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More than likely, he gets the impression that I’m not that bright. It doesn’t matter to me one way or the other. If he is telling anything but the complete truth, it will come out. Most people have trouble keeping up with their lies. If they think you’re stupid, the less they bother trying to cover their tracks.
“How about Arizona?” I ask a little too enthusiastically.
“Too hot,” he says.
It turns out Norman is no liar. This is no shyster.
Norman Fells seems to be exactly who he says he is. A man of means. A successful businessman. A philanthropist. A thinker. A doer. I know right from the first call, this is a man who expects his wife to be precisely what he wants her to be, and nothing more. He’d want a hot meal on the table when he got home in the evening. Weekends are for golfing. He wants a handful of heirs. Five at minimum.
Even before I place the phone in the cradle, I begin to worry that he’ll kill me without actually killing me. He is a man who believes a wife should be subservient. That she should be seen and not heard. Unless, of course, she is telling him what he wants to hear, which he lets on—and not so subtly—is also a requirement of the job. I realize that would be my sole purpose, ormission, as he calls it, serving him. Making his life easier. In exchange for a comfortable life, he says.What more could a woman want?
He makes a promise that seems easy enough. No more frivolous changes of heart, no more fickle alterations in my image, no more constantly changing opinions as to who I want to be. I am to be his wife, his helpmate, as he describes it, and that is that. For better or for worse, in sickness and in health, married to a man I suspect will be a stern father and husband.
But there is one problem. Two—but the first I canpossiblystuff deep down—if I can manage to swallow it whole, the fact that I don’t want to be someone’s,anyone’swife. I have dreams andplansof my own. Dreams I do not want to give up in order to serve someone else.
Not unless it’s the author of those letters. And maybe not even then.
But the real problem, the one that trumps all the others, is that even if I wanted to, I have no idea how to be the kind of woman that a man like Norman Fells is looking for—how to be subservient, or how to be a wife, much less a helpmate. I don’t even know what a helpmate is.
As it turns out, I didn’t have time to figure it out.
