Lorrie Moore: 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

Which brings us to one Sunday in May. Jo came home from a late Sunday afternoon walk to find company for supper. Carrie often had in one of her school-teacher friends, or Babe one of her frivolous intimates, or even Eva a staid guest of the old-girl type. There was always a Sunday night supper of potato salad, and cold meat, and coffee, and perhaps a fresh cake. Jo rather enjoyed it, being a hospitable soul. But he regarded the guests with the undazzled eyes of a man to whom they were just so many petticoats, timid of the night streets and requiring escort home. If you had suggested to him that some of his sisters’ popularity was due to his own presence, or if you had hinted that the more kittenish of these visitors were palpably making eyes at him, he would have stared in amazement and unbelief.

This Sunday night it turned out to be one of Carrie’s friends.

“Emily,” said Carrie, “this is my brother, Jo.” Jo had learned what to expect in Carrie’s friends.

Drab-looking women in the late thirties, whose facial lines all slanted downward.

“Happy to meet you,” said Jo, and looked down at a different sort altogether. A most surprisingly different sort, for one of Carrie’s friends. This Emily person was very small, and fluffy, and blue-eyed, and sort of — well, crinkly looking. You know. The corners of her mouth when she smiled, and her eyes when she looked up at you, and her hair, which was brown, but had the miraculous effect, somehow, of being golden.

Jo shook hands with her. Her hand was incredibly small, and soft, so that you were afraid of crushing it, until you discovered she had a firm little grip all her own. It surprised and amused you, that grip, as does a baby’s unexpected clutch on your patronizing forefinger. As Jo felt it in his own big clasp, the strangest thing happened to him. Something inside Jo Hertz stopped working for a moment, then lurched sickeningly, then thumped like mad. It was his heart. He stood staring down at her, and she up at him, until the others laughed. Then their hands fell apart, lingeringly.

“Are you a school-teacher, Emily?” he said.

“Kindergarten. It’s my first year. And don’t call me Emily, please.”

“Why not? It’s your name. I think it’s the prettiest name in the world.” Which he hadn’t meant to say at all. In fact, he was perfectly aghast to find himself saying it. But he meant it.

At supper he passed her things, and stared, until everybody laughed again, and Eva said acidly, “Why don’t you feed her?”

It wasn’t that Emily had an air of helplessness. She just made you feel you wanted her to be helpless, so that you could help her.

Jo took her home, and from that Sunday night he began to strain at the leash. He took his sisters out, dutifully, but he would suggest, with a carelessness that deceived no one, “Don’t you want one of your girl friends to come along? That little What’s-her-name — Emily, or something. So long’s I’ve got three of you, I might as well have a full squad.”

For a long time he didn’t know what was the matter with him. He only knew he was miserable, and yet happy. Sometimes his heart seemed to ache with an actual physical ache. He realized that he wanted to do things for Emily. He wanted to buy things for Emily — useless, pretty, expensive things that he couldn’t afford. He wanted to buy everything that Emily needed, and everything that Emily desired. He wanted to marry Emily. That was it. He discovered that one day, with a shock, in the midst of a transaction in the harness business. He stared at the man with whom he was dealing until that startled person grew uncomfortable.

“What’s the matter, Hertz?”

“Matter?”

“You look as if you’d seen a ghost or found a gold mine. I don’t know which.”

“Gold mine,” said Jo. And then, “No. Ghost.”

For he remembered that high, thin voice, and his promise. And the harness business was slithering downhill with dreadful rapidity, as the automobile business began its amazing climb. Jo tried to stop it. But he was not that kind of business man. It never occurred to him to jump out of the down-going vehicle and catch the up-going one. He stayed on, vainly applying brakes that refused to work.

“You know, Emily, I couldn’t support two households now. Not the way things are. But if you’ll wait. If you’ll only wait. The girls might — that is, Babe and Carrie—”

She was a sensible little thing, Emily. “Of course I’ll wait. But we mustn’t just sit back and let the years go by. We’ve got to help.”

She went about it as if she were already a little matchmaking matron. She corralled all the men she had ever known and introduced them to Babe, Carrie, and Eva separately, in pairs, and en masse. She arranged parties at which Babe could display the curl. She got up picnics. She stayed home while Jo took the three about. When she was present she tried to look as plain and obscure as possible, so that the sisters should show up to advantage. She schemed, and planned, and contrived, and hoped; and smiled into Jo’s despairing eyes.

And three years went by. Three precious years. Carrie still taught school, and hated it. Eva kept house, more and more complainingly as prices advanced and allowance retreated. Stell was still Babe, the family beauty; but even she knew that the time was past for curls. Emily’s hair, somehow, lost its glint and began to look just plain brown. Her crinkliness began to iron out.

“Now, look here!” Jo argued, desperately, one night. “We could be happy, anyway. There’s plenty of room at the house. Lots of people begin that way. Of course, I couldn’t give you all I’d like to at first. But maybe, after a while—”

No dreams of salons, and brocade, and velvet-footed servitors, and satin damask now. Just two rooms, all their own, all alone, and Emily to work for. That was his dream. But it seemed less possible than that other absurd one had been.

You know that Emily was as practical a little thing as she looked fluffy. She knew women. Especially did she know Eva, and Carrie, and Babe. She tried to imagine herself taking the household affairs and the housekeeping pocketbook out of Eva’s expert hands. Eva had once displayed to her a sheaf of aigrettes she had bought with what she saved out of the housekeeping money. So then she tried to picture herself allowing the reins of Jo’s house to remain in Eva’s hands. And everything feminine and normal in her rebelled. Emily knew she’d want to put away her own freshly laundered linen, and smooth it, and pat it. She was that kind of woman. She knew she’d want to do her own delightful haggling with butcher and vegetable peddler. She knew she’d want to muss Jo’s hair, and sit on his knee, and even quarrel with him, if necessary, without the awareness of three ever-present pairs of maiden eyes and ears.

“No! No! We’d only be miserable. I know. Even if they didn’t object. And they would, Jo. Wouldn’t they?”

His silence was miserable assent. Then, “But you do love me, don’t you, Emily?”

“I do, Jo. I love you — and love you — and love you. But, Jo, I — can’t.”

“I know it, dear. I knew it all the time, really. I just thought, maybe, somehow—”

The two sat staring for a moment into space, their hands clasped. Then they both shut their eyes, with a little shudder, as though what they saw was terrible to look upon. Emily’s hand, the tiny hand that was so unexpectedly firm, tightened its hold on his, and his crushed the absurd fingers until she winced with pain.

That was the beginning of the end, and they knew it.

Emily wasn’t the kind of girl who would be left to pine. There are too many Jo’s in the world whose hearts are prone to lurch and then thump at the feel of a soft, fluttering, incredibly small hand in their grip. One year later Emily was married to a young man whose father owned a large, pie-shaped slice of the prosperous state of Michigan.