Wifey
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
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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
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 and 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.
J
UDY
B
LUME
June 29, 2004