Curtis Sittenfeld - Eligible

Also prior to Liz’s return home, Mrs. Bennet had called their longtime lawyer and friend, Landon Reynolds, who’d explained that turning to the police would serve no purpose. Eloping wasn’t a violation of the law, and there was nothing to suggest that Ham had taken Lydia to Chicago against her will. While the illegality of same-sex marriage in both Ohio and Illinois could potentially render Lydia and Ham’s union void were Ham deemed female, seeking an annulment on Lydia’s behalf, given that she was well over the age of consent, would be complicated and costly; and in any case, it seemed likely that the gender listed on Ham’s driver’s license, if not his birth certificate, was male. His best advice, Mr. Reynolds told Mrs. Bennet, was to buy a bottle of champagne and wait for the newlyweds to return.

Yet so insistent was Mrs. Bennet that twenty minutes later, at her urging, Kitty and Mr. Bennet had begun the almost five-hour drive to Chicago with what Mrs. Bennet chose to believe was the goal of either preventing the couple’s nuptials or, if it was too late, of separating them and transporting Lydia back to Cincinnati alone. Mary, in the meantime, had been tasked with calling Chicago hotels to check for reservations under Bennet or Ryan, a search that by late Sunday night remained fruitless.

Shortly after Mr. Bennet and Kitty’s departure, Mrs. Bennet had swallowed the expired Valium and retired to bed, and this was where, at ten-thirty P.M., Liz found her. The older woman was weeping with a vigor that appeared unsustainable, yet the voluminous scattering of tissues across the bed, nightstand, and nearby rug suggested that she had been at it for some time; indeed, of the four tissue boxes sitting atop the mattress, two were empty, one was half-empty, and one was as yet unopened but clearly waiting to be deployed. Mrs. Bennet herself was surrounded by flotsam that included a cordless phone, two remote controls (when Liz entered the room, the television was showing an infomercial for a spray-on sealant), a partially consumed three-ounce chocolate bar, a king-sized package of Cheetos reduced to orange crumbs, and a preponderance of throw pillows; on the nightstand were a lowball glass and a bottle of gin. Mary, who had opened the front door of the Tudor and led Liz to their mother’s lair, now stood just inside the room with her arms folded. Liz approached the bed and sat, setting her hand on her mother’s arm. “Hi, Mom.”

Mrs. Bennet shook her head, her cheeks florid and damp. “She’s so pretty,” she said in a mournful voice. “I don’t know why a pretty girl would go and do such a terrible thing.”

“I really think Ham is a good person,” Liz said. “Remember how he helped me clean out our basement?”

“Are there people like this in New York?”

“There are transgender people everywhere,” Liz said. “And there have been throughout history.”

Both in the San Francisco airport and then on her layover in Atlanta, Liz had via her smartphone learned about the kathoey in Southeast Asia and the salzikrum of the ancient Middle East. Also, she now knew to refer to it as a gender reassignment rather than a sex change, she knew that Ham might well not have had “bottom” surgery (based on her own observations, she strongly suspected he’d had top), and, in any case, she knew to be embarrassed for having asked Mary if Ham had a fake penis; it was, apparently, no less rude to speculate about the genitals of a transgender person than about those of a person who was nontransgender, or cisgender.

As far as she was aware, Liz had, prior to meeting Ham, regularly interacted with only one transgender person, a sixty-something woman who was a copy editor at the magazine where Liz and Jasper had been fact-checkers. Surely, if Liz had learned that anybody in her social circle in New York had eloped with someone transgender, she’d have greeted the news with support; she might even have felt that self-congratulatory pride that heterosexual white people are known to experience due to proximate diversity. So why, she decided, should her feelings be any different for Ham? Especially now that she understood and could disregard the slight evasiveness he’d shown the time Liz had asked about his upbringing in Seattle, or Kitty’s taunting implication that Liz was ignorant of Ham’s true character. Which she didn’t believe she had been, Liz thought. In the air over the wheat fields of Kansas, Liz had concluded that if a Cincinnatian could reinvent herself as a New Yorker, if a child who kept a diary and liked to read could ultimately declare that she was a professional writer, then why was gender not also mutable and elective? The enduring mystery of Ham, really, was how he managed to stand Lydia’s company and how he now planned to do so for a lifetime.

“Five of you,” Mrs. Bennet said, and a fresh wave of tears released themselves. “How is it there are five of you and not one can find a nice, normal, rich man to settle down with?”

“Mom, we’re healthy,” Liz said. “We aren’t drug addicts. Things could be so much worse. And with Dad having been in the hospital, doesn’t it put something like this in perspective?”

“Does Ham get up in the morning and say, ‘Today I’ll wear a dress. No, trousers! No, a dress!’ ”

“I’m pretty sure he’s a guy all the time, Mom. Just think of him like you did before you knew he used to be female.” Used to be female —Liz had a hunch such a phrase ought not to be uttered by her newly enlightened self, though she’d check online.

“Mom, you should go to sleep,” Mary said.

“I’m waiting to hear from your father,” Mrs. Bennet said, and Mary said, “He and Kitty are probably going to sleep now, too.”

Mrs. Bennet glared between her daughters. “How selfish you all are,” she said. “Doing what you like without regard to how it reflects on our family name.”

“Okay, I’m done here,” Mary said, and Liz stood, too.

“Mary’s right, Mom,” Liz said. “You should sleep.”

IN THE HALL outside their mother’s room, Mary said, “I guess all these years, Lydia has been projecting her secret same-sex attraction onto me.”

Liz looked at Mary. “Do you really think that?”

“She has no idea how mean people can be because usually she’s the mean one.” The pleasure in Mary’s voice was undisguised. “Living her whole life as this skinny, cutesy blonde — well, she’s about to learn.”

“I don’t think most people who meet Ham have any idea he’s transgender,” Liz said. “Although it also doesn’t seem like either of them is trying to hide it.”

“Exactly,” Mary said. “Because Lydia doesn’t know any better. And trust me, this is the kind of gossip that spreads like wildfire.”

“Lydia and Ham are living their truth,” Liz said. “More power to them.”

IT WAS DISPLEASING and confusing to be back in her childhood bedroom again so soon after leaving, and especially after its fumigation with chemicals whose ostensible harmlessness Liz was not entirely convinced of. Though she’d been away from Cincinnati for only four nights, Liz also felt a strange envy for the version of herself who had formerly inhabited this room and had, however unwittingly, enchanted Darcy. The net result of her time in California, she feared, had been to decrease his affections. Though moments had seemed promising, something between them had come loose when she’d canceled breakfast and asked him to drive her to the airport.

She thought of texting him to say she’d made it safely back and wished he’d asked her to when he’d dropped her off. But what if, at this very moment, he and Caroline Bingley were sharing a laugh, standing close to each other, with Caroline looking bitchily gorgeous in an expensive frock?