The Romance Reader's Guide to Life

“Electra!” her mother called. “Come and say goodbye to Judge Le Cherche.” Electra adjusted her bodice, walked woodenly to the door, and nodded slightly as he bowed. The door closed behind him.

Electra’s first words were icily flat and crystal clear. “I will cut my throat before I enter a relationship of any kind with that man. He is not human. I do not know what he is, but he will never touch me.”

“The matter is settled. I have spoiled you! And I will stand for no disobedience here, young miss!”

The two women each strode angrily away in different directions. When Electra reached her room, she drew a bag from beneath her bed, stuffed it with the sturdiest, most practical clothes she had with her, and opened a window. She would be as far away from this place as she could be by morning, nowhere to be found when Judge Henri Le Cherche sought his intended plaything.

Fate had forced her to become mistress of her own future. She swung her leg over the sill and jumped.

*

The day after I read this section of The Pirate Lover I sat in Mrs. Daniels’s living room, again, reading a column from Ladies Good Housekeeping. I closed it. “Mrs. Daniels,” I said, “have you ever run away?”

“Of course. Anyone worth their salt runs away from home at least once.”

Well, no. I hadn’t. And I was certainly worth some salt. “When did you do it?”

“Twice. The first time I was angry with my mother, I was perhaps six. She had spanked me to impress some lesson upon me, now lost to time, and I actually put a handkerchief stuffed with apples and two snickerdoodle cookies on a stick and marched off down our road. Very picturesque. I got as far as the first big hedge, where I sat down and ate all my provisions. Then it got dark and cold and, having run out of cookies, I returned home. No one noticed I’d been gone.”

“Where did you run to the second time?”

“France.”

“France?!”

“I was running from my second husband. It seems I hadn’t outgrown the old strategy, though I packed more intelligently.”

“What did he do to you to make you run away?”

“That is a mature subject for a much later date.”

I’d tried to imagine what a mature explanation for a runaway wife might be, and the exercise was difficult due to youth and inexperience. Now, sadly, I know more and I can imagine lots of reasons for a wife to run away. But when the questions first popped up, I’d read between a few of the lines in the more explicit monster and fantasy comic books under Snyder’s bed. I had read marital advice columns touching on intimate subjects. Still—nothing that I imagined made sense when it was applied to the woman across the tea table from me: fleshy wattles and wide waist, dark circles under both eyes and ankles like popovers. She’d watched me scan her from hairline to toes, and one of her eyebrows popped up. “It isn’t all pretty bows and tiny waists, my dear—other things command men’s attentions if you are interested enough in those attentions to cultivate and use them.”

“Other things like what?” I’d asked.

“If you ask the question in such vague terms, then you are too young for the conversation. Now—I have a short story here by Mr. Fitzgerald called ‘Bernice Bobs Her Hair.’ Ready?”

I had been ready and I said so. Mr. Fitzgerald’s story made perfect sense to me. Maybe I’d never run away from home but I knew what it felt like to wake up in the middle of the night burning with the desire to chop off all of someone’s hair because they did me wrong by day.

“That’ll show her,” I said when we reached the moment when Bernice clipped Marjorie’s beautiful long hair and ran into the night with the braids dangling from one hand.

“Yes. I thought you’d like that one. Go to the kitchen and tell Violette to fetch us brownies.” Mrs. Daniels’s cook was a wizard at brownies. I ate mine thinking about all the terrible thoughts and actions in the grown-up world, a place jam-packed with lusts and betrayals.

“Mrs. Daniels, can I ask Violette to show me how she does it?”

“Does what?”

“The brownies. The other things.”

I thought Mrs. Daniels looked disappointed in me but she sighed and said, “You may ask her. Never let it be said that I stood between a child and her capacity to bake brownies.”

That Saturday I came very early and learned to cream sugar and butter. Violette was patient and free with the kitchen’s startling wealth. The room was saturated with light, orderly, calm, smelling of chocolate and melting sugar. I loved it so much I worried, just a little, if it was wrong to bake with Violette in Mrs. Daniels’s kitchen. Was it petty and silly? Electra Gates would never concern herself with how much lard should be in pie dough, I thought; but then, I was not Electra Gates. I wanted pie, something that didn’t seem to interest romantic heroines.

*

The next week Mrs. Daniels and I read passages from Leaves of Grass:

Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through me the current and index.… Through me forbidden voices, Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil, Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur’d.… If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of my own body, or any part of it, Translucent mould of me it shall be you! Shaded ledges and rests it shall be you!

I can’t say I understood what I was reading, but I had the uneasy sense that these words had something to do with Electra Gates’s dress and how that dress made men feel. Also made her feel. But I couldn’t turn to Mrs. Daniels to help me figure out why they seemed so connected because, of course, she didn’t know I’d stolen The Pirate Lover and I wasn’t about to let her know now. The air was dry and cool and the sugar cookies were as big as soup plates. I ate three and was offered a bag with four more to take home for Snyder, Jane, and Lilly.

“Mrs. Daniels, did you like being married?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t have done it twice if I didn’t. Though no two of them are alike, and you can’t know going in how it’ll turn out.”

“What happened to your husbands?”

“They died.”

I must have looked stricken, because she added, “Everyone dies, child.”

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