The Stepford Wives Read online

  Praise for The Stepford Wives

  ‘Masterful, ridiculously well crafted and, like the ladies of Stepford themselves, flawless.’

  Esquire

  ‘Levin is the Swiss watchmaker of the suspense novel.’

  Stephen King

  Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Introduction by Chuck Palahniuk: REVISIONIST HERSTORY: EVERYWHERE IS STEPFORD

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  About the Author

  Also by Ira Levin

  Copyright

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  Introduction by Chuck Palahniuk

  REVISIONIST HERSTORY: EVERYWHERE IS STEPFORD

  In 1972 Ira Levin told us what lay ahead. Oh, he sounded a loud, clear warning about some pent-up male reaction to the Women’s Liberation movement.

  In 1972 Levin’s outlandish – but not too outlandish – idea of men counterattacking feminists was dubbed The Stepford Wives. Such a silly idea his was, that hostile husbands, afraid of losing control over their liberated wives, would murder those wives and replace them with pretty, painted dolls. These dolls would boast hourglass figures, and dress stylishly and immaculately. Those vapid dollies would enjoy nothing so much as shopping and housekeeping. Those glazed, pretty dolls, actually robots, would be subservient to men. That became the enduring metaphor: The Stepford Wives. A Stepford Wife. Even as the pretty, former fashion model Martha Stewart smiled and polished silver, validating the role of Domestic Goddess to a new generation, the taint was always there … a Stepford Wife looked so calm and organized, so lovely and buxom, but she wasn’t really alive.

  In 1972 American women were nothing if not alive. So much of 1970s feminism was about the physical body, women accepting and celebrating their carnal selves. Here was the era of Our Bodies, Ourselves and the Feminist Women’s Health Centre. For women the physical was political, from breast self-examination to at home briskly extracting one’s menses with a single use of the Karman cannula. The speculum became a tool of political discourse in exploring the cervix, the os, the urethral sponge. The debate pitched vaginal orgasms against clitoral orgasms. Masturbation became a political action.

  And nipples … brassieres were burning and nipples were sighted everywhere. And camel toe: hot pants were everywhere and so was camel toe. We’d banished the girdle and the garter belt. The push was on to ban the razor, and brandishing hairy armpits became a radical political statement.

  No one wanted to be crowned Miss America. The Playboy Bunny was an antiquated joke. A woman’s place was on the picket line, and it’s no wonder men were scared.

  Enter Ira Levin with his cautionary tale about husbands seeking retribution. One man is a plastics expert. Another, a pioneer in robotics. Another husband is an expert in human speech. One, Ike Mazzard, is an illustrator in the tradition of Alberto Vargas, a master at accentuating a woman’s best features, exaggerating her hair and eyes and lips, and turning her into a centrefold beauty. These men are all members of the same boys’ club where they claim to spend their evenings doing charity work. More specifically: building and repairing toys for needy children. Hah! Toys! Needy children, yes, indeed, Ira Levin was nothing if not funny, and his boy-men enjoy nothing more than holing up in their hilltop clubhouse and redesigning their troublesome wives.

  As readers we discover all of this through the eyes of Joanna Eberhart, a wife, a mother and a photographer. She becomes the camera, always watching, focusing, recording each detail in the discovery process. It’s 1972, and New York City is a dirty, dangerous place to raise children so despite wanting to stay engaged with the larger world Joanna agrees to move to the idyllic bedroom community of Stepford. Of the two free-spirited women she meets there, first one, then the second seem to lose their resolve and succumb to being pretty, well-dressed zombies.

  In the physical world of 1970s feminism, the final time we see Joanna Eberhart she’s demanding blood. She’s ferreted out the truth about the Stepford Men’s Association, and she’s standing in a friend’s kitchen demanding this little sacrifice, this ultimate physical proof that her friend is a real woman: blood. After that, nothing physical remains of Joanna. We switch to the viewpoint of a new character, a female artist, to see that even Joanna is lost.

  Levin did his job. We learned our lesson, got the message, and we can recognize a Stepford Wife from three hundred paces. It wasn’t until 1991 when Susan Faludi officially dubbed a male reaction to feminism as ‘backlash’, but by then we’d already gotten wise. Poor Joanna might be replaced by a vapid, painted doll, but succeeding generations of women would be saved by her example. Nope, no way, we can’t say Ira Levin didn’t warn us this was coming …

  Nevertheless, it’s odd how the bookshelves are filling with pretty dolls. Those glazed pretty dolls wearing their stylish designer outfits – Prada and Chanel and Dolce – swilling their martinis and flirting, flirting, flirting in their supreme effort to catch a rich husband. Always a rich husband. Instead of political rights, they’re fighting for Jimmie Choos. In lieu of protest, they express themselves through shopping. And men, they’re no longer the oppressors – these days other women are, older women. In The Nanny Diaries and The Devil Wears Prada and Confessions of a Shopaholic, in this new generation of ‘chick lit’ novels, men are once more the goal. It’s successful women who torment our pretty, painted narrators. Brassieres are back, as are girdles, eyelash curlers, perfumed and meticulously shaved underarms. The speculum and the cervix are forgotten. This it seems is progress: women may now choose to be pretty, stylishly dressed, and vapid. This is no longer the shrill, politically charged climate of 1972; if it’s a choice freely made, then it’s … okay.

  Karl Marx said, ‘History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.’ Even the remake of the Stepford Wives movie in 2004 casts an older female character as the ultimate villain. As a Martha Stewart-type, she only wants to make the world a pretty, genteel place, free from the strife of women’s liberation. Glenn Close plays the bad guy, as does Miranda Priestly, as did Amanda Farrow in 1959’s The Best of Everything. Women are the ultimate threat to women. The Stepford remake is, of course, a comedy.

  Now everyplace is Stepford, but it’s okay. It’s fine. This is what the modern politically aware, fully awake, enlightened, assertive woman really, really, really wants: a manicure.

  We can’t say Ira Levin didn’t warn us.

  ‘Today the combat takes a different shape; instead of wishing to put man in a prison, woman endeavors to escape from one; she no longer seeks to drag him into the realms of immanence but to emerge, herself, into the light of transcendence. Now the attitude of the males creates a new conflict: it is with a bad grace that the man lets her go.’

  Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

  ONE

  The Welcome Wagon lady, sixty if she was a day but working at youth and vivacity (ginger hair, red lips, a sunshine-yellow dress), twinkled her eyes and teeth at Joanna and said, ‘You’re really going to like it here! It’s a nice town with nice people! You couldn’t have made a better choice!’ Her brown leather shoulderbag was enormous, old and scuffed; from it she dealt Joanna packets of powdered breakfast drink and soup mix, a toy-size box of non-polluting detergent, a booklet of discount slips good at twenty-two local shops, two cakes of soap, a folder of deodorant pads—

  ‘Enough, enough,’ Joanna said, standing in the doorway with both hands full. ‘Hold. Halt. Thank you.’

  The Welcome Wagon lady put a vial of cologne on top of the other things, and then searched in her bag – ‘No, really,’ Joanna said – and brought out pink-framed eyeglasses and a small embroidered notebook. ‘I do the “Notes on Newcomers”,’ she said, smiling and putting on
the glasses. ‘For the Chronicle.’ She dug at the bag’s bottom and came up with a pen, clicking its top with a red-nailed thumb.

  Joanna told her where she and Walter had moved from; what Walter did and with which firm; Pete’s and Kim’s names and ages; what she had done before they were born; and which colleges she and Walter had gone to. She shifted impatiently as she spoke, standing there at the front door with both hands full and Pete and Kim out of earshot.

  ‘Do you have any hobbies or special interests?’

  She was about to say a time-saving no, but hesitated: a full answer, printed in the local paper, might serve as a signpost to women like herself, potential friends. The women she had met in the past few days, the ones in the nearby houses, were pleasant and helpful enough, but they seemed completely absorbed in their household duties. Maybe when she got to know them better she would find they had farther-reaching thoughts and concerns, yet it might be wise to put up that signpost. So, ‘Yes, several,’ she said. ‘I play tennis whenever I get the chance, and I’m a semi-professional photographer—’

  ‘Oh?’ the Welcome Wagon lady said, writing.

  Joanna smiled. ‘That means an agency handles three of my pictures,’ she said. ‘And I’m interested in politics and in the Women’s Liberation movement. Very much so in that. And so is my husband.’

  ‘He is?’ The Welcome Wagon lady looked at her.

  ‘Yes,’ Joanna said. ‘Lots of men are.’ She didn’t go into the benefits-for-both-sexes explanation; instead she leaned her head back into the entrance hall and listened: a TV audience laughed in the family room, and Pete and Kim argued but below intervention level. She smiled at the Welcome Wagon lady. ‘He’s interested in boating and football too,’ she said, ‘and he collects Early American legal documents’. Walter’s half of the signpost.

  The Welcome Wagon lady wrote, and closed her notebook, clicked her pen. ‘That’s just fine, Mrs Eberhart,’ she said, smiling and taking her glasses off. ‘I know you’re going to love it here,’ she said, ‘and I want to wish you a sincere and hearty “Welcome to Step-ford”. If there’s any information I can give you about local shops and services, please feel free to call me; the number’s right there on the front of the discount book.’

  ‘Thank you, I will,’ Joanna said. ‘And thanks for all this.’

  ‘Try them, they’re good products!’ the Welcome Wagon lady said. She turned away. ‘Goodbye now!’

  Joanna said goodbye to her and watched her go down the curving walk toward her battered red Volkswagen. Dogs suddenly filled its windows, a black and brown excitement of spaniels, jumping and barking, paws pressing glass. Moving whiteness beyond the Volkswagen caught Joanna’s eye: across the sapling-lined street, in one of the Claybrooks’ upstairs windows, whiteness moved again, leaving one pane and filling the next; the window was being washed. Joanna smiled, in case Donna Claybrook was looking at her. The whiteness moved to a lower pane, and then to the pane beside it.

  With a surprising roar the Volkswagen lunged from the curb, and Joanna backed into the entrance hall and hipped the door closed.

  * * *

  Pete and Kim were arguing louder. ‘B.M.! Diarrhoea!’ ‘Ow! Stop it!’

  ‘Cut it out!’ Joanna called, dumping the double handful of samples onto the kitchen table.

  ‘She’s kicking me!’ Pete shouted, and Kim shouted, ‘I’m not! You diarrhoea!’

  ‘Now stop it,’ Joanna said, going to the port and looking through. Pete lay on the floor too close to the TV set, and Kim stood beside him, red-faced, keeping from kicking him. Both were still in their pyjamas. ‘She kicked me twice,’ Pete said, and Kim shouted, ‘You changed the channel! He changed the channel!’ ‘I did not!’ ‘I was watching Felix the Cat!’

  ‘Quiet!’ Joanna commanded. ‘Absolute silence! Utter – complete – total – silence.’

  They looked at her, Kim with Walter’s wide blue eyes, Pete with her own grave dark ones. ‘Race ’em to a flying finish!’ the TV set cried. ‘No electricity!’

  ‘A, you’re too close to the set,’ Joanna said. ‘B, turn it off; and C, get dressed, both of you. That green stuff outside is grass, and the yellow stuff coming down on it is sunshine.’ Pete scrambled to his feet and powed the TV’s control panel, blanking its screen to a dying dot of light. Kim began crying.

  Joanna groaned and went around into the family room.

  Crouching, she hugged Kim to her shoulder and rubbed her pyjamaed back, kissed her silk-soft ringlets. ‘Ah, come on now,’ she said. ‘Don’t you want to play with that nice Allison again? Maybe you’ll see another chipmunk.’

  Pete came over and lifted a strand of her hair. She looked up at him and said, ‘Don’t change channels on her.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ he said, winding a finger in the dark strand.

  ‘And don’t kick,’ she told Kim. She rubbed her back and tried to get kisses in at her squirming-away cheek.

  It was Walter’s turn to do the dishes, and Pete and Kim were playing quietly in Pete’s room, so she took a quick cool shower and put on shorts and a shirt and her sneakers and brushed her hair. She peeked in on Pete and Kim as she tied her hair: they were sitting on the floor playing with Pete’s space station.

  She moved quietly away and went down the new-carpeted stairs. It was a good evening. The unpacking was done with, finally, and she was cool and clean, with a few free minutes – ten or fifteen if she was lucky – to maybe sit outside with Walter and look at their trees and their two-point-two acres.

  She went around and down the hallway. The kitchen was spick and span, the washer pounding. Walter was at the sink, leaning to the window and looking out toward the Van Sant house. A Rorschach-blot of sweat stained his shirt: a rabbit with its ears bent outward. He turned around, and started and smiled. ‘How long have you been here?’ he asked, dishtowel-wiping his hands.

  ‘I just came in,’ she said.

  ‘You look reborn.’

  ‘That’s how I feel. They’re playing like angels. You want to go outside?’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, folding the towel. ‘Just for a few minutes though. I’m going over to talk with Ted.’ He slid the towel onto a rod of the rack. ‘That’s why I was looking,’ he said. ‘They just finished eating.’

  ‘What are you going to talk with him about?’

  They went out onto the patio.

  ‘I was going to tell you,’ he said as they walked. ‘I’ve changed my mind; I’m joining that Men’s Association.’

  She stopped and looked at him.

  ‘Too many important things are centred there to just opt out of it,’ he said. ‘Local politicking, the charity drives and so on …’

  She said, ‘How can you join an outdated, old-fashioned—’

  ‘I spoke to some of the men on the train,’ he said. ‘Ted, and Vic Stavros, and a few others they introduced me to. They agree that the no-women-allowed business is archaic.’ He took her arm and they walked on. ‘But the only way to change it is from inside,’ he said. ‘So I’m going to help do it. I’m joining Saturday night. Ted’s going to brief me on who’s on what committees.’ He offered her his cigarettes. ‘Are you smoking or non-tonight?’

  ‘Oh – smoking,’ she said, reaching for one.

  They stood at the patio’s far edge, in cool blue dusk twanging with crickets, and Walter held his lighter flame to Joanna’s cigarette and to his own.

  ‘Look at that sky,’ he said. ‘Worth every penny it cost us.’

  She looked – the sky was mauve and blue and dark blue; lovely – and then she looked at her cigarette. ‘Organizations can be changed from the outside,’ she said. ‘You get up petitions, you picket—’

  ‘But it’s easier from the inside,’ Walter said. ‘You’ll see: if these men I spoke to are typical, it’ll be the Everybody’s Association before you know it. Co-ed poker. Sex on the pool table.’

  ‘If these men you spoke to were typical,’ she said, ‘it would be the Everybody’s Association already. Oh
, all right, go ahead and join; I’ll think up slogans for placards. I’ll have plenty of time when school starts.’

  He put his arm around her shoulders and said, ‘Hold off a little while. If it’s not open to women in six months, I’ll quit and we’ll march together. Shoulder to shoulder. “Sex, yes; sexism, no”.’

  ‘“Stepford is out of step”,’ she said, reaching for the ashtray on the picnic table.

  ‘Not bad.’

  ‘Wait till I really get going.’

  They finished their cigarettes and stood arm in arm, looking at their dark wide runway of lawn, and the tall trees, black against mauve sky, that ended it. Lights shone among the trunks of the trees: windows of houses on the next street over, Harvest Lane.

  ‘Robert Ardrey is right,’ Joanna said. ‘I feel very territorial.’

  Walter looked around at the Van Sant house and then squinted at his watch. ‘I’m going to go in and wash up,’ he said, and kissed her cheek.

  She turned and took his chin and kissed his lips. ‘I’m going to stay out a few minutes,’ she said. ‘Yell if they’re acting up.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. He went into the house by the living-room door.

  She held her arms and rubbed them; the evening was growing cooler. Closing her eyes, she threw her head back and breathed the smell of grass and trees and clean air: delicious. She opened her eyes to a single speck of star in dark blue sky, a trillion miles above her. ‘Star light, star bright,’ she said. She didn’t say the rest of it, but she thought it.

  She wished: that they would be happy in Stepford. That Pete and Kim would do well in school, and that she and Walter would find good friends and fulfillment. That he wouldn’t mind the commuting – though the whole idea of moving had been his in the first place. That the lives of all four of them would be enriched, rather than diminished, as she had feared, by leaving the city – the filthy, crowded, crime-ridden, but so-alive city.