Abigail was at her most effective when she worked behind the scenes, using her good judgment and good manners and not getting swallowed up by negative thoughts or her own biases. She’d learned about unconscious biases in a mandatory human resources training at her former place of employment, Silliman School. At first, she resisted implementing the training, feeling put upon as if the entire staff training exercise was aimed at Abigail and her so-called “snobbery.” (Paige, the librarian, felt that Abigail snubbed her once in the dairy section at Stew Leonard’s because she went to public school back in the day. “Nonsense,” she told her boss when questioned about the off-site incident. “The only reason she got into Yale was because she went to public school. How could I hold that against her?”)

But it was when she took the job at the Black Rock Senior Center that she started to understand the concept. Everybody there was not like her. She was the outlier in terms of race, background, or education. She watched how her young boss treated everyone with the same level of respect and authenticity and started to mimic her behavior. She found that opening up her mind had opened up her world. And that, to her surprise, she enjoyed herself among these interesting, fun, smart people who worked and played at the BRSC. Like she was starting to enjoy Alexa and the Merry Widows, who also had a dialect of their own.

“Abby, open your eyes and use what’s in front of you,” she said out loud to herself. Now she had to look at her own biases against Penny—not from Connecticut, not from a family known to them, not blond—and reexamine them. The answer to fixing the situation was probably hiding in plain sight.

When she first met George all those decades ago, she felt an immediate comfort level with him because they spoke the same language, a particular Connecticut/New York/New Jersey dialect of prep schools and private clubs and Main Line colleges (Bryn Mawr for her, Haverford for him.) The crossover of mutual friends and connections and fashion sense created a safety net under their relationship. What could go wrong with so much in common? They felt secure in the knowledge that they would make a good pair.

It was only deeper into their marriage that Abigail realized that the similarity of their backgrounds resulted in the same faults, like an unwillingness to talk openly about money or sex or really anything that was slightly uncomfortable or risky. She and George both valued discretion, but where was the fun in that? She once tried introducing scented candles in the bedroom for their Saturday night nooky and it was too much for her husband, both the light and the scent. They went back to an unscented, lights-off interaction.