Necessary Lies (22 page)

“Oh my,” he said, “I can just imagine the stories! So rural. Were you raised on a farm?”

“Me? Oh no. Cameron Park. No, this is all new to me. I feel as though I’ve been shot into space and landed on another planet.”

“I bet it’s interesting.”

“It is. And I’m dying to ask David a question about one of my clients,” I said quietly, as if asking Gavin’s permission to talk to the psychologist sitting next to Lois.

“Go ahead,” Lois said. “David loves to talk.
Loves
it.”

“Did I hear my name?” David asked.

“Do you mind if I ask a question related to my work?” I had to speak up to be heard; the room was full of chatter and the band had started to play.

“Darling,” Robert said, “this is a social event.”

“You’re right.” I sat back in my chair, remembering my promise to him. “Sorry,” I said to David.

“Would you like to dance, Jane?” David smiled at me. He touched Deborah’s shoulder. “Do you mind, dear?” he asked, and she shook her head, but I was afraid she minded very much and he’d be in the doghouse later. David turned to Robert. “May I dance with your wife?” he asked.

“Of course,” Robert said. What else
could
he say?

Once on the dance floor, we fox-trotted to a Sinatra song. “So,” he said, “what’s your question?”

“Do you do psychological testing?” I asked.

He groaned. “That’s all I do these days,” he said. “I work for Wake County Schools. Do you need someone tested?”

I shook my head. “No, I was just wondering if it’s possible that the results of an IQ test can be affected by, say, a child’s environment.” I had to lean close to his ear for him to be able to hear me. “For example, many of my clients test very low—”

“How low?”

“Well, all over the place, but I’m thinking of a particular fifteen-year-old girl who tests eighty. She seems smarter to me than that.”

“She wouldn’t be considered retarded at eighty,” he said. “Dull normal, yes, but not retarded.”

“I know,” I said, nearly shouting so he could hear, “but I think—”

He held up a hand to stop me, then took me by the arm and led me off the dance floor to the side of the room where we could hear each other more easily.

“To answer your question,” he said, “there’s a lot of controversy about this. I believe the environmental and cultural factors do come into play. The tests were created for white middle-class children, so you add in poverty and cultural differences, and it makes sense that the results would be different, though not everyone would agree with me. There are a few studies that show that poor children who scored low and were then adopted into good middle- or upper-class families later tested higher. But Jane, here’s the thing,” he said. “We have to work with the tools we have. This isn’t a perfect world. What’s your concern with this girl? So she tests eighty. So what? How is that affecting her? Is it holding her back in school, or—”

“No, that’s not it. They—the Department of Public Welfare—plan to sterilize her.”

“Really?” He looked surprised.

I nodded. “I’m in charge of putting together a petition to have her sterilized.” I’d actually finished the petition, but couldn’t bring myself to send it to the board yet.

“Are there other factors being considered?” he asked. “As I said, eighty is not retarded.”

“Yes, she’s epileptic—”

“Ah,” he said, as though that explained everything.

“But it’s petit mal,” I said. “And I don’t think she’s had a seizure in a long time. Maybe years.”

“Colored?”

“White.”

“How about her parents?”

I felt Robert’s eyes on us. Maybe Deborah’s, as well, although I may have been imagining that.

“Her father is dead and her mother … her mother’s insane. She’s at Dix Hospital. My client and her sister are being raised by their grandmother.”

“And of course they’re on welfare.”

“Yes.”

“How are they making out?”

“You mean…” I wasn’t sure what he was asking. “What do you mean?”

“In general. What’s your assessment of the family and how it’s functioning?”

I looked away from him, formulating my answer. Making things seem better than they were would do me no good. “Not well,” I said. “The grandmother’s diabetic. The older sister has a toddler and he’s not getting the best care. The girl I’m talking about, though…” I looked away again, and felt my eyes begin to sting. “She’s really the one taking care of everything. She’s the only one who seems able to manage and she’s pretty overwhelmed.”

“Hmm,” he said. “Too bad you can’t see her out of her environment. Might be interesting. She might look high functioning to you only because she’s someplace where she knows exactly what’s expected of her.”

I thought of my inept use of the kitchen pump, and I would have been lost in the outhouse if she hadn’t told me about the Sears and Roebuck catalog. I would have thought it was there to read, the way my mother kept a
Reader’s Digest
in our bathroom at home. In Ivy’s world,
I
was the retarded one.

“Her grandmother’s signed the petition and all I have to do at this point is turn it in,” I said. “But as I get to know her, I’m having trouble doing that.”

“Well, you said it yourself, Jane. She’s overwhelmed. What will another baby do? Make her less overwhelmed? And the baby will most likely inherit some of the problems you just described. Perhaps the mother’s mental illness. Epilepsy. Low intelligence. Maybe even the grandmother’s diabetes. If it were up to me, I’d get her sterilized sooner rather than later. I’d want to lighten her load and the load on the welfare system.”

I nodded, not happy with the answer. “Thanks for talking to me about it.”

He smiled. “My pleasure,” he said.

We walked back to the table in silence. Deborah sent me a look of blue-eyed daggers across the table but I turned away. I felt depleted. All the people—Robert, Charlotte, Paula, Fred, Gayle, Ann—who’d told me Ivy should have the surgery had made similar arguments. Not one had agreed with me. Maybe I was the one who was wrong.

Gavin leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Well, that looked rather intense.”

I smiled uncomfortably, not looking at him. I felt Robert’s disapproval of me and thought I had been rude, monopolizing another girl’s husband, bending his ear for so long. The next time Deborah looked my way, I was ready and caught her eye. “Thanks for letting me borrow your husband,” I said across the table. “He helped me figure out a problem I’m having at work.” She didn’t smile, but turned toward Beverly Ann, and I knew the look they exchanged was enough to keep me out of their circle for the rest of my life.

The band started playing “The Twist,” and nearly everyone got to their feet, Robert included. He reached his hand toward me and we joined the mob on the dance floor. I loved that dance. Loved how it made me feel—young and free. I’d never again be able to do the twist without thinking of the Hart family and the few precious, lighthearted minutes in their kitchen last week, when even Winona Hart couldn’t help but smile.

When we returned to our seats, the other three wives excused themselves to go to the ladies’ room. None of them looked in my direction with an invitation to join them and that, maybe more than anything else that had happened during the evening, made me aware I was an outsider.

I stood up, and Robert looked at me in surprise. “Going to powder my nose,” I said, and I followed the three girls, tagging along behind them, carrying my sequined purse with its lipstick and powder.

The restroom was large, and I stood next to Deborah in the mirrored lounge as we each reapplied our lipstick.

“I really am sorry I monopolized your husband like that,” I said. “It was rude. I had a question about psychological testing regarding one of my clients and he was able to explain a few things to me. I had no idea it would take so long.”

She cut her eyes at me, then pressed her lips together around a tissue. “You think you’re above us, don’t you,” she said, tossing the tissue into the can below the counter.

“No,” I said. “Why on earth would I think that?”

“We all have university degrees. Beverly Ann, Lois, and I. You’re not the only one.”

“I never thought I was,” I said, “and what does it matter, anyhow? I don’t care who has a degree and who doesn’t.”

“Leave her alone.” Lois approached us, pulling a comb from her purse. To me, she said, “Don’t listen to her.”

“I’d like us to be friends,” I said to both of them. “Our husbands are all connected through the club, and we’re going to be seeing each other throughout our lives, so please. Can we try to be friends?”

“Of course we can.” Lois ran the comb through her short brown hair. She was the only girl in the lounge who wasn’t wearing a fancy hairstyle.

“I don’t see the point,” Deborah said. “You refuse to join the Junior League, and you’re working, so the only time we’ll ever see you is events like this.”

“I can do things with all of you, just not in the daytime,” I said. “I’m really not sure why you’re freezing me out like this.”

“You have no idea how hard
we
work,” Deborah said. “Taking care of a household and two children, plus working in the thrift shop and—”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Deborah,” Lois said. “You have a full-time maid. When is the last time you did a load of laundry?”

“You’ve frozen
yourself
out.” Beverly Ann appeared in the mirror behind me, smoothing her hair carefully into place. “Come on, Deb,” she said.

I bit my lip as I watched them leave the lounge. Lois touched my elbow. “Let’s sit for a minute,” she said, nodding toward the two chairs near the door.

I was all too ready to sit. “I never got back to Beverly Ann about the league,” I admitted. “My mistake.”

“Most of the wives are lovely, and I think you’d enjoy the Junior League,” Lois said. “Tonight, we just got stuck sitting with two of the prunes. I’ve been ill off and on for the last couple of years and—”

“Oh, I’m so sorry.” Perhaps that explained her pallor.

She shrugged off my sympathy. “They … Deborah and Beverly Ann … they cut me out. When I couldn’t make league meetings or help with a baby shower or whatever, they stopped calling. So it’s not just you. It’s anyone who doesn’t fit neatly into their mold.”

“Thank you for telling me that.”

“They’re threatened by you,” she said. “You chose to do something they’d never have the gumption to choose for themselves. Being their own person. When I was teaching, it upset Gavin at first because he thought it reflected badly on him, but then he realized how much I loved it. How it made me a happier person. I hope Robert understands that, too.”

“Oh, he does,” I said, a tiny bit envious.

“That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?” she asked. “Being able to choose what we want to do.”

I walked with her back to our table, thinking not about her or myself or Beverly Ann or Deborah, but about Lita Jordan and Ivy and Mary Ella Hart and all the other women and girls I was seeing who didn’t have many choices in their lives at all.

*   *   *

Robert was quiet in the car on the way home and I felt the tension between us. The evening had definitely gone downhill and I knew it was my fault. He’d had such high expectations. I remembered him saying he wanted to show me off. Now, he probably wanted to hide me.

“The band was great,” I said, taking a stab at a neutral conversation. “I loved how they played something for everyone. You know, for all the age groups.”

“You don’t even try to get along with them.” His hands clenched the steering wheel, eyes on the road.

“What are you talking about?”

“The wives. You don’t have any problem talking to the
men,
though, do you.” He glanced at me. “No problem there at all. But you look down your nose at the girls. You’re never going to fit in.”

“I do not look down my nose at them!” I said. “Why do you think I followed them to the powder room? Except for Lois, they were intentionally rude to me, so I went with them to the powder room to talk to them directly about trying to be friends.”

“Well, there’s your problem.” He shook his head. “You don’t talk
directly
about things like that. I swear, Jane, you have no social graces whatsoever.”

“Why not be direct?” I said. I was pulling the silly pearls out of my hair and dropping them in my purse. “Isn’t it better to be honest? Lois understood. At least I have one friend in that group.”

His nostrils flared, the way they did when he got angry. “You’ve changed so much since you started working,” he said.

“I haven’t changed.” I pulled the bobby pins out of my hair and tried to let it down, but it was sprayed into place. “It’s just that the things you loved about me when we were dating are the things that seem to bother you now,” I said. “I’m the same person. You loved that person as your
girlfriend,
but not as your
wife
.”

“We’re in that beautiful club tonight, surrounded by successful people who’ve worked hard to get where they are—and all you could think about was those …
people
you work with.” He made the word “people” sound like something dirty. “Do you have to throw it in their faces? That you work with Negroes and poor white trash?”

“Don’t talk about my clients that way, all right?” I snapped. “Just don’t!”

“You better start caring about your marriage as much as you care about them.”

“Is that supposed to be some kind of threat?” I stared at him. I wished he’d look at me. I wanted him to see the fury in my face. But he focused on turning into our driveway, parking next to my car. Then he finally turned to me.

“Lois will be dead in a year,” he said.

“What?”

“She has cancer. So if she’s your only friend in our social circle, you’re in trouble.”

He got out of the car and walked around to my side to open my door for me, but I brushed away his hand when he reached for mine to help me out.

“Just leave me alone,” I said.

I didn’t need to ask him twice. He slammed the door so hard that I jumped.

I rolled down the window to catch the breeze and sat there for what seemed like hours. How Robert had looked forward to this night! I played back the evening, remembering my determination to be light and fun and attentive to him all evening, a plan that fell apart within minutes of our arrival.