Chapter Twenty-Four
Nora stared at the cover of The Love Machine, her cheeks already pink and warm.
This wasn’t the first time she’d seen it.
She studied the cover with secret interest. Two hands.
That was all it was. But the way his fingers gripped her skin…
tight and desperate, like something dangerous and decadent was about to happen.
Something inside Nora stirred. Something she didn’t fully have the vocabulary to name yet. Something that sort of felt like the jolt she’d gotten when Joe had touched her shoulder back at the festival. Or really any time his eyes met hers.
She flipped the book open, fingertips brushing the edge of the dog-eared pages, already smoothed from her mother’s prior reads. The words wrapped around her like a pearl necklace she didn’t ask to try on but now couldn’t bear to take off.
By the end of the first page, her entire face was a bonfire.
“Mom…this book…” she hissed, half scandalized, half fascinated.
Leanne giggled. Giggled. Like she was eighteen and Nora was an old lady. “Don’t stop now. I can’t wait to hear the rest.”
Nora groaned but turned to chapter one. Amanda. Fall season. Bra issues. And God apparently not gifting her with “giant, beautiful breasts.”
Nora glanced down at her own chest, concealed in a white camisole. A respectable A cup if there ever was one. Small and simple. Certainly not Love Machine material.
“Maybe I should start wearing falsies,” she muttered.
Leanne glanced over, one brow lifted. “I wore falsies once.”
“You did?”
“On my wedding day.” She chuckled, swiping a piece of hair out of her eyes. “Your grandma told me I was ‘false advertising.’ Said the merchandise didn’t match the sales pitch.”
“Oh my God—Grandma said that?!”
Leanne burst out laughing, a full, whole-body type of laughter that made her shoulders shake behind the wheel. “In front of my aunt too. Mortifying.”
Nora howled, letting her head fall against the open book. “I’m scarred forever. Sounds a lot like when someone says, ‘Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?’”
“Not exactly the same,” Leanne replied, lifting an eyebrow. “But close, and it was pretty hilarious. I still remember your dad’s face when he saw me walking down the aisle in that dress—with those obviously enhanced breasts pushed halfway to heaven.”
Nora held up both hands like she was stopping traffic. “Okay, okay! I give. Not another word about Dad looking at your boobs, please.”
They both broke into giggles, clutching their stomachs, the Lincoln gliding over the flat southern road.
Nora wiped her eyes and returned to the book.
The Love Machine was racy, risqué, and positively provocative.
The sort of book that didn’t even pretend to blush.
Men sleeping with women just because they could.
Breasts described with the care of fine art.
Power, lust, fame. Made The Godfather seem almost chaste.
Almost. There was a lot of talk in that one of Sonny Corleone’s gigantic…
If her father even heard her say some of these words aloud, he might board up her bedroom and send a telegram to Yale saying she’d joined a convent.
But Leanne was cackling beside her, sipping her gas station coffee like it was martini hour.
After finishing chapter one, Nora turned to her and waved the book between them. “Have you read any other books like this one?”
Leanne snickered, then bit her lip as if she wasn’t sure she should confess. “Not in front of your dad.”
Figured, but Nora didn’t say that. “Which one?”
“I read Jacqueline Susann’s other book, Valley of the Dolls. Fantastic.”
Nora smirked. “Maybe I should read that too.”
Leanne gave her a side glance. “Maybe you should. When you go to Yale your English minor classes will have you reading all the important stuff. Chaucer, Proust, Eliot, all the dead white men with big ideas and longer sentences. Reading should be fun too.”
Nora laughed, reminded of her high school English class. It was a good thing she’d gotten practice there showing up with books that her teacher didn’t approve of.
“Don’t let ‘literary’ fool you into thinking that’s all that matters. Jacqueline Susann gets a lot of flak, sure, but every housewife in Ossining has Valley of the Dolls hidden under the bed next to their Avon catalog.”
Nora raised an eyebrow. “Even Mrs. Murphy?” That woman was buttoned up tighter than a toddler in a snowstorm. Nora couldn’t even count the number of times Mrs. Murphy had wagged her finger from behind her curtained window.
“Especially Mrs. Murphy.”
They both burst into another fit of laughter.
The sun danced lower in the sky, casting its golden warmth over the dashboard.
And as the wind tousled their hair and Leanne tapped her fingers on the wheel to the rhythm of Dusty Springfield’s song “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” Nora had a thought she hadn’t had before: My mom is kind of cool.
Nora grinned, picturing it now—those suburban matrons in high-waisted skirts and sensible heels, coiffed hair held tight with Aqua Net, ladling Jell-O molds into Tupperware and cutting perfect brownie squares for the church bake sale.
Women who kept a roast in the oven, lipstick on their smile, and a smutty novel tucked inside the ironing basket or beneath their side of the mattress.
The secret rebellion of housewives.
She wondered how many of them were one steamy chapter away from setting their aprons on fire.
And then she wondered…when her own mother would revolt.
Before this trip she’d never really looked at her mom as someone who might want more. Leanne had always just been Mom. The keeper of lists, of order. A woman made of sturdy heels and perfect posture. But now…
“Did you always want to go to secretarial school?” Nora kept her tone casual but probing.
Leanne’s features softened, and a sentimental stare swept over her face. For a split second, Nora wished to know her thoughts and what made her reminisce in a way that was so not like her usual perfunctory self. But she didn’t have to wonder, because her mother started to share.
“Every little girl dreams of being something magical, don’t they?
” Her laugh was barely audible, more a whisper that carried secrets within memories.
“After I realized I couldn’t be a mermaid,” she laughed softly, “I used to think I might be an artist—though I’m better at stick figures than portraits.
Or maybe a singer like my mom. But when it came time to choose, magic wasn’t what made sense.
I’m not artistic in that way. I had to choose something that was not just practical but respectable too. ”
Nora raised an eyebrow, flipping the corner page of The Love Machine with her finger. “Maybe that’s the whole problem.”
Leanne tilted her head. “What do you mean?”
“I mean…maybe the issue isn’t that women read these books or want different lives. Maybe the issue is that we’re all so scared of looking unladylike, ungrateful, or being too much that we stuff all our desires under the bed with the paperbacks.”
Nora wasn’t sure from her mother’s expression if she was surprised or…impressed.
“Maybe if we stopped worrying so much about being respectable, practical,” Nora added, “we’d remember who we actually are. Or at least give ourselves permission to figure it out. Bring some of that magic back.”
A silence passed between them—not heavy, just…thoughtful.
“Maybe. You’re pretty wise for eighteen.” Leanne’s voice was soft, contemplative, as she steered with one hand, gripping the map with the other to check their route.
“I’m wise, maybe,” Nora replied with a mischievous grin. “But I still want some falsies.”
Leanne laughed. “Every girl should try them at least once. Preferably not on her wedding day.”
They were still giggling when they pulled into a peach-and-mint-colored roadside motel along Route 66.
Neon lights flickered and Adirondack chairs painted in rainbow order lined the walkway.
Leanne parked the Lincoln under the soft buzz of the overhead light, their brown paper sandwich bags crinkling in the back seat like firecrackers.
Instead of flipping on the television like they had at every other stop, they each kicked off their shoes and climbed onto their beds, cracking open The Love Machine.
The room smelled like a mixture of borax and their sandwiches, and someone had left the air conditioner on arctic mode, but they didn’t care; they just climbed under the covers.
Tonight, the entertainment was Jacqueline Susann.
Nora read aloud about Robin Stone—midway through the book now—navigating his dangerous dance between Amanda and Judith, both women heartbreakingly self-aware and heartbreakingly blind at the same time.
In the chapter they devoured, Robin bought Amanda a luxurious apartment, promising love while planning his subsequent escape.
Amanda, wise to the world but not to him, kissed him anyway, knowing what came next.
“I swear,” Leanne muttered, “he’s like if Robert Redford and a bottle of Brut cologne had a baby.”
Nora laughed until she had to set the book down. “I don’t know whether I want to date or slap him.”
“That means Jacqueline did her job,” her mom said, already chewing on the next page.
Later that night, the book closed and their sandwich wrappers tossed in the motel trash, Nora lay in bed, cocooned in the air conditioner’s hum and the thrum of the highway just beyond the curtains.
She didn’t think about college exams or dorm room assignments.
Not about the boy who’d broken her heart junior year or the curveball of calculus.
Instead, she thought about telling her mom she wanted to be a writer.
Really telling her.
Not just the vague “I want to get an English degree so I can write” but the truth about the notebook in her bag—the leather-bound one with bent corners and ideas scrawled in margins. The one that held the line she wrote last night, lying in a motel bed just like this one, after Joe said goodbye…
In the electric haze of the open-air concert, with the night thrumming like a heartbeat around us, I turned—and there he was, a stranger with ink-stained hands and eyes that held entire stories, watching me like he already knew how this would end.
With her eyes closed she let the story drift through her, humming like a song only she could hear.