Grand Avenue by Joy Fielding

as Barbara, Chris, or Vicki. And certainly no one looking at Owen would fight to get into his bed. They’d chooseBarbara’s husband, Ron, because he was tall and good-looking, or Vicki’s husband, Jeremy, because he was rich and powerful, or Chris’s husband, Tony, because he was cocky and full of bravado. And they’d all choose wrong.
    In the end, we are the choices we make.
    “How are you?” her husband was asking now.
    “Good,” Susan said, a purr in her voice. “I’m good.”
    Seconds later, securely nestled inside her husband’s arms, Susan closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep.
    “In our survey of the liturgical beginnings of drama,” Professor Ian Currier was explaining to the class of approximately forty-five less than enthusiastic students, “we’ve talked about the handful of twelfth-century plays that had real artistic merit, most notably those from the Fleury playbook.”
    Susan fidgeted in her hard seat of polished wood, struggled to keep her eyes from closing. I have to get more sleep, she decided, although how she was going to accomplish this feat was open to question. Between going to classes, writing essays, studying for tests and exams, looking after two young daughters—although mercifully, Whitney was easier in every respect than Ariel, which only made Ariel all the more difficult—and making sure her husband didn’t feel neglected, Susan understood there simply weren’t enough hours in the day or, more precisely, in the night, when she needed them most. She pushed herself up straighter in her chair, arched her back, stifled a yawn, returned her attention to the soft drone of Professor Currier’s voice, a voice that all but shouted his been-there, done-that,hate-doing-it attitude. What was she doing here? Where exactly did she think a degree in English literature was going to take her?
    “Yet even the Fleury plays were tied closely to very specific liturgical occasions and were sung during intervals in regular church services,” Professor Currier continued. “As we’ll see in
The Conversion of St. Paul
, this play, which was probably staged on the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul on January twenty-fifth, adheres pretty closely to the biblical account of his conversion as related in the Acts of the Apostles.”
    Around her, Susan heard the movement of pens scurrying across paper like a bunch of tiny wild mice and realized she hadn’t copied down a thing since the lecture had begun. She opened her notebook, reached toward the large canvas bag at her feet for a pen. Immediately, she felt something glom on to her finger, like a leech from a freshwater lake, she thought, recalling the unpleasant incident from her childhood when her parents had taken Susan, along with her older brother and younger sister, to the cottage one summer, and Susan had insisted on going in the water that very first afternoon, even though her mother had cautioned there might be leeches. But Susan was too busy showing off for her little sister to fully appreciate her mother’s warning, and she’d emerged from the water with several hideous black blobs fastened to her arms and legs, only to see her little sister run from her in terror. Susan had tried pulling at them in a vain effort to dislodge them, but that only made things worse, and blood soon trickled down her limbs in thin, squiggly red lines. Her mother had explained that the horridthings couldn’t be pulled off without damaging the skin below, and that they could only be removed by a liberal sprinkling of salt. “And then you have to eat them,” her older brother had teased gleefully, sending Susan scrambling across the sand, screaming and shrieking her dismay, until her mother caught up to her and calmed her down by assuring her that if anyone was going to have to eat the nasty things, it would be her brother.
    Susan extricated her hand from her bag, relieved, yet simultaneously dismayed, by the sight of Ariel’s half-eaten orange lollipop