Eligible (57 page)
Authors: Curtis Sittenfeld
“I WAS UNDER
the impression that this was a terrible show,” Darcy said seven minutes into
Eligible: Chip & Jane’s Road to the Altar.
“But it’s literally unwatchable.”
“Not literally,” Liz said. “Your eyeballs aren’t melting.”
They were curled into each other on the couch, a blanket spread over them; it was early April and still cool in Cincinnati.
With his fingertips, Darcy pulled down the skin around the sockets of his eyes. “Are you sure?”
“I’ll make you a deal,” Liz said. “If you promise to stick with it for the next three nights, I’ll never try to get you to watch
Eligible
ever again.”
Darcy grinned. “Do you think that’s tempting? It’s not like I’m obligated to watch anyway.”
“You kind of are,” Liz said. “Because you’re in it, and so am I, and we’re the loves of each other’s lives.”
Darcy leaned in and kissed her. “We are the loves of each other’s lives,” he said. “But that has nothing to do with
Eligible.
”
What Liz didn’t yet know, but would discover imminently, was that the humiliation of
Eligible: Chip & Jane’s Road to the Altar
belonged primarily to her. She, her sisters, and Chip’s sisters would all appear onscreen with chyrons showing not only their names but also—perhaps in the interest of distinguishing this bevy of women—their identities, or some stereotypical version of their identities bestowed with minimal regard for fact. Brooke Bingley was “The Stay-at-Home Mom,” which was accurate enough, but Caroline Bingley was “The Romantic.” Lydia Bennet was “The Free Spirit,” Kitty was “The Entrepreneur,” Mary was “The Scholar,” and Liz (oh, how this stung!) was “The Party Girl.” Shortly after a clip in which Kitty declared, “What I’m really interested in long-term is opening a chain of salons that cater not just to physical beauty but also to inner well-being,” Liz showed up saying, “I’d describe myself as a focused, down-to-earth person,” and there ensued a montage of her gulping wine, pounding shots, and at one point not just holding but drinking from two separate champagne flutes. Which had actually happened at the wedding reception, but only because she’d picked up a glass for her mother as well as herself, her mother’s had been excessively full, and Liz had been trying to prevent it from spilling.
Naturally, the confrontation she’d had with Caroline appeared in its entirety, contextualized in advance by Caroline trashing Liz during multiple interviews and describing with surprising frankness, if a delusion could ever be called frank, her belief that she and Darcy were meant to be together. A camera crew had, albeit without sound and from a distance of perhaps forty feet, caught Liz’s proposal to Darcy and their subsequent embrace; both were interspersed with Caroline crying furiously, as if she were observing the scene firsthand, which Liz strongly doubted had happened. But maybe weeping on-camera had been the price Caroline was required to pay in order to become the star of the next season of
Eligible;
the announcement of her role, reflecting the first time in
Eligible
history that a sibling pair had starred one after the other, would come the following week.
Liz had assumed she wasn’t interesting enough to warrant a prominent role in the wedding special, given that she was pushing forty, was in neither a transgender nor even an interracial relationship, and didn’t don a bikini. That she’d been mistaken might have been flattering if it weren’t so embarrassing.
“I don’t think I can ever leave this apartment again,” she would tell Darcy. “Aren’t you mortified that people will know you’re engaged to the Party Girl?” (They were to marry in August at Knox Church. They’d considered holding the ceremony at Pemberley, just before the estate was passed off to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, but Liz had reasoned that it was her mother who cared most about the proceedings, and due to a once-unimaginable confluence of circumstances, Liz found herself the daughter best suited to making Mrs. Bennet’s every wedding dream come true. So why not?)
Darcy would look amused. He’d say, “Who cares what anyone thinks?” He’d kiss Liz’s forehead and add, “Besides, who wouldn’t want to marry the Party Girl?”
IT WAS MARY’S
firm belief that any woman capable of satisfying her own desires—which, though not all of them knew it, was any woman anywhere—would never need to disgrace herself in the pursuit of a man. The nine-inch dildo Lydia had boasted of sounded garish, but after experimenting over the years, Mary had settled upon a sleek and ergonomic vibrator with five modes of stimulation, powered by an almost silent motor. She used it nightly before bed, and sometimes in the morning as well, after her alarm went off for her job as a sales account manager at Procter & Gamble.
For her undergraduate degree, Mary had attended Macalester College, where she had been involved, sequentially, with two men and one woman, and the collective lesson she had learned from them was that she cared little for sex and even less for sharing a bed. Back then, before hookup websites became common, physical intimacy involved such rigmarole—you might start on meals and conversations with someone weeks or months prior to them providing you with any true gratification, and even then, gratification wasn’t guaranteed; it was all incredibly inefficient. As for sharing a bed, the other person’s snores and blanket hogging, the small talk you needed to make when going to sleep or waking up—really, what was the point? Mary preferred to spread out alone on a mattress, turning the light off or on when she pleased.
Explaining her view to her sisters, or to anyone else, was out of the question. Everyone she knew was preoccupied with coupling, either for themselves or for others, and Mary understood that trying to persuade them would be an exercise not only in futility but also in tedium. (And with regard to exercising: That was something else Mary didn’t do, nor did she diet, shave her legs or underarms, pluck her eyebrows, or wear makeup. She showered daily, brushed her teeth, and applied deodorant, a routine she deemed more than adequate in terms of holding up her end of society’s hygiene bargain.)
Though Mary knew that her sisters considered her strange, and would consider her more so were she to articulate her true outlook, she observed with a nearly anthropological derision their elaborate fitness rituals and fakely scented lotions and the hours—nay, years—they devoted to making some man see them in a particular way; they reminded her of plastic ballerinas inside music boxes, twirling in their private orbits of narcissism.
She did not detest her sisters, she did not consider them evil—certainly shallow, but not evil—and yet if she weren’t related to them, she wouldn’t spend time in their company. Then again, she wouldn’t spend time in the company of most people.
Even the members of her bowling league, who were the closest approximation Mary came to a community, weren’t individuals she saw except on Tuesday nights. Mary’s team consisted of two other women and two men, and the next youngest person after her was eighteen years her senior. Among their appealing qualities was that Mary stood no chance of encountering any of them at the Cincinnati Country Club.
Really, it was the sport rather than the people that drew Mary week in and week out to Madison Bowl. Every time she entered the building, with its scent of gymnasium and french fries, its rhythmic knocking of heavy polyurethane against wood, excitement activated her salivary glands.
If the first episode of
Eligible: Chip & Jane’s Road to the Altar
had fallen on a night other than Tuesday, Mary might have watched it or she might not have; the decision would have depended on what else she had in the way of P & G deadlines or pleasure reading. As it was, the first episode did air on a Tuesday, and Mary didn’t for a moment consider skipping bowling. Thus, at the exact moment her image first flashed on screens all over the country (“Mary Bennet: ‘The Scholar’ ”), she was waiting her turn in lane 10. When Felicia, who was Mary’s teammate and a fifty-seven-year-old special education teacher, moved out of the way, Mary walked to the ball return, inserted her fingers into her ball (she used one that weighed fourteen pounds), lifted it from the rack, purposefully approached the foul line while extending her right arm behind her, kept her gaze on the pins, and released. The ball surged down the oiled wood lane. In the seconds just before it collided with the pins, Mary knew that a strike would occur, and then it happened: All the pins fell, and when they did, it was so, so satisfying. As the pinsetter descended, Mary balled her right hand, bent her arm, and pulled it back in fist-pumping victory. Her sisters, she thought, could have their crushes and courtships, their histrionics and reconciliations. For Mary, this was heaven.
For Samuel Park,
Austen devotee and beloved friend
Acknowledgments
I’m incredibly lucky to work closely with a trio of strong, smart, funny women: my agent, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh; my editor, Jennifer Hershey; and my publicist, Maria Braeckel.
For advocating on my behalf, and for being people with whom it’s always a pleasure to interact, I’m thankful to many others at WME, including Cathryn Summerhayes, Raffaella DeAngelis, Tracy Fisher, Alicia Gordon, Erin Conroy, Suzanne Gluck, Eve Attermann, Eric Zohn, Maggie Shapiro, Katie Giarla, and Elizabeth Goodstein.
At Random House, I have benefited enormously from the support and wisdom of Gina Centrello, Avideh Bashirrad, Theresa Zoro, Sally Marvin, Leigh Marchant, Susan Kamil, Tom Perry, Sanyu Dillon, Caitlin McCaskey, Anastasia Whalen, Anne Speyer, Allyson Lord, Christine Mykityshyn, Janet Wygal, Bonnie Thompson, Alaina Waagner, Maggie Oberrender, Paolo Pepe, Robbin Schiff, and Liz Eno.
In the U.K., I’m indebted to Louisa Joyner and Katie Espiner, who approached me with the idea for this book, as well as to Kate Elton, Jaime Frost, Suzie Dooré, Cassie Brown, and Charlotte Cray at Borough Press, who saw it through to the end. I am appreciative of my friends at Transworld, among them Marianne Velmans and Patsy Irwin, who permitted a professional excursion.
My generous-hearted early readers include Emily Miller, Susanna Daniel, Samuel Park, Jynne Dilling Martin, Sheena Cook, Eric Bennett, Rory Evans, Anne Morriss, Susan Marrs, Tiernan Sittenfeld, Jo Sittenfeld, and, for being my go-to expert on all things Cincinnati, P.G. Sittenfeld. My parents, Paul and Betsy Sittenfeld, are not (thank goodness) to be confused with Fred and Sally Bennet, though I’m pretty sure they’ve all encountered one another at a cocktail party. My husband, Matt, and our children are my favorite midwesterners.
I enjoyed entertaining conversations and tasty snacks with my Austen book club: Hillary Sale, Maggie Penn, Becky Patel, Stephanie Park Zwicker, Jane Price, Susan Appleton, Susan Stiritz, and Kristin Maher.
I feel great fondness for the people who know more about certain subjects than I do, and who let me pick their brains, often in extensive detail: Ben Hatta, Jute Ramsay, Elizabeth Randolph, Liz Rohrbaugh, Mariagiovanna Baccara, Bruce Hall, Wyman Morriss, Cynthia Wichelman, Craig Zaidman, Stephanie Park Zwicker (again!), Maurizio Corbetta, John Stewart, Jarek Steele, Kris Kleindienst, and Tricia Sanders.
In terms of research, I also want to acknowledge my use of the website for Filoli, in Woodside, California, and of an October 2014
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
article about spiders by Susan Weich.
Transgender 101: A Simple Guide to a Complex Issue
is in fact a real book by Nicholas M. Teich.
Finally, I hope it goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: I am very grateful to Jane Austen, whose books have brought delight to many readers, including me.
BY CURTIS SITTENFELD
Eligible
Sisterland
American Wife
The Man of My Dreams
Prep
About the Author
C
URTIS
S
ITTENFELD
is the bestselling author of the novels
Prep, The Man of My Dreams, American Wife,
and
Sisterland,
which have been translated into twenty-five languages. Her nonfiction has been published widely, including in
The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, Vanity Fair,
and
Glamour
and broadcast on public radio’s
This American Life.
A native of Cincinnati, she currently lives with her family in St. Louis.
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