The Husband's Secret

“She heard a voice from the television boom, ‘You get nothing for nothing!’ That wasn’t such a bad sentiment for her daughters to hear. No one knew it better than Cecilia! But still, she didn’t like the expressions of faint revulsion that flitted across their smooth young faces. She was always so vigilant about not making negative body-image comments in front of her daughters, although the same could not be said for her friends. Just the other day, Miriam Oppenheimer had said, loud enough for all their impressionable daughters to hear, ‘God, would you look at my stomach!’ and squeezed her flesh between her fingertips as though it were something vile. Great, Miriam, as if our daughters don’t already get a million messages every day telling them to hate their bodies. Actually, Miriam’s stomach was getting a little pudgy.”

Cecilia notes the importance of positive body-image in this passage, but the follow-up comment about Miriam is revealing. Though Cecilia pays lip service to the idea of body positivity, it’s clear that she’s internalized messages about what a woman’s body should look like. 

“Of course, Cecilia had never aspired to anything other than ordinariness. Here I am, a typical suburban mum, she sometimes caught herself thinking, as if someone had accused her of holding herself out to be something else, something superior. Other mothers talked about feeling overwhelmed, about the difficulties of focusing on one thing, and they were always saying, ‘How do you do it all, Cecilia?’ and she didn’t know how to answer them. She didn’t actually understand what they found so difficult.”

Cecilia is an accomplished woman who organizes a relatively large family and balances all their needs, interests, and activities. She calls this ability ordinary and suggests it’s inferior to other ways of being. In doing so, she doesn’t validate the amount of physical and emotional labor involved in being a working mother. She finds it effortless, so she believes it is not difficult—this is not true, as the comments from other mothers establish.

“Will and Felicity needed to have a proper affair. The sooner, the better. This smoldering thing they had going on had to run its course. At the moment it was sweet and sexy. They were star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet gazing soulfully at each other over the purple Cough Stop dragon. It needed to get sweaty and sticky and sleazy and eventually—hopefully, God willing—banal and dull. Will loved his son, and once the fog of lust cleared, he’d see that he’d made a ghastly but not irretrievable, mistake.” 

Tess contrasts the romantic idea of being in love with the more mundane reality of a relationship. She suggests that the flush of early attraction and desire is not, in and of itself, worth as much or more than a less intense but more stable long-term relationship.