After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is.
TWENTYEIGHT
As for female friends, I had many.
Of course, Marjorie was my best friend, and Peg and Olive would always be my family. But Marjorie and I had a lot of other
women around, too.
There was Marty—a doctoral candidate in literature at NYU, brilliant and funny, whom we’d met one day at a free concert on Rutherford Place. There was Karen—a receptionist at the Museum of Modern Art, who wanted to be a painter, and who had attended Parsons with Marjorie. There was Rowan, who was a gynecologist— which we all found terribly impressive, and also useful. There was Susan—a grade-school teacher with a passion for modern dance. There was Callie, who owned the flower shop around the corner. There was Anita, who came from money and never did anything at all—but she did get us a pirated key to Gramercy Park, so we appreciated her forever.
There were more women, too, who came and went out of my life. Sometimes Marjorie and I would lose a friend to marriage; other times we would gain a friend after a divorce. Sometimes a woman would move out of the city, sometimes she would move back. The tides of life came in and out. The circles of friendship grew, then shrank, then grew again.
But the gathering place for us women was always the same—our rooftop on Eighteenth Street, which we could access from the fire escape outside my bedroom window. Marjorie and I dragged a bunch of cheap folding chairs up there, and we would spend our evenings on the roof with our friends, anytime the weather was fine. Summer after summer, our little group of females would sit together under what passes for starlight in New York City, smoking our cigarettes, drinking our rotgut wine, listening to music on a transistor radio, and sharing with each other our big and small concerns of life.
During one brutally airless August heat wave, Marjorie managed to haul a big stand-up fan up onto our roof. This she plugged into my kitchen outlet, using a long industrial extension cord. As far as the rest of us were concerned, this made her a genius at the level of Leonardo da Vinci. We would sit in the artificial breeze of the fan, lifting our shirts to cool our breasts, and pretending that we were at a beach somewhere exotic.
Those are some of my happiest memories of the 1950s.
It was on the rooftop of our little bridal boutique that I learned this truth: when women are gathered together with no men around, they don’t have to be anything in particular; they can just be.
—
Then in 1955, Marjorie got pregnant.
I’d always feared it was going to be me who ended up pregnant —the smart bet would have been on me, obviously—but poor Marjorie was the one who got hit.
The culprit was an old married art professor, with whom she’d been having an affair for years. (Although Marjorie would have said that the culprit was herself, for wasting so much of her life with a married man who kept promising that he would leave his wife for her, if only Marjorie would “stop acting so Jewish.”)
A bunch of us were on the rooftop one night when she told us the news.
“Are you sure?” asked Rowan, the gynecologist. “Do you want to come into my office for a test?”
“I don’t need a test,” said Marjorie. “My period is gone, gone, gone.”
“Gone, how long?” said Rowan.
“Well, I’ve never been regular, but maybe three months?”
There’s a tense silence that women fall into when they hear that one of their own has become accidentally pregnant. This is a matter of highest gravity. I could feel that none of us wanted to say another word until Marjorie had told us more. We wanted to know what her plan was, so that we could support it, whatever the plan may have been. But
she just sat there in silence, after dropping this bomb, and added no further information.
Finally, I asked, “What does George have to say about this?” George, of course, being the anti-Semitic married art professor who apparently loved having sex with Jewish girls.
“Why do you assume it’s George?” she joked.
We all knew it was George. It was always George. Of course it was George. She had been infatuated with George since she was a wideeyed student in his Sculpture of Modern Europe class, so many years earlier.
Then she said, “No, I haven’t told him. I think I won’t tell him. I just won’t see him anymore. I’ll cut it off from here. If nothing else, this is finally a good excuse to stop sleeping with George.”
Rowan cut right to the chase: “Have you considered a termination?”
“No. I wouldn’t do that. Or, rather, maybe I would do that. But it’s too late.”
She lit another cigarette and took another drink of wine—because that’s what pregnancy looked like in the 1950s.
She said, “I found out about a place in Canada. It’s sort of a home for unwed mothers, but more deluxe than the usual fare. You get your own room, and all that. My understanding is that the clientele is a bit older. Women with some money. I can go there toward the end, when I can’t hide it anymore. Tell people I’m on vacation—even though I’ve never taken a vacation in my life, so nobody will believe me, but that’s all I can do. They even said they could place the baby in a Jewish family—although where they aim to find a Jewish family in Canada, who knows? Anyway, I don’t care about religion, you all know that. As long as it’s a good home. It seems like a nice enough facility. Plenty expensive, but I can swing it. I’ll use the Paris money.”
It was typical of Marjorie to have solved a problem on her own before reaching out to her friends for help, and certainly her plan was sound. Still, my heart hurt. Marjorie didn’t want any of this. She and I had been saving our money for years, planning to take a trip to Paris together. As soon as we had enough cash gathered, our plan was to close the boutique for the entire month of August, get on the Queen Elizabeth, and sail to France. This was our shared dream. We were
almost there with our savings, too. We had worked for years without so much as a weekend off. And now this.
I knew right then that I would go to Canada with her. We would close down L’Atelier for however long was necessary. Wherever she was going, I would go with her. I would stay with her through the birth of her baby. I would spend my share of the Paris money to buy a car. Whatever she needed.
I scooted my chair over next to Marjorie’s and took her hand. “That all sounds wise, honey,” I said. “I’ll be right there with you.”
“It does sound wise, doesn’t it?” Marjorie took another drag off her cigarette, and looked around at the circle of her friends. We all had the same loving, pitying, and somewhat panicked expressions on our faces.
Then the most unexpected thing happened. Suddenly Marjorie grinned at me, in a slightly crazed-looking, lopsided manner. She said, “Goddamn it to hell, but I don’t think I’ll go to Canada. Oh, Christ, Vivian, I must be out of my mind. But I just decided it right now. I have a better plan. No, not a better plan. But a different plan. I’ll keep it.”
“You’re going to keep the baby?” Karen asked, in open shock.
“What about George?” Anita asked.
Marjorie stuck her chin up in the air like the tough little bantamweight fighter she’d always been. “I don’t need stinkin’ George. Vivian and I are gonna raise this kid ourselves. Aren’t we, Vivian?”
I gave it only a moment’s thought. I knew my friend. Once she had decided something, that was it. She would somehow make it work. And I would make it work with her, like always.
So once again I said to Marjorie Lowtsky: “Sure. Let’s do it.”
And once again, my life completely changed.
—
So that’s what we did, Angela.
And that kid was our beautiful, difficult, tender little Nathan.