Ira Levin - The Stepford Wives

The car stopped, and the spotlight swung away and died to an orange spark. She blinked a few times, still seeing the blinding radiance.

A police car. It stayed where it was, about thirty feet away from her on the other side of the street. A man's voice spoke softly inside it; spoke and kept speaking.

She waited.

The car moved forward, coming opposite her, and stopped. The young policeman with the unpolicemanlike brown mustache smiled at her and said, "Evening, ma'am." She had seen him several times, once in the stationery store buying packs of colored crepe paper, one each of every color they had.

"Hello," she said, smiling.

He was alone in the car; he must have been talking on his radio. About her? "I'm sorry I hit you with the spot that way," he said. "Is that your car there by the post office?"

"Yes," she said. "I didn't park it here because I was-"

"That's all right, I'm just checking." He squinted at the camera. "That's a good-looking camera," he said. "What kind is it?"

"A Pentax," she said.

"Pentax," he said. He looked at the camera, and at her. "And you can take pictures at night with it?"

"Time exposures," she said.

"Oh, sure," he said. "How long does it take, on a night like this?"

"Well that depends," she said.

He wanted to know on what, and what kind of film she was using. And whether she was a professional photographer, and how much a Pentax cost, just roughly. And how it stacked up against other cameras.

She tried not to grow impatient; she should be glad she lived in a town where a policeman could stop and talk for a few minutes.

Finally he smiled and said, "Well, I guess I'd better let you go ahead with it. Good night."

"Good night," she said, smiling.

He drove off slowly. The silver-gray cat ran through his headlight beams.

She watched the car for a moment, and then turned to the camera and checked the lens. Crouching to the viewfinder, she levered into a good framing of the Men's Association house and locked the tripod head. She focused, sharpening the finder's image of the high square tipsyantennaed house. Two of its upstairs windows were dark now; and another was shade-pulled down to darkness, and then the last one.

She straightened and looked at the house itself, and turned to the police car's faraway taillights.

He had radioed a message about her, and then he had stalled her with his questions while the message was acted on, the shades pulled down.

Oh come on, girl, you're getting nutty! She looked at the house again. They wouldn't have a radio up there. And what would he have been afraid she'd photograph? An orgy in progress? Call girls from the city? (Or better yet, from right there in Stepford.) ENLARGER REVEALS SHOCKING SECRET. Seemingly diligent housewives, conveniently holding still for lengthy time exposures, were caught Sunday night disporting at the Men's Association house by photographer Nancy Drew Eberhart of Fairview Lane…

Smiling, she crouched to the viewfinder, bettered her framing and tocus, and took three shots of the darkwindowed house-ten seconds, twelve, and fourteen.

She took shots of the post office, and of its bare flagpole silhouetted against moonlit clouds.

She was putting the tripod into the car when the police car came by and slowed. "Hope they all come out!" the young policeman called.

"Thanks!" she called back to him. "I enjoyed talking!" To make up for her city-bred suspiciousness.

"Good night!" the policeman called.

A SENIOR PARTNER IN WALter's firm died of uremic poisoning, and the records of the trusts he had administered were found to be disquietingly inaccurate.

Walter had to stay two nights and a weekend in the city, and on the nights following he seldom got home before eleven o'clock. Pete took a fall on the school bus and knocked out his two front teeth. Joanna's parents paid a short-notice three-day visit on their way to a Caribbean vacation. (They loved the house and Stepford, and Joanna's mother admired Carol Van Sant.

"So serene and efficient! Take a leaf from her book, Joanna.")

The dishwasher broke down, and the pump; and Pete's eighth birthday came, calling for presents, a party, favors, a cake. Kim got a sore throat and was home for three days. Joanna's period was late but came, thank God and the Pill.

She managed to get in a little tennis, her game improving but still not as good as Charmaine's. She got the darkroom three-quarters set up and made trial enlargements of the black-man-and-taxi picture, and developed and printed the ones she had taken in the Center, two of which looked very good. She took shots of Pete and Kim and Scott Chamalian playing on the jungle gym.

She saw Bobbie almost every day; they shopped together, and sometimes Bobbie brought her two younger boys Adam and Kenny over after school. One day Joanna and Bobbie and Charmaine got dressed to the nines and had a two-cocktail lunch at a French restaurant in Eastbridge.

By the end of October, Walter was getting home for dinner again, the dead partner's peculations having been unraveled, made good, and patched over.

Everything in the house was working, everyone was well. They carved a huge pumpkin for Halloween, and Pete went trick-ortreating as a front-toothless Batman, and Kim as Heckel or Jeckel (she was both, she insisted). Joanna gave out fifty bags of candy and had to fall back on fruit and cookies; next year she would know better.

On the first Saturday in November they gave a dinner party: Bobbie and Dave, Charmaine and her husband Ed; and from the city, Shep and Sylvia Tackover, and Don Ferrault-one of Walter's partners-and his wife Lucy.

The local woman Joanna got to help serve and clean up was delighted to be working in Stepford for a change. "There used to be so much entertaining here!" she said. "I had a whole round of women that used to fight over me! And now I have to go to Norwood, and Eastbridge, and New Sharon! And I hate night driving!" She was a plump quickmoving white-haired woman named Mary Migliardi. "It's that Men's Association," she said, jabbing toothpicks into shrimp on a platter. "Entertaining's gone right out the window since they started up! The men go out and the women stay in! If my old man was alive he'd have to knock me on the head before I'd let him join!"

"But it's a very old organization, isn't it?" Joanna said, tossing salad at arm's length because of her dress.

"Are you kidding?" Mary said. "It's new! Six or seven years, that's all.

Before, there was the Civic Association and the Elks and the Legion"-she toothpicked shrimp with machinelike rapidity-"but they all merged in with it once it got going. Except the Legion; they're still separate. Six or seven years, that's all. This isn't all you got for hors d'oeuvres, is it?"

"There's a cheese roll in the refrigerator," Joanna said.

Walter came in, looking very handsome in his plaid jacket, carrying the ice bucket. "We're in luck," he said, going to the refrigerator. "There's a good Creature Feature; Pete doesn't even want to come down. I put the Sony in his room." He opened the freezer section and took out a bag of ice cubes.

"Mary just told me the Men's Association is new," Joanna said.

"It's not new," Walter said, tearing at the top of the bag. A white dab of tissue clung to his jawbone, pinned by a dot of dried blood.

"Six or seven years," Mary said.

"Where we come from that's old."

Joanna said, "I thought it went back to the Puritans."

"What gave you that idea?" Walter asked, spilling ice cubes into the bucket.

She tossed the salad. "I don't know," she said. "The way it's set up, and that old house…"

"That was the Terhune place," Mary said, laying a stretch of plastic over the toothpicked platter. "They got it dirt-cheap. Auctioned for taxes and no one else bid."