A Week as Andrea Benstock

The conversation with her sister-in-law lingered throughout the evening. The busy ritual of dinner at the club kept her from thinking too intently about anything. It was almost a relief to have essentially the same conversation a couple of dozen times with a couple of dozen people.

They sat at a table for four in the club’s main dining room. Her mother sat across from her, with her father on her left and Mark on her right. From time to time Mark would take her hand or touch her leg with his.

It meant so much to spend this birthday in this room. At this table, with these people. She thought of how she had examined her thirty-year-old face in her mirror. Without these people — the three at her table, the others at the other tables — she would lack definition. She would be unframed canvas, the perimeters of her world uncharted and hazy.

Linda’s world was like that, and for the first time Andrea was able to appreciate the enormous difference between their two worlds. She and Linda both lived in cities about the same size, lived in new houses in the suburbs of their respective cities. They were both married to professional men who were doing well financially. They were both mothers. In short, they would occupy very much the same shelf in a sociologist’s cupboard, and yet their worlds were worlds apart, and the difference was very simple. She lived in the town she had been born in, while Linda lived thousands of miles away.

And that made all the difference. She belonged to an entire community in a way that neither she nor the community could change. All of these people around her, all of these people whose lives touched hers in the smallest way, were there to prop her up and be propped up by her. All of the people who had irritated her with birthday phone calls were people who made it easier for her to stay married, to stay sane, to stay alive.

Linda couldn’t expect to get that kind of support from her friends. Not when her friends were people I who had been a part of her life for a matter of months, people she knew next to nothing about, people who knew next to nothing about her. People who were her friends because friendship was convenient, but who would forget her readily and permanently when a whim — their own or an employer’s — led them away from that city, even as an earlier whim had led them there in the first place.

How very different this country club was from the place where Linda swam and played tennis. Linda’s social circle had all the permanence and commitment of those hippie communes scattered throughout the same desert. Either way you could snap your fingers and leave. Of course Linda’s friends couldn’t throw their belongings in a knapsack. They were devoutly middle-class, their lives defined by artifacts. For them a long-haul moving van took the place of a knapsack. But the difference was only a matter of degree. Emotionally it was not much more difficult for them to take leave of their friends, or of each other.

These thoughts came to her not all at once but in bits and pieces as she sat with her husband and her parents. They dropped into place like puzzle parts while she participated in conversations, ate her food, sipped her coffee.

When she had a moment to herself in the ladies’ room, she was annoyed to find herself again studying her reflection — and in such an unflattering mirror, with the fluorescent lights overhead making her look all grayish-green.

Thirty.

And graced with the perception and philosophy of the mature woman, she told herself. Well, youth for wisdom wasn’t all that bad an exchange, was it?