Make Mine a Double: Why Women Like Us Like to Drink (Or Not)

The Breakup

116 laurie fendrich ฀ t The Breakup ihadn’t seen Eliza in fifteen years when, on a brisk and sunny autumn morning, I bumped into her at the farmers’ market in Union Square. “Eliza!” I said, turning to the voice that had called my name. We hugged and exchanged pleasantries before deciding to walk together up Broadway. Suddenly, she asked if I’d been one of the women who’d been in the reading group—the final one, many years ago now, the one that got the big headline and picture in the New York Post’s celebrity section, Page Six. I explained to her that she was right to remember I’d belonged to the group, but I’d stopped going long before that night when the group broke up. Did I know what had happened, she asked. I told her I knew there’d been a tiff of some sort that had put an end to the group. Well, Eliza said she’d learned all about it from the other Laurie in the group, who had been there, so she would tell me. It just so happened that Eliza had recounted the story to someone else a few days earlier, and I could tell she was eager to tell it yet again. Frankly, I was eager to hear it. In relaying it to you, I’ll probably mix things up a little, but I think I have the gist right. Here’s Eliza’s account of what Laurie said. t฀ ฀t฀ ฀t Since you asked, I’m going to tell you all about what happened. There were lots of reading groups in the city back in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Our group was all women, and we conducted our discussions very seriously, almost as if they were college classes. It’s true that we probably drank too much wine when we talked The Breakup t 117 about the books, but we rarely got totally drunk. We simply believed wine made discussions flow. Whatever good ideas we had over the years came about because of the wine. But right before we broke up, the wine, instead of making us better at talking about the books, seemed to be making us do nothing but argue. Our group met once a month at a downtown restaurant. As soon as the first person arrived, a waiter would bring two bottles of wine—one white, one red—along with a platter of hummus with carrots, celery, and pita bread. Most discussions lasted about three hours. My head used to spin like crazy afterward— not from the wine, I swear—but from all the hard thinking. Phoebe, at twenty-six, was the youngest in the group. Petite and pretty, with bright skin and a lovely, shy smile, she wore the same kind of black-rimmed glasses Daniel Libeskind wears. She always seemed animated, even though she hardly gestured at all, and for some odd reason, she never showed even the slightest effects from the wine. Phoebe wrote theater and movie reviews for a West Side community paper, and her first novel came out right near the time we broke up. It was “well received,” as they say. I never actually read it—such a jejune title: My Lovely Jane. Olive, at sixty, was the oldest. Time had been kind to her, etching only a few fine lines around her eyes. A tall woman, she was what you would call “handsome.” At our meetings, the group followed rules. For example, we never chose books from bestseller lists. To choose a book for discussion, each person gave a two-minute pitch on behalf of a particular book. Then we’d ask questions about the book—comments weren’t allowed. After the pitches, we’d write down our choice on a piece of paper. Whichever title got the most votes won—simple as that. Our first book had been Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. All anyone could say during the discussion was, “Holy cow, things got even worse after that!” It took us a while to learn that we needed books we could talk back to. The next book was Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror. Al- 118 t l a u r i e f e n d r i c h though we learned the fourteenth century was full of beheadings, spearings, burnings at the stake, rape...