The Highland Park Woman [April 1976]
Some are born into the club, others never quite make it.
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Domestic relations. Ha. There is, or was, the matter of John and Miss or Mrs. Nameless. The little bitch. But it is over now, the Highland Park woman says, and forgotten if not totally forgiven. Nobody ever mentions names or anything else. Except, oh, about once a year. And John, damn him, asks for it when she does. "All right . . . all right. Take off," she says she told him, "take right off. But don't take anything with you. Not one damn thing." Or words to that effect. But she didn't. She was scared and sick and frightened—lonely, depthless fright—and went from mirror to mirror asking herself questions, wondering what had happened. And John acting guilty, mean, harsh. The Highland Park woman cut him off at the source when she found out. Click, like that. Except, she discovered herself wanting her husband worse than ever. Maybe to prove to him she was as sexy as Miss or Mrs. Nameless. Maybe to prove it to herself. But she didn't solve it. The "other woman" solved it. She married an oilman from West Texas. Money enough to do things for her and with her John couldn't have done. He says that ended it, but sometimes the Highland Park woman wonders if it might not happen again. Sometimes she can't believe it won't. When he acts discontented and blames things on his career and talks about getting older without having done any of the things he wants to do. The Highland Park woman wonders.
She's never been involved herself, not really. The crowd they run with, their Highland Park herd, gives lots of parties. Flirts a lot and touches. Kitchen kisses and hugging in the hallway after enough scotches and sodas. Some are worse than others. The women, too. Martha, who is so calm and sweet and Eastern finishing school. Give her a few drinks, which she won't turn down if there are enough men around. And Shuggie. Shuggie's the only grown woman she knows of who smokes pot. The Highland Park woman wonders about Martha and John sometimes. Martha's much nearer the kind of woman John thinks he likes than she is, hi sown wife. oh, John denies it if she makes some veiled reference to him and Martha in fun. But it's a matter of style. Martha's his style. Shuggie might be even more his style, but the Highland Park woman suspects Shuggie has wider worlds to conquer than John. Shuggie is so chic, so sleek and superior. Thank God, John isn't really up to something like Shuggie—whom she really likes, the Highland Park woman says.
Personally, she's on the pill—has been since college—and there are no problems. But the problem with no problems is the simple fact that there is no problem. She thinks she and John make love twice a month or so. If she kept track of it. Sometimes it may be longer. He works hard and thinks about his work and sits up late and gets up early and plays hard—golf and tennis—and stays on the job, really stays on the job, plenty of evenings. And with all that they just don't make love very much. But no one she knows, except her younger sister, does.
And there is Dick. If Dick were a little younger—he's 44—a little more, should she say, aggressive? Anyhow, if Dick were a little more . . . , well, something. There have been lots of kisses and hand-holding and dates for lunch and desires freely expressed. By Dick. But not involved. Would she get involved? Well, she isn't the type who plans that sort of thing. The answer would have to come simultaneously with the opportunity, and the opportunity has not come. Yes, she might even become his mistress, although she hates that word. But Dick is as caught in it all as she is. Everyone they both know they see constantly. Dallas is small enough: Highland Park is like living in a retirement home when it comes to knowing what everyone is doing. Let Dick take her to Kuby's or Arthur's for lunch and their whole circle would know it by nightfall. Going to bed with him might turn out to be the same thing. If Dick took her to bed. She wonders about Dick, if he's as passionate for her as he says he is. But he's sweet and very clever. And not many men pay the personal attention to her he does. Not even John.
Several hours of every day are spent in the car, driving carpool with her daughter every third week, taking John's shirts to the laundry he likes, picking up the maid at the bus stop three times a week, shopping, shopping and going, going. She's not fond of it, she says, and, the Highland Park woman confesses, she's not a superb driver. But she can still talk a policeman out of a traffic ticket. Especially one of the Highland Park police. Not that she gets that many tickets.
She finds plenty to occupy her time, regardless of what Women's Lib says. Volunteering at the museum or Old City Park. Going to ballet and exercise class. Taking Trey to his soccer games. From time to time she enrolls in some continuing education class at SMU. Languages or art. Right now she's taking backgammon lessons at DCC as a sort of lark Dick suggested. Nobody in her crowd plays bridge anymore.
Two days a week she shops. With someone. Sometimes Anne, sometimes Martha. Shuggie's taste is too rich for her, but it's fun going shopping with Shuggie. Fun to watch the saleswomen at Marie Leavell's and Lou Lattimore fall all over her when she walks in. They will have lunch at the Chimney or the Upper Crust at Olla Podrida, or if it's one of the girls' birthday they'll take her to the Zodiac Room at Neiman-Marcus. They never talk about men. Well, only their husbands and how hard they work. Nobody ever says she's unhappy. Just frustrated. They talk about their children most of all, and about new things they've bought, or some change at home they're planning to make. If they gossip it will be sympathetic and not caustic.
What else?
Well, she belongs to a book review club, one her mother helped start, that meets once a month in some Highland Park home. If it's a particularly interesting home, she'll go. She seldom goes to the DCC. She doesn't play golf. Not that age yet, she told Rachel, who's 40 and plays twice a week. And didn't like her remark. The Highland Park woman tried to play several years ago when John wanted her to learn, but that little piece of newly married togetherness dissolved with her first pregnancy.
She makes the mothers meeting at Lamplighter and St. Mark's but never says anything. The super-rich gals run that show and the best she can hope for is to be asked to join a committee with one of them. She wanted to go to the SMU Film Festival last spring but she had an appointment with her hairdresser the morning they showed the Warren Beatty picture, and she had to take Missy to the dentist another afternoon. And she couldn't get anyone to go with her, regardless.
She reads a lot, but it's not very deep. They've been members of Book-of-the-Month Club for years and she automatically reads what they send unless it's too thick. John reads about one book a year, if it's about business or money. He says the Wall Street Journal tells him all he needs to know about books. She has an account at Preston Books and the Bookseller at Willow Creek and sometimes she will come away with $20 or $30 worth, and John will say, "When in God's name do you plan to read all that?" John watches more television than she does, although he claims he doesn't have time. She likes an old movie late at night—the only time she can watch TV in peace—and she tried to follow Upstairs, Downstairs but gave up because of the kids. A number of magazines come to the house, but the only ones she reads much are The New Yorker, Vogue, Time, Texas Monthly, and D. Sometimes she finds something in Harper's or Atlantic someone's said she should read, and she looks at the pictures in House Beautiful and House and Garden every month. She wishes she had read more of the classics in college; learned to read modern poetry and drama. But she didn't.
All right, so she passed over The Time. He was a lawyer but she met him in a night French class at SMU and he said he was giving up the law and was going to get his PhD in American literature at Harvard. He was divorced. His wife had been from a famous Houston family and was so dumb, he said, he had to remind her every month when it was time for her period. The Highland Park woman went to his apartment at 3525 after their third class and he had champagne in the refrigerator. It hadn't been like a college affair. It was more deliberate on her part. A man can't take off panty hose. He was passionate but no better in bed than John when John is interested. And the whole time she kept thinking she needed to go to the bathroom. After that he begged and begged her to sleep with him again and when he left Dallas to go to Boston he begged her to leave John and marry him. He seemed to have a lot of money and drove one of those little Mercedes 450s that cost so much. But she couldn't picture herself married to him. Not really. He'd never had children and acted as if she could simply take her children along, the way people take poodles with them to Aspen and Santa Fe. For a while he called her once a week, then every month or so. But that was four years ago, and there'd been no more phone calls since, oh, year before last. Except, the Highland Park woman says, thinking about him now makes him seem terribly exciting. If she lets herself she even wonders how long it might have lasted.
What about the future?
"I don't know exactly," she says. "I want a better life for my children, of course. I love my children and I think I'm a good mother. I don't spoil them." Would she like for her children to do more or less the same things she's done? Live the same life? "Well, I expect them to live a certain kind of way—a certain lifestyle, if that doesn't sound too hackneyed."
What about herself?
"I'm happy," the Highland Park woman says. "One thing sure. I'm not ending up like my mother getting silicone injections at 56. Or like John's mother completely wrapped up in her children. I'm going to be a person."
Last week the Highland Park woman and her husband and their children flew down to South Padre for a short vacation. They had a nice room with an ocean view and there were supervised play areas for the children and she and John had, for the first time in years, a few days completely to themselves. They had dinner in the dining room the first evening and sent the kids to a nature show, then returned to their room and had drinks. Later, John sat at the window with a scotch and soda and said, "I ought to call the office, I guess," and shook his head a few times and turned to her and said, very seriously, "Shit." She sat in bed with the sheet around her, feeling deliciously nude, and smoked a cigarette while he stared out to sea.
The sunset faded in a positively gorgeous pile of pink and gold clouds and the sea birds swirled and darted across the view. The sound of the surf came through the wide window and John finished his drink, dropped his cigarette butt in the glass, and said to her, "We've had dinner, we made love, we had a drink. What do we do now?"
The Highland Park woman, who only smokes with her husband, lit another cigarette and thought about it.
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