Connect

About the Book

Marge Evans is a woman in her mid-forties, divorced seven years, who is coordinator for CONNECT, a floundering discussion group for singles at Conover Neighborhood Center. She does not like the sometimes predatory nature of the singles scene and therefore finds some satisfaction working with the group in a coordinating capacity which can deny any role as a predator.

Jerry Fanson, more recently divorced, hesitantly and skeptically comes to CONNECT not sure of what he wants to find there and ready to dismiss them all as a group of rejects as he himself feels he is a reject.

Social worker at a family service agency dealing with abused women and children, Marge identifies to a limited extent with some of the women because of her personal experience with abuse. She has two teen-age children who are in a constant state of friction but are united in urging her, partly at least in fun, to find a man.

Autocratic director of the local library, Jerry is the father of two children ages 8 and 10, with whom he has difficulty working out an adequate relationship in regular visitation periods.

Bea, one of Marge’s clients, comes to stay at the Evans household when she can find nowhere else to go. Bea's abusing husband, Bill, finds her there and threatens violence which is turned off at the opportune arrival of Jerry who has known Bill in another capacity.

In the week following their initial meeting at CONNECT, Jerry and Marge go through alternating attraction to one another and repulsion related to their needs and fears as they attempt to work out a new relationship within the context of their ongoing professional and home environments.

They each assist the other, knowingly or unknowingly, in resolving some of their individual conflicts but their periods of being together are fraught with confusion and resulting misunderstanding. Their mixed reactions lead Marge to a desperate trip to a singles bar with some girl friends and Jerry to an evening as a fill-in male at a couple’s dinner party with friends of his former wife.

A week after their initial meeting finds them back at CONNECT, however, still hesitant but daring at last to drop the barriers which seem to divide them.

About the Author

Doris Bingham was raised in Nebraska. She was section editor at the Globe-Times, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, for fourteen years and was co-owner of the Dunlap Reporter in Iowa. She works today at the News-Times in York, Nebraska. She is author of a paperback original published in 1981 called "Lovers and Liars."