Five Women Read Online Free PDF

hasn’t.”
    â€œAre you sure?”
    â€œIf he wanted to see you all the time, you wouldn’t want to see him,” Gara said.
    â€œI suppose you’re right,” Felicity said. “But when he doesn’t call I think he’s tired of me.”
    â€œYou’re obsessing again.”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œWhy won’t you tell us who he is?” Eve said.
    â€œI can’t. I’ve already told you more than enough. If my husband knew I was having an affair, he would kill me.”
    â€œReally?” Kathryn said.
    â€œProbably,” Felicity said. “Russell is a very angry man.”
    â€œYou’d better watch out,” Eve said. She was trying to sound solicitous, and perhaps she was, but Gara knew she loved the drama of it.
    â€œI don’t know why you need a husband
and
a lover,” Kathryn said. “Why don’t you get rid of both of them and start over with a man who makes you happy?”
    â€œIf I could, I wouldn’t be neurotic,” Felicity said. “The irony of it is that my friend is what’s saving my marriage. After I see him is the only time I feel like being nice to my husband.”
    â€œAnd why is that?” Gara asked.
    â€œI feel a sense of power. Being wanted by two men. What do you expect after my crazy childhood?”
    â€œBut after a certain time you just have to get off of it,” Kathryn said. “If I let my childhood bother me, I’d be a basket case.”
    â€œMe too!” said Eve.
    But we do, Gara thought. We keep making the same mistakes and passing them on to others. When does it stop? When can we finally put it to rest? Chain of fools . . .

Chapter Three
    Gara’s parents called her “the miracle baby.” After two miscarriages, years of infertility and worry, and six months lying flat on her back in bed, her mother finally produced the daughter she had been waiting for. After that, they never tried to have another child. This little daughter with the big blue eyes would have everything; on her tiny shoulders would rest the fulfillment of their dreams.
    She was born in 1940. The Depression was not yet really over, the World War that would crank up the economy had not yet begun in America, although its presence in Europe hung over everything. It was not unusual to be an only child. Most of the children in Gara’s class at private school had, at the most, one sibling. People couldn’t afford more. Gara’s mother told her that only the poor, who didn’t know better, had a lot of kids. What she neglected to say was that her method of birth control was abstinence.
    By the time the baby boomers were old enough to fill the kindergartens to bursting, Gara was twelve years old and ready to graduate from eighth grade. She had always been bright and precocious, and had been skipped twice. People were moving to the suburbs in search of a better life for their children, but Gara’s parents were both second generation New Yorkers, and they had no intention of leaving the culture and autonomy of the city. Her mother couldn’t even drive. Her father was a lawyer with an office in Manhattan, and he was not eager to commute. Their six-room apartment in a 1930s Deco building was spacious and filled with reproduction English antiques. It was a good setting for Gara to receive the boys who would come courting her when she was older.
    Gara was delighted that they were going to stay, and that she would be going on to an all-girls private high school that was supposed to be very difficult academically. She was too young to date boys anyway—in fact they sort of scared her—and her main ambition at the moment was getting into college so she could have some kind of career. Her mother was a college graduate even though she was a housewife. Her college psychology books were on their living room bookshelf, and Gara had read them all. She loved reading about real people who