Wife & Wife

Wife & Wife opens in 2011 with eighty-one-year-old Ruth Wolfe standing outside the New York City Clerk’s Office on the first day same-sex marriage is legal in New York. She watches gay couples emerge newly married, applauded by supporters and heckled by protesters. The sight stirs in her wonder, fear, envy, and disbelief: after a lifetime of secrecy, the idea of two women being publicly and legally wives feels almost unreal.

The novel then moves back to Ruth’s youth in the late 1940s. Ruth is a Jewish teenager in Rhode Island whose life has been shaped by grief and emotional deprivation. Her beloved father, Aaron, dies suddenly of a heart attack when she is twelve, leaving Ruth alone with her difficult, brilliant mother, Ida. Ida is a psychiatrist and one of the first female doctors in Rhode Island, but she is emotionally remote, practical to the point of cruelty, and often unable to give Ruth the tenderness she needs. After Aaron’s death, Ida takes a job at a psychiatric hospital, and Ruth grows up on the hospital grounds, lonely, embarrassed, and starved for affection.

At school, Ruth meets Irene during tennis class. Their friendship quickly becomes flirtatious, then romantic and sexual. Ruth experiences with Irene a kind of desire and recognition she has never known before. At the same time, she begins to understand how dangerous that desire is in the world she inhabits. Newspaper stories about “homosexuals” being arrested, fired, and publicly shamed frighten her. A psychology book tells her there are “no happy homosexuals,” but Ruth notices that even this hateful text admits some homosexuals claim to be happy. That possibility stays with her.