Solos by Kitty Burns Florey

Author:Kitty Burns Florey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497693425
Publisher: Open Road Distribution

11

Eve damned eden mad eve

(Mid-November 2002)

Emily comes in from a photography session and checks her Emails. There are five. The headings are:

Emily, your dog can be smarter!

Eddie Bauer pre-Christmas Outerwear Sale!

Work at Home for BIG $$$$$!

Emily Limo! Your Mortgage Has Already Been Approved!!

Thanksgiving? London? Mom? California? Guilt? Help?

The last one, she knows immediately, is from her sister Laurie telling her that she’s thinking of not going to Berkeley for Thanksgiving. She and Jonathan want to go to London and see some plays, and what does Emily think about all of them meeting up at Mom’s for Christmas instead?

She E-mails her sister that she has already decided to fly out only for Christmas this year, not Thanksgiving, and reassures her about the lack of necessity for guilt: Mom’s new beau is helping her make the Christmas fruitcakes, so it’s serious—she probably won’t notice whether her kids are there for Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Groundhog Day. Emily cc’s her brother on the E-mail, puts in a wash, and then curls up under her quilt with Otto and Miss Mackenzie. But she’s distracted from the book by the need to contemplate her life.

Emily is tired of being poor.

Her sister Laurie, two years younger than she, is a senior curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, specializing in sixteenth and seventeenth century English needlework, and Laurie’s husband Jonathan is a pediatrician with a large practice. Emily’s brother Milo is a building contractor in Ann Arbor, married to a well-known novelist who teaches at the university there. Both her siblings will offer her money for a plane ticket to California at Christmas, and so will her mother. She will debate whether to accept it from one or the other of them (and make things easy on herself), or scrape together the money (as she usually does) by a creative combination of late rent, a maxed-out Visa, frugal eating, and hope. Hope is not entirely illusory; Dr. Demand has bought photographs from her on four of the eleven Christmases she has lived in Williamsburg. But hope is also, as Emily Dickinson and the posters in the Hallmark shop have it, the thing with feathers, and it can soar into the air faster than Izzy does when he hears a ringing phone.

In the end, she knows she will pay for her own ticket.

But what she will do about gifts for everyone is another question.

Last year, when she made fudge for her family and begged them not to give her presents, they all got together and presented her with a check so large she couldn’t bring herself to cash it until Milo flew to Brooklyn in March and escorted her personally to the bank. The year before, she suggested they all draw names: She drew her mother and gave her three pairs of striped socks and a loaf of home-made bread; Jonathan drew Emily and gave her the rare antique “Hummingbird” pattern quilt that she is presently snuggled under with the dog.

Outside her windows, she can see an occasional aimless snowflake.

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