One
Judith
Favorite book: The Red Tent—yes, still!
I read somewhere that the very first “book club” (female discussion group) took place in 1634 on a ship sailing to the Massachusetts Bay Colony when a “religious renegade” named Anne invited a group of women—no doubt exhausted from the voyage and in dire need of a break from their husbands and children—to talk about (and apparently critique) the sermons given at weekly services. (Which was nowhere near as relaxing as, say, a conversation about Bridget Jones’s Diary or Where the Crawdads Sing.)
They continued these discussions when they reached land (because how else did you get out of the cabin to hang with your friends?). It seems this didn’t go down too well with the Bay Colony’s general assembly, because they condemned the gatherings and banished Anne to Rhode Island. Which seems a bit extreme and, frankly, confusing. Perhaps they believed that the state was too small for a worrying number of women to gather?
Women have bravely faced the threat of banishment to Rhode Island ever since, gathering in reading circles and salons and literary clubs and societies. They were aided and abetted by the Book-of-the-Month Club, galvanized by Helen Hooven Santmyer’s “. . . And Ladies of the Club”, and ultimately validated by Oprah, whose meatier/weighty exploration of dysfunction and unhappy endings put the concept on the map. And perhaps introduced the need for wine at book club meetings so as not to lose hope completely.
Our book club was started in 2004 by Annell Barrett, who owns Between the Covers Bookstore, which takes up the bottom floor of the historic home she lives in. It sits just OTP, which is Atlanta shorthand for Outside the Perimeter, aka I-285, the highway that encircles the city—kind of like the early settlers’ circling of the wagons—and separates the city folk and the suburbanites.
Annell, who is a practical sort of woman, never saw a reason to give the book club a name or confine it to a single genre. She just wanted more readers in the store, and so she picked a book she thought people would like, wrote the title up on the chalkboard behind the register, and offered a twenty percent discount to anyone who joined the book club. Then she promised there’d be wine. (The food to soak up the wine and allow members to drive home legally came later.)
There were five of us, including my friend and neighbor Meena Parker, at that first meeting in the carriage house behind the store, to discuss The Secret Life of Bees. The next month there were ten for The Jane Austen Book Club. He’s Just Not That Into You, requested by then twenty-five-year-old twins Wesley and Phoebe, who kept falling in love with the same commitment-phobic guys, took us to fifteen members.
I chose this club over the one that started in our neighborhood because I love everything about Between the Covers and the carriage house behind it, and also because my neighbors liked to talk about one another more than the books. Plus, a few doors from home is not far enough away to avoid coming back for an especially messy meltdown, a lost cell phone, or a science project that is suddenly and inexplicably due.
Over the last fourteen years, we’ve read one hundred and fifty-four books, which Annell has duly recorded in an official book club binder that she keeps at the front desk. The group swells and shrinks. We’ve had two different sets of siblings. Mothers and daughters. Best friends, work friends, and the occasional frenemy. Some members have left, never to be seen again. Others have come back. One member joined as Carl and transitioned to Carlotta, and both of them totally rocked their skinny jeans in a way I’ve always dreamed of.
We’ve tried out nearby restaurants and bars, but we always end up back at the carriage house. It’s a reassuring and comforting constant in a world that can take you by surprise.
Like the day I realized that Nathan, my husband of thirty years, had been rewriting our personal history. At first the revisions were so small I barely noticed. A minor detail reinterpreted. A tiny triumph appropriated and then repeated until it became an undisputed part of our marital history.
I never made a conscious decision to allow it. But I didn’t call him on his embellishments, either. (Which in case you’re wondering is the emotional equivalent of faking orgasms and then being doomed to nonorgasmic lovemaking for the rest of your married life.) This is how he became the star of our life together and I became the supporting player.
At the moment, he’s packing the things I laid out for him into the suitcase I left open on the bed. I started letting him think he was actually packing way before the creators of prepackaged meals began putting just enough premeasured ingredients in a box to convince the person assembling them that they were actually cooking.
The first time I did this, the suitcase was made of cardboard, the mattress it sat on was lumpy, and the red-and-blue-striped tie I bought him for his first sales trip came from the sale rack at T.J. Maxx.
“Thanks for picking up the dry cleaning.” Nathan stops long enough to flash me a smile. At fifty-eight, his hairline is in retreat and his features have begun to blur, but his dark eyes still crinkle at the corners when he smiles, and he can still make a person feel like the most fascinating being on the planet.
“No problem.” I don’t bother to explain that I haven’t dropped off or picked up the dry cleaning for a good ten years now. Because really, how can he not know this?
“Have you seen my lucky . . . Ah, there it is.” He lifts the red-and-blue-striped tie—now an Hermès that I reorder from Neiman’s as needed. “Can’t close a deal without this baby.”
“Oh, I’m sure you could close a deal in your sleep if you had to.” The words of reassurance are automatic, but they barely fit through my lips. Because no amount of smiling is going to change the fact that he’s leaving for Europe to introduce the Chickin’ Lickin’ chain of “Southern fried chicken” to key cities. And he did not invite me to go with him.
“I know you wanted to come, Jude, but I’m going to be racing from one meeting to the next. You’d be bored to death.”
“I’m pretty sure I could have found a few things to do in Paris and Rome on my own.” I think about those magnificent cities all lit up for the holidays. The Christmas markets. The department store decorations. The Louvre and Musée d’Orsay. The presepe in St. Peter’s Square.
He slips his Dopp kit, upgraded over periodic Father’s Days, into the corner of the Tumi suitcase. “You know I’d love to have you with me, but I’m going to be completely focused on business. I can’t afford to get distracted.”
Somehow, I manage not to ask if he’s ever heard of multitasking. Nor do I point out that he might never have been anything more than a semi-successful salesman if I hadn’t been there to push and encourage him, to entertain potential franchisees and the company brass, while keeping a sharp eye on our finances.
We never talk about the fact that I’m the one who kept us on a spartan budget so that we could buy our first Chickin’ Lickin’ franchise. Or that I put every penny my parents left me into a second franchise. All while running our home and our lives, serving on every PTA at every school our kids attended, being room mom and team mom and field trip chaperone and . . . it makes me tired just to remember it all.