By the time the first box of books arrived at our little apartment, Francie could pull herself up onto her knees. She grasped the edge of the cardboard box as I tore the tape open carefully, my heart pounding. It seemed only fitting that we’d open it together.
“This is it, my love,” I sang to her. “Mama’s book is here.”
The box burst open, and there they were, a dozen shiny iterations of Katherine with her arm across Sergey’s chest. Margot and I had decided to put him in a spaceman’s uniform, but without the Soviet insignia—let that be another of the book’s hidden secrets. Katherine had her hair pulled back, an apron over her housedress. Behind them was a stylized version of the moon’s pockmarked surface. The Lunar Housewife blazed in garish red across the top of the cover, and beneath it “by Sharon Lysander.”
In the end I’d decided to go with a pen name. Francie and I had just settled in an apartment in Hoboken, where we could look across the Hudson at the city I’d once called home. I couldn’t quite see Joe’s building, but I knew where it was, and sometimes I stared for what felt like hours at that spot. I wondered if he knew where we were. I also wondered if Eli did, and if it was still possible for either of them to pull the plug on my novel. As Papa Hemingway would have put it, I was chickenshit. But at least it wasn’t “Alfred King” or another man’s name I’d have to hide behind. We’d even used an actual photo of me inside the back cover.
Francie pulled a book out first, and I let her gum along the edge of the pages. I reached for one as well and lifted it to my nose to sniff. It smelled better than anything I’d ever inhaled before, except perhaps Francie’s neck just behind her earlobe. The cover felt flimsy, the pages prone to yellowing, but I didn’t care. The book was just the right size to fit inside a pocketbook, or a nightstand drawer, or under a mattress.
Margot called me three weeks later to let me know that the first print run of ten thousand had sold out. “We’re going into a second edition,” she crowed. “Get out your champagne flutes!”
I collapsed onto the couch, shaking with relief. Champagne would have been nice. Paying our rent was more like it. I’d borrowed the money for our first few months’ rent and security deposit from my mother, and I intended to pay it back.
A month later, Margot called with the news that the second and third print runs had also sold out. This time her voice was serious. “We’re getting fan mail like you wouldn’t believe. I don’t even know what to do with all this. Can I have a truck take it over to you? Are you done with the next book yet?”
After that, I hired a nanny to take care of Francie while I wrote, four days a week. Most Fridays, my mother came to spend time with her, bringing lunch and just enough probing questions about whether I’d ever marry to keep my gratitude for her help and my appreciation for our paid nanny in balance.
When I needed a break from writing, I read fan mail. Most of it was polite, complimentary—“I’ve read a good many dime-store novels, but none kept me awake quite as many hours as this one”—but occasionally there were notes from disgruntled husbands, or shocked patriots, male and female. “To even imagine the government could pull a stunt like this on one of its citizens! You should be hanged as a traitor.”
I put that one right in the dustbin. To even imagine, indeed.
Most of the letters I couldn’t keep. There simply wasn’t room. But a few stood out, and these I folded into a locked wooden box I kept on the top shelf of my closet.
This one, for instance, which had been sent to the publisher’s office with all the others:
Dear Miss Lysander,
I hope you won’t think I sound desperate when I tell you I’ve been combing the shelves of women’s romance titles for months, looking for a book just like yours. I’ll admit your novel isn’t normally my cup of tea, and I take issue with some of the plot points you invent, especially the parts regarding the U.S. government. But you have a beautiful imagination and a keen wit. I should have given your work more of a chance earlier, I see. I look forward to reading more from you in the future.
I wanted in particular to commend the ending you gave to Katherine and Sergey. It was gratifying—or, I should say, inspiring—to read his apology and then her acceptance. A heartwarming reconciliation. Their ending, which was truly a beginning, gave this humble reader hope that one day I might have such a beginning as well.
Yours,
Joe Martin
I read and reread his note a hundred times. The formal tone, the pretension that I was really a stranger named Sharon Lysander—was he being funny? Or did he think someone might be monitoring his mail? In any case, it seemed as if he wouldn’t try to find me, at least not anytime soon; nor would he be alerting anyone else about my book. The letter felt like an apology, a peace offering. I could feel his longing, could read it in the sad slant of the script.
After I read it the first time, I wiped my face and went to the telephone. I wanted to call him and to let him see Francie. But then I remembered the way he’d destroyed the first version of this book he now claimed to respect. I remembered the way he’d refused to admit even the possibility that something sinister had happened to Harry. I remembered Bob, driving us home from the hospital. And I put the handset down.
In some ways—even though I could live on my own, and could afford to have someone else help with Francie—I found the author’s life to be anticlimactic. My book may have been on the verge of becoming famous, or an underground version of famous, but I certainly wasn’t. I walked around Hoboken, and sometimes the city, staring at the faces of the girls I passed, wondering which of them had taken a peek inside my mind. Once I saw a beat-up copy of The Lunar Housewife forgotten on the counter in a women’s restroom, beside the attendant’s cluster of perfumes and soaps. The book’s appearance there felt like a little sign: a reader had been there. But she and I were like ships passing in the night.
One day I boarded a train headed into the city at a little past eleven. I was on my way to meet Glenys for lunch, to try to patch up our friendship. We were meeting downtown, near the stock exchange, to avoid Joe.
The train’s seats were mostly empty, but there was a girl sitting across from me in a belted pink dress. A bag of peanuts sat balanced in her lap, and she chewed them thoughtfully, one after another, as she read from a book perched high in her left hand.
It was The Lunar Housewife.
For a while, I watched her eyes dart over the pages, excitement coursing through my veins. Her copy had white creases on the spine. Was she rereading it? Had she gotten it from a friend? Margot said the book had been spreading by word of mouth, across a network of sly female readers. I wanted so badly to ask this girl what she thought of it, but every time I opened my mouth something seemed to happen: the lights in the train flickered off for a minute; a busker boarded and blasted a trumpet at us, its case open on the floor for tips, before hopping to the next car.
We were approaching the city. I cleared my throat.
“Excuse me, miss,” I said. She didn’t budge, so I reached over and tapped her knee with my gloved hand. “I’m sorry to disturb you, but—I wrote that book.”
“Oh!” Her face lit up like a Christmas tree. She put the peanuts down on the seat beside her, then flipped to the last page of The Lunar Housewife so that she could see my picture. “Well I’ll be! That is you!”
“It’s me,” I said, beaming. “What do you think of it?”
“Oh, gosh, I just love it. This is my second time reading, and I’m noticing so many things I didn’t the first time around. The locked door—”
“What’s this about?” The man beside her had appeared from behind his newspaper. I hadn’t realized they were together, but I could tell now, by the way he reached over and plucked the book right out of her hand. “The Lunar Housewife, eh?” He chuckled. “You say you wrote this?”
“I did,” I said, wishing he’d go away.
“What’s it about?”
I clicked my tongue, ready to say something quick that would let me get back to talking to his girlfriend, but she beat me to it.
“It’s a romance, dear. Silly stuff.”
“Ah.” He handed the book back to her. Quickly, she slid it into her purse. She reached for her peanuts. The train had arrived in the station now, to my disappointment; the announcer’s voice blared over the loudspeaker. People were beginning to get up out of their seats.
The girl in pink caught my eye between two suits standing in the aisle. She perched on the edge of her seat, ready to stand, and she gave me a little smile, which I returned with a shrug. Just before her fellow took her by the arm to guide her out the doors, she looked back at me—and winked.