The Scarlet Letter Society (27 page)

“So wait a minute,” Eva said. “If you aren’t a fake lesbian anymore, Ted is taking off, and your divorce to #2 is finally final, then who the hell are you cheating on, Maggie? Maybe we should throw you out of the Scarlet Letter Society, too, ya big hypocrite.”

“Oh, fuck you,” said Maggie. “I’m just tired, that’s all. My love life has been quite a damn rollercoaster and I sort of feel like the ride’s been great, but I want to get off.”

“Oh you’ve gotten off all right,” said Eva, laughing.

“What about Dave?” Lisa asked Maggie.

“Dave,” said Maggie. Her eyes seemed far away for a moment. “The only guy I’ve never stopped fucking.”

“The only guy you’ve never stopped loving, too?” asked Lisa.

“Yeah, that too,” said Maggie. “Though for some reason it wasn’t easy for me to admit it. When I was back in the house over Christmas and the four of us were together at the breakfast table, I felt like I was home. I hadn’t felt that way in a long, long time.”

“You know what the bitch in the sparkly red shoes says,” said Eva. “There’s no place like home.”

“That’s so true,” said Lisa, smiling. “And I’m happy to say I’m no longer an owner of any sparkly red shoes.”

“And, what about you, Junior SLS member?” asked Maggie. “If technically Eva and I are entering the ‘Wild Oats Already Sown’ stage of our lives, it would leave you as the only active member of the club.”

“Yeah, I should get you two a couple of Clappers and some Geritol for sure,” said Lisa,. Then she thought for a minute. “Being the sole wearer of the scarlet letter sounds like a lonely place to be.”

“For women who cheat on their husbands, it
is
a lonely place,” said Maggie. “If you don’t know anyone else who has cheated, it’s not like you can go to some Facebook fan page and find a bunch of other cheating women to hang around and discuss your feelings with.”

“I have a confession to make,” said Lisa. “You two aren’t the only ones who feel like you don’t belong in this club. I never did. I never slept with Ben. I only kissed him, and that was only recently. I lied to you, and I am really, really sorry.”

Maggie and Eva looked at each other as though to do a quick assessment of how to handle this odd and shocking news.

Maggie couldn’t help but laugh: lying seemed so out of character for Lisa. “Secret club breach! Alert the society police!” she said, chuckling.

“Why?” said Eva.

“When I met the two of you, I wanted so badly to cheat on Jim with Ben,” said Lisa. “I thought maybe I could learn from you how you did it. But then, I couldn’t do it. I just decided not to go down that road, because I knew there was no turning back. If I had a membership card in my purse, I would hand it back.”

“Nah,” said Maggie. “I think we can accept you as an honorary member, especially when we’re not even going to technically be members ourselves anymore.”

“Things have changed for me. Jim and I went to fertility treatment,” said Lisa. “And he started seeing a therapist about his foot fetish so he could stop driving me
nuts with the shoe shit. He sold the shoes and painted the shoe room with hopes it will eventually be a nursery. I have been much happier at home. I don’t feel like I just want to leave anymore, I feel like I want to stay. I want a baby. I want a family. Those are the things that are important to me.”

“Hang on a second,” said Eva, smiling. “The three of us are the worst red A-club ever. Our Hussy of the Month club cards-
expired? Invalidated?
This is madness.”

“Well, who needs a club?” said Maggie. “We know we’re all bonded by our common choices, our histories, our …”

“Our sex drives?” asked Eva, smirking.

“Yeah, I guess so,” said Maggie.

“Our passion in life,” said Lisa.

“Yes,” said Maggie. “That’s more it. We’re the kind of women who need the strongest kind of men. Men who can be there without making us feel like we need them there. Who allow the independence they know we want and are secure enough to not feel threatened when we stray.”

“It’s not about them,” said Eva. “When we cheat. I never blamed Joe. When people cheat on each other, it could be said it’s ‘both their faults’ because it means they weren’t happy in the first place, but it’s always a choice.”

“It’s a choice,” said Lisa.

“You make the choice to cheat because you’re coming from a place of unhappiness,” said Maggie. “It’s not to hurt the other person, even a person you love. It’s because you’re trying to find yourself, as selfish as that may sound. But you can’t walk around lost.”

“It’s true,” said Eva. “Somehow you were not getting what you needed, so you can go out looking for it all you want, but you have to eventually find it within yourself, not with some guy.”

“Do you miss them?” asked Lisa to Maggie and Eva. “Ted? Ron? Do you miss them when they aren’t in your life anymore?”

“You have to be thankful for the time you had with them,” said Maggie. “No reason for regrets, because it’s part of who you are now. It’s all about finding
happiness when you figure out what that means for you, and holding on to memories, but what’s that saying, about letting some things fall apart so that better things come together.”

“Oh no,” said Eva. “I feel like you’re about to go Dr. Seuss on us. She’s right, though. I don’t think there is any reason to beat ourselves up about it. Guilt is something we’re taught, and something we have to unlearn. Go ahead Maggie, something about being happy or sad it’s over or something?’

“Don’t cry because it’s over,” said Maggie, making air quotes in the air. “Smile because it happened.”

“Says the good doctor,” said Lisa, jotting the quote down in her faithful journal.

February 2013

“Now the miles stretch out behind me,

Loves that I have lost;

Broken hearts lie victims of the game.

Then good luck, it finally struck

Like lightning from the blue:

Every highway leading me back to you.”

-
The Search is Over
,
Survivor

The So-Called Scarlet Letter Society

Can Meet Wherever

And Whenever

They Damn Well Please

We can talk about future ‘meetings,’ though they will really be get-togethers, and no longer called meetings. Casual coffees, gatherings of friends. No more invitations, no more books (sorry, Eva!) unless they’re random ones we genuinely find, love and share. Our passports into regions where most women dare not tread have been stamped, and now we’re home
.

from:
Ben
[email protected]

to:
Lisa
[email protected]

date:
Monday, January 28, 2012, 8:41 AM

subject:
excuses

Our kiss both took me off guard and was at the same time one of the most incredible things ever to happen to me. We’re not professionally involved anymore, so I can tell you I’ve been attracted to you since we met. My only fear is not having an excuse to see you again, short of simply wanting to repeat the magic of that kiss.

Ben

Lisa sat at her bakery counter. She breathed in the smell of the raspberry tart cooking in the oven. The fire warmed the shop for customers who stopped by on busy ways about their days. She smiled at the email from Ben; that old excitement of seeing his name in her inbox was still there, though different now.

She stared at her screen. Here was her choice, in a simple email before her. Thanks to modern technology, she didn’t have to endure awkward, drawn-out in-person scenes of rejections or goodbyes or temptations; she could simply hit reply.

from:
Lisa
[email protected]

to:
Ben
[email protected]

date:
Monday, January 28, 2012, 9:07 AM

subject:
moments

I agree there was magic in the kiss, but I am afraid I can’t let it happen again. My devotion to my husband and my commitment to making my marriage work despite its challenges won’t allow it, and I know you understand. But I want you to know that I appreciate how beautiful you made me feel in the time I knew you. Thank you for that. Wishing you all the best, Lisa

Lisa closed her laptop a tiny bit too forcefully, as if the action was closing the door on a part of her life that she wasn’t 100% sure she wanted closed. As if the decisive snapping sound would convince her she was making the right choice. She had actually considered, for a significant part of the last year, sleeping with Ben. She knew it wasn’t fair to him, but one of the reasons she’d considered it was the hope that she might get pregnant.

To this day, there had been no evidence that Jim was the cause of her infertility. Her own doctor had not found anything wrong with her, but neither had a doctor found something out of place with him. They were waiting for the most recent test results. But somehow Lisa had thought if she’d slept with Ben, she’d get pregnant and have some kind of secret love child; a secret she’d keep for a lifetime from Jim. She now realized that this childish fantasy could have created a lifetime of heartache and shame for not only her but potentially everyone around her.

Maybe now, with her heart set and her mind clear, her body would allow her, finally, to conceive and carry the child that would make her a mother. In a family
that included a husband who loved her. Not a perfect husband, but one who loved her the best he could.

And she vowed to herself to try to do the best she could to love him back.

Eva sorted sea glass at the cottage on Matthew’s Island. The collecting of the glass, finding a perfectly smooth piece in an unusual color, was the most enjoyable part of sea glass hunting, but the sorting was somehow therapeutic as well. She normally placed her day’s finds of colored glass into a huge vintage metal washtub, but sorting it by color into big glass jars had a calming effect on her.
Green goes in the green jar, blue goes in the blue jar
. Her mind could wander as she did the mindless task. The whole act of sea glass hunting was soothingly ritualistic. Check the low tide chart. Go to the beach. Pick up the pieces of glass, place them into a bag. Return to the cottage, rinse off the glass. Place the glass out on the deck to dry. Put it in the large container. And then, when you had time, you sorted it.

White and green and brown were the most common colors. She only picked them up now off the beach if they were special in some way, a fragment of a written word, a perfectly tumbled piece, a complete bottle top. It was the rare colors she wanted: the cobalt blue, the Coca Cola bottle turquoise, the deep jade, the softer cornflower blue. And the rarest: the purple, the yellow, the pink, the red. The red was the holy grail. Well, technically the
orange
was the holy grail, but she had rarely known orange to be found on the island. She had only a few pieces of red after years of collecting, along with a collection of other unusual finds: a cat-eye marble, perfectly tumbled. A gorgeous aqua bottle stopper. A tiny porcelain doll’s head. A few colored beads.

You never knew what you were going to find. There were pieces of a 19
^th
century Blue Willow patterned dish that she’d found periodically over time. She’d collected so many pieces she could almost put the dish back together like a puzzle again. She’d find a piece one day and then, a month later, another piece from the same dish. It was romantic to think about where the pieces came from—a
shipwreck, a long-ago ferry to Baltimore. There never seemed to be a rhyme or reason to the patterns of the tide and how the bay churned out what it churned out. But somehow, it always kept you coming back. It was so easy to forget the rest of the world when she hunted for sea glass. There was only the search to find the next piece.