Your Life — 121 Years Ago

It’s October 15th, 1893.

You live in a small, middle class household with one servant, a mostly absentee father, and a mother who fills the role of de-facto servant number two. Newspapers seem to scream at you from the parlor or the stoop about the Colombian Exposition. The World’s Fair might as well be in Japan, for you’re not likely to attend.

You are too young and too middle class to afford the trip and besides, your father suspects that any young woman of marriageable age does not belong in a place that leads itself to easy sin and excess. You don’t disagree with him, necessarily. You understand that there are rules and consequences for breaking them and that if there was so much as a shadow of a doubt cast upon your virtue in this tight knit little Calvinist community than your future prospects would go up like so much smoke.

You know you are waiting, always, but you’re not sure what you’re waiting for.

But — young people are saying things, repeating ideas from books they aren’t supposed to read and looking forward to marriage in ways that the older generation would consider carnal and base.

There’s a girl who works in a Law Office on Main street who wears fashionable hats and neat, white pressed shirtwaist with a small pocket watch attached to her collar like a broach. Her name is Lettie, you think, but it’s difficult to catch bits of conversation regarding her person without the tone of scandal so you’re careful not to bring her up directly.

She lives in a boarding house filled with other young women of her type, The New Women, the ones who earn a salary and come and go as they please. You inquire, secretly, about correspondence courses in stenography or typewriting, but are discouraged by the equipment and cost. It is a half formed thought, but you think, perhaps, a good education at a women’s college would give you some chance of respectable work.

There is a young man who comes for dinner on Sundays and after dinner he plays popular songs on the piano in the parlor. He has fair, bright eyes and skin that blushes like health and you like him because you know you should like him. He works with your father, something to do with shipping and goods traveling from where they are made to stores where they are purchased. One night, you ask him what he does, exactly. He smile and touches your cheek, the other hand resting over the keys of the piano and says fondly, “It’s too complicated for you to understand dear. Just know there will be money and I won’t be gone as long or as often as your father is gone.”

You hate him, for a moment. The rage comes sudden, it’s surprising and unbearably intense but he isn’t paying attention any longer. There’s a song coming from his hands and you hate him. You hate him because you’ve read Darwin, can recite the Bible in Latin, and can recite the Canterbury Tales by rote. You hate him because he is a clerk and you were being polite and you know well what it is he does.

You hide it, you do it well because what else would you do?

For a week you walk in a stupor of pretending. At night, when the maid has helped you from your corset and you lay in bed, you imagine that you’re drowning. A few days later you collapses, shallow breath and pale damp skin. They say it’s something like Hysteria. Un-married, and under twenty and you are developing hysteria.

You spend more time than you should at the library, a comfort that your father could easily revoke if he feels as though it is corrupting you or causing your hysterics in some fashion. The young man, Samuel, still comes for Sunday dinner that week. It is either a sign of his devotion or ambition for your father’s small business, but he comes that evening with a proposal.

The ring is simple and thin, a cold gold band around your finger. Your mother and father say yes for you; you feign shock and coyness. There is a rare treat, wine, red and cheap, served all around.

That night you lay in bed once more and it’s not a fit you suffer, but premonitions. In the dark, you see every last day of your life, stretching until their completion.

The next day you go to the library, on the pretense of looking for a pattern book for the wedding day. The old librarian, a bushy, forgetful man, is gone. In his place is a woman not much older than you, as smartly and neatly dressed as the working girl on Main street.

“Women can become librarians?” You ask, before you realize it is forward and rude.

“Women may become many things.”

You talk for hours about her college, a women’s college, Wellesley, and the particulars of her strange and singular life. You learn it is not so uncommon in bigger places, that some women are studying with men, and graduating next to them as Doctors or lawyers.

College is expensive, you think as you walk home in the afternoon, and no one in their right mind would educate a daughter when he could marry her instead. The hope is dashed so thoroughly and soundly by the time supper is set that you are fighting to take breaths, like each mouthful of mutton, it is a chore.

Your father asks to speak to you in the den after the meal. That is his room, a man’s room, he always says. You cannot read the books there or touch his cigars nestled in their small oak casket. When you enter there, it feels heavy and forbidden.

There are pleasantries exchanged between the two of you. A man cannot speak briskly or plainly, not even with his own daughter. It riles you, you find that bright hot spot of injustice and rage once more and swallow it like a burning pill.

“You should think more on what it is to be a wife. I fear you’ll be unhappy- and my dearest wish is that you will not be so. Speak less than you do, read far fewer books, or look to the guides of comely behavior within the domestic realm.”

You cannot remember what you say to him, but it is light and obedient and there is bile behind it, bile so sweetly hidden that it burns you, rather than he it is intended for.

Before you faint from lack of air, he tells you one more thing. There is money, a vast sum of it, in fact. It is yours, or rather, it is the property of your new household. He takes pains not to consider it a dowry, such an old fashioned practice. He would like her to be comfortable in those first years of marriage — it will- he says- be difficult enough for you as it is.

Three weeks later the white lace for your veil arrives with news of your father’s death. He was sailing on a steamer along the coast and it hit some rough water. Not all of the bodies were discovered, your mother weeps and thanks God that you are all fortunate enough to him to bury.

Samuel takes liberties you should not, he is too close to you, touches you too often during the funeral and insists on helping with any arrangements he may. Finally, you tell him that you must be left with your grief and you hand him his rang tied on a black ribbon. He is angry, but there are too many male relatives in the parlor for him to express the truth raging in his pale eyes.

The money for your dowry is yours, legally. Your father had it entrusted to you in case he died before seeing you married. It sits, a leaden weight in deposit as you wear your mourning weeds. When the letter from Wellesley arrives, your acceptance, your father has lain cold in the ground for three months.

You accept, replace your black gowns with the light tailored jacket and shirtsleaves of the librarian and the working girl, and then you leave.