Chapter 19 Dearly Beloved
Dearly Beloved
June was a busy month, so the Bettys chose Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Dearly Beloved—which was fairly short—as their first read of the summer, and decided to hold their meeting at the soda fountain in Mayer’s
Drugstore.
Margaret, Viv, and Bitsy had to run an errand at Babcock’s first. When they were done, they walked to Mayer’s and took three
stools at the counter. Bitsy ordered a strawberry shake, Margaret a cherry cola, Viv a banana split. The soda jerk went off
to prepare their orders.
“Hope he makes it quick,” Viv said. “I’m famished.”
Bitsy pulled a box from her Babcock’s shopping bag and lifted the lid, revealing a gold pen and pencil set that glimmered
like jewelry against the box’s black velvet lining.
“It doesn’t seem very original. Maybe we should have gone with books after all?”
“She’ll love it,” Margaret said. “A good pen is the perfect gift for a budding writer.”
“I suppose.” Bitsy slipped the pen set back in the shopping bag and glanced at her watch. “Where’s Charlotte? I thought she
was going to meet us.”
Margaret put the water she’d been sipping down on the counter. “Forgot to tell you. She called this morning and said she can’t make it. Some crisis with the florist, another in the series,” she said, giving her head a small but sympathetic shake.
“Sounds like this party is really getting out of hand. Howard invited his entire office, plus a bunch of clients and potential
clients. Charlotte’s parents are coming down too. What started out as a party for family and friends has turned into a corporate
happening with all the trimmings—caterers, tents, flowers, photographers, and a dance band.”
“Well, sure.” Viv shrugged. “No point in throwing a graduation party for your granddaughter unless you can write it off as
a business expense, am I right? Did Charlotte say what we should wear? Because this is about as fancy as I get these days.”
She glanced down at her pleated, yellow-checkered maternity smock. “You should see the looks I’ve been getting from the patients.
They’ve never seen a pregnant nurse before, and since I can’t fit into my uniforms anymore, it’s this topped with a lab coat.
Yesterday one of the patients asked if I was the cleaning lady.”
“Maybe you can sew a new maternity dress before the party,” Bitsy suggested.
“And when would I do that?” Viv asked. “Between working, commuting, kids, and housework, I don’t have enough time to change
my mind, let alone sew. It’s even busier now that school is out. The only reason I was able to come today is because Andrea
took the whole crew to see a matinee of The Nutty Professor.”
“I know what you mean,” Margaret said as she picked up her water glass again. “Things were crazy enough before. The column
is taking more time than ever, but writing with three kids underfoot is—”
“Oh, stop,” Bitsy said, tsking her tongue and rolling her eyes. “You know you love it. You both do! Kids, chaos, deadlines,
schedules. Admit it—you two have never been happier.”
Margaret smiled. She couldn’t speak for Viv, of course. But yes, even on days when she felt like a piece of dough rolled too
thin, she was happy, happier than she’d been in a long time.
The response to the initial column had been so positive that the magazine wanted her to write a piece in every issue, not just once a month.
It was gratifying to know readers liked her work, and Margaret was delighted to put some extra money in her pocket.
She was still saving up to buy furniture, but had decided to pay what she owed on Sylvia first. Doing so all but emptied her account, but marching out of the stationery store with a receipt marked “Paid in full” was something she’d never forget.
That day she really did feel like a professional writer.
Thanks to the photo spread that accompanied her column debut, and Barb Fredericks’s flapping tongue, word of her accomplishment
had spread among the housewives of Concordia, turning her into a minor celebrity. Margaret couldn’t say she didn’t enjoy the
attention. But it hadn’t taken long to realize that attracting a certain notoriety also meant attracting a certain amount
of jealousy.
The week before, while sitting on a lounge chair at the community pool and scribbling down possible ideas for columns while
the kids swam, two women Margaret barely knew made a point of coming over to say how much they liked the column. It was flattering
but also a little embarrassing, because once you say thank you, what else is there to say? Her embarrassment increased when
they spread their towels out on chairs a few yards away and started talking about her, apparently unaware of how their voices
carried.
“Will you look at her? Bringing a notebook to the pool of all places, just so everyone will know she’s a writer. What a showboat.”
“Well, you can’t really call it writing, can you? Just silly little vignettes about the kinds of things every housewife deals
with. I’m sure you or I could do it just as well, if we had the time.”
“Oh, please. How much time could it possibly take to bang out one of those columns? I bet she just sits down at the typewriter
and lets whatever’s in her head spill out onto the keys.”
Thankfully, some kids chose that moment to start playing cannonball near the gossips, creating a splash that forced them to decamp to different chairs.
If not, Margaret might have gone over and told them a thing or two about writing.
But she did jot down some notes, just in case a future column might need a couple of gossipy, thinly veiled villains based on real people.
Producing two columns a month ate up nearly all of Margaret’s free time. And though she wrote more quickly now than she had
at first, she still spent hours on every piece. But the thing that really got to her, making her cheeks flush red, was the
comment about her columns being silly, because she feared—no, she knew—it was true.
The world was changing, and so quickly.
June still had ten days to go, but so far that month a governor had been thwarted in his attempt to prevent two Black students
from integrating the University of Alabama; a Russian cosmonaut named Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to travel
to outer space; the first human lung transplant had been performed; the president had signed the Equal Pay Act of 1963 into
law; a Buddhist monk had died by self-immolation to protest the treatment of Buddhists in Vietnam, and horrifying photos of
the monk engulfed in flames had appeared in newspapers across the globe; the pope had died, and the College of Cardinals had
sequestered themselves to choose a new one; civil rights activist Medgar Evers had been shot and killed in his own driveway;
and President Kennedy had gone on television to talk about a proposed civil rights bill, then sent the language for the bill
to Congress just days later.
Earthshaking, society-altering change was happening all around, the kind of change Margaret felt was long overdue. As the
three of them sat there at the counter waiting for their ice cream, she couldn’t help but remember the Negro students who
sat down at a segregated lunch counter only a few weeks before, and the pictures she’d seen of sneering young white men pouring
ketchup, mustard, and sugar over the heads of the peaceful protesters.
What made those men so angry? Why did they feel so threatened? Margaret couldn’t begin to understand it, but she didn’t need to understand it to know it was wrong.
During his television address, President Kennedy had said that “the rights of every man are diminished when the rights of
one man are threatened.” She couldn’t have agreed more. However, had she been writing the president’s speech, she would have
added “and woman” into the text. But it seemed things were changing on that front as well.
Charlotte didn’t think the Equal Pay Act would amount to much. “Companies will find a way to worm out of it,” she said. “As
the daughter of a greedy, double-dealing captain of industry, you can trust me on this. There’s always a loophole somewhere.
Always.”
Margaret wasn’t as cynical as Charlotte, but she wasn’t completely naive either. Change wasn’t going to come overnight, but
it had to start somewhere, didn’t it? And when she thought about how many things were changing . . . Well, it was a pretty
exciting time to be alive.
Yet, despite all that, the only thing Leonard Clement wanted from her was humorous, mostly made-up, and yes, silly columns. Bons mots about failed diets, dealing with a critical mother-in-law, or getting a flat on a lonely country road
and trying to change a tire while wearing a dress and with two toddlers in the car.
Okay, that one had happened, back when they lived in Ohio. In retrospect it was pretty funny. But would it have been so terrible to throw a
little meaning in along with the funny, to acknowledge the fact that the world, and women, were entering a new era?
Margaret didn’t think so. But every time she tried to sneak something a little less trivial into her column, Clement put his
red pencil to work, striking a line through the thing she wanted to say, or scrawling a few cryptic words to remind her of
what she was being paid to write, hinting that the checks might stop coming if she didn’t “stick to the script.”
The fact that he used those exact words was discomforting because Betty Friedan, who had worked at a few women’s magazines, had said there actually was a script—that selling women on the idea of homemaking as the ultimate and only true path to feminine fulfillment also helped sell lucrative ad space for appliances, cleaning products, and foodstuffs.
Until recently Margaret found Betty’s theory a little hard to swallow, even conspiratorial.
Then Mr. Clement called and asked her to come up with a column that involved diet gelatin.