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  “Oh, no!” Lorraine giggled. “I’d better stick to juice. Otherwise I might get silly.”

  “Yeah, that’s right.” Her husband, Jim, was quick to agree. He came up behind her and protectively put his arm around her shoulders. “Lolly here is what us guys used to call a cheap date. A couple of sips of wine and she’s dancing on the tables.’’

  Jessica forced a smile. Lolly?

  “I’ll take a beer, though,” said Jim. “That’s okay; I don’t need a glass.”

  Somehow, that didn’t surprise her a bit. There was something about Jim Denholm that just shouted Old Boy. She had already figured him out: he was the kind of guy who knew everything there was to know about spectator sports, watched more than the average seven-and-a-half hours of television per day, and considered Alf, the Beach Boys, and Howard Stern high art.

  “But let me help you,” Lorraine was insisting. “I want to put these brownies in the kitchen, anyway.”

  “Oh, you brought brownies? How nice! You shouldn’t have bothered.’’ Especially since we have more ice cream in the house than the Good Humor man.

  “Oh, it’s no bother at all. I love to bake. Besides, whenever I’m invited to someone’s house, I hate to show up empty-handed. It’s so rude, don’t you think? I’ll just bring these into the kitchen, and then I can get started on giving you a hand. ...”

  “I can take those, Lorraine. Really.” Jessica found herself having to draw upon every lesson in assertiveness training she had ever studied in the pages of Cosmopolitan. “It’s absolutely no trouble. And I don’t need any help. Everything is pretty much ready. Here, why don’t you sit down in the living room, and I’ll be with you in about two seconds.”

  Sammy, meanwhile, was getting along great with Jim and Lorraine’s kids. Stacy was about his age and, much to her credit, she was hampered only minimally by the fact that she was dressed like a doll in a frilly, lemon yellow dress, decorated with tiny pink flowers, and dotted with bows, bits of lace, and a few other varieties of froufrou. Her white socks were edged with yellow eyelet, and each of her black patent leather shoes was decorated with a precious pink rosette. In her fine, golden hair was an oversized pink satin ribbon, the exact same shade as the flowers in the dress fabric.

  Her older brother, Jim Junior, was about five or six years old. He had a Dennis the Menace look about him, complete with cowlick, freckles, and the unofficial uniform of little boys: a red-and-blue striped cotton knit shirt, jeans, and Nikes with Velcro closures. He was thrilled to have two little kids to boss around, so much so that he left Jessica free to turn her attention to the adult conversation already in progress.

  “So, you folks just moved out here from the city, did you?” Jim said jovially, banging his beer can down on the coffee table with just a bit too much vehemence. “Lolly and I have lived here on Long Island all our lives. Yup, born and bred.”

  “Do you work in the city?” Jessica asked politely.

  Jim snorted. “Are you kidding? There’s no way you’d get me into that filthy, crime-ridden city! Nah, I own a few hardware stores in the area.”

  “Jim just opened up his third,” Lorraine said proudly.

  “Yeah, I guess we’re doing okay. How about you? You working out here now?”

  Jessica opened her mouth to reply, then realized that his question had been directed at David, not her. Men like Jim Denholm did not ask a woman like Jessica, a woman with a small child at her knee demanding apple juice in a whine so high-pitched it could no doubt shatter crystal, about her “work.”

  Despite this—or perhaps because of it—Jessica was tempted to break into the conversation and explain that while she may look like the Second Runner-up in the Pillsbury Bake-Off, she was really a marketing manager.

  But Sammy kept insisting that apple juice was the order of the day. And so she retreated to the kitchen, half listening to the conversation going on in the other room, telling herself that it didn’t sound all that interesting, anyway.

  “It’s true that it’s a real pain driving into the city every day, but what could we do?” David was saying in that hearty tone of his that he reserved for social situations. “We just couldn’t afford to stay in the city anymore, especially with Jessica not working. So we zeroed in on this area. We ended up shopping around for a house for a really long time. Just about every weekend, in fact, for, what, three or four months? And then we found this real estate agent out here in Sea Cliff, a guy named Lloyd Nolan....”

  “Oh, do you know Lloyd?” Lorraine interrupted excitedly. “He found us our house, too! Gee, what a coincidence! Isn’t that an incredible coincidence, Jim? Oh, Lloyd’s just the nicest man, isn’t he?”

  Jessica returned to the living room, the fruit of her loins momentarily content.

  “That reminds me,” she said, more to herself than to anyone else. “Good old Lloyd Nolan still owes us a couple of hundred dollars. When we wrote the check for his commission back at the closing, we miscalculated somehow and overpaid him.”

  “Well, give him a call tomorrow and straighten it out.’’ David sounded irritated.

  “I’ve been trying to get hold of him since the closing,” Jessica returned. “It’s not my fault he’s never there to take my call. Or so they tell me.”

  She was tempted to go on and on about how the moral standards of real estate agents were somewhere below those of drug dealers, kidnappers, and car salesmen. But fortunately the conversation was already drifting to the ridiculous increase of real estate values in this quaint little town they all called home.

  “Yeah, it’s criminal, what they’re getting for houses around here these days. If Lolly and I hadn’t bought our place back before this crazy real estate boom, we never would have been able to live here.”

  Lorraine was nodding. “I ran into Lloyd a few weeks ago, and he was saying that our house has probably tripled in value since we bought it.’’ Suddenly an angry glint appeared in her eyes. “Of course, we’ll all have to wait and see what the new incinerator does to our real estate values.”

  “What new incinerator?” Jessica pricked up her ears. Now that she lived in the suburbs, she was learning that this was the kind of thing you were supposed to care about.

  “You mean you haven’t heard? There’s a plan to build a huge garbage-burning plant across from Sea Cliff. It would be right on Hempstead Harbor. All the towns nearby have been fighting it for a couple of years now.’’ Lorraine was speaking with more animation than Jessica had seen all evening. “It’s guaranteed to raise our taxes, pollute our air, pollute our water—”

  “Lolly,’’ Jim interrupted, “you have no reason to believe any of that. Besides, what do you propose we do with all the garbage we create? Eat it?” He looked over at David, chuckling and shaking his head.

  “We could try recycling it, for one thing,’’ Lorraine returned. “And if they are going to build some kind of incinerator, they could build one that’s on a more realistic scale. The one they’re proposing is something like ten times bigger than what we need in this area. And burning the garbage practically guarantees that it’s going to destroy this whole area. We’re all trying to raise our kids in a healthy environment. We don’t need some polluting monster like that—”

  “Come on, Lol. You’re just getting all hotheaded over something you can’t do a thing about. You know as well as I do that once the politicians put their minds to something, there’s no turning back.” He took a large swig of beer, then said, “So, David, I noticed you folks have a Volvo. Ours is an eighty-four. Yours is one of the new ones, isn’t it?’

  Jessica noticed that Lorraine had lapsed into a furious silence, her lips drawn into a straight little line and her cheeks flushed pink. She was tempted to go over to her and say something consoling. But the truth was that the topic of incinerators had turned out to be less interesting than she had anticipated. Besides, she had been around married people long enough to know that Lorraine and Jim were talking about a lot more than other people’s garba
ge.

  So instead, she sat back and observed, finding it an almost pleasant experience to sip the glass of wine she had poured for herself and leave all the work to the others. At the moment, Jim and David were engaged in a subtle competition, the kind of thing that no man would ever admit to participating in, asking question about cars and jobs and personal history.

  And then Jim came up with a way guaranteed to win first prize.

  “By the way, speaking of cars,” he said, spreading his arms over the back of the couch and opening his legs, as if to physically claim a larger portion of the room now that he had the floor, “I forgot to tell you, Lolly. I almost got killed today.”

  Lorraine cocked her head in a manner that was almost perky. “You did?” She sounded more puzzled than distraught. “What do you mean, honey? What happened?”

  “Well, I was driving to the Hicksville store this morning, going the route I always take, down Cedar Swamp Road. It’s kind of twisting, you know, and narrow—only two lanes. I was in the Honda, not the Volvo. And I admit it, I was going too fast.’’ He grinned, proud rather than penitent.

  “Jim!” Lorraine cried. “You know that the treads on the Honda’s tires are all worn out! It’s always slipping all over the place. How could you—”

  “Hey, this had nothing to do with the shape the tires are in,” Jim protested. “I hit some sand, and the next thing I know, I go into a tailspin. I whipped around a hundred and eighty degrees. There was a car tailgating me, and another one coming up in the opposite lane. Boy, another couple of feet and there would have been one hell of a crackup.”

  “Jim, you’re talking about this like it was nothing!” Lorraine scolded.

  “Aw, all that matters is that he came out of it all right.’’ David instantly took his side. “Boy, Jim, it sounds like you really lucked out on that one,” he chortled, metaphorically slapping him on the back. “Almost had a three-car accident. That would’ve been a heck of an accident, too!”

  For a few seconds, they were two eight-year-old boys. Jessica was aghast, thinking not only of Jim’s car but also of the other two that were almost involved.

  “Jim, I’ve told you again and again not to drive too fast. ...” This time, Lorraine stopped herself. She began waving her hands in comic desperation. “Oh, you! What good does it do to tell you anything? You always go ahead and do whatever you please, anyway.”

  “Uh, I hate to break up this discussion, but I think dinner’s ready,” Jessica announced. She was glad that the evening was moving along to stage two.

  “Yeah, I been noticing that something smells good,” Jim commented, rising slowly from the couch.

  “It’s beef stew. Something I just kind of whipped up.”

  “Beef stew, huh? Sounds great. Forget about all this health stuff. I’m still a real meat and potatoes kind of guy.”

  Jessica let out a sigh of relief.

  The children were rounded up and, in a moment of true inspiration, seated at their own separate table, where they could do disgusting things with their food to their hearts’ content. The adults then indulged in the usual cheerful confusion over who should sit where at the table.

  “Oh, look!” Lorraine observed with a giggle. “We’re sitting boy, girl, boy, girl!”

  Much to Jessica’s surprise, the dinner proceeded smoothly. The beef stew was a success, and there was lots to talk about:

  the pros and cons of blacktop, the best video store in the area, pruning.

  “Well, it sure looks like you guys have got your work cut out for you,’’ Jim observed as he finished up his third serving of the very food that, less than an hour before, Jessica had worried might offend him. “This place is still only half done.”

  “Well, we’re using that old technique of tackling one room at a time,” David replied. “We’ve got to finish the upstairs bathroom first, then the kitchen. ...”

  “The nice thing,” Jessica commented, “is that we can make everything exactly the way we want it. The tile, the floors, the windows, everything. Because we’re doing it all from scratch, we don’t have to live with somebody else’s choices.

  “Most of all, I’m looking forward to building our dream kitchen,” Jessica called over her shoulder as she walked in and out of the dining room, clearing away the dinner dishes and bringing out a pot of coffee and Lorraine’s brownies. “Putting in everything brand new, exactly the way we want it.”

  “Gee, we should do that, too,” said Lorraine. “Jim, why don’t we rip out our old kitchen and redo the whole thing, like Jessie and Dave?”

  “Sure. And who’s going to pay for it?” Jim retorted. “You gonna go out and get yourself a job?’’

  “Jim, you know I can’t get a job. I have to be at home for Stacy and Jim Junior.’’

  “Ever heard of baby-sitters?” Jim countered.

  “You know as well as I do that by the time we paid somebody, with the kind of salary I could make, it wouldn’t be worth it. How much could I make? I mean, what could I do? Be a waitress? A salesgirl?”

  Saleswoman, Jessica was tempted to correct her. But this hardly seemed the time for making even a halfhearted attempt at standing up for her feminist principles.

  “Besides,” Lorraine went on, her anger escalating, “I want to be home when Jim Junior comes home from school. And Stacy’s still a baby. I am their mother.”

  Perhaps Jim felt there was no argument against that point, or maybe he just lost interest. At any rate, he turned to David and said, “So what have you got here, gas heat or oil?”

  Jessica reached for one of the brownies she had arranged on a plate and bit into it, ready to commend Lorraine for her baking skill. But as she clamped down on it, she could feel a stricken look cross her face.

  “Ummm. Uh, interesting flavor. What is it, exactly?” It was all she could do to keep chewing, resisting the urge to search desperately for a stray paper napkin or other relatively polite means of disposing of the remains.

  But Lorraine was beaming. “It’s carob,” she said proudly. “I know; you were expecting chocolate, right?”

  “You’ve got me there. And, uh, what about this texture? It’s kind of. . . dense.”

  “That’s the wheat germ. I always throw in a little when I bake. A little extra roughage is good for you. And you know, there’s no sugar in that recipe. You’ll never guess what I used instead-”

  Jessica forced a smile, then gulped loudly as she finally managed to down the huge mouthful she had so optimistically bitten off. “Oh, I know you bakers like to have your little secrets. . . . Here, would you like some coffee?”

  When the coffee was gone and, miraculously, a large percentage of the mystery brownies had vanished, Jessica was not at all surprised that Lorraine followed her into the kitchen, intending to help her clean up while the menfolk were left to continue their discussion of dry rot.

  “You know,” she said in a conspiratorial tone, leaning over the dishwasher as she loaded the dinner plates, “Jim is always harping on me to get a job. But the truth is, I like being a housewife. I’m not interested in having some stupid career. I like going to the supermarket and keeping my house clean.” She turned to Jessica and said, “Don’t you?”

  “Well, uh, I guess it is kind of fun, poking around in the supermarket when I’ve got some time to kill. ...”

  “No,” Lorraine said impatiently. “I mean, don’t you enjoy being a housewife?”

  Jessica just stared at her, incredulous. She was tempted to scream: A housewife! I’m not a housewife!

  But just then David came barging in, empty pitcher in hand, looking distraught.

  “Jess!” he cried. “We’re out of milk out there. Jim needs some more for his second cup of coffee.’’

  Dutifully Jessica took the pitcher and refilled it with milk from the refrigerator while David returned to his guest. For the moment, she was willing to overlook the fact that her husband, normally a rather bright fellow, had momentarily forgotten where they kept the milk. She l
ooked over at Lorraine apologetically. But her new neighbor just returned her look with a blank stare.

  She shuffled into the living room, bearing the milk refill. It was all she could do to keep from drawling, “Heah’s yo milk, masser. Ah’s sorry I taked so long.”

  “Well, Jessie, this was a perfectly lovely evening.” Lorraine reached over and squeezed her arm before following her husband and overtired children out the door. “We’ll have to do this again, soon—my house next time. Oh, and before I forget, I want to invite you to the Mini-Mart.’’

  “The what?”

  “I figured you wouldn’t have heard anything about it. The Sea Cliff Mini-Mart. It’s this big street fair they have here in town, right on Sea Cliff Avenue. They have crafts and food and all kinds of stuff. It’s always held the first Sunday in October. Next weekend, in fact.”

  “Sure,” she replied. “Sounds like a great idea.”

  Already she was wondering about the probability of such an event being rained out.

  By the time the dishwasher was chugging away loudly, doing a job she was only too grateful to relinquish to the wonders of modem technology, Jessica was exhausted. These days, she always was by nightfall, wondering how on earth she had ever found the energy to lie in bed and read, back in the days when the demands made on her by Klinger-Wycoff Pharmaceuticals seemed so tyrannical.

  She fell into bed while David was still in the shower, drifting off before she even had a chance to decide whether to be polite and wait up for him. But she was a light sleeper, and when he came into the bedroom, she awoke automatically.

  Mustering up whatever energy still lingered in her exhausted body, she mumbled, “I sure am glad we’re not like Lorraine and Jim. You can tell they just don’t know how to communicate.”

  “What do you mean?” he said. But Jessica didn’t bother to answer.

  Chapter Two

  “Oh, boy, Nikki, I sure wish you could have been there last night.” Jessica shook her head in disgust as she maneuvered Sammy’s stroller the long way around the pretzel stand, craftily avoiding still one more of the countless junk food temptations at the Roosevelt Field shopping mall.