Chapter 2 Emily #2
“I think you have some time,” her father said reassuringly. “He’s saving for the ring now, but it’s coming. So you’re going to need to decide what your answer will be, my girl. Have you talked to him about what you want? About Chatelaine?”
Emily shook her head.
“You’re going to need to do that. You must do that.”
“But how can I tell him, Dad?” Emily pleaded, anger and fear and resentment all twisting together in her tone.
“How can I tell him that I want more than what he can offer? That I want this career? That any marriage I enter into will only be a part of my life, and not its entirety? What man is going to want to hear that?”
William sighed heavily. “Well, I can’t say that he’ll want to hear it. But he’s going to have to. And I think, if he asks for your hand and you say no…you have to tell him why. You’ve been going together long enough that he deserves an explanation.”
Emily hung her head. “I know.”
“Tell him what you just told me. And he’ll either accept those terms, or he won’t.”
“And if he won’t?” Emily asked, deflated. She felt tears prick at her eyes.
William shrugged. “Then he’s not the man for you. Then you both move on.” He looked strained, and Emily realized that he was wrestling with her situation almost as much as she was.
“But, might I suggest,” he said, squinting thoughtfully, “that you speak to Doris about this?”
Emily looked up, startled. “Speak to my boss? About Jem?”
“Yes. I think you’d be interested to hear her opinion.
Doris Anderson also had a rather…unconventional life trajectory, and has landed where she is.
She’s managed to do everything she does while also having a family.
So if that’s where you want to end up, go talk to the person who’s done it.
Just like with any other interview: get your facts straight, hear their story, then see what you take from it. ”
The cuckoo clock on the wall in the dining room ticked away the seconds.
Emily tried to tune it out, tried to ignore the physical manifestation of the countdown that was now going to dictate her life in the coming weeks.
She cleared her stuck throat. “Mom in the kitchen?” she asked, to change the subject.
“Yup,” her dad said, leaning back again in his chair. “Cooking for an army.”
Emily stood, brushed his shoulder affectionately and wandered through the living room into the kitchen at the back of the house. Her heart fluttered with nerves. She wished Jem wasn’t coming tonight; she needed time to think.
“Hi Mom,” she said, greeting Bess, who was busy at the stove, her black hair frizzing in the steam issuing from a pot.
“Hello, darling,” her mother called, flashing a quick smile over her shoulder before attacking something with a whisk.
“How was work?” Emily opened her mouth to answer but Bess kept talking.
“Ellie will be here at six with the brood. Have you heard from Jeremy? He’s still coming, isn’t he?
I know how he loves bourguignon. I do too, really. ” She chuckled.
“Yes, he’s coming,” Emily said, working to keep the weariness from her voice. “He called the office on my lunch break.”
“Oh good! That’s nice that he calls, isn’t it?”
Emily half smiled, but didn’t answer, which prompted her mother to glance over her shoulder again, as though to check that Emily was, indeed, in agreement.
She knew Bess thought she was never enthusiastic enough about her boyfriend, whom Bess loved.
They were “Jem and Em,” a tidy little rhyming set.
“Your father used to come pick me up sometimes, after work, when we were courting. It was ever so lovely to know he’d been thinking about me over the day.”
Bess set down the whisk and came over to Emily, patting a stray wisp of hair back and smoothing her apron as she walked.
She always wore that faded red apron, even in the few hours during the day when she wasn’t cooking or cleaning up after a meal.
She’d worn it from breakfast through bedtime for as long as Emily could remember, and Emily wondered whether her mother had just become so used to trying to protect her clothing from the messes created by two young girls that the apron had ingrained itself as part of her wardrobe forevermore.
Emily smiled tightly at Bess, who was a couple of inches shorter than she was.
Bess had been a real beauty in the height of her youth, before exuberant twins and a husband away at war had added wrinkles to her forehead and dulled the sparkle in her eyes.
She was still lovely-looking, though, and was one of those people whose features shone so much brighter when they smiled. She embraced Emily.
“Is Nana coming tonight?” Emily asked when they pulled apart.
Bess’s parents lived in a small apartment a few blocks away, paid for in part by Emily’s parents.
Her papa hadn’t worked since the first war left him “unsuited to employment,” as Bess said, always with a pinch of her lips.
Emily was fond of her nana, but hardly knew her papa at all.
“No, not tonight,” Bess said. “Her asthma’s too bad. But I’m planning to take her out for a nice walk on Sunday, if you’d like to join. Maybe see if the cherry blossoms are out yet in High Park. She always loves that.”
Emily nodded. “What can I do to help now, then?” she asked, doing her best to shake off Jem’s impending arrival. She wished that she could duck out of this dinner entirely, but that wasn’t an option.
“Well, if you want to change,” Bess said, “then set the table, that would be lovely. Red-wine glasses tonight, please.”
Emily made her way up the narrow staircase to her bedroom at the end of the hall. She shut the door behind her, then sat down on the bed with a creak of aging springs.
Her well-loved writing desk was now where Ellie’s bed used to be throughout their childhood, all the way up until the day she got married to Harry, just shy of the girls’ twentieth birthday.
Emily had inherited the entire room then, which at the time felt both liberating and lonely.
Despite their many differences, Eleanor and Emily shared a multitude of twin commonalities and, standing up at the altar with her sister as she vowed love and obedience to her new husband, Emily couldn’t help but feel a creeping sense of abandonment that had only deepened as Ellie was drawn further into marriage and motherhood.
Emily felt a little left behind, but not in a way that bothered her; it was just as though Ellie had taken a one-way trip to a country Emily didn’t have the least interest in.
But she still missed her sister, and looked forward to the postcards.
She ran a hand over the bedspread now, still the same one from her teen years, faded and patched in several places.
There were vestiges of her childhood everywhere; it wasn’t a grown woman’s bedroom.
A pink musical jewellery box still stood atop the dresser, dusty and silent, and the children’s books of their youth—Winnie-the-Pooh, the Anne of Green Gables series, and Emily’s favourites, the Nancy Drew mysteries—were still stashed under the bed.
Eleanor preferred the Little House on the Prairie books, stories of domestic adventure, while Emily craved the daring and dangerous feats of the blond teenage sleuth.
She made a note to give a few of the children’s stories to her nephew Charlie.
Her eyes moved to the bookshelf, where the adult books were lined up: Shakespeare plays, of course, and Wilde.
Jules Verne and Virginia Woolf. Lots of non-fiction, and the memoir of one of Emily’s journalism heroes, Nellie Bly.
Emily sighed. A part of her wished she could have an apartment of her own.
She had an income, and probably could have afforded a small studio, but it wasn’t something single women did.
She felt too old to live with her parents, and too young to stay with them indefinitely in a state of dependent spinsterhood.
She’d read about some modern unmarried women striking out on their own.
That American Marjorie Hillis had written a bestselling book about her experience as a successful “live-alone” woman.
Emily thought of her conversation with Doris, who was so confident that real change was coming for women, that all it needed was a big enough push.
But what form would that “push” eventually come in, and what would be the catalyst?
There must be other women out there also bursting with dissatisfaction with their lives.
Surely enough of them pushing together could effect some sort of change.
Someone should write a book about that, Emily thought.
Marriage could not be the only option for women. It simply couldn’t. And her career at Chatelaine, as a journalist, felt like a secret passage to something more, if she had the wits to take it.
But for now, this was her home, her reality.
Twenty minutes later, freshly changed into a plaid skirt and yellow blouse, Emily had just placed the last of the dessert forks on the lace tablecloth when the doorbell rang.
She glanced up at the clock on the dining room wall: it was six on the nose.
Jem was always on time, a trait she appreciated in him.
She thought tardiness signalled a lack of respect.
There wasn’t anything “fashionable” about making other people wait, as though your time were more valuable than theirs.
“I’ll get it,” she called, padding her way down the hall to the front door.
She composed herself before opening it to find Jem standing on the stoop, looking smart, bottle of wine in hand.
He was clean-shaven and smelled of earthy cologne.
His infectious smile stretched ear to ear at the sight of Emily, which made her both swell with friendly affection and squirm with guilt.
“Hi Em,” he said, leaning in to kiss her on the cheek. “I think the Chisholms will be here in a moment—I saw them circling for a parking space.”
Emily beckoned him in, silently shocked that Eleanor and her family had arrived on time for once. With the children, they were always at least ten minutes late.
An hour later, she was grateful that they’d finally reached the dessert course, Bess’s neighbourhood-famous baked Alaska.
Charlie, age three, was currently trying to smear chocolate ice cream into his hair.
Bess intercepted with a napkin as Eleanor bounced an impatient Jeannie on her knee, attempting to spoon her bits of rice which she was loudly resisting.
The men were all on to their after-dinner Scotch as they discussed the bank merger.
Emily sipped her coffee as calmly as she could with one hand.
Her left was gripped in Jem’s heavy palm on the table between them, and for the past five minutes he’d been gently running his thumb along her ring finger.
She had no idea if it was intentional or not.
All she knew was that she wanted him to stop.
“How are things at the office?” Eleanor asked over Jeannie’s continued whines as Bess rose to go refresh the coffee pot.
Emily glanced across the table at her sister.
She looked buried. Buried, quite literally, beneath the wiggling child on her lap, and the weight of her married life.
Though they were identical twins, Ellie’s life had already aged her.
For Emily, it was like looking into some mystical mirror that showed her future self, if she were to take the path that was expected of her.
It was there in the puffiness around Eleanor’s eyes that she couldn’t quite mask with makeup; the exhaustion of sleepless nights pursued by relentlessly busy days of homemaking and childminding; in the tight roll of hair at the back of her neck that was always locked in with three layers of hairspray, as though she might be able to hold up the load of her life on that weight-bearing bun if only she could twist it tight enough.
It was there in the subtle downturn of her mouth, the frown that had been present since Charlie was born and she’d silently battled “the baby blues,” as their mother had called Eleanor’s melancholy, whispering the term low into Emily’s ear—some women’s password that Emily was meant to understand, but didn’t.
Emily took another sip of her coffee. “They’re good,” she said. “I really enjoy it. Doris just gave me a small article, so I’m working my way up to more challenging things.”
Eleanor watched her through those tired eyes and nodded. “I’m glad for you, Em,” she said, then glanced subtly at Jem, whose eyes were on Harry as he weighed in with an opinion at the men’s end of the table. “Do you think you’ll stay?” she added, quieter.
Emily opened her mouth to reply in the affirmative, thinking at first that Eleanor was referring to Chatelaine.
But her sister’s eyes flicked once more to Jem.
Though she had taken a very different path, Ellie knew what Emily’s career meant to her; knew that to remain at Chatelaine, Emily couldn’t stay with Jem.
Emily licked her dry lips. I don’t know, she mouthed.