Away from Home Read Free

the party, and it’s too hot tonight.”
    “Listen,” Helen said, “Roger is going to flip tomorrow when he sees that train you and Neil gave him. You shouldn’t have spent so much money. I never saw a train like that in Brazil.”
    “I sent to F.A.O. Schwarz for it,” Margie said. “Why not, anyway? By the time you all go back to live in the States he’ll be too old for trains. And I adore him.”
    “Oh, how he adores you, too!”
    “I really ought to have children,” Margie said vaguely. She turned her gold bracelet around on her wrist and looked at it as if she had never seen it before. “I can, you know. There’s nothing wrong with me. I just … never decided to.” She lowered her voice. “I had two martinis in the kitchen before we came here. You might have gathered.”
    “You look fine,” Helen said.
    “Neil got a letter from his mother today and she made another one of those awful coy remarks about how nice it would be to be a grandmother. I hate it.”
    “I hate it too. Luckily for me I had Julie right away, so all I had to put up with was ‘Oh, you’re too young, too young, what a shame! ’” She and Margie grinned at each other companionably. Then Margie’s smile faded.
    “There are limits to everything,” she whispered vehemently. “I don’t care what anyone tells me. You can tell me my shoes clash with my dress, or my new tablecloth is ugly, or I ought to learn more about politics. All right. Okay. I’m not a brilliant person, I’m just an ordinary person, and I’ll thank anyone who wants to tell me something if it’s going to help me improve. But there’s one thing I can’t stand. Nobody is going to tell me when I’m going to do my screwing with my husband, nobody! ”
    Helen looked at Margie, troubled. She had never seen her so excited. She covered Margie’s hand, where it lay on the couch, with her own. “Of course not.”
    “I’m just drunk,” Margie said lightly. She smiled, and she looked the same as before her outburst—unruffled, serene, ladylike, not even a bit of face powder beginning to wear off. “You know,” she said quietly, “Sometimes, like this evening before we got here, I wish I were dead.”
    Neil Davidow was looking at his watch. He came over to the sofa and smiled at Margie, reaching out to pull her to her feet. “Come on,” he said. “We have to go. We’ll be late.”
    “We’ll all take our car,” Margie said. “All right?”
    Helen looked at both of them, Margie encircled lightly by her husband’s arm, looking up at him with an expression that could only be honest affection, warmth and pleasure, Neil with his before-party look that showed he knew he was going to have a good time no matter what happened. In many ways, except for being childless, they were the most conventional couple Helen knew. And yet there was sorrow there, and suffering, and something worse, she suddenly realized, some kind of secret that one held away from the other. “Come and say goodnight to your brats,” Helen said, taking Bert by the hand. “I promised them.”
    Margie and Neil came too, and as she watched Margie kissing Roger and Julie, Helen wondered briefly if she herself were the kind of unpleasant mother who showed off the delights of motherhood to her less fortunate friends. She hoped it wouldn’t look that way to Margie. She felt a kind of wariness for a moment in the presence of her friend who was dear to her and could be hurt by something completely unwitting and innocent. But Margie seemed perfectly happy, and when they all went down in the elevator she was already fussing with the back of her hair to be sure the humidity had not spoiled her set and you would not think she had another thought in her head. God, Helen thought, I’m glad I have a happy marriage. I’m glad I can know that it’s always going to be there, that it’s always going to be the same.
    The party they went to was given by an American couple named Mildred and Phil Burns, who