reading

Chapter One

What feminists had to downplay to make their point was that essential differences exist between men and women. While we should all be equal under the law, we are not all the same in actuality.

–Dr. Abigail Rosen, The F Word: Femininity in the New Century

Millerton, Ohio, had a certain stench about it. Not egg farm or landfill or even chocolate factory, but college town. Places like Millerton, home of Tilsen University, drew people together not naturally destined to interact, making an aromatic melting pot of school versus town, jock versus brain, science and humanities, silver spoons and charity cases.

Such a morass tended to spark one of two reactions: a sweeping embrace of the chaos or a grueling battle against it. Tilsen University fought the good fight. Though groups self-segregated as a general rule, that small nod toward order didn’t satisfy Tilsen. Up went wrought-iron gates between Millerton proper and the university, and even its manicured quad enforced a certain internal hierarchy within the school itself, with the purest humanities highest up the hill to the east and the most applied sciences farthest down the hill to the west. The trek from engineering to philosophy was daunting, to say the least, but close proximity flung people together time and again, and the whiff of those resulting combinations informed Millerton’s characteristic scent even more than the skunky haze of pot smoke wafting from dorm room windows.

At Tilsen, the opposites-attract axiom was practically a natural law, a rite of passage as universal as fraternal hazing or final exam all-nighters. It was a perverted gravitational force, a hot stone begging to be touched, a frozen flagpole in search of a tongue, and not only had it left in its wake uncountable broken hearts and wishes to forget, but it was perhaps the only explanation for best friends Mitch Mitchell and Carol Hollister.

Mitch had swum so many miles in lane four of Tilsen University’s Olympic-sized pool her name might as well have been lacquered across its starting block. While her way with the 500 free would have been merely serviceable in a Big Ten school, it was sought after at Tilsen and had financed half her undergraduate education while her mathematical prowess had taken care of the rest. She spent hours swimming laps over that fat black line to earn her keep, reaching, pulling, kicking her way through hundreds of thousands of meters. Even after months of twice-a-day workouts, of feeling the rhythm of her stroke in her arms at night, she loved it indecently. By now, at thirty-five, her shoulders had paid a steep price from all that repetitive motion, but didn’t everything important have an associated cost?

Ultimate success in swimming came down to who could best cheat the clinging drag of water—a mindset that played right into Mitch’s sweet spot, a lifelong obsession with friction in its many forms. Her three Tilsen diplomas stated, in an
Olde English font, that she’d studied mechanical engineering, but she’d really majored in friction. Friction was like leaky faucets or opened doors in air-conditioned rooms. It generated noise, ate up power, and produced heat, and Mitch had spent her graduate school years getting intimate with the most insidious types. At the time, if someone told her she rubbed them the wrong way, which wasn’t uncommon, Mitch thought about metal against metal, estimated coefficients and loss curves.

She could iterate endlessly over ways to mitigate mechanical friction: cooling, smoothing, buffering with air or water, greasing the proverbial wheels with any of the natural or synthetic lubricants on the market, but her knowledge ended at the boundary between machines and humans, leaving the exercise of reducing friction between people to Carol.

Carol Hollister summed up her solution to this in one word: booze. She was a recognized expert in the subject, a designation reaffirmed every year when Labor Day weekend slapped Millerton awake from its languid summer. For those three days, the last before students arrived, Tilsen became a party school. Each department participated in an unofficial competition for best kickoff event, which had led to the rise of lauded specialties like potato-chip-crusted corn dogs at the engineering party or the way the chemistry faculty rolled out canisters of liquid nitrogen and flash froze everything in sight.

The undisputed king of these events was the sociology-
sponsored shindig—due to a punch perfected by Carol, whose husband, Brian, headed the department. Conjecture had it that a single match taken to the cut-glass punch bowl could level the whole neighborhood. Needless to say, the party had gotten so popular it had engulfed most of the other soft-science departments and threatened to overflow the Hollisters’ spacious backyard.

< ≈ >

During the Saturday lap swim of this Labor Day weekend, Mitch had the pool to herself except for a very pregnant woman drifting down lane one in a listless breaststroke. The luxury of such quiet water was hard to resist, but in deference to Carol’s annual call of party-preparation panic, Mitch stuck to a short set: twenty-five hundred meters in a mix of freestyle and backstroke with just enough butterfly thrown in to keep it interesting. Afterward, she kept her shower short then pulled on jeans and one of her dozen-odd Tilsen T-shirts before driving to Carol’s house in a quiet subdivision on the edge of town.

The atmosphere around the Hollister household was exuberant with the smell of cut grass, and Mitch wondered how many of the neighbors had been rudely awakened by the lawn mower this morning. The hedges along the front walk were trimmed to sharp right angles that bristled against Mitch’s outstretched palm. She let herself in the open front door and headed through the hall into the kitchen beyond.

Carol set down two trays of cupcakes on the stovetop with a clatter then closed the oven door with one foot. She pushed some curly, bright-red hair off her face with an oven-mitted hand and said, “You’re late.”

“Late? I thought people weren’t coming until one.”

At once, Carol was across the kitchen and in front of Mitch. She stretched up, put her nose to Mitch’s neck, and sniffed, a move full of accusation. “Mm-hmm. I thought you said you’d be by when you got up.”

“I figured the swim was implicit.”

Carol blew a protracted raspberry, one of the countless rude noises she’d picked up from her sons, James and Gordon.

Mitch said, “Do you want to argue or put me to work?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Carol directed Mitch to her usual station in the kitchen, the deep corner of countertop next to the refrigerator. A large serving platter waited there along with a pile of tomatoes, onions, and lettuce.

“Did you sharpen the knife?” Mitch asked.

“Did I sharpen the knife? Pshaw. When did I ever ask you to wield a dull knife in this kitchen?”

“The last time I was here, I would have done less damage to that tomato with a spoon.”

“Yes,” Carol drew out the word. “I sharpened the knife. Believe me, this is one area where your anality is a virtue—you make the condiments look like they were catered.”

Mitch got slicing while Carol popped in and out of the kitchen around vacuuming, zipping to the store for bags of ice, filling coolers with the party’s lesser beverages, yelling at James—her older son—to get off his butt and bring up the folding chairs from the basement. She was a freckled blur while Mitch smiled and worked, a little high on the satisfaction of producing so many slices of uniform thickness. Carol’s kitchen was good for small pleasures like these.

Carol finally settled at the sink to wash more produce for Mitch. “This party will be the death of me.”

“Where’s Brian?”

“Outdoor readiness.” Not a trivial task given the size of the backyard and the crowd they were expecting. Carol turned off the water and shook a colander full of broccoli. “I don’t know why I even serve this. Who eats broccoli with everything else that’s available? Well, maybe she …”

Mitch used the front of her T-shirt to wipe away onion-induced tears. “Maybe she?”

Before Carol answered, she piled the washed broccoli in a clear space by Mitch’s elbow. “Have I told you about Dr. Rosen?”

“I don’t think so, but it’s hard to keep track of all the PhDs in this town.”

“Oh, you’d remember.” Carol leaned against the counter close to Mitch. “She’s the department trophy this year—this decade, the way Joe Obermann is drooling over her. He used words like ‘monumental,’ ‘triumph,’ and, of course, ‘endowments.’”

The academic holy grail. It wasn’t all about money and reputation, just mostly. “The dean’s happy, huh? What about Brian? Is he all worked up too, or is she competition?”

“He says she’s average at best.”

There was a point around here somewhere, but it might be a long time coming. “Something doesn’t compute,” Mitch said, specifically to make Carol smile, which she did before giving Mitch a playful shove and sailing back into motion again.

Mitch started in on the broccoli, raising her voice to carry over running water. “Did they poach her from Harvard or something?”

“No, she was just at City College in New York.”

“But Tilsen pursued her?”

Brian asked, “Who did Tilsen pursue?” He walked through the sliding patio door, his tanned arms dotted with cut grass and dirt.

“Dr. Rosen.” Carol pulled the colander from the sink, set it on the counter, and moved aside to let Brian wash his hands.

“Pursuit puts it mildly. She passed our tenure review in two weeks, which has to be a new record. In a case like this, I’d usually blame our overactive diversity initiative—”

“She’s a lesbian,” Carol said. “A smart, beautiful, popular lesbian.”

Brian said, “The only kind of lesbian that does any good.”

Mitch put down her knife and exchanged a sour look with Carol, who shrugged. Mitch knew she should shrug too, but she didn’t have the same peacekeeping incentive—instead of going into business with her graduate school adviser like Mitch, Carol had married hers. When Brian came out with broad statements like these, ones dripping with the weight of his sociological experience, the familial-grade animosity that lurked between him and Mitch flared up into the more vitriolic version that often arose between hard and soft scientists. She said, “Says the incredibly useful straight, white male.”

“You know what I mean. This time the diversity was a footnote.” He dried his hands on a blue-striped kitchen towel. “There’s a book.”

Carol said, “A popular book.”

“What’s it about?”

“How girly girls are going to take over now that feminists have paved the way,” Carol said. “It’s called The F Word: Femininity in the New Century.”

Mitch tried not to laugh but failed. “Ah. She’s marquee value. How long until Tilsen starts pumping her for the follow-up then punishing her when it isn’t as successful?”

Brian put hands to hips and frowned. “How do you live with such pessimism?”

“Ninety percent of engineering is preparing for the worst, which seems like realism to me,” Mitch said. She continued to carve out bite-sized florets in case this guest of honor were watching her figure and went crazy on the crudités.

Instead of responding to that, Brian said, “I thought James was going to get the chairs from the basement.”

Carol said, “And I thought raising boys was supposed to be easy.”

James was fourteen to the marrow of his bones. When he sighed in the new rolled-eyed way of his, Mitch was hard-pressed to keep a straight face and was thankful her role in his life included essentially no disciplinary duties. Carol and Brian were complementary in many ways, not the least of which being their general approach to parenting. While Carol preferred the full-frontal attack, Brian went in for the element of surprise, and he put a finger to his lips before creeping from the kitchen toward the stairway leading up to the bedrooms.

Carol put the cauliflower back in the sink, turned on the water, and said, “Maybe you should ask her out.”

“Ask who out?”

“Dr. Rosen. I’ve seen her author photo, and she’s at least as hot as that ex of yours, besides being twice as smart. I mean, Mitch, not only does the woman have a doctorate, but she’s got tresses. Honest-to-God dark, curly tresses.”

Mitch laughed and kept chopping. “I doubt your Dr. Rosen and I are compatible.”

“Compatibility is overrated. No one thought you and the ex were compatible.”

“Her name’s Kim, and we weren’t.”

Carol dumped the cauliflower next to Mitch and pinched her through her T-shirt. “You know what I mean. I lost a bet with Brian over that. Fifty bucks. I gave you guys three months, tops, and you went and lasted over a year.”

“Such faith. You got off cheap.”

Carol laid her hand on Mitch’s forearm, not moving until Mitch stopped her knife work. “You know I only joke because you’re not heartbroken. Are you heartbroken?”

“No,” Mitch said to the broccoli battlefield in front of her. Carol took her by the jaw and pulled her face around so they were blue eye to blue eye.

“Are you telling me the truth?”

“Yes.”

She held Mitch’s gaze for a moment before smiling. “Well, then. Think about Dr. Rosen. How often does the new person in town turn out to be the only kind of lesbian who does anyone any good?”

Mitch blew a pathetic raspberry, and Carol bounced off to make the beds or polish the doorknobs or something else on her extensive last-minute to-do list. A little of the fun had drained from Mitch’s slicing-and-dicing at having let another opportunity go by without telling Carol about someone she’d met at a conference back in July who’d grown into a strange romantic entanglement.

Reginald was English, black, and—as the name implied, though certainly didn’t conclude—male, a big man with a popping accent and a coughing laugh. Mitch had lost her mind over him at their first handshake before finding it later that night in his bed, and each week ushered in more transatlantic emails between them.

Her feelings for him were confounding in a pleasant way, and this alone seemed to justify her silence on the subject. But, really, her reasons for not yet telling Carol fell into three distinct categories: her friend’s default conversational tactics, which often precluded a word in edgewise; Mitch’s initial conviction that time would diminish the affair; and the characteristics of the object of her growing affection.

Certainly in part because of how Mitch and Carol had gotten started—by a short, ultimately doomed romantic “thing” when they’d been undergrads—Carol made the common assumption that Mitch’s desires could be pinned down and that she was as gay as James was fourteen. Any mention of Reginald would come to a screeching halt at the wrong part of the story, and though Mitch had misgivings about not saying anything, she wasn’t particularly inclined to start talking now.

She kept busy for the next couple hours frosting cupcakes, securing flapping tablecloths outside, moving plastic utensils from bags to baskets lined with a red gingham print, and all other manner of what she considered the remainders—decimal points and fractions of the morning’s activities.

When she’d found her way back to her kitchen station and was taking cabbage to task for coleslaw, Carol commandeered the table to make her infamous punch. A profusion of bottles surrounded the big bowl—alcohol, mostly, but also ginger ale and a few different kinds of juice. She poured, stirred, and tasted, and the quiet between them was familiar and easy. Mitch kicked herself for not having ordered “No Smoking / Flammable” stickers from the Grainger catalog, wishing she had one to slap on the bowl’s side.

Gordon, Carol’s younger son, broke their humming industriousness when he thundered down the stairs and slid halfway into the kitchen on the slick linoleum. Gordon was Carol’s carbon copy down to his uncountable freckles, and he had a bell-like voice that projected through conventional obstacles to sound. He peppered Carol with a stream of questions about the makeup of the party-going population, the ratio of kids to adults and their ages, and what he might be allowed to do now that he was newly ten.

“Dad told me I could eat two hot dogs and two cupcakes.”

“Gordo, if your dad says you can, you can. But if you get sick from all that crap, don’t come running to me.” Carol pulled him to her and made loud kissing noises against his neck.

“Hey, bud,” Mitch said. Gordon teleported across the kitchen to her hip. “Want to make yourself useful?”

“Totally.”

“Grab a stool and stir up this coleslaw, okay?”

Gordon erupted in a little-girl giggle. “I don’t need a stool anymore.”

“My mistake,” Mitch said. “You’re practically a giant. You must’ve grown at least an eighth of an inch since last week.”

Carol said, “Gordo, honey, don’t you think it’s time for you to move out and get a place of your own? Now that you’re all grown up?”

“Mom,” he whined, as if imitating his older brother, but his bubbly laugh undermined the effect.

Mitch finished chopping the head of cabbage and added it to the bowl Gordon was working over. “Looking good, bud. Keep at it, but don’t hurt yourself, okay?” Getting Gordon to laugh was as easy and rewarding as making Carol smile. She rinsed the board and knife then wiped errant cabbage bits from the countertop into a cupped hand and dumped them into the sink.

Carol slurped at a shot glass of punch. She smacked her lips, tilting her head back and forth. “So close.”

Mitch pulled up her jeans and plunged her hands into her pockets. Around her were trays of food covering the counters, Gordon’s body swaying in time with his stirs, and mad-bartender Carol. Everything looked under control. She checked her watch: 12:13.

“Anything else? Or are we good?” she asked.

“You’re leaving? You don’t have to. Who cares if you’re not technically invited? If Brian has a problem with it, I’ll pour this punch down his throat until he relents.”

“There’s a corn dog with my name on it over at the engineering party.”

“Right, the corn dog.”

“It’s not your ordinary corn dog.” Mitch rubbed her hands together.

“You can’t leave without punch,” Carol said.

“I have no tolerance for that stuff.”

“I’ll fix you some to share with the other engineering geeks.”

Carol didn’t particularly want Mitch to leave, even though she knew Mitch didn’t particularly want to stay, so she made a small production of ladling punch into Gordon’s Spider-Man thermos and sealing it up tight. “Give my regards to the corn dogs. May they be structurally sound,” she said then pulled Mitch into their usual parting hug. A strange but persistent comfort came from feeling the crazy topography of Mitch’s back, the knobs and wings and slats of her sturdy skeleton sliding under Carol’s hands.

She handed off the thermos like a football and gave a last little wave when Mitch left the kitchen, trailing Gordo, who had abandoned his coleslaw duty. Though Carol mostly wanted to sit and spend a little quality time with the punch, she limited herself to letting out a James-worthy sigh, picking up two trays of uncooked chicken, sliding the patio’s screen door open with her bare, freckled foot, and walking over to Brian, who was scrubbing the rack on a grill he’d borrowed from their neighbors.

He stopped cleaning at her approach. “You read my mind.”

“A rare benefit of long association.” She winked and held out the trays so Brian could move the breasts onto the heat. Over at their own grill, he arranged drumsticks with surgical precision.

Carol said, “Mitch sure nailed it about Tilsen and Dr. Rosen’s next book, huh?”

“Mitch isn’t always right.”

“No, only ninety-eight percent of the time.”

He tossed off a quick harrumph and finished with the chicken. “What do you think, veggie burgers next?”

“Definitely,” Carol said. “I don’t think anyone eating those will notice if they’re a little cold.”

“I figured I’d stack them up on some foil in a corner over here to keep them warm.”

“Anyone who doubts your genius is summarily uninvited.”

“Unfortunately, that would diminish our guest list considerably.”

Carol stretched up to kiss the fuzzed apple of his cheek. Brian was dark and broad like James. His graying temples made him look distinguished, not old, but the crepelike texture of the skin at his elbows and in the hollow of his neck had begun to affect Carol’s balance. When they’d gotten pregnant and married, their fourteen-year age difference had been the last thing on her mind, but once he’d turned fifty a few years back, it was everywhere Carol looked.

By the time the first people arrived—Dean Obermann and his family—the buffet of meats and salads and Mitch’s condiment bar covered an array of folding tables, and the punch was perfect, though that didn’t stop Carol from continuing to “taste” it.

Joe and Joyce Obermann certainly looked like the married-to-death couple they were. At a distance, it was hard to tell them apart: two rounded bodies topped with puffs of graying hair who came across as older than they were, more like grandparents than parents to their son, who was James’s age and slumping along with them. They scattered halfway across the backyard, each heading to their Hollister equivalent. In Joyce’s beeline for Carol, her flower-skirted girth was partially obscured by a massive plastic platter bowed under a saran-wrapped mound of cookies.

If Carol were held at gunpoint and forced to name one thing about Joyce that she didn’t despise at least a little bit, she could always fall back on cookies. Joyce made cookies in a clearly compulsive way, and it showed in their deliciousness. Carol harbored a sinking suspicion she would gobble them down even if she knew one of the ingredients was a scoop of dog shit from Joyce’s collie, Scooter.

She tried to take charge of the platter, but Joyce swept past her into the kitchen. Carol followed and said, “Do you know what you’re bringing to next month’s PTA meeting? ’Cause I was thinking of coming up with some sort of cookie appetizer, but that requires knowing the main cookie course.” Carol leaned against the counter and watched Joyce struggle with the reams of saran wrap.

“I do prefer to let these things happen more organically, as you might say, but if you want to coordinate …” An unfocused look came over Joyce’s eyes. “What would you say to my pretzel-
peanut-caramel twists?”

“I would say popcorn, probably cheese.”

“Really. What if I said triple-chocolate marshmallow?”

“Cinnamon graham crackers.”

“Strawberry shortcake drops?”

“Banana bread.”

“Bite-sized puff pastry éclairs with dark-chocolate glaze and chocolate whipped cream?”

Carol smiled. “A defibrillator and extra batteries.”

“You’re too much.” Joyce laughed. But then she said, “Honestly, I don’t know how Brian handles you.”

Carol and Joyce were nearly a generation apart, and the backward swing of Joyce’s behavioral compass showed her age. She was always saying shit that lit up Carol’s whole switchboard of buttons. A lap around the kitchen table revealed only cupcakes, brownies, chocolate-covered strawberries, and an open spot for Joyce’s cookies. When Carol realized she was looking for the punch, which Brian had already moved outside, she sidled toward the door. “What do you say to a drink?”

Brian called for her from the patio. Even though his tone was sharp in asking her to help greet some people, beating a sanctioned retreat from Joyce was a relief. The bright sun and smoke-tinged air felt like freedom, but Carol was disappointed at not finding Dr. Rosen in the large clump of new arrivals.

For the next two hours, Carol made inroads on her jumbo plastic cup of punch while she circulated, fielding questions about peanut, gluten, and dairy content, handing out moist towelettes like condoms at a family-planning clinic, and bringing out the second round of cupcakes and burgers. Then, after two cups of party lubricant and no food besides one of Joyce’s double-
chocolate peppermint cookies, Carol saw Dr. Rosen standing at the edge of the backyard.

Of fucking course. By now Carol was one-and-a-half sheets to the wind and likely to say absolutely anything to this woman. She needed a burger IV with a side of slaw and about an hour to sober up. But, wait. No dark tresses were being tossed about by the breeze. Maybe it wasn’t her. Maybe Carol would be granted a reprieve from inevitable embarrassment.

No. It was her. Dr. Rosen took a step back as if to leave, and Carol stumbled forward, sticking out her right hand in ready greeting absurdly early. Had her food / alcohol intake been close to even, she might have been able to tear her attention from Dr. Rosen’s hair—or lack thereof—but when Carol’s hand finally connected with its target and started jerking it up and down, she was still looking so hard at that almost–crew cut that Dr. Rosen’s free hand crept up and touched the side of her head. Carol relinquished her grip.

“Hi,” she said through a furious blush she could feel even across her chest. “Welcome. I’ve evidently had too much to drink.”

“I’m sorry I’m late.”

“God, don’t apologize. Don’t you know blushing redheads can spontaneously combust? I’ll shut up now.”

“Don’t worry. It’s the sign of a good party. I’m Abby, by the way. Abby Rosen.”

“Carol. Resident idiot. Oh, and Brian’s wife.” While the extent of her lunacy sank in, she contemplated the rest of Dr. Rosen. In a snappy linen skirt and rust-colored short-sleeved blouse, she was voluptuous in exactly the way that most put Carol to shame: curvy yet tight. Carol felt grublike in comparison. The growing pudge around her belly button had appeared in its nascent form the week after her thirty-fifth birthday and, after three years, was officially irreversible. And there stood Abby Rosen with her buoyant breasts, come-hither hips, and a waist that tempted you to try to circle it with your hands even though it was too womanly and mature ever to allow such a thing.

“Dr. Rosen, can I just say—”

“Abby, please. And no.”

“No?”

But then Abby shook her head, pushed nonexistent hair from her face, and smiled. “Never mind that. What were you saying?”

Abby had given her a moment of pause, and now Carol was a bit adrift. She looked down at a blade of grass sticking up between two toes on her right foot. Then she took in Abby’s lovely smile and said, “Okay, what I was going to say was, ‘Wow!’”

Abby jumped.

“I mean, really. Wow. Your hair. I’d been expecting something … but this is so much better. Have you got a set of cheekbones on you or what?”

“It seems I needed a change,” Abby said, but her smile had disappeared.

“It suits you. Had to take guts.” The stutter between them that followed felt too serious for its own good, and to dispel it, Carol exhaled in a sirenlike stream, clapped, and surveyed the backyard. “Okay, ten-second orientation.” Channeling Annie Oakley, she pointed with both hands while she spoke. “Pool; croquet; tables for the civilized; food for every diet under the sun, though I recommend the chicken; horseshoes in the back over there; and the changing room is through the sliding doors to the left. The only rules are no liquor to minors and try not to injure a child under ten—their screams are too piercing.”

Brian must’ve filled Abby in on the Hollister family tree because she asked, “And your youngest?”

“Turned ten last month. Whale away all you’d like. He’s a big boy now.”

With a mix of reluctance and relief, Carol went off to pile a plate with food and sequester herself in the kitchen. She had to admit that after reading The F Word, she’d indulged in some daydreaming about what Abby’s life might be like. She imagined her sitting for a Today Show interview, looking and sounding smart, living a life of the mind spiced by just the right amount of glamour. Carol had once contemplated exactly that for herself, eons ago, and Abby made those old fantasies percolate past Brian and the boys, compelling Carol to feel close to Abby in a manner she in no way was.

Later, grounded by chicken and slaw and a handful of baby carrots, Carol reemerged into the hot sunshine. Kids ran around screaming or jumping impressive cannonballs into the pool, and everywhere was a sea of khaki shorts and sundresses. She looked around in a panic until she spotted Abby, eating at an out-of-the-way table, tantalizingly alone and with a pile of used napkins next to her plate. Carol snagged a box of moist towelettes and swooped in.

She brandished the box at Abby. “Wet nap?”

“You certainly thought of everything.” Abby took two packets.

“Believe me, with my three slobs, I own stock. Glad to see you went for the chicken. I know law requires us to serve veggie burgers, but anyone who likes those isn’t fully human.”

Carol hovered behind the chair next to Abby, squeezing and pulling at the cardboard box she held. Abby’s face was made up without looking made up, an understated application of eyeliner and lipstick unknown to Millerton, if not the entire state of Ohio. Finally, Abby asked, “Would you like to join me?”

In a blink, Carol was seated and talking. “When I was a vegetarian, which naturally coincided with the forty-two seconds I was a lesbian, I used to wake up in the night gasping for breath, aching for a piece of meat. Any meat. I wasn’t particular. I tried to convince myself that it wasn’t as good as I remembered, though I practically had to leave campus the mornings I caught a whiff of bacon from the cafeteria.”

She had seen Abby’s head jerk in acknowledgment of that stupid forty-two-second remark, but she ignored it, made a swooning gesture, and continued. “The meal I used to reintroduce meat into my system was one of those Denny’s grand slam numbers sporting half a pound each of bacon and sausage. Let me tell you. I thought I would die of pleasure. I get weak in the knees remembering. I mean, sure, it made me violently ill later, but what the hell is it about pork?”

Abby appeared preoccupied, gazing out across the backyard, but she said, “For half my life, pork was the forbidden fruit. My mother was a pick-and-choose Jew.”

“Pick-and-choose? Is that a new denomination?”

“Lois Rosen didn’t accept anyone’s edict without tweaking, not even God’s. I suppose her version of Judaism was no more contradictory than the official one. No pork, but shellfish was okay. Temple every first Friday—when the choir put in an appearance—followed by a late dinner at Howie’s down the street. Cheeseburger and fries.”

“Mm. Not exactly kosher.” Carol played it cool as if she weren’t restraining herself from squirming in excitement. Abby’s Jewishness and general cosmopolitan aura made her deliciously foreign.

“Not exactly. Eventually, I concluded that my mother forbade pork because she didn’t care for it.”

“Silly woman. When did you put aside your pork virginity?”

Abby made a dismissive gesture but smiled beautifully, wide and bright and warm. “Oh, you know. Who keeps track of that?”

“Obviously you! I saw that face. Spill it, sistah.” In a sizzle of hopefully real camaraderie, Carol nudged Abby with the box of wet naps.

“I was twenty-three and in New York for the first time at a conference. At a fantastic restaurant, this perfectly sized, perfectly pink bite of orange-brined pork roast came floating across the table. So I ate it.”

“How hot was the woman holding the fork?”

“Who remembers? No one could compete with that roast.” Abby laughed and put up her hand, and the sauced nap it held, to cover her wide-open mouth.

“Well, I doubt that but appreciate the sentiment. After however many years, a spouse can pale in comparison with a well-arranged platter of smoked meats and sausages. But Brian … I swear, every day he ages in reverse, wakes up like cold pizza and sits down to dinner like rack of lamb. I, on the other hand, despite my eternal youth, closely resemble a bulldog by bedtime. I’m sure you have no idea what I’m talking about with that skin of yours.”

“No, but I’m wondering what your nefarious purpose is with all this flattery.”

Carol whooped and banged the wet naps on the table. “Nefarious! Man! If only I had something nefarious going on. I’m just an outlaw in my own backyard.” She pried her ass from the chair and stood up. “I’ve monopolized enough of your time. I’m sure you’ll want to get back to mingling now that you’re sauce-free and all. Welcome to Tilsen.” She tried to hurry without hurrying back to the kitchen—but not before a detour for some more punch.