Gibbon's Decline and Fall by Sheri S. Tepper Page B

“A single woman couldn’t even get birth control at Planned Parenthood unless she already had at least one out-of-wedlock child or had a letter from a minister saying she was to be married within a week of the appointment.”
    Stace gave her a weighing glance. “Really? How did you find that out?”
    â€œHow do you think!”
    â€œI can’t believe it! You and Daddy?”
    â€œDon’t pretend you’re shocked.”
    â€œDidn’t you read books? Didn’t you see the injustice?”
    â€œWell, most of us probably read
The Feminine Mystique
, but that was later. Our consciences weren’t really raised.”
    â€œSo if you all weren’t feminists, what held you together?”
    â€œProbably my cousin Albert.” She laughed shortly, this time without amusement.
    â€œYou never told me about any cousin Albert!”
    â€œAlbert Crespin. My intended. Or, I should say, he was what my family intended for me. He’s a lawyer with the FBI. During Christmas vacation, 1959, my first year in college, he came over to the house. I was sitting on the sunporch, putting some snapshots into an album, pictures of us, the DFC. Albert leaned over my shoulder to see what I was doing. He made a sort of disapproving noise; then he put his finger on Faye’s picture, on Jessamine’s and Sophy’s. Tap, tap, tap, very annoyed little taps. He cleared his throat—Albert was always clearing his throat—and said in his pontifical voice that I should be careful about the friends I made in college, that hooking up with the ‘lesser races’ was a mistake because that’s where subversion bred.”
    â€œMom! You’re joking!”
    â€œNot even slightly. I should have ignored him. Instead I blew my stack, told him off, told him my friends were black and yellow and red, homo and hetero, pagan, agnostic, and Christian, and then I added, totally gratuitously, that we were already dedicated to the decline and fall of society, as it was, so I was a subversive already, thank you very much.”
    â€œHe must have loved that.”
    â€œHe was extremely annoyed. I wouldn’t apologize and I wouldn’t recant. My aunts even got the family priest into the act, which just intensified my fury with the world in general. That was the end of my betrothal to Albert. I even gave him his damned bracelet back.” She nodded slowly, remembering. “Things got pretty frosty at home. Mother eventually forgave me, but my aunts never did.”
    â€œSo how did that unify the club?”
    â€œAlbert had no sense of humor, so he did his duty as he saw it and started an FBI file on the DFC! Of course, J. Edgar himself was antiblack, antiminority, and antiwoman, so Albert was just being one of the boys.”
    â€œHow did you find out about it?”
    â€œYour dad told me. After his first wife died, he asked Albert where I was, and Albert told him to stay away from me because I was a subversive! Hal tried to convince Albert he should destroy the file, but I’m pretty sure Albert wouldn’t have done that. Wounded pride, if nothing else.”
    â€œMy mother, the traitor.”
    â€œYeah. Ain’t I special!” She put the photograph back where it had been. “Feminist or not, it gave the seven of us something specific to be angry about, so we had to stick together, us against the world. We never really had an agenda except our fondness for each other. What we called holding our ground. Being together.”
    And they had been together until 1998. And they still were. All of them but Sophy, the sun toward which they had turned.
    Carolyn put her comb away in a drawer, dusted the top of the dresser with a fold of her robe, frozen for a moment by her own image in the mirror. Where had this stout old lady come from? There, for a moment, she’d been twenty again.
    â€œAnd you all resolved neither to Decline nor Fall,” Stace prompted the