Wifey Read online

  Praise for the novels of Judy Blume

  Smart Women

  “Filled with good insights and great, quotable one-liners . . . Men are always asking what women like and don’t like, want and don’t want. Why don’t they read Judy Blume and find out?”—The Washington Post

  “Emotionally satisfying . . . compulsively readable . . . triggers both laughter and tears . . . you’ll be utterly captivated.—Working Woman

  “Blume’s sensitivity to a child’s viewpoint elevates this book . . . the children are splendid in their richness.”—The New York Times Book Review

  Summer Sisters

  “An exceptionally moving story that can leave the reader laughing and crying . . . sometimes at the same time.—The Denver Post

  “Compulsively readable . . . her powers are prodigious.”—The New York Times Book Review

  “As warm as a summer breeze blowing through your hair, as nostalgic as James Taylor singing ‘How Sweet It Is.’ You remember. So does Judy Blume. How sweet it was.”—Chicago Tribune

  books by judy blume

  For Adults

  Wifey

  Smart Women

  Summer Sisters

  For Young Adults

  Forever . . .

  Tiger Eyes

  Letters to Judy: What Kids Wish They Could Tell You

  Places I Never Meant to Be: Original Stories by Censored Writers

  (edited by Judy Blume)

  For Young Readers

  The Pain and the Great One

  The One in the Middle Is the Green Kangaroo

  Freckle Juice

  The Fudge Books

  Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

  Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great

  Superfudge

  Fudge-a-Mania

  Double Fudge

  Blubber

  Iggie’s House

  Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself

  Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret

  It’s Not the End of the World

  Deenie

  Then Again, Maybe I Won’t

  Just as Long as We’re Together

  Here’s to You, Rachel Robinson

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

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  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not claim any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 1978 by Judy Blume.

  “Introduction” copyright © 2004 by Judy Blume.

  Cover photograph copyright © 2004 Terry Doyle/Getty Images.

  Cover design copyright © by Honi Werner.

  Text design by Stephanie Huntwork.

  “Taking a Chance on Love,” by John LaTouche, Ted Fetter, and Vernon Duke, copyright 1940 by Miller Music Corporation; copyright renewed © 1968 by Miller Music Corporation. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” design is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons hardcover edition / November 2004

  Berkley trade paperback edition / September 2005

  ISBN: 978-1-101-56292-5

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the G. P. Putnam’s Sons hardcover edition as follows:

  Blume, Judy.

  Wifey / Judy Blume.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-399-15237-7

  1. Housewives—Fiction. 2. Married women—Fiction. 3. Sexual fantasies—Fiction. 4. Adultery—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552.L843W54 2004 2004054462

  813’.54—dc22

  To Claire and Phyllis

  for believing

  To Randy and Larry

  for enduring

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Also By Judy Blume

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  Special Preview

  introduction

  I GREW UP IN THE FIFTIES, with a mother whose expectations for me didn’t go beyond wanting me to be a good girl. She urged me to get a college degree in education in case, God forbid, I ever had to go to work. Along the way, I was supposed to meet and marry a professional man from a nice Jewish family, have a couple of children, and wind up in a beautiful house in suburban New Jersey. My mother was a good woman, but her dreams for me were based on her own. I couldn’t tell her that in my fantasy life I was anything but a good girl, or that I dreamed of a life of drama and adventure. Ah, what Mother never knew!

  But ever anxious to please, and maybe afraid to try anything else, I went to college and got a degree in education. Before graduation I met and married a young lawyer. By the time I was twenty-five, I had two children and was living in a ranch house on a cul-de-sac in suburban New Jersey. My mother was very happy.

  For sixteen years, writing saved me and my marriage. But by the mid seventies all the rules had changed. I was thirty-seven at the time. Like Jennie—the canine heroine of Maurice Sendak’s Higglety Pigglety Pop!, who believed there must be more to life than having everything—I was after experience. I had never been on my own. I longed to taste freedom and adventure; I longed to discover what was out there and to write about it. And so, in 1975 I left my marriage and set off with my children to find out what I’d missed.

  For all three of us the journey was difficult an
d sometimes painful. What I learned would fill a book, one I haven’t yet written and may never write. Instead, a year or so later when I sat down to start a new book, the story that came tumbling out was about what happens to a suburban New Jersey marriage one summer when a woman named Sandy Pressman begins to question her choices and give in to her fantasies. No, I’m not Sandy, although many of the details of her life come from mine—her exotic illnesses, her failure on the golf course, her fantasies. And I was never married to Norman but I knew plenty of guys like him.

  It took three months to find the voice in which to tell Sandy’s story. Three months of stuffing my face with donuts because I’d rented a tiny office above a donut shop in Los Alamos, New Mexico (don’t ask how I wound up there). Every day while my kids were at school, I’d go to my office to write. Every day the scent of freshly baked donuts wafted upstairs, making my mouth water. After three months and who knows how many glazed donuts, I gave up my office and moved back home to write the book.

  When I look at the book today, I can’t believe how fearless I was in my writing. I mean, all those sexual fantasies and escapades! Maybe I just didn’t know enough then to be worried. Maybe I really didn’t care what anyone thought. I just remember this burning inside, this need to get Sandy’s story on paper. I was, after all, raised to be Sandy. I still identify with her.

  If I sat down to write Wifey now I wonder if I’d be able to let go the way I did then. I’m not as filled with angst today (angst is good for writers). I’m as content as I’ve ever been (contentment is bad for writers), though I can always come up with something to worry about.

  When Wifey was published, it caused an uproar. By then, I’d written and published thirteen books for young readers. Some people thought Wifey would end my career. Some congratulated me on having written a real book at last. Some were angry that I hadn’t used a pseudonym, others that I even had such thoughts. People magazine shot a photo of me in a lacy teddy. The headline read, “The Jacqueline Susann of Children’s Books Grows Up.” I cringe, even today, thinking of that article. I began to hear from old boyfriends. The underlying message was, Judy must have been a hot number. Who’d have guessed? Strangers wrote letters and sent gifts. I especially enjoyed this poem, sent to me by a fan:

  You’re rude and crude

  Depraved and lewd

  You’re caught in a moral crunch

  You’re vexed, perplexed

  And oversexed

  So when can we have lunch?

  A man named Norman Pressman wrote to assure me he was nothing like Sandy’s husband. Since I was traveling to his city on my book tour, we agreed to meet. It was an awkward meeting in a hotel suite with my publicist and a few other people from the publishing company (everyone wanted to meet the real Norman Pressman). He seemed sweet and shy, and was married with children. He had no way of knowing I was basically a good girl with an active imagination. I think he was relieved not to be alone with me. Then again, maybe he was disappointed.

  My mother, who went to high school with Philip Roth’s mother, met Mrs. Roth on the street. Mrs. Roth had some advice for her: “When they ask how she knows all those things, you say, I don’t know, but not from me!” I’m sure my mother used that line more than once. My mother and I never talked about sex but she was more pleased by my success than embarrassed by what I’d written. The only thing she asked was to be left out of my books. I tried to explain that there would always be mothers in my stories and that none of them were based on her. She said it didn’t matter, that everyone would think she was Sandy Pressman’s mother, anyway. She wasn’t. When my grown daughter wrote a novel I told her not to worry, that I understood how fiction is created. Still, I found myself telling everyone that I was not the mother in her book.

  I never intended to stop writing books for young readers, though most people assumed I had. Wifey was followed by Superfudge, Tiger Eyes, and many other titles for children. The need to write stories about the lives of grown women struck two more times, first with Smart Women and more recently with Summer Sisters. Will it strike again? Who knows?

  I hope you enjoy Sandy Pressman and her story. Though it was written in a very different time and place, some things never change, some longings are universal, and these are what I most enjoy exploring in my writing.

  JUDY BLUME

  June 29, 2004

  In terms of affluence America in the 60s reached a stage that other societies can only dream of.

  —From Good Times by Peter Joseph

  1

  SANDY SAT UP in bed and looked at the clock. Quarter to eight. Damn! Last night she’d told Norman she might sleep all day just to catch up. No kids for once, no demands, no responsibilities. But the noise. What was it, a truck, a bus? It sounded so close. And then the empty sound after the engine cut off. She’d never get back to sleep now. She slipped into her robe, the one the children had given her for Mother’s Day. “Daddy picked it out,” Jen had said. “Do you like it?” “Oh yes, it’s perfect,” Sandy had answered, hating it. Imagine Norman choosing the same robe for her as she had sent to his mother and her own.

  She traipsed across the room to the window, rubbing her eyes to keep them open, spitting her hair out of her face. She looked down into the wooded backyard. He was in front of the crab apple tree, hands on hips, as if waiting for her, dressed in a white bed sheet and a stars and stripes helmet, standing next to a motorcycle. What was this? A kid, playing Halloween? A neighborhood ghost? No . . . look . . . he threw off the bed sheet and stood before her, naked, his penis long and stiff. Sandy dropped to her knees, barely peeking out the window, afraid, but fascinated, not just by the act itself, but by the style. So fast, so hard! Didn’t it hurt, handling it that way? She’d always been so careful with Norman’s, scared that she might damage it. Who was he? What was he doing in her yard? Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, Sandy counted. He came on twenty-seven, leaving his stuff on her lawn, then jumped on his bike, kicked down with one foot, and started up the engine. But wait. It stalled. Would she have to call Triple A and if so how was she going to explain the problem? Hello, this is Mrs. Pressman . . . there’s a . . . you see . . . well . . . anyway . . . and he’s having trouble with his motorcycle . . . No. No need to worry. The engine caught and he took off, zooming down the street, wearing only the stars and stripes helmet.

  She called Norman first, at the plant, and he asked, “Did it make ridges in the lawn?”

  “What?”

  “The motorcycle, did it make ridges in the lawn?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, find out.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, I’ll hold.”

  She put the phone down and ran outside.

  “Yes, there are ridges,” she told Norman. “Two of them.”

  “Okay. First thing, call Rufano, tell him to take care of it.”

  “Right. Rufano,” she repeated, jotting it down. “Should he reseed or what?”

  “I can’t say. I’m not there, am I? Let him decide, he’s the doctor.”

  “But it doesn’t pay to put money into the lawn when we’re moving, does it?”

  “We haven’t sold the house yet. It would be different if we’d already sold.”

  “Norm . . .”

  “What?”

  “I’m a little shaky.”

  “I’ll call the police as soon as we hang up.”

  “I’m not dressed.”

  “So get dressed.”

  “Are you coming home?”

  “I can’t, Sandy. I’m in the middle of a new solution.”

  “Oh.”

  “See you tonight.”

  “Right.”

  Sandy showered and dressed and waited for the police.

  “OKAY, MRS. PRESSMAN, let’s have it again.” She’d expected, at the very least
, Columbo. Instead she got Hubanski, tall and thin, with a missing tooth and an itchy leg. He sat on the sofa and scratched the area above his black anklet sock. Plainfield, New Jersey’s, finest.

  “My husband told you the whole story, didn’t he?”

  “Uh huh.”

  He whipped his notebook out of his pocket and made squiggles with his ballpoint pen. “Doesn’t seem to be working today.”

  “Try blowing in it,” Sandy suggested. “Sometimes that helps.”

  Hubanski blew into the end of his ballpoint and tried again. “Nope, nothing.”

  “Just a minute.” Sandy went into the kitchen and came back with a pen. “Try this one.”

  “Thanks,” he said, printing his name.

  Sandy sat down on the love seat opposite him, tucking her legs under her.

  “Okay, now I want to hear it from you, Mrs. Pressman. You say it was about quarter past eight?”

  “No, quarter to.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Yes, positive, because as soon as I woke up I looked at the clock.”

  “And the noise that woke you sounded like a motorcycle?”

  “Well, I didn’t know it was a motorcycle then. I just knew it was a noise, which is why I went over to the window in the first place.”

  “Now, we have to be very sure about this, Mrs. Pressman.”

  “I looked out the window and there he was,” Sandy said. “It’s very simple.”

  “He didn’t ring the bell or anything, first?”

  “Why would he have done that?”

  “I’m only trying to set the record straight, Mrs. Pressman, because, you know, this isn’t our everyday, ordinary kind of complaint. So just take your time and tell me again.”

  “He was wearing a sheet and he was looking up at me.”

  “Now, this here’s the important part, Mrs. Pressman, and I want to be sure I’ve got it one hundred per cent right. You’re telling me that this guy rides up on a motorcycle.”