faking it, unsuccessfully impersonating an authority figure. But tonight, for some reason, she felt calm and well prepared, an adult among her peers. Maybe she’d grown up in the past five or six years without realizing it. Or maybe she was just happier now than she’d been back then. She looked at Mary Ann with what she hoped was a kind of empathy.

“I think I understand your feelings about this book. I used to feel the same way myself.” She shifted her gaze around the circle, making eye contact with each of the older women. It was okay being the center of attention; it was even kind of fun. “When I read this book back in college, Madame Bovary just seemed like a fool. She marries the wrong man, makes one stupid mistake after another, and pretty much gets what she deserves. But when I read it this time, I just fell in love with her.”

Mary Ann scoffed, but the ladies seemed intrigued. Jean smiled proudly, as if to remind everyone who was responsible for Sarah’s presence at the meeting.

“My professors would kill me,” she continued, “but I’m tempted to go as far as to say that, in her own strange way, Emma Bovary is a feminist.”

“Really?” Bridget sounded skeptical, but open to persuasion.

“She’s trapped. She can either accept a life of misery or struggle against it. She chooses to struggle.”

“Some struggle,” said Mary Ann. “Jump in bed with every guy who says hello.”

“She fails in the end,” Sarah conceded. “But there’s something beautiful and heroic in her rebellion.”

“How convenient,” observed Mary Ann. “So now cheating on your husband makes you a feminist.”

“It’s not the cheating. It’s the hunger for an alternative. The refusal to accept unhappiness.”

“I guess I just didn’t understand the book,” Mary Ann said, adopting a tone of mock humility. “I just thought she just looked so pathetic, degrading herself for nothing. I mean, did she really think a man like that was going to run away with her?”

Sarah couldn’t help smiling. Just yesterday, for the first time, she and Todd had discussed the possibility of divorcing their respective spouses. Sarah had floated the subject cautiously, after he’d told her about his miserable Saturday at the beach, how he and Kathy had argued the whole time, how fragile and unhappy their marriage had become. She’s losing patience with me, he confessed. I’m going to leave Richard, she replied. And then they had made love tenderly, almost fearfully, as if trying to absorb the meaning of what they’d just told each other.

“Madame Bovary’s problem wasn’t that she committed adultery,” Sarah declared, in a voice full of calm certainty. “It was that she committed adultery with losers. She never found a partner worthy of her heroic passion.”

Mary Ann shook her head sadly, as if she pitied Sarah, but the other ladies were beaming, nodding in fervent agreement with this unexpected and thought-provoking assessment of the novel. Sarah sipped her wine, basking in the glow of their approval. Maybe I should go back to graduate school, she thought. Josephine raised her hand.

“Could we get back to the sex now?” she asked.