Mrs. Bennet looked from her end of the table to her husband’s. “If any of our girls marry doctors, it will meet my needs, yes,” she said to him. “But, Fred, if it gets them out of the house, I daresay it will meet yours, too.”
IN THE PROFESSIONAL realm, Mr. Bennet had done little while supporting his family with a large but dwindling inheritance, and his observations about his daughters’ indolence were more than a little hypocritical. However, he was not wrong. Indeed, an outsider could be forgiven for wondering what it was that the Bennet sisters did with themselves from day to day and year to year. It wasn’t that they were uneducated: On the contrary, from the ages of three to eighteen, each sister had attended the Seven Hills School, a challenging yet warm coeducational institution where in their younger years they’d memorized songs such as “Fifty Nifty United States” and collaborated—collaboration, at Seven Hills, was paramount—with classmates on massive papier-mâché stegosauruses or triceratops. In later years, they read The Odyssey, helped run the annual Harvest Fair, and went on supplemental summer trips to France and China; throughout, they all played soccer and basketball. The cumulative bill for this progressive and wide-ranging education was $800,000. All five girls had then gone on to private colleges before embarking on what could euphemistically be called nonlucrative careers, though in the case of some sisters, non-lucrative noncareers was a more precise descriptor. Kitty and Lydia had never worked longer than a few months at a time, as desultory nannies or salesgirls in the Abercrombie & Fitch or the Banana Republic in Rookwood Pavilion. Similarly, they had lived under roofs other than their parents’ for only short stretches, experiments in quasi-independence that had always resulted in dramatic fights with formerly close friends, broken leases, and the huffy transport of possessions, via laundry basket and trash bag, back to the Tudor. Primarily what occupied the younger Bennet sisters was eating lunch at Green Dog Café or Teller’s, texting and watching videos on their smartphones, and exercising. About a year before, Kitty and Lydia had embraced CrossFit, the intense strength and conditioning regimen that involved weight lifting, kettle bells, battle ropes, obscure acronyms, the eschewal of most foods other than meat, and a derisive attitude toward the weak and unenlightened masses who still believed that jogging was a sufficient workout and a bagel was an acceptable breakfast. Naturally, all Bennets except Kitty and Lydia were among these masses.
Mary, meanwhile, was pursuing her third online master’s degree, this one in psychology; the earlier ones had been in criminal justice and business administration. The plainest in appearance of the sisters, Mary considered her decision to live with her parents to be evidence of her commitment to the life of the mind over material acquisitions, and also to reflect her aversion to waste, since her childhood room would go empty were she not its occupant. By this logic, Mary’s waste avoidance was truly exemplary, since she hardly decamped from her room from one day to the next and instead sequestered herself with her studies, stayed up late, and slept in. The exception was a standing Tuesday-night excursion, but if asked about this mysterious weekly outing, Mary would bark, “It’s none of your business,” or that’s what she would have said back when her family members still inquired. Also back then, Lydia would have said, “AA meeting? Lesbian book club? Lesbian AA meeting?”
Jane and Liz had always held jobs, but even for them, a certain awareness of the safety net below had allowed the prioritizing of their personal interests over remuneration. Jane was a yoga instructor, a position that might have let her cover her rent in a city such as Cincinnati but did not do so in Manhattan, and certainly not on the Upper West Side, which she had called home for the last fifteen years. While Liz, too, had spent her twenties and thirties in New York, she had for most of them, until a recent move to Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood, inhabited dingy walk-ups in the outer boroughs. The exception had been the apartment at Seventy-second and Amsterdam that the sisters had shared shortly after Liz graduated from Barnard College in the late 1990s, just a year after Jane’s graduation from the same school. Though they had gotten along well as roommates, the sisters’ cohabitation had reached its conclusion when Jane became engaged to an affable hedge-fund analyst named Teddy; Mrs. Bennet’s uneasiness with Jane and Teddy living together prior to their marriage was allayed by Teddy’s degree from Cornell and his lucrative job. Alas, Teddy’s dawning awareness of his attraction to other men ultimately precluded a permanent union with Jane, though Jane and her erstwhile fiancé did part on good terms, and once or twice a year, both Liz and Jane would meet Teddy and his toothsome partner, Patrick, for brunch.
Liz had spent her entire professional life working at magazines, having been hired out of college as a fact-checker at a weekly publication known for its incisive coverage of politics and culture. From there, she had jumped to Mascara, a monthly women’s magazine she had subscribed to since the age of fourteen, drawn equally to its feminist stances and its unapologetic embrace of shoes and cosmetics. First she was an assistant editor, then an associate editor, then a features editor; but at the age of thirty-one, realizing that her passion was telling stories rather than editing them, Liz had become Mascara’s writer-at-large, a position she still occupied. Though writing tended to pay less than editing, Liz believed she had a dream job: She traveled regularly and interviewed accomplished and sometimes famous individuals. However, her achievements did not impress her own family. Her father still, after all this time, pretended not to remember Mascara’s name. “How’s everything at Nail Polish?” he’d ask or “Any new developments at Lipstick?” Mary often told Liz that Mascara reinforced oppressive and exclusionary standards of beauty; even Lydia and Kitty, who had no problem with oppressive and exclusionary standards of beauty, were uninterested in the publication, likely because they were fans of neither magazines nor books and confined their reading to the screens of their phones.
And yet, if Liz’s job underwhelmed those close to her, its flexible nature was what had allowed her to remain at home during her father’s convalescence, and the situation was similar for Jane, who had taken a leave of absence from the yoga studio where she was employed. Five weeks earlier, the two sisters had traveled to Cincinnati unsure of the outcome of, and greatly rattled by, Mr. Bennet’s surgery. By the time it was clear that he would make a full recovery, Liz and Jane were deeply involved in both his recuperation and the day-to-day proceedings of the household: They grocery shopped and prepared cardiac-friendly meals for the entire family; they took turns transporting Mr. Bennet to his doctors’ appointments, including to the orthopedist treating the arm Mr. Bennet had broken when he’d lost consciousness during his original heart incident and had fallen at the top of the stairs in the second-floor hall. (Because he still wore a cast on his right arm, Mr. Bennet was unable to drive himself.) Additionally, though they had made little progress so far, Liz and Jane intended to address the cluttered and dusty condition into which the Tudor had deteriorated.
While their sisters could in theory have performed all such tasks, the younger women appeared disinclined. Though also clearly rattled by their father’s heart incident, they weren’t rattled in a way that caused them to alter their daily schedules: Lydia and Kitty carried on with CrossFit and leisurely restaurant lunches, while Mary emerged from her room erratically to attempt to engage family members in discussions of mortality. In the kitchen, observing her father drinking the powdered-psyllium-seed-husk-based liquid meant to offset the constipating effects of his pain medication, Mary had announced that she considered the Native American view of life and death as cyclical to be far more advanced than the Western proclivity for heroic measures, at which point Mr. Bennet had poured the remainder of his beverage down the sink, said, “For Christ’s sake, Mary, put a sock in it,” and left the room.
Mrs. Bennet expressed great concern about her husband’s plight—indeed, she could hardly speak of the evening on which he’d been hospitalized without sobbing at the recollection of the fright it had caused her—but she could no
t act as his nurse or chauffeur because of her many Women’s League luncheon duties. “What if you ask somebody else on the committee to take over and you’re the chair next year instead?” Liz had inquired one day when Mr. Bennet was still in the hospital. Her mother had looked at her in horror.
“Why, I’d never hear the end of it,” Mrs. Bennet said. “Lizzy, all those items being solicited for the silent auction—I’m the one keeping track of them.”
“Then how about creating an online spreadsheet that everyone can see?” Because Mrs. Bennet wasn’t proficient with a computer, Liz added, “I can help you.”
“It’s out of the question,” Mrs. Bennet said. “I’m also the one who’s been talking to the florist, and I’m the one who had the idea to do napkins with the league’s insignia. You can’t pass off things like that in midstream.”
“Does Mom secretly hate Dad?” Liz asked Jane the next morning when the two sisters were out for a run. “Because she’s acting really unsupportive.”
“I think she just doesn’t want to face how serious things could have been,” Jane said.
After Mr. Bennet’s return home, however, Liz wondered if she’d been wrong not about her mother’s antipathy for her father but only about its being secret. Although her parents resumed their regular lunches together at the Cincinnati Country Club as soon as Mr. Bennet possessed the energy, the couple led largely separate lives within the Tudor. In fact, her father no longer shared the master bedroom, instead sleeping in a narrow sleigh bed in his second-floor study, a setup that predated his hospital stay. When Liz asked Mary how long the arrangement had existed, Mary squinted and said, “Five years? Or, I don’t know, ten?”
Reinforcing Liz’s dismay was the fact that, although Dr. Morelock had explicitly talked about the importance of Mr. Bennet embarking on a diet low in red meat, salt, and alcohol, Mrs. Bennet had welcomed her husband home with a cocktail hour of Scotch and Cheetos followed by a steak dinner. When the subsequent night’s entrée was roast beef, Liz discreetly asked her mother afterward if she might consider making chicken or salmon. “But Kitty and Lydia like beef because it’s caveman food,” Mrs. Bennet protested.
“But Dad had a heart attack,” Liz said.
For all the nights since, she and Jane had taken turns preparing dinner. They had also agreed to stay in Cincinnati until the weekend after the Women’s League luncheon. Liz had little confidence that her mother would step in and provide care for her father at that point; rather, with his cast off by then, his physical therapy well under way if not complete, and his ability to drive likely restored, she hoped he’d be able to care for himself.
“HONK SO YOUR mother knows we’re waiting,” Mr. Bennet said. In the large circular driveway of the Tudor, waiting to depart for the Lucases’ barbecue, Liz sat in the driver’s seat of her mother’s Lexus sedan, with Mr. Bennet in the passenger seat and Jane in back.
“She already knows,” Liz said, and Mr. Bennet leaned over and, using his left arm, which was the one not in a cast, pressed the horn himself.
“Jesus, Dad,” Liz said. “Show a little patience.”
The Bennets would transport themselves to the Lucases’ in no fewer than three cars: Lydia and Kitty would drive out in Kitty’s Mini Cooper, and Mary insisted she’d take her own Honda hybrid. “This way, it won’t be a problem if Dad is tired and needs to leave early,” Mrs. Bennet had said as she, Liz, and Jane conferred in the kitchen about the slightly droopy strawberry-and-blueberry-bedecked sponge cake Jane had made.
In the driveway, Liz turned to her father. “Are you eager to meet the famous Chip Bingley?”
“Unlike your mother, I don’t care whom any of you marries or, frankly, if you marry,” Mr. Bennet said. “The institution hasn’t done much for me, Lord knows.”
“That’s a nice sentiment.” Liz patted her father’s knee. “Thank you for sharing.”
Mrs. Bennet appeared at the back door, looking flustered, and called out, “I just need another minute.” Before they could respond, she vanished again.
Liz glanced at Jane in the rearview mirror. “Jane, are you excited to meet Chip?” Jane was gazing out the window; so placid was she in demeanor that at times it was difficult to discern whether she was upset or simply reflective. In any case, she had never participated with much gusto in the banter her father and sisters enjoyed.
“I suppose,” Jane said as Mrs. Bennet emerged from the house.
“How lovely of you to join us!” Mr. Bennet called out his open window.
Liz started the engine as her mother climbed into the backseat. “The phone rang, and it was Ginger Drossman inviting us for brunch,” Mrs. Bennet said. “That’s what took so long.” As she leaned forward into the front seat, a look of concern pinched Mrs. Bennet’s features. “Lizzy, I’m sure there’s time for you to run in and put on a skirt.”
In her teens or early twenties, such a remark would have irritated Liz, but at thirty-eight, having wardrobe fights with her mother felt preposterous. Cheerfully, she said, “Nope, I’m comfortable.” Even if her mother couldn’t recognize it, the shorts she had on were extremely stylish, as were her sleeveless white blouse and straw sandals.
Jane spoke as they pulled out of the driveway. She said, “I think Lizzy looks pretty.”
WHILE IT WAS technically accurate that both Liz and Jane were single, this fact did not for either woman convey the full story. After Jane’s fruitless early engagement, she had met a man named Jean-Pierre Babineaux, a courtly French financier, and they had become a couple for the better part of a decade. Though Jane had assumed she and Jean-Pierre would marry, their conversations on the subject were always marked by a bittersweetness she recognized in retrospect as a kind of warning. It was not that either of them lacked affection for the other but, rather, that the circumstances of their lives were incompatible: He was fifteen years older than she, divorced, and the father of twins who were, when Jane met him, twelve. He traveled back to Paris frequently, and while Jane could hardly complain about her visits there, staying at the apartment he maintained in the Sixth Arrondissement, she did not wish to live so far from her family and certainly not permanently; yet Jean-Pierre’s ultimate plan was to return to his birthplace. Further, while Jane unequivocally wished to bear children, Jean-Pierre had had a vasectomy when the twins were two.
Jane and Jean-Pierre’s eventual breakup was no less devastating for being both protracted and decorous. At thirty-seven, she was single once more and remained so for the next two years. Shortly after her thirty-ninth birthday, following the painstaking consideration of a multitude of anonymous candidates, Jane lay on her back in a hospital gown at a clinic on East Fifty-seventh Street, awaiting the insertion of donor semen into her cervix via needleless syringe. Though Jane followed all the recommendations for creating conditions favorable to pregnancy—she stopped drinking alcohol, slept eight hours a night, and meditated daily—fertilization didn’t occur during that cycle or in any of the next several rounds. While not statistically anomalous—few women attempting to become pregnant via donor insemination were immediately successful—this lack of progress was discouraging as well as expensive, and Jane’s insurance covered none of the monthly $1,000 charge. Anticipating her parents’ disapproval, she hadn’t disclosed her pursuit to them and thus was receiving no extra money beyond the rent, which Mr. Bennet paid directly on her behalf. Thus, for the first time in her adult life, Jane found herself bypassing restaurants, forgoing haircuts, and shunning the street on which her favorite clothing boutique, with its elegantly tailored $400 pencil skirts and luxurious $300 sweaters, was located. Such sacrifices would not, she recognized, count by most people’s standards as hardships, but she was privately conscious of a new austerity.
With no one other than Liz did Jane discuss her efforts to become a mother. Her gynecologist had suggested that she tell her parents even before the first insemination, but Jane thought that if she wasn’t able to become pregnant, then she’d have courted the double punishm
ent of what she assumed would be her mother’s histrionics and no baby. And Jane still hoped to marry eventually, though marriage was no longer her immediate goal.
Unlike Jane, Liz wished to avoid motherhood. That she was dating a married man made such avoidance logical, though whether these circumstances had occurred by chance or subconscious design even Liz herself couldn’t say. In the late nineties, Liz and Jasper Wick had immediately hit it off as new hires in the fact-checking department of the same prestigious magazine: They bit back smiles when the books editor, who was from Delaware, pronounced the word “memoir” mem-wah; they got lunch together several times a week at a cheap Thai restaurant; and they routinely divided the work between them when checking facts on onerous articles. (They had started their jobs using computers with spotty Internet connections, back when fact-checking meant visiting the public library or waiting anxiously for the return of phone calls.)
When Liz and Jasper met, he had a girlfriend, which was unsurprising: He had deep brown eyes and tousled blond curls and was at once smart and irreverent, boyish and thoughtful, with, in Liz’s assessment, the perfect quantities of neuroses and prurience to make him interesting to talk to, receptive to gossip, and game for analyzing the behavior and personalities of others without tipping over into seeming unmasculine. Indeed, Jasper’s sole flaw, in Liz’s opinion, apart from his girlfriend, was that he wore a gold ring from Stanford University, his alma mater; Liz did not care for either jewelry on men or academic ostentatiousness. But she actually was glad to have identified the one thing about Jasper she’d change, because it was similar to realizing what you’d forgotten to take on a trip, and if it was only perfume, as opposed to your driver’s license, you were relieved.
Initially, Liz had believed that a union with Jasper was just a matter of time; such was Jasper’s tendency to confide in her about the multitude of challenges he and his girlfriend, Serena, were experiencing that Liz imagined she need not persuade him of anything. While still together with Serena, Jasper had dropped conversational bombshells on Liz that included “I mean, I talk way more openly with you than I do with her” and “Sometimes I think you and I would be a good couple. Do you ever think that?” Liz knew for certain he had said these things because, although she no longer kept a journal, she’d written them down verbatim, along with their date of utterance, on an unlined sheet of computer paper she kept in her nightstand. Also, after she mentioned to Jasper that as a toddler she’d referred to herself as Ninny or Nin, he began calling her by the latter pet name.