Read Five Women for Free Online Page B

at home, with her social life supervised by her mother’s constant nagging, it was a different story.
    â€œHe called three times. Why won’t you give him a chance?”
    â€œI gave him a chance.”
    â€œIt takes a while to get to know a person.”
    How could she explain about chemistry, about how one man made her want to nuzzle warmly into him while another made her feel cold and ill? “He’s not my type.”
    â€œMaybe he has a nice friend,” her mother would always say. It was the reason of last resort.
    Gara had met a boy at college whose mother, it turned out, was a friend of her mother’s. Not a close friend, but someone she knew socially. His name was Marvin Wink, formerly Winkelstein; he was going to learn to be a stock broker after he graduated, his family lived in a nice house in the suburbs, he had his own car, his father was a rich doctor, and his mother was a hypercritical harridan of such proportions that her son had developed a stammer that became much worse when his mother was near. He was too tall and soft and heavy for Gara’s taste, and when he was with her he was unable to say her name because he liked her so much. He called her “G-g-g-Gary.” Whenever he danced with her he got an immediate erection, and she always pulled away. For some reason May considered him a suitable boyfriend for her.
    She was in love with someone else. His name was Luke, he was handsome and funny, and he lived in California. She hadn’t mentioned him to her mother because he wasn’t Jewish, and she knew her mother would say he would never marry her, and that if, unfortunately, he did marry her, they would forever after fight over the children’s religion. Gara didn’t want to marry him because she considered herself too young to know whom she wanted to spend the rest of her life with, but she was in love with him all the same, and they had as much sex as they could, as often as they could, without going all the way, although they had talked about that, too. She was going to be a senior in the fall, and the thought of choosing her own lover, without even the mandatory ring, was beginning to seem quite tantalizing.
    But in the meantime it was spring vacation, Luke was with his family in California, and Marvin Wink was here in the suburbs of New York. He called Gara constantly, and finally, because he had gotten theater tickets and her mother was nagging her, Gara said yes.
    She started to worry immediately. She didn’t much like him, he made her nervous, and after spending all that money for a Broadway musical and taking her to dinner and driving in and having to drive back again, she knew he was going to try to kiss her goodnight, and she was expected to let him do so even though he made her feel sick. She felt manipulated and twelve years old.
    What would be so terrible if he put his warm, possibly wet mouth on hers? She didn’t know. All she knew was that she couldn’t, she just couldn’t, and she was going to have to. When Marvin picked her up she could barely be civil to him, and her father had to make all the conversation until they finally left for the show. They would eat afterward at Sardi’s, where there were supposed to be celebrities to look at.
    Their seats were in the mezzanine. Gara didn’t even know what she was seeing. The lights seemed too bright on the stage, the colors too garish. She began to feel lightheaded, and nausea rolled through her.
    â€œI’m going to faint,” she whispered to him. She put her head down on her lap because she had heard that if you did you wouldn’t black out. Marvin was frightened. “Are you?”
    She supposed she had fainted, because when the lights went up after the first act she noticed everyone near them was staring at her. People were murmuring with concern. She’s sick. Are you all right? Is she all right?
    â€œI have to leave,” Gara said.
    â€œG-g-g-Gary,