Persuaded

by Alicia J. Chumney

  Elizabeth, being Elizabeth, seized the chance to grab a pint of Strawberry Cheesecake for herself.

  “Hey,” she whispered, barely knocking on the door as she pushed it open to notice that Anne was still curled up in bed. “This might help.”

  “Bunny Tracks?”

  “There’s some Moose Tracks and Phish Food downstairs if you would rather have more chocolate,” Elizabeth told her.

  “Thank you.”

  “We’ve all had our own broken hearts,” was all her sister said before disappearing out of the room.

  It was probably the only time Anne could ever recall her sister being so caring towards her. Not that Elizabeth was a mean sister, only she tended to look towards her own best interest than worry about others.

  Granted, according to Elizabeth’s line of thinking, the sooner Anne recovered from the initial pain of her heartbreak, the sooner Anne would be able to resume her normal routine which included the cooking and cleaning.

  Part Two

  Five Years Later

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “What do you mean we are broke!?!” Elizabeth screeched. Anne nearly expected the glasses on the table and in the cabinet to shatter from the high-pitched sounds that managed to escape from her sister’s mouth.

  Fortunately, the glasses did not shatter, the orange juice stayed in its glasses and did not form a sticky mess for Anne to clean up later…

  Until Elizabeth’s water glass was launched through the air where it crashed against the wall, leaving behind a wet, glass-embedded spot in the drywall.

  Getting up to clean the mess before somebody stepped on it, Anne didn't even bother to point out that Elizabeth should clean it up. Elizabeth never cleaned up after herself and earlier attempts to get her to do so resulted in an even bigger mess and a childish tantrum until the next time the maids came by for their weekly cleaning.

  “The maids can get it,” Walter Elliot halted his middle daughter’s progress.

  “They came yesterday,” Anne reminded him. “And if I don't clean it up nobody will and somebody will cut their foot on that glass.”

  “Why are we talking about a stupid glass when Father just told us that we are broke?” Elizabeth screeched.

  Anne paused, wondering why a broken glass bothered her more than her father's announcement. “Because if someone steps on that glass, we'll have an emergency room visit that we can't afford.”

  What she really wanted to say was that their father was broke and she had no intention of allowing his poor financial actions to dictate her future plans. She might have had to drop out of her first-choice art school all because Elizabeth – the college dropout who was more than willing to help spend their father into the poorhouse – had been incapable of taking care of then sixteen-year-old Mary. She still had what was left in her college fund – it was now half in her name – and the trust fund that her mother had left each of her daughters.

  The trust fund that could not be touched until they either turned twenty-five or were married, at least Anne assumed based on Elizabeth’s complaints.

  “We have health insurance,” Elizabeth growled.

  It did occur to Anne that Elizabeth, or their father for that matter, was more than likely to forget that she’d had a tantrum, had ruined the wall, that there was broken glass underfoot. She would be the person most likely to step on that broken glass and, of course, she would then blame Anne for not cleaning up her own mess

  “Do we have enough money to keep paying the monthly premiums?” Anne countered instead.

  Both girls looked at their father. Walter Elliot gulped. Normally he would side with his eldest, but Anne had a good point. Shrugging, he answered, “I don't know.”

  “Then I am going to clean up Elizabeth’s mess,” Anne stated, keeping her real thoughts to herself. Somebody needed to be calm and rational instead of throwing a massive fit.

  “But that’s the maids’ job!” Elizabeth protested.

  “Elizabeth,” Anne tried to calmly explain. “If we cannot afford health insurance then we most definitely cannot afford the maid service. And even if we could, they will not be here until next week. Somebody will step on that glass and it will hurt. So, either you can clean up your broken glass or you can go into Father’s office and find out just how bad everything is. You have the head for numbers and finances.”

  Holding her breath, Anne waited for her sister’s response. Elizabeth was constantly throwing her mathematical abilities in her younger sisters’ faces; she might as well use those brains for something useful.

  The news got worse after Elizabeth had calmed down and taken a moment to sort through their father’s financial records.

  Striding into Anne’s room where she was looking over her supply lists for her fall classes, Elizabeth bluntly stated, “It’s worse than Father told us. He mortgaged the house shortly before Mother died, and after he stopped talking to Uncle Warren and they dissolved the partnership.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “I guess insurance didn’t pay all of Mother’s expenses,” Elizabeth shrugged. “The good news is, you have enough money in your college fund that we can easily pay off the remaining balance of the house and…”

  “But it’s my college fund,” Anne protested. “I need that money to finish college.”

  “Oh, don’t be a bitch, Anne,” Elizabeth snapped. “Father will lose the house without that money. We both know that he won’t be going back into practice after six years out of it.”

  Anne had so many things she wanted to say. Elizabeth had transferred her own college fund over to her checking account the day after she turned twenty-one. Mary had been gifted her college fund as a wedding present.

  But no, Anne, with one year left, was being asked to give up her college fund. The college fund that technically still had her father’s name attached to it. She really should have put it solely in her name almost two years ago when she turned twenty-one.

  “But how will I finish my last year if I can’t pay for it?”

  Waving a hand in dismissal, Elizabeth countered with, “Get a scholarship or a loan or something.”

  She wanted to argue that she’d had a scholarship. A very good – at least decent – scholarship to art school in Chicago. A scholarship she gave up when Elizabeth proved incapable of taking care of Mary and other things around the house.

  “How about you just sell or rent out the beach house,” Anne tossed out as soon as the idea popped into her head. She made a mental note to get down to the bank soon and get her father’s name taken off of her savings account where at least thirty-thousand dollars was ‘safely’ stored.

  Elizabeth froze, the thought paralyzing her in place. Finally snapping out of it, she darted out of the room and bellowed, “Father!”

  “You cannot sell the house in Florida!” Elizabeth protested. “Where will I take my friends during the summer? During Spring Break?”

  “You aren’t a student anymore,” Anne rolled her eyes. “You don’t get a Spring Break. You should be looking for a job.”

  “It’s not like you ever went to the beach house for Spring Break,” Elizabeth sniped.

  “Quit saying Spring Break!” Walter Elliot snapped. “We aren’t selling the beach house,” he turned to Anne. “We aren’t going to rent it out either.”

  Both girls narrowed their eyes. They knew that doing nothing was going to do more to hurt their situation than if they could come up with a workable plan. The sisters might not get along that much, but even they would agree that their father would rather stick his head in the sand than deal with tricky situations.

  He had done the same thing after their mother had passed away and it seemed, five years later, still had his head turned away from what was going on around him.

  “Then what are we going to do?” Elizabeth bravely asked.

  “I’ll use what’s left in Anne’s college fund to pay off the mortgage on the house,” he said, starting to share his ‘well-thought
-out’ plan.

  “That’s my college fund! Can’t we hold out what I’ll need for my last year?”

  “I’m afraid not,” he sighed, shaking his head with an emotion he didn’t actually feel. He hadn’t felt anything other than numb ever since Eliza had died.

  “Told you,” Elizabeth smirked.

  “Well, if I have to give up my college fund, you should have to give up something yourself,” Anne snapped.

  “Well, I already spent my money. What do you expect me to give up?”

  “The gym membership you use only for the tanning beds.”

  “Oh,” Walter Elliot already interrupted, “I already canceled that.”

  “Father!” Elizabeth screeched. “My tanning bed!”

  “And I canceled the maid service this afternoon,” he added, ignoring Elizabeth’s outburst. Turning to Anne, he stated, “You did make a point about them earlier and they are an expense that I can barely spare.”

  “But that’s still not enough,” Anne pointed out. “Elizabeth should sell the clothes in her closet.” It had been the first thing that she thought of. If Anne had to give up something that was important to her, Elizabeth needed to give up something as well. “She has a ton that has never been worn.”

  They all knew the shopaholic sister loved her clothes and shoes, even if she didn’t wear a fourth of what was in her closet.

  “You want me to sell my clothes!” Elizabeth screeched.

  “Over half of them still have the store tags on them!” Anne retorted. Any more screeching and her ears might start bleeding, but baiting her sister was worth it.

  “What are you doing going through my closet?”

  “Somebody had to remove your clothes from the laundry room so that others could do their own laundry.” Especially whenever Mary brought over her family’s clothes expecting one of the maids to do them on the day that they worked.

  Anne couldn’t let her nephews go without clean clothes and ended up washing them herself, even though she clearly remembered teaching Mary how to do her own laundry during Mary’s Senior year of high school and the fact that she had a brand-new washer and dryer at her own place.

  “Girls.” Their father’s weak attempt at ending their battle fell on deaf ears.

  “I can do my own laundry, Anne!”

  “I have yet to ever see you doing laundry! All you do is take your laundry basket to the laundry room and let it sit there.”

  “We have maids to handle the laundry!”

  “The maids aren’t paid to do our laundry. There’s a reason Mama taught us how to wash our clothes. The maids only clean up after you and put your dirty clothes into your hamper for you to wash!”

  “Then who has been washing my clothes?”

  “I have been!” Anne shouted, fed up that nobody ever listened to her.

  “Girls!” Walter Elliot snapped. Again, they ignored him.

  “Well, I didn’t ask you to! It’s the maids’ job!”

  “Once again, the maids are not paid to do our laundry. And if I didn’t do your laundry you would steal my clothes when you run out instead of taking the tags off the of the unworn clothes in your closet!”

  “I would never!” Elizabeth protested. “Your clothes are boring and too big for me.”

  Anne clinched her jaw. She might not be skinny thanks to all of the time she spent in class or drawing in her sketch pads, but Elizabeth wasn’t a size six herself. “You are currently wearing my red sweater,” she pointed out through clenched teeth.

  “Am I?” Elizabeth smiled cruelly. “That explains why it’s so baggy.”

  “It’s baggy because you keep pulling at the hem and the sleeves.” Even though it was a few sizes bigger than Elizabeth tended to wear, she still tended to stretch out clothes when she was distracted about something.

  “Fine!” Elizabeth shouted, standing up and pulling the sweater and threw it at Anne’s head. “You can have your ratty old sweater back!” She missed and it landed in the trash.

  Walter Elliot sat there sputtering as his eldest daughter stood in his office wearing only her bra and jeans. His middle daughter glared at her sister as she fished the sweater out of the trashcan. “Girls!”

  “Mama bought me this sweater!” Anne hissed. “It’s not my fault that you spilled nail polish on yours!”

  “Girls!”

  Jaw clenched, Anne stood in the doorway waiting to see if her father had anything else to say. When he said nothing, she left the room, clutching the sweater to her chest. It now smelt of the sickly-sweet perfume Elizabeth insisted on dousing herself with every morning.

  No amount of washing and drying was going to fix the damage Elizabeth had done to the sweater. Size twelve Anne knew that her only exercise came from walking around campus and chasing after her elder nephew on the nights she agreed to babysit her nephews. Size ‘six’ Elizabeth did nothing but sit around all day watching T.V. and eating and terrorizing her personal trainer.

  And then she would complain about not having a larger chest like Anne had inherited from their mother.

  Along with the extremely curly hair that Anne had given up on trying to keep tame.

  Without a doubt, most of the clothes in Elizabeth’s closet were only there because she wouldn’t wear them. That made them more than perfect candidates to resell. People sold clothes on eBay and Facebook Marketplace all of the time.

  Holding back tears, Anne flung her sweater towards her laundry basket, unable to look at – or smell – it another second. Although now the rest of the clothes in the basket would reek of Elizabeth’s perfume.

  Elizabeth would not admit to anybody, but later that night she stood in front of her closet and stared at the tagged clothes that she was well aware did not fit anymore by a size or three in both directions.

  Despite her time with the trainer, she still couldn’t fit into her goal of size six. It was just one more thing she frequently suspected she had inherited from her mother. However, unlike Anne, she refused to give up. If Mary could be a size six after having two children, the ability had to be somewhere in her genes; half of them supposedly came from her father.

  It was a shame to have to sell off clothes that she never even had the chance to wear, but her father had pointed out that if Anne was having to give up her college fund to help him out, she could part with some clothes she had never even worn.

  “You can always get Penelope Clay to post them online so that nobody even knows you are the person selling them,” he had suggested.

  Pressing her lips together, annoyed that Anne had won this fight even if she wasn’t aware of it, Elizabeth got out her phone and sent her best friend a quick text.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “Anne!” Walter Elliot called from his office as she entered the house the next day. “Can I speak to you for a minute?”

  Drawing in a deep breath, she wasn’t exactly certain she wanted to know what her father wanted to tell her. “Yes, sir?”

  She had been by the bank but was too late. Anne didn’t want to hear the confirmation coming from his lips about what she knew he had done.

  “I wanted to let you know that I went to the bank and used your college fund to finish paying off the mortgage.”

  Closing her eyes, Anne weakly plopped down in the nearest chair. “All of it?” she weakly asked him. “There was over thirty-thousand dollars in that fund.”

  “There is about two thousand left,” he answered, holding up a check for the remaining balance from paying off the house and handed it over.

  “This won’t even pay for one semester,” Anne mumbled to herself.

  “There’s still student loans,” Walter Elliot shrugged. “I take out loans all the time.”

  Anne resisted the urge to remind him that those loans were exactly what caused his current problems. Instead, she meekly accepted the check. After the past couple of days – not even twenty-four hours if she wanted to get technical - she could feel her righteous indignation floundering as the he
lplessness of the situation overwhelmed her.

  “Thanks,” she whispered, getting up and leaving the room. There had to be something she could do.

  “And Anne,” her father interrupted her progress to the door.

  “Yes?” she asked without turning around, her hand frozen on the door jamb.

  “I’ll be renting out the house this year to add money to my accounts. I’ll be moving into the Florida house in a few weeks once I get everything else taken care of.”

  “But…” Anne hesitated to ask despite the necessity. “Where am I supposed to stay for my last two semesters?”

  Shrugging, “The dorms I presume,” her father answered.

  “But…” she trailed off. The additional loan amounts that needed to be calculated raced through her head.

  “I’m talking with Mr. Shepard late today about which real estate agent to use and the best way to go about everything.” He moved around his desk. “I thought about renting the place as furnished so that we don’t have to deal with moving the furniture and everything else except what we want to take with us.”

  “Even the books?”

  “Only the books that you want to leave behind.” Opening a desk drawer and pulling out several pages that had been stapled together, he cleared his throat and held out the paper.

  Without any visual sign of frustration, Anne turned around and returned to the desk. Taking the pages, she scanned over the numbered listings. “What’s this?”

  “A list of all of the things that you’ll have to do before you move out. I figure you have until August to get everything done.”

  “But you said you were moving there in a few weeks.”

  Walter Elliot shrugged. “You can’t really expect me to waste any time in moving down there and getting settled in.”