Gretchen thinks Madeleine and Carol might as well be gay. “Jeez, you’d make a great dyke,” she’s said more than once to Madeleine, after listening to one of her anecdotes of independence or watching her in a feisty feminist moment. Madeleine always calls Gretchen on that – she hates the way lesbians try to co-opt strength and feminism – but she also jokes that she’s a lesbian trapped in a straight body. She admits that homosexuality would be convenient for her. Men her age still fantasize about sex, but they dream of fucking twenty year-olds. Gay women on the other hand, attractive gay women, lately seek Madeleine out.

As for Carol, Gretchen and Madeleine more or less agree that she’s mostly asexual. Sure she’s married, to a very nice man whose 74 years is the antidote for her 47; no one believes they have sex. And while it’s true that Wayne is supportive and loving and too tired to compete with Carol intellectually, so he’s no bother at all as a husband, it’s also true that Carol would go farther in academia if she were gay. There’s a network.

The inconvenient fact is that both Madeleine and Carol are straight. They’ve each been married twice, and Carol is set to stay married. Madeleine is happily divorced but starting to look around; now that her nest is emptying she can see loneliness ahead, lurking in ambush around a not-distant corner. She’s still not ready to subscribe to a matchmaking service but she’s no longer waiting to be found by someone perfect enough to seek her. Tonight she is going to dinner and opera with her friend James, and she’s inclined to try viewing him through fresh unassuming eyes. He’s single, she’s single, they’re at least conversationally compatible – why not?

The three of them sit around Madeleine’s kitchen table now, but Gretchen is about to leave to make dinner for her partner, and Madeleine is expecting James in an hour. Carol is staying the week with Madeleine, on a brief hiatus from husband and Harvard, and she’ll have the house to herself soon.

Madeleine and Carol go all the way back to high school together, and they know Gretchen from college; the dynamics between the three friends are now hard-wired. Gretchen is graceful and physically modest, with fingernails that keep breaking because she cleans them so often. She can’t abide the sight of any darkness under them. She discovered her sexual orientation late in college, after a few catastrophic attempts with guys, and she believes since she was actually gay all that time, all women must be. Even as she’s getting her things together to leave now, she’s advising Madeleine to forget this James guy and try Susan, perfect for her, who just joined Gretchen’s church.

Carol is dark, petite, lovely, and brilliant. She’s completely intellectual; she seems to have no sense of her body. She can’t ride a bicycle. She is thrifty and efficient and cannot tolerate a bad taste in her mouth. Gretchen and Madeleine each attempted to room with her when they were young, and each was driven to a studio apartment by Carol’s incessant tooth-brushing and admirable, irritating tidiness. Right now Carol is preparing her own dinner. She’s chosen to make polenta with a mixed mushroom ragout on top, and there’s a third of a cup of the ragout left after she spreads an even layer on the corn meal. Anyone else would either add the remaining ragout to the dish, or eat it as cook’s treat; only Carol seeks out the perfect container to preserve the stuff in the refrigerator. When she finger-digs the detergent scum out of the sink dish to clean the pot, Madeleine can’t stand it any more. “Good grief, Carol.  I have scouring pads.” Her tone of voice is all out of proportion to the event, because she’s letting off a bit of repressed exasperation and there’s still plenty more in her, but Carol and Gretchen are accustomed to Madeleine’s passion; they no longer look for extra meaning in her expressive face.

Madeleine is the most libertine and liberal of the three. She’s a woman who knows how to get her hands dirty. Actually, she can’t stand newsprint stains on her fingers; she appreciates the non-smearing ink most publishers are now using. And much as she loves dogs, she really can’t put up with their smell on her fingers. But she’s always been the one of them to roll up her sleeves and get a necessary but unpalatable job done.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Madeleine now apologizes to Carol. “I don’t know where that came from,” she adds, leaning back in her chair, the last of the three to be done picking at the snacks they’ve been munching with their tea. One plate has half a stuffed grape leaf on it. Another has two partially-torn pita. A third supports maybe a quarter cup of hummus, and the last has four olives and eight pits. “I must be nervous about tonight or something. But no,” she continues with a lifting voice to Gretchen, “I am not interested in trying out Susan or any other woman. The jury is out about whether I even want a man…”

“Okay, okay, I’m going,” Gretchen says. Before she gets to the door she turns around. “I’ll back off on the Susan thing, but it’s high time you had someone.  A little romance can be a good thing, you know.” Gretchen and June have just come back from a long weekend at Disneyland. Gretchen had never visited the magic kingdom before, and she was enchanted. “We certainly had a great time. I wish every place were as tidy and well-organized.”

“Yecchh. I can’t believe you said that! Don’t get me wrong,” Madeleine declares, “because Disneyland is a bit of wonder, but after a few hours the place gives me the creeps. Wherever I go I feel subtly manipulated and directed. Once I made the trip there with Anne and my mother – I think Annie was around ten so it was a dozen years ago now – and my mom, who’s been addicted to gum ever since she gave up cigarettes, went searching for some Trident. She never found any, because the Disney folks don’t permit gum to be sold anywhere in the park or hotel grounds. You guessed it: too hard to clean up.”

“But that’s exactly what I like about it. No gum on the pavement. No litter. No weeds. Nothing out of repair.” Gretchen glances at Carol as if looking to her for arbitration, but both Gretchen and Madeleine can see that Carol has no opinion. She’s never been to Disneyland and she isn’t likely to go. She may not know who the President is, and she certainly doesn’t know the current TV lineup. She’s completely historical, classical, devoted to a life of study and contemplation. She’s also irritating Gretchen and Madeleine now that they notice her, because she’s taking meticulous care to wrap up each item they haven’t eaten. They can understand her packing away the pita pieces and the four uneaten olives. But they get antsy when they see her try to scrape the tiny lump of hummus back into its plastic container, and they grow impatient when Carol starts to wrap the piece of dolma in a scrap of used foil. Who’s going to eat it? their facial expressions seem to ask. And they both know the possible answer is Carol, for breakfast, along with two teaspoons, perhaps, of the leftover mushroom ragout, which she’ll then recover to eat more of later.

“Have I mentioned the latest with my office toilets?” Madeleine tries to divert them from watching Carol. “You know how they work, or don’t?” she asks Gretchen. Carol has never visited Madeleine’s office. She continues to tidy the table.

Gretchen understands the question. She’s sensitive and observant about toilets, especially public ones. If a restaurant ladies’ room doesn’t look right to her she’ll avoid the restaurant. She knows that the toilets in Madeleine’s office ladies’ room won’t flush unless pressure is maintained on the handle. They’re the type with the metal lever sticking off the big pipe – the kind you use your foot to flush – and in Madeleine’s ladies’ room you have to stand over the toilet bowl, left foot on the lever, until the flush is completed.

Gretchen doesn’t like that. She doesn’t boycott Madeleine’s office but she tries not to use the toilets there. She once read that the unhealthiest place to be is right over a flushing toilet. She learned that the whirling water goes down while the whirling germs fly up. She’s heard of more than one person who couldn’t get rid of an intestinal problem until she started closing the toilet before flushing, and storing her toothbrush inside a cabinet. She keeps telling Madeleine to demand toilet covers of her building management.

“Well, you know how some of the ladies fail to complete their flush?” Madeleine continues her anecdote. “I guess someone on the floor got annoyed about the yellow or pink or brown that we sometimes find our toilet water, but last week a hand-lettered sign was taped up next to the paper towel dispenser, announcing that we all work there and have to use the same facility, and firmly requesting that flushes be completed.

“If anything, that sign triggered an increased tendency not to flush. So yesterday a batch of signs went up. One behind each stall door, one near the towels, one on the mirror. All of them computer-generated and printed in red ink. The representative of the building management threw a minor fit (‘It’s an office bathroom, not a bulletin board, for heaven’s sake,’ she grumbled as she removed the signs), but I managed to get one before she arrived. Wait a minute; let me quote it correctly…” Madeline takes three long steps to where she left her briefcase, and returns unfolding a half-sheet of paper, printed in all caps.  “INSTRUCTIONS FOR FLUSHING TOILET” is its title, followed by its three points:

1. PRESS LEVER DOWN – HOLD DOWN FOR 1 MINUTE.
2. BEFORE LEAVING THE STALL MAKE SURE THE CONTENTS IN THE BOWL HAVE FLUSHED.
3. EXIT BATHROOM.”

She’s laughing by the time she finishes reading the list. Gretchen says “A full minute? Does she have any idea how long a minute is?” at the same time that Carol suggests item two point five might involve hand-washing. “Do I have to exit immediately after flushing for a minute?”

Now all three are laughing. They look younger like this; their faces broaden, and their eyes are delight-shut, tears of merriment squeezing out at the corners.

“So Madeleine, is there going to be a thing with this James?” Gretchen continues to postpone her departure.

“I think not. I keep trying to talk myself into him – he’s extremely appropriate for me – but there’s just no spark.”

“How so, appropriate?”

“Oh, our age, widowed, childless, moneyed, cultured, not unattractive, streetable… but somehow to me not masculine. I don’t know… there’s no chemistry.”

“And when exactly was the last time you felt chemistry with a man?”  Gretchen’s tone is a bit snide.

“I know. I know. It’s been nearly ten years. But it’s not like I feel it for a woman either.” Madeleine twists in her seat to face Gretchen. Carol has finished putting the food away and is watching both of her friends. “What can I say?” Madeleine continues. “His fingers are shorter than mine. His shoulders slope down, and they’re too narrow. He has a beard but it’s sparse. The arms of his rimless eyeglasses press into the sides of his head. All of this gives me the creeps.”

“Maybe you’re overly fastidious,” Carol comments as she steps momentarily out of the room.

“This from the one married to a 74 year-old,” says Madeleine to Gretchen. She raises her voice to Carol: “Maybe I am, but what can we do about it?” and finishes by commenting to Gretchen, “I just can’t imagine his pale narrow butt pumping between my thighs. No way.”

Gretchen is about to respond when Carol walks back into the room, brushing her teeth. One look in her direction and Gretchen leaves with a “…talk to you two later.” As the door closes behind her Madeleine heads for her bedroom and notices me on the porch.

“Anne! What are you doing tucked in there? I thought you left an hour ago.”

“I was going to, Mom. But as I was getting my stuff together I had an idea for this paper I’m supposed to write. So I’ve been sitting here jotting notes.”

“It’s fine, honey; I was just surprised. This is the writing assignment for your seminar?”

“Yeah. I still don’t get why we have to write and take math for an MFA… But whatever. I’m off now. Have a good date.”

“Oh, it’ll be fine, thanks. But nothing’s happening. James has old man fingernails and nightly heartburn.”

We kiss/hug and I leave. Gretchen may be right. Things probably would go better for Mom if she were gay.