Chapter 3 What the Neighbors Think
What the Neighbors Think
When Margaret first saw the contest announcement, six weeks had felt like more than enough time to write one little essay.
But the task turned out to be more challenging, and more invigorating, than she’d imagined. Handing the envelope with her
entry to the postal clerk filled her with fluttering excitement and a sense of accomplishment she hadn’t known in years.
Upon exiting the post office, she drove to the stationery store to return the typewriter.
“Are you sure?”
The clerk cocked an eyebrow in a way that made Margaret think he somehow knew she’d come to think of the machine as a friend,
that she’d even given it a name—Sylvia—and that the clackety-clack-clacking of the keys and spritely ding of the return lever
lifted her spirits like nothing else.
“Tell you what,” he said, clapping his hands together, the same gesture he might have used to trap a fly midflight. “How about
I drop the rent to seven dollars, and she’s yours after twenty months? What do you say to that?”
Margaret couldn’t say she wasn’t tempted. But seven dollars was still seven dollars, and the contest was over. Why spend money
she didn’t have on something she’d never use again?
Margaret bit her lip. “I really shouldn’t.”
The clerk stared at her, waiting.
Margaret opened her purse.
* * *
During college Margaret had been the kind of student who made other students groan when they spotted her on the first day
of class because they knew her presence would skew the curve and torpedo their chances for an easy A. Had she stayed on for
her final year instead of marrying Walt, she would have graduated with high honors. Even so, the fact that she took to academic
life so readily surprised no one more than Margaret herself.
She’d grown up in a modest neighborhood favored by blue-collar families who worked in Dayton’s factories. Though she maintained
a B+ average in high school, the idea of going to college never occurred to her, nor to most of the girls in her graduating
class. Those with boyfriends scheduled summer and fall weddings. Those without planned to take jobs and live at home until
they found a husband, Margaret among them.
Then, a week after Margaret graduated from high school, her mother died.
Instead of finding a job, Margaret spent the summer keeping house and caring for her younger siblings, stepping into her mother’s
shoes so her father could continue working. Things might have gone on like that had not her best friend, Ethel Chenault, phoned
in late August, sobbing and furious, to report that she’d caught her fiancé, Cliff, necking in the back row of the movie theater
with Cherry Schaffer, the town tramp.
“Cherry Schaffer! Can you believe it?”
Margaret could. Cliff was the type who winked at every passing skirt. But what can you do when your friends fall in love with
the wrong people?
“I poured my Coke over his head and told him that was it—the wedding is off!”
“Oh, Ethel. I’m sorry.”
“Better I found out now rather than later, right?” Ethel sniffled, sounding less than convinced. “Anyway, I wanted to let
you know before you bought the fabric for your bridesmaid’s dress.”
Too late. Margaret was stuck with four yards of peach chiffon she now had no use for.
“Is there anything I can do to help? When my dad gets home from work, maybe we can go do something fun to get your mind off
things. Not the movies, obviously, but . . .”
Ethel sniffled again but also laughed, as Margaret had hoped she would.
“Thanks, but I’m packing. I can’t stick around Dayton after this. I just got off the phone with the admissions office at Ohio
State. They said all I need to do is drive over and register for the fall semester, so Mom is driving me to Columbus. Why
don’t you come too? It’ll be fun!”
“What? You mean to college? I can’t do that.”
“Sure you can! Why stick around here and marry a mechanic when there’s a campus full of eligible college men less than a hundred
miles away? Come on, Maggie! Don’t you want to get away from here? See the world?”
Seeing the world was beyond the boundaries of Margaret’s imagination—she’d never traveled farther than Indianapolis. But yes,
oh yes, she very much wanted to get away from Dayton, the house permeated with grief, and the small, ordinary future that
was mapped out for her. All these years later, Margaret still felt guilty about deserting her post. But her father understood.
“Just come home weekends,” he said when he dropped her at the bus station in September. She promised she would but rarely
did, and felt guilty about that too.
But she had loved college, especially the fact that she was surrounded by strangers; no one, apart from Ethel—who was impregnated by an engineering major in the spring semester and dropped out to get married—knew anything about her or her family.
She loved her classes, too, signed up for the toughest courses she could talk her way into, and worked hard, giving her full concentration to topics that were weighty and wonderfully impersonal.
Her moral analysis of Mansfield Park, arguably Jane Austen’s least readable novel, was heavy lifting, and her A was well deserved.
But did the musings of a nineteen-year-old
girl on a 135-year-old novel matter in the here and now?
Not a bit. Well, apart from the grade.
Collecting top grades was something else Margaret loved about college, revealing a competitive streak she’d never known she
had, which had reemerged the moment she handed the clerk at the stationery store eight dollars for the first month’s typewriter
rental.
She hadn’t told anyone about the essay contest—not even Viv, whom she normally shared everything with—furiously tapping out
drafts while the kids were in school and Walt was at the office. The rules stipulated that submissions must be typed double-spaced,
no more than twelve hundred words in length, and titled “A Holiday to Remember.” The Christmas debacle gave her plenty of
material to work with.
Her writing muscles had atrophied considerably since college, but day after day she kept at it. She went through half a ream
of paper over a period of weeks before producing a draft that shone a bright light on her feelings about Christmases past
and present, linking them in ways that surprised even herself. It was a fine piece of writing, poignant and honest, infused
with longing for things just out of reach. But once her subscription started showing up and Margaret began studying the magazine’s
content more intently, she realized that poignant honesty wouldn’t make the editorial cut at A Woman’s Place.
She started all over again, leaning harder into humor, setting the tone with a few paragraphs about the hopes and heroic efforts
she’d put into creating a magical holiday that quickly went off the rails, something she thought most women could relate to.
The middle section was a mostly accurate depiction of how things unfolded, including the part about leaving the turkey in the car and turning potentially poisonous poultry into soup.
In hindsight, it really was pretty funny.
Then she took a turn from comedy to romance, altering the ending to make it sweeter, because who wants to read a Christmas story about harsh words and a husband sleeping in the den?
Instead, she gave it a sort of “Gift of the Magi” twist, in which she sacrificed her precious cache of Green Stamps to get
Walt a new bag for his golf clubs, and Walt sold his clubs to buy Margaret lamps and a maple dresser, ending the piece with a kiss in front of a crackling fire that just happened to coincide with the ringing
of distant church bells and a gentle fall of snow.
Margaret felt better about this version. Not because the writing was better than her earlier attempt. She knew it wasn’t.
But she wanted to do more than write well; she wanted to win. Of course the money would be great. But wouldn’t it be something to see her words and name printed in a national magazine?
One read by thousands of women?
* * *
Margaret was the last to arrive at the coffee klatch. If she hadn’t known that Barb would have called later, sweetly but persistently
probing for an explanation, she might have skipped this week. It wasn’t that she disliked Barb, or any of the neighborhood
women. When she first moved to Concordia, she’d been grateful to meet women she had so much in common with and who, like her,
were eager to launch new friendships. Lately, however, she’d begun to think they might have too much in common. All they ever
talked about was kids, husbands, recipes. And Margaret was as guilty as any of them.
What had happened to her? She used to be an interesting person.
The front door had been left ajar. Margaret entered a wide foyer papered with navy-blue toile.
Danish modern was all the rage, but Barb’s taste leaned to Virginia Colonial, lots of florals and dark wood.
Margaret hung her jacket on a hall tree and headed toward the crowded, overheated living room.
It smelled of burned coffee, stale cigarettes, and Shalimar.
“There you are!” Barb said, raising the coffeepot in a sort of salute as Margaret entered. “We were starting to wonder what
happened.”
“Sorry. There was a line at the post office.”
“That’s all right. Sit down, let me get you some coffee. Ellen, Dorothy, Iris,” she said, addressing the three women seated
on the sofa, “scoot down to make room for Margaret.”
Margaret had been disappointed to discover it was Iris Rasmussen, and not the intriguing woman from the drugstore, who had
moved into the Nottingham right after Christmas. Two months later, she was still disappointed. Iris was too anxious to be
liked, almost obsequious in her attempts to gain approval and make friends. But in a way, weren’t they all?
Viv, the only woman Margaret truly counted as a friend, was the lone exception. Perhaps because she was a military wife and