Back in Little Rock, I found myself stepping out on David. I would go down to the Garhole, as a customer now, and, along with an old friend, Linda Ferguson who went to high school with me, we would pick up men. All my cheating were one-night stands.

I can hear you asking why would you cheat on a man who had saved your children for you? Was the problem sex? Did you feel neglected? Was he cruel to you in any way? None of these things apply.

I know this is going to sound weird but I cheated on David because I didn’t want to feel beholden to him for returning my older boys to me. I cheated on him because I needed to prove to myself that I was bound to no one. I cheated on him for his fucking saintliness. David thought he was rescuing me, but he was wrong. He never really understood how important my freedom is to me, and until then neither did I.

We lived in Little Rock for two years. David wrote editorials for the Arkansas Gazette. He wrote a piece on poverty in America for The Atlantic magazine that got him the job of director of the anti-poverty program in Pulaski County, which included Little Rock, North Little Rock, and the surrounding area. The year was 1964, the time of the civil rights movement. All sorts of young people from New York, working summers for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, were popping into and out of our house. David was conspiring to try to get them money for their projects.

A year or so later we moved to Chicago, where, through a man named Harry Ashmore, David got a job at Encyclopedia Britannica. He bought a house in suburb called Berwyn. Even though there weren’t any Jews, he moved us to Berwyn because two of my cousins, Pat and Shirley, my father’s brother Archy’s daughters, lived there; Archy had come up to Chicago after the war, and worked for General Electric in Cicero. David thought it might be more comfortable for me to have these cousins nearby. He must have sensed that our marriage was coming apart. I don’t know how much he really loved me, I do know that David hated failure, and among his hates a failed marriage scored high.

David was always telling me how smart I was, and at one point he suggested that I enroll in college. But where was I to find the patience at this point to sit in classrooms with kids fifteen years younger than me answering dopey questions and writing hopeless papers? I signed up for secretarial school, but lasted less than a month. My patience was growing less the older I got. Mostly I shopped, looking for antiques in second-hand furniture shops. Some days I would find myself at the Anti-Cruelty Society, from which twice I brought home dogs, one a storybook mutt named Luv, another time a large collie left by a young man who had to go off to Vietnam. We kept Luv, but David insisted I take back the collie.

I had all my sons, I had a lovely house, I had a successful husband, I had my cousins living nearby, but none of it did the trick. I began going out evenings, at first telling David I was visiting friends I had met at Anti-Cruelty. I don’t think he believed me from the first, and he certainly didn’t when I would return home at four in the morning. Once I told him that my mother was ill, and I needed to be with her for a week or so after she returned home from breast-cancer surgery. In fact, I used the ten days to drive down to New Orleans, and called him from there, telling him that my parents’ phone was out of order.

It was the late 1960s and feminism was in the air. I can’t say that I bought all the ideas bopping around about the suppression of women, the hopelessness of being a wife and mother, and the rest, but it did strengthen me in my decision to leave David. When we finally sat down to work out the details, he suggested that I take Donald and Allen and leave Richard and Joel, his own kids, with him.