"Sure," Joanna said. "Come on over later. Walter is drafting a trust agreement; maybe he'll lend us a few whereases."
SHE MADE AUTUMN-LEAF collages with Pete and Kim, and helped Walter put up the storm windows, and met him in the city for a partners-andwives dinner-the usual falsely-friendly clothes-appraising bore. A check came from the agency: two hundred dollars for four uses of her best picture.
She met Marge McCormick in the market-yes, she'd had a bug but now she was fine, thanks-and Frank Roddenberry in the hardware store-"Hello, Joanna, how've you b-been?"-and the Welcome Wagon lady right outside. "A black family is moving in on Gwendolyn Lane. But I think it's good, don't you?"
"Yes, I do."
"All ready for winter?"
"I am now." Smiling, she showed the sack of birdseed she'd just bought.
"It's beautiful here!" the Welcome Wagon lady said. "You're the shutterbug, aren't you? You should have a field day!"
She called Charmaine and invited her for lunch. "I can't, Joanna, I'm sorry," Charmaine said. "I've got so much to do around the house here. You know how it is."
CLAUDE AXHELM CAME OVER one Saturday afternoon-to see her, not Walter. He had a briefcase with him.
"I've got this project I've been working on in my spare time," he said, walking around the kitchen while she fixed him a cup of tea. "Maybe you've heard about it. I've been getting people to tape-record lists of words and syllables for me. The men do it up at the house, and the women do it in their homes."
"Oh yes," she said.
"They tell me where they were born," he said, "and every place they've lived and for how long." He walked around, touching cabinet knobs. "I'm going to feed everything into a computer eventually, each tape with its geographical data. With enough samples I'll be able to feed in a tape without data"-he ran a fingertip along a counter edge, looking at her with his bright eyes-"maybe even a very short tape, a few words or a sentence-and the computer'll be able to give a geographical rundown on the person, where he was born and where he's lived. Sort of an electronic Henry Higgins. Not just a stunt though; I see it as being useful in police work."
She said, "My friend Bobbie Markowe-"
"Dave's wife, sure."
– got laryngitis from taping for you."
"Because she rushed it," Claude said. "She did the whole thing in two evenings. You don't have to do it that fast. I leave the recorder; you can take as long as you like. Would you? It would be a big help to me."
Walter came in from the patio; he had been burning leaves out in back with Pete and Kim. He and Claude said hello to each other and shook hands. "I'm sorry," he said to Joanna, "I was supposed to tell you Claude was coming to speak to you. Do you think you'll be able to help him?"
She said, "I have so little free time-"
"Do it in odd minutes," Claude said. "I don't care if it takes a few weeks."
"Well if you don't mind leaving the recorder that long…"
"And you get a present in exchange," Claude said, unstrapping his briefcase on the table. "I leave an extra cartridge, you tape any little lullabies or things you like to sing to the kids, and I transcribe them onto a record.
If you're out for an evening the sitter can play it."
"Oh, that'd be nice," she said, and Walter said, "You could do 'The Goodnight Song' and 'Good Morning Starshine."'
"Anything you want," Claude said. "The more the merrier."
"I'd better get back outside," Walter said. "The fire's still burning. See you, Claude."
"Right," Claude said.
Joanna gave Claude his tea, and he showed her how to load and use the tape recorder, a handsome one in a black leather case. He gave her eight yellow-boxed cartridges and a black loose-leaf binder.
"My gosh, there's a lot," she said, leafing through curled and mended pages typed in triple columns.
"It goes quickly," Claude said. "You just say each word clearly in your regular voice and take a little stop before the next one. And see that the needle stays in the red. You want to practice?"
THEY HAD THANKSGIVING dinner with Walter's brother Dan and his family. It was arranged by Walter and Dan's mother and was meant to be a reconciliation-the brothers had been on the outs for a year because of a dispute about their father's estate-but the dispute flared again, grown in bitterness as the disputed property had grown in value. Walter and Dan shouted, their mother shouted louder, and Joanna made difficult ex- planations to Pete and Kim in the car going home.
She took pictures of Bobbie's oldest boy Jonathan working with his microscope, and men in a cherry picker trimming trees on Norwood Road.
She was trying to get up a portfolio of at least a dozen first-rate photos-to dazzle the agency into a contract.
THE FIRST SNOW FELL ON A night when Walter was at the Men's Association.
She watched it from the den window: a scant powder of glittery white, swirling in the light of the walk lamppost. Nothing that would amount to anything. But more would come. Fun, good pictures-and the bother of boots and snowsuits.
Across the street, in the Claybrooks' living-room window, Donna Claybrook sat polishing what looked like an athletic trophy, buffing at it with steady mechanical movements. Joanna watched her and shook her head.
They never stop, these Stepford wives, she thought.
It sounded like the first line of a poem.
They never stop, these Stepford wives. They something something all their lives. Work like robots. Yes, that would fit. They work like robots all their lives.
She smiled. Try sending that to the Chronicle.
She went to the desk and sat down and moved the pen she had left as a placemark on the typed page. She listened for a moment-to the silence from upstairs-and switched the recorder on. With a finger to the page, she leaned toward the microphone propped against the framed Ike Mazzard drawing of her. "Taker. Takes. Taking," she said. "Talcum. Talent.
Talented. Talk. Talkative. Talked. Talker. Talking. Talks."
SHE WOULD ONLY WANT TO move, she decided, if she found an absolutely perfect house; one that, besides having the right number of rightsize rooms, needed practically no redecoration and had an existing darkroom or something darn close to one.
And it would have to cost no more than the fifty-two-five they had paid (and could still get, Walter was sure) for the Stepford house.
A tall order, and she wasn't going to waste too much time trying to fill it. But she went out looking with Bobbie one cold bright early-December morning.
Bobbie was looking every morning-in Norwood, Eastbridge, and New Sharon. As soon as she found something right-and she was far more flexible in her demands than Joanna-she was going to pressure Dave for an immediate move, despite the boys' having to change schools in the middle of the year.
"Better a little disruption in their lives than a zombie-ized mother," she said. She really was drinking bottled water, and wasn't eating any locally grown produce. "You can buy bottled oxygen, you know," Joanna said.
"Screw you. I can see you now, comparing Ajax to your present cleanser."
The looking inclined Joanna to look more; the women they met-Eastbridge homeowners and a realestate broker named Miss Kirgassa-were alert, lively, and quirky, confirming by contrast the blandness of Stepford women. And Eastbridge offered a wide range of community activities, for women and for men and women. There was even a NOW chapter in formation. "Why didn't you look here first?" Miss Kirgassa asked, rocketing her car down a zigzag road at terrifying speed.
"My husband had heard-" Joanna said, clutching the armrest, watching the road, tramping on wished-for brakes.
"It's dead there. We're much more with-it."
"We'd like to get back there to pack though," Bobbie said from in back.