to know when I had eaten something I shouldn’t have. He was like a well-dressed bloodhound, and if I ate anything other than carrot sticks, he nailed me for it every time, even though I had finally learned to check my shirts for powdered sugar before going home.
“Fine,” I said, heading into the bedroom to change into the black dress. Fighting with him wasn’t worth the effort—it was easier to eat what he told me to, wear what he wanted me to, act how he thought I should. He was a little like my mother in that way, though in a competition between them, he’d never win. Phillip was used to getting his way, but my mother could kill you with canapés and kindness.
I changed into the assigned dress and slipped on a pair of heels that pinched at my toes. My stomach was tight and painful, but there were no antacids left in the bathroom. After going through a couple of evening bags and the bedside table, I finally found some in my closet and threw them in my mouth, wiping my hands on the hem of my dress as I walked back into the living room.
“I’m ready to go,” I announced, hanging my sweater in the closet.
Phillip, who had been flipping impatiently through channels on the television, turned and looked at me. “What is that on your dress?”
I looked down to see the outline of my chalky fingers on the bottom of the skirt. “Oh, you know. I was working a crime scene.”
No smile. He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Just clean up, Madeleine. We’re going to be late.”
“And I’d hate to miss a moment with Dimpy,” I said. I walked over to the kitchen and wet the corner of a towel, dabbing at the dust until it disappeared. Throwing the damp towel onto the counter, I sighed loudly, which was my best passive-aggressive effort at letting Phillip know I didn’t want to go to this dinner. I didn’t want to pretend to be interested in real estate investment and development, and I didn’t want to make conversation with the wives. I hated that we were always on the periphery. And maybe it was worse that night because I knew I could have been with Miss Pine. I could have been painting, and afterward I could have gotten a steak sandwich, which was definitely not on my diet and even more definitely would have been delicious, Phillip’s sense of smell be damned.
Instead, we went to Twelve, which was about trendy cocktails, tiny, artfully arranged portions on enormous plates, and waiters so attentive I felt like I had to put my arm protectively around my meager dinner lest they whisk it away if I stopped to take a breath.
“Madeleine, hellllllooooo,” Dimpy Stockton brayed at me. We’d seen each other only a few days ago at the Women’s Club, and we weren’t particular friends, but you might have thought, from the performance she gave, that we were reuniting after the war.
“Hi, Dimpy,” I said as she dropped a cool, perfumed kiss on each of my cheeks. She looked exactly like you would expect someone named Dimpy Stockton to look, with a shockingly tight facelift and a pile of cocktail rings more threatening than a set of brass knuckles.
“I thought I might see you at the historical society board meeting today,” she said, and there was an odd scolding tone to her voice.
“Oh, on Fridays I read to orphans,” I said solemnly.
“Isn’t that nice? You’re always so community-minded.” Dimpy patted me on the hand. I tilted my head at her. How disconnected from reality was she? Life wasn’t a production of Annie. You couldn’t just go to an orphanage and corral unsuspecting children into storytime. But Dimpy was sailing along happily. “You missed the most ghastly argument,” she said, tossing her head back and regaling me with a story about the trauma of choosing a theme for the annual gala.
I nodded at whatever Dimpy was saying, watching Phillip glad-handing his way around the table. When he smiled, it was dazzling, and it reminded me of how charming he had been when we first met, how having his attention focused on me had felt rare and precious, had made me into someone else, someone who might have something beautiful and special inside her after all.
Over time, he had treated me less and less that way, focusing his charm on people from whom he still needed something, people who hadn’t already sworn to spend their lives with him. Now I could see his charisma was an act, something he turned on and off at will, but I could still recall the way it had felt to be held in the sunlight of his smile, and that only made being out of it colder.
Before Phillip, I had been biding my time until I got married, at which point I assumed my life would really begin. While the girls I had gone to school with found perfect husbands and had perfect babies, I went on blind dates my mother arranged for me with the sons and grandsons of women she knew from the country club. I never managed to retain their attention for more than a few dates (though, to be fair, they rarely retained mine for more than a few minutes). I had lived alone and worked in the alumni department of Magnolia Country Day, the same school I had attended, where I wrote fundraising appeals that managed to be gracefully desperate, and helped organize an endless parade of events even I didn’t want to go to. I painted, and I read, and the years went by, until I looked up and I was almost thirty and still no one had chosen me.
Phillip’s interest in me had come as a relief. Finally, I would not be the only single one at class reunions. Finally, my mother would be happy with me. Finally, I would have proof that someone thought I was beautiful, someone thought I was enough, someone thought I was worth marrying. I wore my engagement ring like a sigil to ward off everyone’s doubt and pity, most of all my own.
My mother, of course, had been thrilled with Phillip’s pedigree. His great-greats of some ordinal or another had made a fortune in real estate, and now the men of the family continued to make the money and the women spent it, an arrangement I found incredibly depressing for copious reasons. I found out after we were married that all was not as smooth as that—when Phillip’s father died, he had left the family’s real estate investment business in crisis, threatening the livelihood of miscellaneous cousins and brothers-in-law, and it was only through a lot of fist-clenchingly tough deals and a handful of patient investors, including my father, that the ship had been righted and everyone could go back to shopping in blissful ignorance.
Did I ask why he’d never married? Of course I did. I was almost thirty and single, so basically I might as well have been dead, and Phillip was thirty-five, which was not as problematic for a man, but was still old enough to raise some eyebrows. He told me he’d been engaged and she had broken his heart, and that he had never recovered. Until me, I guess.
But I knew why he had married me. It was because I was so eager to please, because he would be in control and I would not object when he told me what to wear or what I could eat or how I should spend my time. And it was because his family’s business was in trouble and my father might become an investor if Phillip could only get close enough, and how much closer can you get than to marry a man’s spinsterish daughter?
I know. I should have seen it coming. But I had been tired of Sunday night dinners at my parents’ house, tired of social events at which I was the only unmarried one, tired of the same job I had held since my college graduation, tied to the endless, thudding repetition of the academic year. And because I thought being married would change things. I thought it would make me someone special. I thought it would mean, at last, that I wasn’t wrong and ugly and broken.
So I put aside my misgivings and I married him. I married him and I had the wedding my mother had given up all hope of my having, and I moved to Chicago to be with him, and I told myself this was a sign, a sign that I might be something more than how people had seen me for my entire life. A sign that I might not be as beautiful as my mother wanted me to be, that I might never fit in as easily as everyone around me seemed to, but that someone thought I mattered.
And for a while, that had been enough. Enough for Phillip and me to convince ourselves we were in something that at least resembled love. But it didn’t feel that way now. It wasn’t enough anymore.
Around me, Dimpy and the other wives kept up a running chatter that I found myself unable to focus on. Most nights I would have suffered through the conversation, distracting myself with other things, but I felt unable to settle down, shifting in my chair, tugging at my dress. Meeting those