some time, and I might need her at some point. I think she could learn a great deal from working for me again.”
“Oh, does Vivian have a particular bent for the mining industry?”
“It just seems to me that you’ve driven a long distance to find a menial laborer. It seems to me you could’ve filled the position in the city. But then I’ve never understood why you always resist everything that might make your life easier.”
“Vivian’s not menial labor,” Peg said. “She’s a sensational costumer.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Years of exhaustive research in the field of theater, Douglas.”
“Ha. The field of theater.”
“I’d like to go,” I said, finding my voice at last.
“Why?” my father asked me. “Why would you want to go back to that city, where people live on top of each other, and you can’t even see the daylight?”
“Says the man who has spent the better part of his life in a mine,” retorted Peg.
Honestly, they were like a couple of children. It wouldn’t have surprised me if they started kicking each other under the table.
But now they were all looking at me, waiting for my answer. Why did I want to go to New York? How could I explain it? How could I explain what this proposal felt like, compared to the marriage proposal Jim Larsen had recently offered me? It was merely the difference between cough syrup and champagne.
“I would like to go to New York City again,” I announced, “because I wish to expand the prospects of my life.”
I delivered this line with a certain amount of authority, I felt, and it got everyone’s attention. (I must confess that I’d heard the phrase “I wish to expand the prospects of my life” on a radio soap opera recently, and it had stayed with me. But no matter. In this situation, it worked. Also it was true.)
“If you go,” said my mother, “we won’t be supporting you. We can’t keep giving you an allowance. Not at your age.”
“I don’t need an allowance. I’ll earn my own way.”
Even the word “allowance” embarrassed me. I never wanted to hear it again.
“You’ll have to find employment,” my father said.
Peg stared at her brother in astonishment. “It’s incredible, Douglas, how you never listen to me. Only moments ago—at this very table—I told you that I had a job for Vivian.”
“She’ll need proper employment,” said my father.
“She’ll have proper employment. She’ll be working for the United States Navy, just like her brother. The Navy’s given me enough of a budget to hire another person. She’ll be a government employee.”
Now it was I who wanted to kick Peg under the table. For my father, there was scarcely a worse combination of two words in the English language than “government employee.” It would have been better if Peg had said I’d be working as a “money thief.”
“You can’t keep going back and forth between here and New York City eternally, you know,” said my mother.
“I won’t,” I promised. And boy, did I mean it.
“I don’t want my daughter spending a lifetime working in the theater,” said my father.
Peg rolled her eyes. “Yes, that would be appalling.”
“I don’t like New York,” he said. “It’s a city full of second-place winners.”
“Yes, famously,” shot back Peg. “Nobody who has ever been successful at anything has ever lived in Manhattan.”
My father must not have cared that much about his argument, though, because he didn’t dig in.
In all honesty, I think my parents were willing to consider allowing me to leave because they were weary of me. In their eyes, I shouldn’t have been inhabiting their home anyway—and it was their home. I should have been out of the house a long time ago—ideally through the portal of college, followed by a finalizing shunt into matrimony. I didn’t come from a culture where children are welcome to remain in the family household after childhood. (My parents hadn’t even wanted me around that much during childhood, for that matter, if you consider the amount of time I’d spent at boarding school and summer camps.)
My father just had to razz Aunt Peg a little more before he could finally agree to it.
“I’m unconvinced that New York would be a good influence on Vivian,” he said. “I would hate to see a daughter of mine becoming a Democrat.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that,” said Peg, with a fat smile of satisfaction. “I’ve been into the matter. Turns out, they don’t allow registered Democrats into the Anarchist Party.”
That line actually made my mother