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Summary
Chapter 7: A to B
The narrative jumps forward in time from Scotty’s story to a few years before “The Gold Cure.” It also “flips” to the other side of the “record,” beginning the “B” section of the book.
Bennie and his wife Stephanie have relocated to a very affluent part of New York called Crandale. Stephanie finds the people of Crandale unwelcoming and considers them snobs, especially the other young-ish mothers. In the locker room at the Country Club, Stephanie gets her first “hello” from one of the implacable Crandale women and is unexpectedly delighted at this small mark of success. The streak of positive affirmation continues, especially when Stephanie starts to play tennis there. When one of their fellow members finds out that Bennie used to work with his favorite band, he invites them to a cocktail party. Stephanie knows she’s made it in Crandale when Kathy, the woman who spoke to her in the locker room, introduces Stephanie and Bennie to her husband Clay, and invites Stephanie to play tennis with her.
Stephanie and Kathy become tennis partners, and though an outside observer would assume they were also friends, Stephanie secretly hates Kathy for her smug entitlement and her conservative, bigoted politics. As Stephanie wins acceptance, Bennie feels himself losing it. Because of his job and because he’s not white, Bennie feels like the Crandale community is uneasy with his presence. One evening, as the couple attends a cocktail party, a local congressperson named Bill Duff starts to discuss conspiracy theories about Al-Qaeda operatives. The way he glances at Bennie clearly indicates that he’s implying Bennie is one of them, and no one speaks up on Bennie’s behalf. Stephanie and Bennie fight about this, but Stephanie keeps going to tennis because she does not want to be ignored and excluded like her neighbor Noreen. She hides her tennis-playing from Bennie and justifies her secrecy by the fact that he has previously been unfaithful to her.
The next year, Stephanie’s brother Jules is released from prison after serving five years for the attempted rape of the starlet Kitty Jackson. He seems stable but struggles to find a job. Stephanie and Jules visit Bosco, the former guitarist for the Conduits. He’s now old, fat, and dying of cancer. Bosco wants to record his decline and go on a "national suicide tour,” which Jules thinks is genius and Stephanie finds chilling and anxiety-inducing. When she gets home, Stephanie almost joins Bennie in the shower but stops to go through his pockets, as she’s suspicious that he’s cheating on her. She finds a gold bobby pin in his pocket and recognizes it immediately, realizing that he’s having an affair with Kathy. She despairs, as she thinks she knows exactly what he’ll say and do next if she brings it up. She goes outside and speaks briefly to an eavesdropping Noreen through a hole in the garden fence, unsure what to do next.
Analysis
The relationship between identity, class, and gender is important in this chapter, as both Bennie and Stephanie experience pressure from the same people in different ways. Stephanie's experience in the Crandale community is heavily influenced by her perception of gender norms and their relationship to social class. She knows that she and the women in Crandale have almost nothing in common besides their gender, as her neighbors are all thin, white, and conservative in a way that revolts her. However, she also sees that women like her neighbor Noreen—women who don’t “join in” and refuse to conform—are treated as social pariahs and left out of everything. She feels an inherent conflict between wanting to fit in with the Crandale women so she won’t be alone, and her desire to maintain the sense of individuality she’s diligently cultivated her whole life.
This need to conform runs deep, but the women of Crandale also demonstrate it with fashion and beauty choices. Kathy and the rest of her cohort are all varying shades of honey blond highlights, but Stephanie’s aesthetic is more alternative. She’s pleased with how her cropped, dark hair and tattoos make her stand out from the other women, but she also buys a regulation white tennis dress in order to fit in. Because of this, she ends up playing tennis with Kathy, the queen bee of the Crandale set.
Kathy’s tennis game is very much like her social one. She’s deceptively skilled and absolutely ruthless, which makes Stephanie feel competitive. Stephanie’s integration into the Crandale community parallels her improvements at tennis. She’s desperate to equal and then best Kathy at her own game in every sense of the word. The men in the community apparently have no idea of the spite that underlies all of their wives’ leisure activities, and Kathy and Stephanie never openly communicate about it—it’s all implied.
The Crandale women's social and romantic interactions are also colored by midcentury American gender norms. The expensive, exclusive community values appearance and status, which for women are unfortunately always synonymous with beauty and sex appeal. For example, Kathy's unchanged body post-childbearing represents an idealized femininity that Stephanie envies. Indeed, to Stephanie, Kathy appears to look exactly the same as she might have before pregnancy, as “her prodigious childbearing had left no mark on her narrow waist and well-tanned biceps.” Though Stephanie thinks she’s more original and interesting-looking than Kathy’s soccer-mom aesthetic allows for, this jealousy and tendency to compare herself shows how deep-rooted her insecurities about her body are. Like many of the other women in Crandale, Stephanie’s husband has cheated on her previously. She worries that keeping her looks is the only way to make sure he doesn’t stray again. Relatedly, the theme of gendered beauty is closely tied to mortality and aging this chapter. Stephanie's nostalgia for her teenage years, when she was a good tennis player, is also a longing for the body she lived in as her more youthful self. She decides to become better than Kathy and to wear a white tennis dress again partially to reclaim this version of herself.
Bennie's experience also touches on the theme of appearance, though it is expressed through a ridiculous incident concerning the Crandale community's racial profiling. Bennie’s success in the record industry and his desire to fit in in their affluent new neighborhood are undermined by the community's prejudiced judgments. Because he’s visibly not white, his background makes him a target of suspicion when the news reports the presence of Al-Qaeda operatives in New York. Bennie is the only brown person there: although he is neither Al-Qaeda nor even Middle Eastern, he’s immediately scapegoated. The racial profiling he experiences at the party calls attention to the superficial nature of the acceptance he’s desperate to win. Despite his financial success, Bennie is unable to escape the biases that certain American communities have toward people of color.
