Helen Hath No Fury An Amanda P

Book by Roberts Gillian

"H ave sex and die." Helen Coulter barely paused for breath. "That's what
she's saying."????????????????

Helen's words produced the heavy silence of a collective held breath.
Etiquette had been broached. My book group had been discussing Kate
Chopin's The Awakening. More accurately, we'd been listening to another
member discuss the research she'd done on the book and author when Helen
charged in.

My teacher muscles twitched, ready to chastise Helen for interrupting. I
reminded myself that this wasn't a classroom, it was a living room, and
its occupants, all ten of us, were adults.

Helen filled the lull she'd created. "I'm sick of that literary
staple--dark-haired women who lust and die." Helen tossed her own sleek cap
of brown-black hair like one of those vixen heroines of old B movies. "Why
was suicide her only option? Suicide is cowardly, too easy. She had her
own house, her painting, friends like the piano teacher, her children--why
do such a thing? No wonder the critics hated it."

"Not because of that." Denise was the one who'd been interrupted. "They
considered it pornography." Denise had a sheaf of printouts on her lap,
and although she was being polite about being interrupted and
misrepresented, she kept smoothing her skirt in a compulsive manner that
suggested how much she wanted to do the same thing to the discussion.

"Well, it makes this critic sick, too," Helen said. "Maybe a woman wrote
it, but she's echoing all the men through history who decided that if a
woman steps across their line in the sand--sexually--she has to be punished."

At this, Denise stopped pressing her skirt and sat up, on alert, sensing a
slur on her husband, Roy Stanton Harris, state legislator, candidate for
Congress, and energetic advocate of "family values." In my family, values
meant really good buys--low rates for strip steak or telephone calls--but it
didn't mean that to him.

Denise was a fairly recent bride. She'd retained her maiden and
professional name since marrying Roy Stanton, as she always referred to
him, but she'd merged identity and opinions with him and had become the
perfect political wife.

"Sorry," Helen said, not sounding at all sorry. "But that's how I feel.
Sick and tired of men telling women what to do with their bodies."

Denise looked on the verge of snapping back, but only for the smallest
interval. And then her composed expression returned. "Could we talk about
the book? About Kate Chopin's book?" she asked quietly. "About Edna
Pontellier and her world?"

In response, a chorus of voices. After a year in the group, I've given up
wishing we'd be coherent or stay on track. We've twice voted down the idea
of a formal leader, and instead took turns leading sessions. We are noisy
and opinionated, sometimes chaotic, but I appreciate the emotion that's
behind the clamor. A love of books propelled me into teaching, then made
the job frustrating, because I can so seldom transfer my passion for words
and stories to my students. So it's a treat to gather with literate women
to whom ideas mattered, women who savored books the way they might fine
meals. Or savaged them if they found them rancid, because their quality
mattered to them.

"Don't blondes also lust and die?" Clary Oliver asked. She was Helen's
business partner and best friend, and together, they produced high-end
children's clothing. Now she adopted a challenging stance and raised her
eyebrows. "Hath not a blonde a sex drive?" she asked. Her own head sported
a unique and expensive shade of beige.

Her sister and shadow, Louisa, also blonde, laughed with a harsh "Ha!"
that I was sure was supposed to convey lots of meaning, but Louisa's
meanings were generally not worth figuring out.

"Sorry, Clary," Helen told her partner, "but think about those famous
sex-and-suicide girls--Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Edna, too. Not a
single blonde."

Susan Hileman, whose red hair and freckles could have been borrowed from
Raggedy Ann, spoke up. "I read somewhere it goes back to the blonde
Anglo-Saxons. The invading barbarians, the baddies, were dark, and we all
know wild, sexy women are bad, right? So they're dark, too. Angels and
babies are blonde, the pure and the innocent, unless the woman's a
platinum blonde--an obvious fake, and thereby corrupt."

Susan had been a lit major with me at Penn, and a year ago was my conduit
into this long-established book group. She worked for a PR firm, tweaking
images. But that was, she insisted, only her day job. Her true calling was
as a writer, and she had a mystery in progress.

There had been several earlier mysteries in progress. I wasn't sure she'd
ever finished any of them.

"Renegade blondes," she continued, "the obviously bleached kind--they drive
a man to his destruction by making him kill for her. Except for Marilyn
Monroe, who was perfect, because she was bleached but squooshy. Corrupt,
but compliant." Susan pointed at her springy red curls. "As for me, my
literary or film role is doomed to be as the sexless best friend."

I wondered if there really was a pattern, and where my own brown hair--I
like to think of it as chestnut, but really, it depends on the light--fit
into the spectrum. Undoubtedly not in the province of heroines, and not
even of sexy villainesses, more's the pity.

"Edna killed herself," Tess said, quietly pulling us back to the subject
at hand. "Drowning was certainly not her only option." Tess was a
psychologist with short no-nonsense brown hair. I just knew there weren't
any myths about the two of us.

"Do you think society killed Edna?" I asked. "In the sense that it had no
place for her. She had two affairs. She didn't much care about her kids.
She no longer fit anywhere."

"Thank God times have changed," someone softly commented.
"Nothing's that changed," Helen said. "Because of the Ednas. Edna could
have stood up for herself, lived a Bohemian life, defied them, but she
didn't. That's the same today. Most people won't take a stand--a stand that
might put them in a bad light."

"It was harder then." The incongruously babyish voice belonged to Helen's
neighbor, Roxanne Parisi. Roxanne struck me as a woman reinventing
herself, at least outwardly. Her current image seemed costumed rather than
dressed, in gauzy layers and noisy jewelry, and all of it topped by hair
dyed the color of fine Bordeaux. But her voice seemed left over from an
earlier incarnation.

"It's hard now," Helen said. "Hard to take a stand. Be defiant."

"Don't you just love the ruined woman!" Susan said with her customary
verve. "Ruined! As if we're pill bottles with warnings: Do not use if seal
is broken--contents may have been tampered with."

"How come you can't ruin a man?" somebody muttered.

"Can we get back to this book?" Poor Denise. She had assiduously prepared
for the evening, and here we were, being especially unruly.

"What about her children?" Helen demanded. "Didn't she have an obligation
to them?"

"She didn't really like them all that much."

"The art! Everybody's forgetting the art and the piano
teacher--Madame--what's her name?--remember how independent--"
"The book's a hundred years old--you have to remember the cultural
context--Victorian, for God's sake--against which--"

"That's right--why aren't we looking at her as a woman of her times and her
specific world?"

We were into the verbal free-for-alls that drove us crazy but never
stopped.

"After all, the book was banned, libraries wouldn't take it, Chopin never
published another book--"

"I guess the book is relevant," Helen said. "Because it's so pathetically
predictable. Women having sex voluntarily. Men deciding what to do about
it. And one hundred years later, nothing's changed except the language of
it."

The chorus swelled, disagreeing, agreeing, addressing the group, herself,
the woman next to her, as many verdicts as voices.

"What about her affairs?" Clary asked. "Aren't they relevant? What about
her morality? Does everybody here think what she did is all right?"

"You're right--the book's about marriage, isn't it? About how oppressive
and confining it is."

"Was."

"Hah!"

Half the time, the married members proselytized for marriage. One of us
was a young widow, two were divorced--one who'd already run through three
husbands, another two--and yet another had been engaged for ten years. And
then there was me. I. Amanda Pepper, spinster teacher. I didn't have an ex
and I didn't have long-term commitments with the man I lived with. I was
therefore the focus of their missionary zeal. As if my mother had trained
them.

They never seemed to notice that when they weren't touting that hallowed
institution, they were trashing it, but I did.

"Wouldn't you have an affair if you were married to that man?"

"The book's called The Awakening, after all--"

"I think it means more than sexual awakening. I think it means--"

In the din, the only voices we could hear were our own. It was one of
those moments when you don't want the male of the species to happen by our
"discussion" and have his every disgusting macho prejudice confirmed.
But no man was likely to stroll by. Helen's husband, Ivan, was o...