Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [52]
She loved him terribly; her moods fluctuated between undiluted joy and pure sorrow, always, it seemed to Alice, dependant on him. Mary tried to act calm about it, but she was certain his family would never accept their marriage. Sometimes she wept in bed, and Alice wondered if this was really what being in love did to a person. If so, love seemed downright dreadful.
Alice worried too—she wanted her sister to marry him, perhaps as much as Mary herself wanted it. Once Mary married Henry, she would give their mother grandchildren. Then maybe Alice could go off and do as she liked. Henry and Mary would give her money when she was starting out, and Henry might have more friends like Richard, who wanted to buy her work.
Somehow Mary kept up with all her duties around the house—cooking dinner and sewing and cleaning up the parlor. She rarely invited Henry over. Alice assumed this was because their home wasn’t grand enough, and also because of the way their father was likely to behave. On the one hand, she understood. But on the other, she couldn’t help but feel a bit insulted. Mary cared so much about what Henry thought. It was as if she lived in two worlds at once, and Alice just happened to be a part of the world Mary was trying to leave behind. Still, she reminded herself of what Henry had said: One day they would all go to Paris.
Alice had begun to see her friends grow giddy and joyful about their weddings. Even Trudy from the party line had met a nice young army doctor and was moving out to a house in Winthrop (this felt almost like a betrayal to Alice, though she knew her reaction was foolish).
Alice wanted no part of being a wife, cooped up in some house full of rug rats, constantly serving a man you liked less and less with each passing year. But she was twenty-two, and it seemed once a girl reached a certain age, that’s what everyone expected her to do. Dating had become a chore because of it. She had always had suitors, and she still went on dates. But the boys who courted her now were mostly the same old ones she had known in high school, and they came through only briefly, on leave, or else there was something plain wrong with them—a vision defect or a skittishness that meant they weren’t even fit for war.
Plenty of boys wrote her letters. A few, who she had been out with only once or twice, now wrote to tell her they were in love and wanted to make an honest woman out of her when they got home. She’d do her duty by writing back, but always remind them that absence made the heart grow fonder, and it had never really been all that rosy when they went to the movies, or to the ice cream parlor, way back when.
In the bedroom closet, Alice had stashed a paperback copy of Live Alone and Like It, the book she had heard Trudy raving about over the phone. She often riffled through its pages, reading a line aloud to her sister: living alone, according to Vogue editor Marjorie Hillis, was “as nice, perhaps, as any other way of living, and infinitely nicer than living with too many people or with the wrong single individual.”
One night Alice read to Mary in bed in an exaggerated, glamorous voice, a bit like Trudy’s: “You can, in fact, indulge yourself unblushingly—an engaging procedure which few women alone are smart enough to follow. Even unselfishness requires an opponent—like most of the worthwhile things in life. Living alone, you can—within your own walls—do as you like. The trick is to arrange your life so that you really do like it.”
She looked up from the pages smiling, imagining an apartment full of clean linens, pink bath towels, and untouched canvases ready to be painted, all hers.
“Can you imagine?” she said to Mary.
Mary shook her head, looking a bit sad. “I wouldn’t like it,” she said. “I want to live with someone, always.”
Alice sighed. “I know you do.”
Her sister grew silent, and after a moment Alice realized that she had begun to cry.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Never mind, go to sleep.”
“Mary. What?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Go on.”
“I’ve done things