The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides Read Free Book Online Page A

up onto Billy’s front porch and was about to rap on his window when something told her to look in the window instead. In the storm-tossed bed, Billy lay curled, John Lennon–style, against the spread-eagled Kyle. Both were naked. A second later, in a puff of smoke, Fatima materialized, also naked, shaking baby powder over her gleaming Persian skin. She smiled at her bedmates, her teeth seed-like in purple, royal gums.
    Maddy’s next boyfriend wasn’t strictly her fault. She would never have met Dabney Carlisle if she hadn’t taken an acting class, and she would never have taken an acting class if it hadn’t been for her mother. As a young woman, Phyllida had wanted to be an actress. Her parents had been opposed, however. “Acting wasn’t what people in our family, especially the ladies, did,” was the way Phyllida put it. Every so often, in reflective moods, she told her daughters the story of her one great disobedience. After graduating from college, Phyllida had “run away” to Hollywood. Without telling her parents, she’d flown out to Los Angeles, staying with a friend from Smith. She’d found a job as a secretary in an insurance company. She and the friend, a girl named Sally Peyton, moved into a bungalow in Santa Monica. In six months Phyllida had three auditions, one screen test, and “loads of invitations.” She’d once seen Jackie Gleason carrying a chihuahua into a restaurant. She’d developed a lustrous suntan she described as “Egyptian.” Whenever Phyllida spoke about this period in her life, it seemed as if she was talking about another person. As for Alton, he became quiet, fully aware that Phyllida’s loss had been his gain. It was on the train back to New York, the next Christmas, that she’d met the straight-backed lieutenant colonel, recently returned from Berlin. Phyllida never went back to L.A. She got married instead. “And had you two,” she told her daughters.
    Phyllida’s inability to realize her dreams had given Madeleine her own. Her mother’s life was the great counterexample. It represented the injustice Madeleine’s life would rectify. To come of age simultaneously with a great social movement, to grow up in the age of Betty Friedan and ERA marches and Bella Abzug’s indomitable hats, to define your identity when it was being redefined, this was a freedom as great as any of the American freedoms Madeleine had read about in school. She could remember the night, in 1973, when her family gathered before the television in the den to watch the tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. How she, Alwyn, and Phyllida had rooted for Billie Jean, while Alton had pulled for Bobby Riggs. How, as King ran Riggs back and forth across the court, outserving him, hitting winners he was too slow to return, Alton began to grumble. “It’s not a fair fight! Riggs is too old. If they want a real test, she should play Smith or Newcombe.” But it didn’t matter what Alton said. It didn’t matter that Bobby Riggs was fifty-five and King twenty-nine, or that Riggs hadn’t been an especially great player even in his prime. What mattered was that this tennis match was on national television, during prime time, billed for weeks as “The Battle of the Sexes,” and that the woman was winning. If any single moment defined Madeleine’s generation of girls, dramatized their aspirations, put into clear focus what they expected from themselves and from life, it was those two hours and fifteen minutes when the country watched a man in white shorts get thrashed by a woman, pummeled repeatedly until all he could do, after match point, was to jump feebly over the net. And even that was telling: you were supposed to jump the net when you won, not lost. So how male was that, to act like a winner when you’d just been creamed?
    At the first meeting of Acting Workshop, Professor Churchill, a bald bullfrog of a man, asked the students to say something about themselves. Half the people in the