Bess Pfeiffer didn’t mean to start anything when she walked into Honey Finnegan’s house with seven copies of The Joy of Sex. She thought it would be fun. Their group had been meeting for years and even though it started as something that kind of sort of resembled the consciousness raising groups they’d been reading about, it had, predictably, become a watered-down suburban version of consciousness raising. The wives and mothers of Cambridge Road weren’t talking politics or sex or activism or civil rights or even a light, sugarcoated feminism, but mostly trying to help each other as their children climbed the slippery shoals of adolescence to the sebum-soaked years of puberty. They discussed teachers and curfews and their concerns about cigarettes and liquor and peer pressure. That their kids—some of them only yards away from where they met—were already smoking pot and bringing Welch’s grape jelly jars refilled with Smirnoff to the massive tree house in the Tannenbaums’ backyard would not have occurred to any of the mothers in the room. Except Bess, a high school nurse and trusted confidante of some of the older teens, especially the girls, who couldn’t talk to their parents about sex or, God forbid in this neighborhood of Catholics, birth control.
The women chatted about husbands and cooking and which families were not obeying the local leash laws, and should their bowling league move from Wednesdays to Tuesdays, and why were Father John’s sermons so excruciatingly boring, and did they still need to abstain from meat on Fridays?
So when Bess saw the book on display while browsing at Sibley’s she thought, Why not? Why not have a little fun, stir things up. Her status on the block was already dicey as the first divorcée, the first victim of a burgeoning national trend if the media was to be believed, when her husband walked out because he fell in love with his office manager, who was the spitting image of twenty-three-year-old Bess. She brought the stack of seven books to the checkout and enjoyed the look on the face of the young girl behind the counter when she asked if they could be gift wrapped.
“I guess?” the girl had said. “I’ll have to check.” She returned quickly and said she could only wrap three books for free.
“Pity,” Bess said. “Well, then I’ll take them unwrapped.” She made cheerful small talk as Dana, according to her name tag, rang up each copy and quickly slipped it into one of two large shopping bags while trying to hide her mortification.
“Have you read it?” Bess asked, tapping the cover with her fingernail. She couldn’t help herself. She’d lost all inhibitions since Doug left. Who cared about manners? Maintaining pretenses? Life was absurd.
“Me?” Dana’s voice rose two octaves. “No!” “How come?”
“Because it’s basically pornography.”
Bess sighed. “Who told you that? Let me guess. Your mother?” “No. I mean, yes. But no, I looked at the pictures. They’re disgusting.”
“Honey,” Bess said as Dana finished ringing up the books and slipped the last one into a shopping bag, visibly relieved, “let me give you some advice: don’t marry anyone who isn’t as concerned with your orgasm as they are with theirs.”
“Oh my god.” Dana put her face in her hands.
“Someday you’re going to thank me, Dana. In some glorious postcoital moment in a room somewhere in a town other than this one”—Bess paused while Dana groaned and then warily looked back at Bess—another room in another town? Interesting—“you’re going to wonder who that fairy godmother was who gave you the best piece of life advice in the Sibley’s book department in 1977. You’re going to wish you could find me and thank me, so I’ll tell you now: you are very welcome.” Bess reached into one of the shopping bags, plucked out a book, and said, “Here. This one’s for you. From me.”
“I can’t.”
“You can.”
“I can’t. My mother will have a conniption.”
“Ah, it is the mother. Do you know who I’m buying all these books for?”
Dana’s expression went back to confused. “Your—children?” “No. These are for my friends. For all the mothers on the block
who are horrified that I’m divorced and have thoughts about sex. So here.” She put the purchased book on the counter in front of Dana. “Don’t put it under the mattress if your mother still changes your bed. Hide it in a closet somewhere and educate yourself.”
“Okay.” Dana took the book, slightly less reluctant. “Thank you?” Bess started to leave, got as far as the shelf of nonfiction bestsellers and turned back. “Dana? One more thing. I’m a nurse. Get on the pill. Do what you want to do, but be smart.”
Dana leafed through the book. She didn’t look up and she didn’t look disgusted. Bess walked closer. “Did you hear me?”
“Uh-huh.”
Bess peeked over the counter and read the subtitle on the page. “Ah. Mouth music. That’s a good section.” Dana slammed the book shut. She smiled a little.
“Keep reading, Dana! Keep reading.”
*
Nearly midnight. Nearly November.
The evening was winding down but not quickly enough.
Somebody needed to make a move to bring Sam’s birthday dinner to an end, but it couldn’t be Nina because he would pout the entire next day if she stood and started clearing plates, the universal signal that the party was over. In her life, Nina had never known anyone who could string out a birthday longer than her husband, and tonight’s gathering had already disappointed.
The calls began late in the morning, just as Nina finished baking the pound cake she would use for the bottom layer of baked Alaska, a dessert she found too fussy and common, but the one Sam requested. His cousins who lived down near Canandaigua cancelled first. Peter had a nasty cold and Grace didn’t drive, so they couldn’t make it. Nina had barely put the receiver down when the Tannenbaums from down the street phoned. Such a terrible cough. The whole family. And it wasn’t even winter yet! Nina offered to send Sam over with some soup she had in the freezer. “No real loss,” he said as he loaded two mason jars of chicken noodle into a grocery bag. Sam liked to say that Ned Tannenbaum’s personality was 98 percent I’ve worked at Kodak since I was eighteen and 2 percent golf. Only thirty minutes later, the phone rang again. “Let me guess,” Nina said as she answered. Sam’s boss at Xerox and his wife were laid low. “I don’t even want to think about the dinner we’re missing,” James said, his voice hoarse and raspy through the phone line. “Please give us a rain check.”
So. Only five around the table tonight. Sam and Nina. Honey and Finn Finnegan, who lived directly across the street in a house that was the mirror image of Nina and Sam’s colonial revival. Next to Nina sat Bess Pfeiffer, who, in her typical, drunken, combative fashion, seemed determined to pick an argument with Sam or Finn, equally disinterested parties. In twenty-two minutes, the digital clock in the kitchen would gently flip to Sunday morning and this dinner would spill into the start of a new day, the kind of shift Nina used to think signaled a wildly successful evening.
The remains of the meal littered the surface of the long, gleaming mahogany table. Empty wine bottles. A cheese plate with crumbs of Stilton and half-eaten crackers. Splashes of port on the ivory linen runner next to a hardening baguette heel. After dessert, Sam resumed pouring the elegant French Bordeaux he’d chosen to accompany the beef Wellington, the potatoes lyonnaise, the mushrooms with brandy and cream, the roasted carrots with fresh thyme. For the last hour, the same Dionne Warwick album had played on repeat until the songs seemed to come from Nina’s own head (One less bell to answer, One less egg to fry). She swallowed a yawn.
Every year, Nina tried to make this dinner a little more interesting, but tonight’s version felt warmed over. How many ways could a person prepare a slab of beef? And Sam always wanted beef. “You’re a victim of your own success,” he said yesterday as she rolled and folded and chilled pastry for the Wellington, aiming for the proper distribution of butter and fat so the pastry would puff. She supposed he was right, but that didn’t explain why she no longer felt the old urgency to dazzle her guests the way they still expected from someone who wrote a monthly food column in a local rag. Back when their two daughters were in middle school and Nina suddenly had too much time on her hands, she’d volunteered to do something—anything—at the local city paper run by her old friend Thomas. He somewhat reluctantly gave her proofreading and light editing jobs that she could do at home. Nina was so fast and reliable that Thomas asked her to write up some short items on local arts and dining. Within a year, she’d inherited one of the paper’s columns, “Simply Put.” The previous author, who retired with her husband to Fort Lauderdale, had exclusively featured her suburban Junior League friends and their most trusted recipes, which led to a surfeit of casseroles and jellied salads and various roast beasts. Every column ended with the same sentence construction: “Simply put, Marilyn Field is the reigning lemon meringue queen of Brighton!” “Simply put, Bernice Dorman’s Lipton soup brisket is the one to beat!” “Simply put, Carol Hendrickson is on to something when she says coconut adds a kick to both sweet and savory dishes!”
Thomas wanted her to take the column in a more lively, sophisticated direction. “Find some interesting people around town who like to cook,” he told her. “Or like to eat. I don’t care which.” He wanted to rename the column “The Gracious Gourmet” or “The Gallant Gourmet” or something equally anodyne, a nod to the Galloping Gourmet’s popularity. Nina lobbied for “The Wolfish Gourmet” or “Cravings” or just “Famished!”
“Why are these all so hungry?” Thomas complained.
“Because hunger is the root of all cooking.”
“No, hunger is at the root of appetite. Ego is at the root of the kind of cooking we want to write about. And ‘Cravings’ sounds like a dirty movie.”
She finally capitulated to “The Ravenous Gourmet,” after extracting a promise that she could pick her own subjects and not only feature suburban women and their unappetizing canapés. Eventually, “The Ravenous Gourmet” morphed into Nina interviewing chefs around town and featuring one of their popular entrées adapted for the home cook. And then she started to offer cooking classes based on the column in her kitchen. She loved doing both, but not the pressure it applied to every meal she presented.
For so many years, the revolving dinner parties on the block were a lifesaver, a gentle valve release, a chance to forget the gray landscape of winter in Rochester or celebrate its beautiful summers. The women would dress up and drink too much and the men would talk about work and drink too much and everyone would stay up too late. They’d wearily wave at each other the next morning at church, miming head pain and lack of sleep while corralling their children down the aisle, all of them quietly thrilled by the previous night’s misbehavior.
Maybe the modest size of tonight’s group wearied Nina. They’d all known each other forever and had had the same conversations dozens of times. They knew each other’s cocktail orders and food quirks and who was a mean drunk and who was a weepy drunk and which of their teenagers were “testing boundaries” and which were barreling toward delinquent. And now Bess had started her favorite worn rant about how Nixon shouldn’t have been pardoned. She blinked back angry, drunken tears while claiming she’d landed on Nixon’s enemy list due to her activism around Roe v. Wade. They’d heard it all before. “Nothing in my life,” she said, pointing a bony finger at a slightly amused Finn, “has made me prouder.” Like everyone else, Nina’d had too much to drink and was trying to follow Bess’s diatribe while looking for a place to break in and divert.
“Free speech!” Bess finally blurted out, gesticulating and knocking over her glass of wine just as Sam opened a new bottle. Shit. How much of that beautiful red had they gone through? Judging from the way Sam slopped wine into the glasses, at least five or six bottles. She tried to catch his eye. “Whoops!” he said, after spattering Honey Finnegan’s untouched dessert. Her wedge of baked Alaska slouched on the plate like a children’s book illustration meant to convey sadness.
“Slide that over here,” Finn said to his wife. “I’m not afraid of a little booze on my meringue.”
Honey pushed the plate across the table with the tip of one finger. “A lot of sugar.”
“I think that’s the point of dessert,” Finn said to the plate.
“Sam,” Bess said, raising her empty glass. “I’ll have another splash.”
Nina saw her chance. She stood and picked up a few dirty dishes. “Can I get anyone anything else? Coffee? Tea?”
“I’d kill for a Sanka,” Honey said. Of course Honey would kill for a Sanka.
*
Upstairs, Clara had stopped trying to eavesdrop on her parents’ boring dinner party. Instead, she resumed her recent favorite game, where she pretended she was under surveillance from hidden cameras installed behind the bathroom mirror, at the dinner table, in the school hallways. This state of constant watchfulness by people she imagined as faceless judges, a committee of elders evaluating her life skills, and sometimes as peers (okay, boys) gave her a self-consciousness she leaned into. Helped hone her awareness of awareness. Nothing made her sadder than the girls in her school who seemed completely oblivious to how they looked to others, as if they didn’t deserve attention. The game made Clara mindful of her posture and her gait and her smile. She would never mindlessly pick her nose like Ruth Ambrose or pluck her underwear out of her ass while walking down the school hallway like Pauline Sanders or worry a pimple in public. Private vigilance would prevent public slovenliness and insulate her from accidentally doing something embarrassing. When she got ready for school in the morning, she went through her closet miming exasperation, like an actor on a sitcom, never mind that she wore a uniform to school and only got to choose which navy sweater to bring that day. In the bathroom, she’d brush out her long hair and apply makeup, pretending to give a tutorial to the readers of Seventeen. She’d make breakfast as if she’d be graded on her efficiency. And if the game got exhausting, she’d turn the cameras off. Poof! Back to plain old Clara.
Now, for example, alone in her bedroom she had to mentally disable the cameras because she’d been idly, almost unconsciously, playing with her breasts, reassuring herself that she hadn’t dreamed up their recent existence. To have this gift long after she believed it could happen—at seventeen!—still felt miraculous.
“You bloomed late, but you bloomed hard,” her mother said in the dressing room of the little clothing boutique they frequented. Clara had burst out of her training bra, and when the saleswoman fitted her for a new one, she landed at 32C. 32C! A miracle!
She stood and lifted her nightgown and looked at herself in the mirror above her dresser. Yes, her breasts were perfect. She lowered the nightgown and went to her window and for the millionth time in the past weeks, wished that Dune Finnegan’s bedroom faced the street so they could signal each other like they were in a Nancy Drew book. Clara had never read a Nancy Drew book, but one on the shelf downstairs had an illustration of Nancy on the cover looking out of a window with binoculars. Spying on a crush seemed the kind of thing Nancy would do. From downstairs, raucous laughter. A good time to call Dune from her parents’ bedroom extension. Then maybe she could sneak into the kitchen and filch a glass of wine. She grabbed a pair of jeans off the floor and pulled them on. Changed into her 32C black bra (it had taken A+ whining to convince her mother she needed a black bra) under a sweatshirt and tiptoed down the hall to her parents’ closet. She didn’t want to wake her sister, Bridie, because she’d insist on joining Clara and ruin the fun.
Her parents’ bedroom still felt a little bit like church, hushed and dark, the air redolent with her mother’s perfume and hair spray, something mustier beneath. The dark and foreboding furniture in this room had been inherited from the grandparents Clara had never met, and her mother hated it. The rest of the house had her mother’s easy sense of style and airiness. Lighter wood, lots of plants, homey and elegant. Clara picked up the phone and dialed the house across the street. Dune answered.
“Sundance?” she said.
“Hey, Butch,” he replied, and she could hear his smile. Some weeks ago, they’d gone to see Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid at a revival house downtown and she’d insisted they call each other Butch and Sundance on the phone when other people might overhear. Unnecessary but fun. “How’s the party going?” he asked.
“Fine, I guess. Lots of people called out sick. Your mom and dad are still here. Obviously.” Clara could hear Dune’s sister, Fern, in the background bugging Dune to resume their chess game. “Do you have to go?” They couldn’t say anything interesting with Fern listening.
“Yeah.”
“See you tomorrow. Three o’clock.”
She hung up the phone and decided to shop in her parents’ closet. She and Nina wore the same size shoe now, so Clara went through the meticulously stacked boxes and tried on some of Nina’s high heels. They weren’t her style exactly, but she enjoyed the extra height. Maybe her mother would let her borrow a pair for the New Year’s formal. She carefully rewrapped the shoes in tissue paper and put them back exactly as she’d found them. She opened the bottom drawer of her mother’s dresser and pulled out a plum-colored scooped-neck short-sleeve T-shirt. She went into her parent’s bathroom and flipped the light. The top fit her like a dream, like a very breast-revealing dream. The color flattered her olive skin and dark hair and eyes. She posed in front of the mirror, imagining the audience of editors from Seventeen magazine talking about how perfect she’d be for their next cover. Her mother might even give the shirt to Clara when she saw how it flatered. She opened the medicine cabinet and took out a vial of lipstick. She applied the light pink color carefully and added a little mascara and blush. It was magic. She looked like herself, only better, a little heightened. Too good not to go downstairs.
__________________________________
From Lake Effect by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney. Copyright © 2026 by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
