It’s such a pain. My favorite singer only has four songs.
Write her.
They are in the room where they had painted the alcoves an off-lavender but the daughter had found the color belonging more to her grandmother’s generation. Now the alcoves are a vibrant blue. What is the next step? This daughter has not felt it possible to belong to this house; the house has seen many parsons come and go, the church keeps bringing them in, from China, from Utah, but cannot sustain their presence. They are three: two daughters and a mother, and the apple wallpaper in the kitchen suggests the hearty parsonage feasts that never were. The idea of this place was that it would be a new, kind safe house in which there could be hammocks, good neighbors, even a hot tub down the road for snowy moonlit nights.
But they have been there some months and have not been able to do more than throw out most of the younger daughter’s belongings and repaint the alcoves. The bed in her room is good; at least there’s that.
For succor, they like to watch a particular version of the Jane Austen classic. Elizabeth Bennet, played by Keira Knightly, juts her chin and issues invectives and giggles at the absurdity of life: a perfect foil for the mother and older daughter, both of whom are moving toward new kinds of love in their personal life away from the parsonage.
They have all so memorized every line that they speak to one another in these voices to denote displeasure or interest. It would behoove me to know more what you mean, one might say. I cannot discern any great reason for either of us to follow the idea through to its end, another says. This is about simple matters: whether the bathroom door has been locked too long or there are pantry flies waiting to get at the gluten-free flower.
But something starts to happen to them. The mother, who teaches at a local school, starts to wear floor-length skirts with button-up boots, as if a stern governess. The elder daughter, formerly someone who liked to stroll through swamps and who had been trying hard to teach herself trumpet so that the capricious jazz band teacher might let her in started instead to play the fife. The youngest daughter undergoes the quietest and most profound transformation: she wears simple pastels that start to mute into gray. She goes to school in a green caul and then slowly starts to wear something that bears the greatest resemblance to a bonnet.
This is how it plays out. They are living in the parsonage and begin to expect visits from gentleman callers. The worst part of it is that in the jostle of their daily lives, there is an appetite for a rhythm that cannot quite happen: the rhythm of a lady unplaiting her braids at the end of the day, a gentleman stroking his sideburns in his den dedicated to German books and entomology. They begin to retreat to the parsonage; all home improvement projects other than pickling and canning cease; if a story seems to have a truth related to this moment, it seems therefore false.
One hundred days in, as marked in chalk on the blackboard which has replaced their screens, by the wood stove which chugs and spits unevenly heat throughout the house, they find themselves choked. Only in lines not even from the movie, which they can no longer watch, they begin to speak to each other. I dare say, I hope to convince, and by the end of it, when the workmen come to see about refilling the oil in the canister in the basement, they find the three, as if frozen, stuck in an attitude of deep admiration, at the window, peering out, praying for callers to come stir the pot that will never again be stirred.