Read Online The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer - Free Book Online

woman named Carol Bredloe, who lived down the street. “You know what that means.”
    There was light snickering, and someone else said, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”
    Final guzzles were taken of the G&Ts, and the glasses were placed on available surfaces, resting on copies of coffee-table photography books, volumes on economic theory, paperback novels, and the coffee table itself. Antonia looked around in slight dismay, picturing all the overlapping wet rings that would sully the wood and wondering what kind of cleaning fluid she should buy tomorrow at Steinberg’s.
    Stop, she told herself. Don’t think about cleaning fluid now, of all times. Get outside yourself and try to be more than a housewife; this is 1972, for God’s sake, and women are changing before everyone’s eyes. Think about that change right now. Think about the evolution of women. Think about what is taking place here and in the States and across the ocean in Europe and all over the world. Think about what is going to happen in this very room tonight.
    Antonia had invited a woman named Marsha Knowles to come up from Toronto to give a demonstration to the consciousness-raising group. Every month for the past year, one of the women in the group cooked a casserole in a Pyrex dish, usually something with a lid of scorched cheese and some kind of ground meat underneath, and then baked a fruit crumble and brought out bottles of gin and tonic water and a bowl of ice and several bottles of Zinfandel, and banished her husband and children for the evening, opening her home to the other women. Since they had been assembling, the group had covered a great deal of ground, talking about subjects ranging from “Does It Matter If I Achieve Climax?” to “Nurturing a Political Awareness” to “How to Raise Confident Daughters and Soulful Sons.” After the first few shy, tentative meetings, the talk became bolder. Often tears flowed in these living rooms, and once in a while a bolus of anger suddenly shot from someone as if from a blowgun.
    “I am just so unhappy,” a woman might say with quiet fury, and she would go on to talk about her husband, who simply did not understand why he had a moral imperative to empty the dishwasher once in a while. “Would it kill Martin to do some chores around the house? He thinks it’s all meant for me to do. I mean, is there some logical connection between handling silverware and possessing ovaries?” the woman would ask, and the others would dutifully tell her no, there was no logical connection, and that she, and all of them for that matter, had a right to demand change. “When we got married, did I sign up for this?” the woman would continue. “Did it say in the ceremony that I shall be the person in this relationship who empties the dishwasher for all eternity?”
    “Um, I don’t think there were dishwashers when you and Martin got married,” someone else put in, trying to be helpful.
    Henry, Antonia knew, was not overtly sexist, like some of the husbands. Still, she had never entirely gotten over a moment that had taken place in 1969, when, at the Economics Department Christmas party, she had walked past his office and come upon him kissing his department secretary. Ginny Foley was a homely, pale little thing, all red hair and anemic milk-skin, in elephant bell bottoms, and it wasn’t that Antonia felt threatened by her, but she did feel a tremendous rush of betrayal and a secondary wash of personal inadequacy. How was it that tall and graceful and articulate Antonia was not enough for her husband, who had to seek succor in little Ginny Foley, whose hands smelled of mimeograph sheets and who kept a jar of sour candy always filled on her desk? Economists would wander by and absently plunge a hand into the jar whenever they liked.
    In the car going home from the Christmas party that night, Henry had been in good spirits, unaware of Antonia’s angry, hurt simmer beside him. “I saw you,” she said