Lake Effect

Prologue

Bess Pfeiffer didn’t mean to start anything when she walked into Honey Finnegan’s house with seven copies of The Joy of Sex.

She thought it would be fun. Their group had been meeting for years and even though it started as something that kind of sort of resembled the consciousness raising groups they’d been reading about, it had, predictably, become a watered-down suburban version of consciousness raising.

The wives and mothers of Cambridge Road weren’t talking politics or sex or activism or civil rights or even a light, sugarcoated feminism, but mostly trying to help each other as their children climbed the slippery shoals of adolescence to the sebum-soaked years of puberty.

They discussed teachers and curfews and their concerns about cigarettes and liquor and peer pressure.

That their kids—some of them only yards away from where they met—were already smoking pot and bringing Welch’s grape jelly jars refilled with Smirnoff to the massive tree house in the Tannenbaums’ backyard would not have occurred to any of the mothers in the room.

Except Bess, a high school nurse and trusted confidante of some of the older teens, especially the girls, who couldn’t talk to their parents about sex or, God forbid in this neighborhood of Catholics, birth control.

The women chatted about husbands and cooking and which families were not obeying the local leash laws, and should their bowling league move from Wednesdays to Tuesdays, and why were Father John’s sermons so excruciatingly boring, and did they still need to abstain from meat on Fridays?

So when Bess saw the book on display while browsing at Sibley’s she thought, Why not?

Why not have a little fun, stir things up.

Her status on the block was already dicey as the first divorcée, the first victim of a burgeoning national trend if the media was to be believed, when her husband walked out because he fell in love with his office manager, who was the spitting image of twenty-three-year-old Bess.

She brought the stack of seven books to the checkout and enjoyed the look on the face of the young girl behind the counter when she asked if they could be gift wrapped.

“I guess?” the girl had said. “I’ll have to check.” She returned quickly and said she could only wrap three books for free.

“Pity,” Bess said. “Well, then I’ll take them unwrapped.” She made cheerful small talk as Dana, according to her name tag, rang up each copy and quickly slipped it into one of two large shopping bags while trying to hide her mortification.

“Have you read it?” Bess asked, tapping the cover with her fingernail. She couldn’t help herself. She’d lost all inhibitions since Doug left. Who cared about manners? Maintaining pretenses? Life was absurd.

“Me?” Dana’s voice rose two octaves. “No!”

“How come?”

“Because it’s basically pornography.”

Bess sighed. “Who told you that? Let me guess. Your mother?”

“No. I mean, yes. But no, I looked at the pictures. They’re disgusting.”

“Honey,” Bess said as Dana finished ringing up the books and slipped the last one into a shopping bag, visibly relieved, “let me give you some advice: don’t marry anyone who isn’t as concerned with your orgasm as they are with theirs.”

“Oh my god.” Dana put her face in her hands.

“Someday you’re going to thank me, Dana.

In some glorious postcoital moment in a room somewhere in a town other than this one”—Bess paused while Dana groaned and then warily looked back at Bess—another room in another town?

Interesting—“you’re going to wonder who that fairy godmother was who gave you the best piece of life advice in the Sibley’s book department in 1977.

You’re going to wish you could find me and thank me, so I’ll tell you now: you are very welcome.

” Bess reached into one of the shopping bags, plucked out a book, and said, “Here. This one’s for you. From me.”

“I can’t.”

“You can.”

“I can’t. My mother will have a conniption.”

“Ah, it is the mother. Do you know who I’m buying all these books for?”

Dana’s expression went back to confused. “Your—children?”

“No. These are for my friends. For all the mothers on the block who are horrified that I’m divorced and have thoughts about sex.

So here.” She put the purchased book on the counter in front of Dana.

“Don’t put it under the mattress if your mother still changes your bed.

Hide it in a closet somewhere and educate yourself. ”

“Okay.” Dana took the book, slightly less reluctant. “Thank you?”

Bess started to leave, got as far as the shelf of nonfiction bestsellers and turned back. “Dana? One more thing. I’m a nurse. Get on the pill. Do what you want to do, but be smart.”

Dana leafed through the book. She didn’t look up and she didn’t look disgusted. Bess walked closer. “Did you hear me?”

“Uh-huh.”

Bess peeked over the counter and read the subtitle on the page. “Ah. Mouth music. That’s a good section.” Dana slammed the book shut. She smiled a little.

“Keep reading, Dana! Keep reading.”