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

simply.
    “You saw me?”
    “With your stupid stupid department secretary.”
    He put a hand over his eyes, the way a child does, thinking it might render him invisible to everyone else. “Henry, you’re driving ,” she reminded him. He told her how sorry he was. He’d been drinking, he said, and Milt Berkman had passed around a joint. The Doors had been playing on the stereo that had been set up in the hall, and everyone at the party had felt festive and had let loose a little, “especially the Keynesians,” he added. He told her he had never done anything like that before.
    So what could Antonia do? She forgave him, for it had only been a kiss, and a kiss with Ginny Foley , and Henry was so hangdog and apologetic.
    But although they recovered, the pieces of the marriage resettled; she knew she could never love her sheepish, academic, distracted husband in exactly the same way. By the time feminism appeared in her life two years later, Antonia was ready to receive it. The women’s movement would give her an imperative. It would also be her big distraction; it would be her Ginny Foley. The novelty of the meetings, the solidarity, the big-hearted conversations with other women, gradually absorbed and transformed her. Soon she was speaking in ardent ways about real and important matters.
    She told her consciousness-raising group that she had always wanted to be an historical novelist and that she had an idea for a book, and they said, “Good for you,” and “We know you can do it.” The morning after the group met at her house, Antonia Lamb would wake up and start writing the opening of a novel called Turning Around and Going Home , about a schoolteacher in nineteenth-century Ontario who begins an erotic relationship with a local farmer. She imagined the farmer as being the temperamental opposite of her husband: visceral instead of intellectual, hard-muscled instead of wiry and academic-thin.
    Lately, a few of the women in the group had complained that their sexual lives were disappointing and that their husbands were eager to screw and then happy to dive headfirst into snorey sleep. The men needed to be educated in the various components of female body parts, someone said, and in order to do that, the women needed to be educated too.
    Enter Marsha Knowles. Yes, enter Marsha Knowles, Antonia Lamb thought in her living room. For on this evening Marsha Knowles, a middle-school guidance counselor in the greater Toronto school district, who had been invited here as a special guest, produced the black leather bag she had brought with her, a bag that had once belonged to her dead father, a doctor who would have been appalled by its current usage. Marsha Knowles was in her thirties, with dark hair shorn close to her head. She was a good-natured woman who seemed embarrassed at nothing, a trait that soon became clear to everyone in the living room.
    In the voice of someone starting to make a toast, Marsha Knowles said, “I want to thank all of you womenfolk for being so brave and so curious.” She was often on the road, going to houses like this one all over Ontario, speaking to the consciousness-raising groups that had sprung up in the past several years like newly planted little maple saplings. Just a week earlier she’d flown up to Moosonee to talk to a dozen housewives.
    Now Antonia Lamb sat forward on her chair and watched as Marsha Knowles, who looked a little bit like a performing seal, inched out of her velour pants and her faded, slightly depressing cotton briefs with elastic that left pale pink teethmarks impressed upon her white skin, then scooted up onto the Lambs’ couch, where a sheet had been laid for the occasion. It was one of Amy, Naomi, or Jennifer’s bedsheets, and a tiny pattern of strawberries ringed the edges. Briefly, Antonia wanted to take it back and give her an old picnic blanket or a frayed beach towel. Marsha Knowles took something metallic and glinting from her leather bag, and as the