The Engagements

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  Right away, May’s oldest, Leo, had produced a green tube of braided straw from his pocket and said, “Aunt Kate, stick your fingers in this.”

  “Don’t!” his brother Max warned, coming up behind him. “It’s a Chinese finger trap.”

  Kate remembered the toy from when she was a kid. They used to buy them by the bagful at the five-and-dime.

  “Shut up, Max!” Leo said. “You just ruined it.”

  “Leo. Language,” said Kate’s mother, Mona, who was the next one out of the clown car, followed by May’s youngest, Olivia, wearing a blue Cinderella dress.

  “Hi sweetheart,” Mona continued. “How are you?”

  She kissed Kate on the cheek.

  “A girl we saw at the mall had to get her hand cut off after it got stuck in a Chinese finger trap,” Max said. “They’re really dangerous.”

  “I made that up, you idiot,” Leo snickered. “I don’t know why she didn’t have a hand, but it wasn’t because of a Chinese finger trap. Come on, Aunt Kate. Try it!”

  “Is that okay to say?” Mona frowned, looking to Kate. “Shouldn’t it be Asian finger trap now?”

  “All right, let me see that,” Kate said, slipping her fingers into the holes at either end of the tube. She made a big show of being stuck.

  “Let me try it on someone,” Max said.

  “No,” Leo shot back.

  “I have something better than that,” Max said with a pout. “I have a Mongolian finger trap.”

  “No such thing,” Leo said, dismissing him.

  May climbed out of the car, and rolled her eyes at Kate. “Please don’t encourage them.”

  As if Kate had given them the Chinese finger trap as a welcome gift. As if she herself were eight years old. And so it begins, she thought.

  They made it through the rehearsal dinner without any fighting, though May’s boys fidgeted and complained until they were allowed to play video games at the table, which Kate could tell her cousin Jeffrey hated. She had never respected May’s parenting style. May always told her, Just wait. When you have kids, you’ll understand. But Kate had been a parent for three years now, and she still objected to the strange cycle of bribing children to be good and scaring the shit out of them when they were bad.

  Now she turned to Dan. “I guess I’d better go downstairs.”

  He pulled her close, his body warm beneath the sheets. “Let’s just stay here for the day. We’ll tell them we’re sick.”

  She grinned. “Yeah, right. And deprive the flower girl of her parents’ adoring gazes?”

  “We can tell her we’ll just check out the pictures on Facebook later. You know your sister will find a way to post them before the wedding has even started.”

  May had documented what seemed like every instant of her children’s lives online, as if a birthday party or a t-ball game were somehow not quite real until she told 437 of her closest friends and acquaintances about it.

  Kate and Dan were silent for a moment, which allowed them to overhear the following exchange:

  The first voice belonged to her mother. “What is this? Orgasmic apple juice?”

  “What?” May said. “Let me see that! Mom, it says organic.”

  Kate laughed.

  “Wow, that must have been a letdown for her,” Dan said.

  “I’m going in,” Kate said, getting to her feet. “Wish me luck.”

  In the kitchen, May’s three sat around the table eating Pop-Tarts. May and Mona stood against the counter, coffee cups in hand. Kate couldn’t remember the last time they’d all been together in the morning like this. Her mother and sister always wore makeup in public. They looked odd without it now, like some small but vital part of their faces was missing—an eyebrow, or an upper lip.

  Ava, still in her footie pajamas, was strapped into her booster seat, a crumbling Pop-Tart in hand. At three years old, she was already fiercely opinionated.

  “Mama,” she said. “I like this. I want more.”

  Kate wanted to rip the thing away from her and shove it in the trash. She would need to decide quickly whether to fight this particular battle. She fed Ava all natural foods, nothing processed or full of sugar, even though she and Dan still ate greasy Chinese one night a week and scarfed down the occasional bag of Doritos. They did try to eat consciously, aware of the evils of factory farming. They had cut out meat almost entirely. But they still ate plenty of junk. In some ways, they were a lost cause, but Ava, beautiful Ava, was pure. Kate thought of asking her sister why she had felt the need to undermine her authority so early in the day.

  “You brought your own Pop-Tarts?” was all she said.

  May frowned. “Good morning to you too, Sunshine! Sorry. My kids won’t eat anything else.”

  “They’re made with real fruit,” Leo pointed out, trying to be helpful.

  Kate knew they thought she was foolish to care so much about what Ava ate. “You were raised on hot dogs and Kraft macaroni and cheese, and you turned out fine,” her mother had said on various occasions when the subject came up.

  Mona and May treated Kate and Dan like they were a couple of radicals, even though there was nothing particularly unconventional about their life. Any choice Kate made that contradicted what her mother had done was somehow seen as a slap in the face. Moving to the country, feeding her daughter organic food, deciding not to marry.

  Kate had believed that Ava’s birth would take some of the pressure off the idea of marriage, but that had been a total miscalculation on her part. In the flurry of Jeff’s wedding preparations these past several months, it had all come back to her: the day after she announced that she was pregnant, her mother bought her a white dress. (“It just reminded me of you, that’s all.”) The week they found out they were having a girl, May made her husband take Dan out for beers and try to pressure him into proposing.

  “Your child will be illegitimate. Don’t you care about that?” her mother said when Kate was seven months along, and there was no longer time to even pretend at subtlety.

  “In what way exactly will she be illegitimate?” Kate had asked.

  “Her parents aren’t married.”

  “Neither are mine,” Kate said.

  “Yes, well, that’s different.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we were married, once upon a time.”

  Kate’s had been a relatively traditional suburban childhood. She grew up in Montclair, New Jersey. Her father was the letters editor for the Newark Star-Ledger, her mother the dean of students at a small nearby college.

  She attended a good public school, played soccer and softball, though not particularly well, and was in the Girl Scouts until age eight. Her parents’ house, a normal-sized Colonial, was always in a state of near messiness that could be cleaned up for guests in thirty-five minutes or less. She had her own bedroom, and so did May.

  They were born four years apart. Far enough that they didn’t really play with one another if there was any possible alternative. They each had their own friends, and the only times they socialized were during boring family parties or when they went away on vacation.

  They bonded, sort of, during their parents’ divorce. Kate was a freshman in high school and May was a senior. Neither of them saw it coming. Yes, their parents fought a lot, and from time to time her mother had made threats. While driving them to school one morning, she announced that she felt she was finally ready to leave their father, as if they might congratulate her on the news. May started to cry. Kate was silent, though she worried for months. But then two years passed, and nothing changed.

  She wept when her parents told her for real. On some level she understood that they would both be happier apart. But screw their happiness: she didn’t want to be the child of divorced parents. Couldn’t they at least have waited until she went away to college? She considered high school the worst possible time for this to happen. She knew people whose parents had split before their first birthday, and she considered them lucky beyond belief. They had n
ever known anything different.

  When her parents divorced, the court granted them joint custody. They decided that she and May would spend Sunday through Wednesday with their father in the original house, and Thursday through Saturday with their mother, in a cheap rented condo she got through campus housing. This was how Kate spent her high school days, and she hated it.

  After the divorce, May tried harder than ever to be perfect—pretty, polite, well dressed, popular, always with a boyfriend by her side. It seemed as if every choice she made was an attempt to erase the taint of the broken home. Kate went in the opposite direction. On Fridays, she stayed out late with a bunch of college kids she and her friend Brandy had met at a party and quickly latched onto. They claimed to be BU students themselves, and spent many nights in dorm rooms, drinking, smoking pot, listening to Radiohead and Ani DiFranco; discussing literature, feminism, and life with the women in the group, before making out for hours with the sleepy-eyed boys, who smelled of Tide and cigarettes.

  The differences between the two sisters were only emphasized by the fact that they looked so much alike. May and Kate were both five foot five, with brown hair and olive skin. They had the same skinny legs and arms, the same flat chest, even the same tiny, hairless gap in their eyebrows, which May spent untold amounts of time and money getting waxed and plucked and lasered, so as to correct the imperfection, while Kate just left it alone. She could look at her sister and see exactly how she herself would look if she spent an hour applying makeup each morning and took great care with her outfits. But Kate’s style, if she had one, could only be described as unintentional. She sometimes wore a bit of lip gloss, that was all. She never learned how to apply eyeliner; the few times she had tried, her lids clamped shut as soon as they came within three inches of a pencil, making her wonder if she’d been blinded by a stick in a previous life.

  Their father remarried when Kate was a freshman in college. His wife, Jean, was a nice woman from the paper, also divorced with two kids. Kate was happy for him, and relieved—his lonesomeness was one thing she could cross off her long list of worries. But she found it odd that her father and Jean still lived in the house she grew up in. It was like he had just replaced one woman with another, keeping everything else the same. Even the sofa in the den was the same, and the brass poster bed in the master suite. Jean’s kids from her first marriage had grown up with a deadbeat dad they never saw, so they looked to Kate’s father as their own in a way, even though they were in their twenties. This could be hard to take. You should call your brother and congratulate him on the new job, her father might say over the phone, and it would take Kate a moment to figure out what the hell he was talking about. Brother? She didn’t have a brother.

  Her mother never remarried. Mona was married to her life—her work and her friends. She had once told Kate that after women got out of lousy marriages, they generally had the good sense to stay away from the institution altogether. While men just kept trying to get it right because they were incapable of being alone.

  Despite this, Mona wanted her daughters to get married. She had obsessed over planning May’s wedding like there was an award to be won. Like her sister, so many of Kate’s friends had watched their parents languish in bad marriages or go through painful divorces, only to jump right into marriage themselves, as if they could fix the whole messy business of their elders’ mistakes with a next-generation do-over.

  Early on, even as far back as high school, Kate was distrustful of marriage. The popular perception was so sad and discouraging, so Everybody Loves Raymond. After the divorce, her father started reciting a Rita Rudner quote whenever the subject came up: “Men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for marriage—they’ve experienced pain and bought jewelry.” Each time he said it and laughed, Kate felt slightly ill.

  The fall of her sophomore year at UVM, she took a class called “The History of Marriage,” in which she learned that, historically speaking, marriage wasn’t about love at all. It was essentially a business transaction.

  Through centuries and across cultures, women were intimidated and coerced into marriage through horrible means—kidnapping, physical violence, even gang rape. In eighteenth-century England, the doctrine of coverture dictated that a woman had no legal rights within a marriage, other than those afforded her by her husband. Early American laws replicated this idea, and did not change until the 1960s. Before then, most states had “head and master” laws, giving husbands the right to beat their wives and take full control of family decision making and finances, including the woman’s own property.

  Every bit of new information sickened her. This was marriage?

  While home for Thanksgiving, Kate made her feelings known: she wanted to have a family someday, but she knew in her heart that she would never get married.

  “Marriage is a construct,” she said as she poured gravy over her turkey breast. “It’s been sold as a way to keep women safe or make their lives better, but for the most part it’s been used to keep them down. In Afghanistan today, a woman might be encouraged to marry her rapist.”

  “This isn’t Afghanistan,” her mother said, looking embarrassed.

  “Well, here in America, a woman couldn’t get a credit card or a bank loan without written permission from her husband until the seventies. And until then, a man could also force his wife to have sex with him. There was no such thing as marital rape.”

  “Please stop saying rape at the dinner table,” her mother said. “Grandpa, would you pass the cranberry sauce?”

  Everyone thought it was just a phase, including her college boyfriend, Todd. They were together for five years, moving to New York after graduation and breaking up the summer they both turned twenty-five. When he proposed to her on a weekend drive to Burlington, Kate was shocked. She had told him hundreds of times why she didn’t want to get married, and he had seemed to agree. For a long time, he acted as if he had hit the jackpot by finding a woman who wasn’t interested in all that. But a few months before his proposal, it was as if someone had flipped a switch in him—he started saying that it was childish not to get married, what would people think of them, of their future kids? Plus, the government made it impossible not to marry, he said. If you were married, you got benefits and tax breaks. She told him that wasn’t exactly true: “Only for traditional, patriarchal setups, where the man makes all the money and the woman stays home. Our tax system punishes couples where both members are high earners.”

  He shook his head. “Whatever. I don’t want to marry you for tax purposes, Kate. Way to suck all the romance out of it.”

  She said she wanted to be with him, but not marry him. He said that was bullshit, that every woman wanted to get married deep down. They broke up. Six months later, Todd was engaged to someone else.

  Around this time, Kate’s mother started to panic. “You know,” she said, “a lot of us form grand ideas in college that we later abandon. There’s no shame in it.” She suggested that they go to therapy together, to sort out exactly how much the divorce had damaged Kate.

  She tried to tell her mother that it wasn’t about the divorce. It was about the fact that marriage was outdated and exclusionary, and worked only 50 percent of the time anyway. But none of this logic made a difference. In every other way, she was an ideal daughter: high achieving, devoted. But the fact that she wouldn’t get married made her suspect in her mother’s eyes.

  The men she dated in her late twenties seemed similarly suspicious. When she told them that she did not want to get married, she was usually met with disbelief or some variation on the word feminazi. By the time she turned twenty-eight, Kate felt certain that she was never going to meet someone to be with for the long term. She made peace with the idea. She had a small rented studio apartment in Brooklyn Heights. She was self-sufficient and had fulfilling work and wonderful friends, and maybe that was enough.

  Then she met Dan—ironically, at the wedding of their mutual friend Tabitha. He was from Wisconsin, a website designe
r, who before moving to New York had spent eight years working in Sweden. There, it was perfectly common not to get married. Plenty of his friends in Stockholm had purchased houses and had kids but never made it official. He probably would have gotten married if he’d ended up with anyone else, but he liked the idea of two people choosing each other every day, rather than feeling stuck with one another, as though they were a failure if they couldn’t make forever happen. Dan had a slight suspicion of authority to begin with, and once he thought about it, he saw no reason why the government should be a part of their relationship. What had been a brick wall with every other man she had ever dated was suddenly just no big deal.

  They were a good match, for this and a hundred other reasons. At the wedding where they met, a female minister in flowing white robes had said something that Kate never wanted to forget. Outdo each other with kindness. She and Dan tried to. If something between them irritated her, she attempted to work it out herself, or talk to him in a calm, compassionate way.

  She remembered too many weekends when she was a kid that had been ruined by her parents’ bickering. It usually started out with a nudge from her mother over breakfast, a slight twist of the screw: Gary, I thought you said you were going to run the dishwasher last night. Now there are no clean mugs in the whole damn house. Perhaps most men would apologize or make a joke out of it, but Kate’s father would ignore his wife, turning his attention instead to the children, his human shields. Well, what should we do today, huh? Do you want to go to the aquarium?

  The passivity drove her mother insane. Maybe that’s why he did it. Gary, I was talking to you, she’d say. Gary!

  I heard you, Mona. I can just think of a lot better ways to spend a Saturday than fighting with you about the stupid dishwasher.

  Kate would sit between them, her body filling up with concrete, willing her mother to back down. But Mona didn’t know her own strength. She’d usually take the conversation somewhere cutting and out of the blue, saying something like, Maybe if you were able to take just the tiniest bit of constructive criticism, you might have gotten a promotion sometime in the last decade. From there, it would start to snowball, and Kate knew that soon enough her father would be locked away in his woodworking shed out back, her mother shrugging her shoulders, asking what his problem was.