A Walk with Jane Austen (25 page)

There is one aspect to
Emma
that always bothers me. It is the two days she spends in agony wondering about how Knightley feels after she realizes that she has always loved him and cant stand the thought of his
marrying Harriet, if indeed he could be contemplating that. It's not what Emma feels, or how those feelings are described; it's that she has to wait only two days to find out that Knightley loves her equally in return. Once again, Emma gets exactly what she wants, with little difficulty (which I think is just the thing Jane thought no one would like about her). It's not that I don't like Emma. But I don't feel much pity for her seeing how everything was so quickly resolved.

Relationships in Jane's day happened so much faster. Mr. Collins proposed to Lizzy in little more than a week (and then, of course, to Charlotte Lucas just a few days later). Knightley and Emma went from being friends to being engaged in the space of five minutes. Marianne and Willoughby were the closest to dating, hanging out together inseparably, but even he was ready to propose within two months at the most. This is an extreme I wouldn't want to go back to, nor would I want the kind of world in which Charlotte Lucas's accepting Mr. Collins makes any kind of sense whatsoever. But today we've gone to another extreme. We date for years, only to have (usually) the guy unable to make up his mind, unable to finally commit. I can kind of understand this when couples are living together and there's no real need for commitment, but within the church, without being too hard on the guys (because who wants to encourage someone into marriage who isn't ready for it?), I suppose I expect them to be more masculine, to prize marriage more, to be better able to commit.

So we have all these Christian couples going out for years and attempting not to have sex. Personally, I'm about ready to try one of the other extremes—to marry someone ridiculously fast or to just give up and move in with someone. I have no intention of doing that, of course, but I can't say it's not attractive.

I am exhausted (I'm always exhausted) and beginning to feel ready to go home. I don't want to leave Bath. My eyes are bloodshot. There are bags underneath them that I cannot cover up. I am dying to talk to someone close to me, and if anyone at the hotel or at church is too nice, I am likely to burst into tears. I don't have the energy to exert myself anymore, all of this traveling alone. My ankles hurt.

Why did I bring twelve pounds of books? They don't fit in my bags.

Just when I was in need of care, the sermon at St. Michael's was on 1 Peter 5:6-7: “Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you.”

I'm still trying to get my head around what it means to trust God. For some reason I fear that God would just as soon (or even rather) rake me over the coals than give me something that feels genuinely good, something I really want. As though now that I've seen that side of God, I can't allow him to be good in the way we define goodness. I'm not sure why I feel this so strongly; it's not like I am Job, with a list of grievances. I keep thinking about Jane's prayer: “We feel that we have been blessed far beyond any thing that we have deserved; and though we cannot but pray for a continuance of all these mercies, we acknowledge our unworthiness of them and implore thee to pardon the presumption of our desires.”
¹⁴
Seen from the right angle, there's a desperation in that, a feeling that perhaps you are dealing with a God who may be capricious at times, whose favor may not last. He cares for you. I'm trying to believe that.

And somehow now I feel him caring for me. There have been so many instances of grace and goodness on this trip. I want to pray, /
dont deserve this, but please give me more.

I was dying for someone to welcome me at church, but that is not really the English way. But they sang one of my favorite songs at the end, and when I left to do some shopping, I was smiling scandalously at people on the street.

The theater was nice last night—smaller than any back home, but elegant and red. It was
Much Ado About Nothing.
I sat in the dress circle—of course, no one was wearing dresses—with an empty seat beside me and could barely get comfortable because my legs ached. It was a bit cruel to have to listen to Benedick, with his, “When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.”
¹⁵

Against my will it made me think of Jack and wonder if he has quite determined not to marry. It is as though Elinor and Marianne are at war inside me—the one determined not to think about him (I have no real reason to after all) and the other all smiles and hopes. I am leaving all thoughts of him in Bath and determined they will not follow me. Derbyshire sounds terribly romantic I think. If only I felt like going anywhere. I'm staying at a pub and it will probably smell.

The village of Pilsley is tiny and I adore it. I sat on my sloping canopy bed looking out the window on two or three streets, all the cottages of stone, every one with a garden, and all the doors and trim painted the loveliest shade of teal blue—even the little schoolhouse at the end of the street. It's very clean and everything a pub should be— red carpet and thick beams, comfortable clutter everywhere. So as a result, all is better than right with the world. There are even two sweet brown English Labs.

I called home and talked to my parents and each of my nieces— the twins are three, and Grace is getting close to five—and they want to know when I am going to come see them, which makes me miss them even more. They manage at the same time to be both terrors and the sweetest children in the world. They are very loud, which I love,
and regularly get into very bad trouble. As my sister says, it's a good thing they're cute.

Being an aunt has been one of the best surprises of my life. I cannot make up fairy stories like Jane did for her nieces and nephews, but I read stories to them and buy them things and let them eat whatever they want, and this seems to make up for any other deficiencies in their minds. Grace is terribly put upon having two younger sisters. She said her first sentence when she was about sixteen months and Linda was in the hospital with the twins: “Dog poop side,” like she was finally beginning to understand the world, and this was so interesting to her, seeing the dog pooping in the backyard.

Alison has a little smoker's voice. We don't know where she got it. I want to always remember her singing her grace before dinner (“God our Father, God our Father, we thank you…”) sounding like she'd just finished a pack of Marlboros. Once I took Eleanor to Frying Pan Park, a little farm by my house, and before we even pulled up she started to laugh in her car seat—she was two and a half I think—like I've never heard a little child laugh, continuous, genuine joy. Once she got over the great wonder of finding thousands of small rocks in the parking lot (she was collecting them then), she continued her laughing spree all around the barnyard, interspersed with animal noises (“Heheheheh, pig! pig! oink, oink, oink, heheheheheh, cow! moooooo”).

Ellie and Ali, the twins, are sort of miracle babies. They are identical and there was only one sac, which is rare and dangerous. Linda was in the hospital for ten weeks before they were born. Had the timing for the separation of the egg been only slightly different, they would have been conjoined. So they were born early, tiny and with acid reflux so bad that Jon and Linda had to shove feeding tubes down their noses
and pump them with formula. They screamed for the first five months of their lives, louder than any babies I've ever heard. It's still their first reaction to anything unpleasant—real or imagined.

Anyway, it's all great fun for me because I just get to hear the stories and give them things and love them. And they adore me, which is pretty much the best deal in the world.

I've always wanted to have children. I hope I will. Every year I cower at the doctor's office (not any doctor but
that
doctor, you know), wrapped in something that looks like a big paper towel with armholes and a huge rip down the front, trying to keep my intricate parts covered. The walls are pinned with pictures of delivery-room moms, smiling and sweaty, holding prizeling prune-faced babies, surrounded by three or four or five stairstep kids. The women glow, as if they've just fulfilled their earthly mission. They've gotten these bits and pieces of intricate wiring and odd-shaped containers to actually produce something valuable— something human. How could you ever ask anything of them again? They've done their life's best work. I would like one or two or three little prizeling babies of my own. And if not, I think perhaps I'll adopt one, a girl, maybe with brown skin and curly hair, or maybe very shy.

I was worried about how I would get here, to the pub. I took the train to Matlock, which is about fifteen minutes away, and walked to the bus station, but the schedules were very hard to read, and it was nearly deserted except for one rather shady character. A cab just happened to pull up with the sweetest driver. He was thin, Pakistani, and barely spoke English, probably late thirties. He couldn't pronounce the name Pilsley or even spell it, but he was so enthusiastic to take me here and managed to follow the signs without any problem and pointed out the great Chatsworth estate along the way. It seems that his parents live
here in England, too, and that he and his wife have no children, which is a shame because I'm sure he would shower them with great and demonstrative affection.

My wonderful dumpy bed is once again achingly empty. My bed is always empty. It is one of the things about my life that seems ridiculous in the twenty-first century that would not have seemed so to Jane.

It's not that I don t want to have sex; it's not even that all the desires are repressed and buttoned up. They are just there, and I bide them. I wait with them. I endure them. At the risk of sounding cheesy or ridiculously holy, I give them to God. Sometimes I do not want to give them to God. Sometimes I just weep them at him or with him, try to make sure he is hearing me struggle at least. Biblically, of course, he is with me in the struggle, but his presence is not as palpable as I'd like. He can be a thin sort of thing when I need a physical presence. Half the time it seems crazy, even to me, and I'm afraid that if the right guy came along—someone charming and funny, who adored me—I could just forget it all. I'm afraid ofthat.

Tonight I want Jack to be here. I'm not supposed to be thinking about him, but I can't stop.

I don't regret pursuing chastity. I'm not sorry that this is how I've lived my life. But in the present and future, it's harder to be certain. I believe this is the right decision and the healthiest decision, the intention of God's creation and the best way to fulfill it (if one can talk about being fulfilled not having sex) and all that. It's just that it doesn't always make sense.