All Roads Lead to Austen by Amy Elizabeth Smith Page A

wrongs don’t make a right, so why would I think that these women would behave as if they did? Badly done, Amy.
    Sheepish but still curious about the relationship question, I waded back in with arguments I’d heard from former students, since the Charlotte/Mr. Collins match always finds defenders in California. “Can’t there be more than one kind of marriage? Why do we have to assume that everybody’s looking for the same kind of thing in their married life?”
    Still not buying it. “Without love, it’s not a marriage,” Flor pronounced bluntly.
    The other four defenders of love concurred. Then two began to waffle.
    â€œHer husband is a preacher, after all, and that’s a good thing,” said Nora.
    â€œI hope for her sake Charlotte will grow to love him,” Ani added, a look of compassion on her kind face. There it was, again, just like I’d seen over and over again in the States—Austen’s characters bursting the seams of her novels as if they were real people. I couldn’t help but smile, thinking about my students (and a slew of Austen sequel writers, eager to chronicle Charlotte’s fate).
    â€œLove doesn’t work that way,” Flor insisted firmly, moving forward in her seat for emphasis. “In a couple, if from the outset one doesn’t love the other, they’re never going to.”
    That love is necessary, all agreed. But the question of whether love can grow provoked yet another flurry of debate.
    â€œWe’ve all had our different experiences here,” Mercedes declared. “Me, I’m a widow. And you’ve been divorced, you’ve been divorced, you’ve been divorced,” she pointed in turn at Nora, Élida, and Flor. “And Ani, single. We all know now that when it comes down to it, you’ve got to ask yourself, how will I feel by this person’s side?”
    â€œCan you really live with them?” seconded Élida.
    â€œThe biggest problem here is that we all worry too much what other people think about our decisions,” Mercedes said. “We say we shouldn’t, but we do.”
    As for Austen, she was fading further into the background, but I had no intention of steering us back. I didn’t want to turn this into a lecture; I wanted to see where Austen would lead us.
    â€œBut it can be hard to make good decisions about men, because we grew up with so little information,” Mercedes continued. “I didn’t spend any time with men until after I finished school. That’s how we were raised here, right?” Nods all around. “My very first school was a convent!”
    Flor giggled and the rest joined in, sharing memories of conservative Catholic schools and encounters with nuns.
    â€œMy school was so strict,” Nora said. “But actually, I wanted to be a nun!”
    As Flor laughed even harder, Mercedes added, “I did too! I really did! But my grandmother talked me out of it. She told me to make sure that I understood the commitment.”
    â€œYes, since it’s like a marriage,” I offered.
    Suddenly five sets of eyes were fixed on me. “It’s not like a marriage,” Ani said gently but firmly. “It is a marriage.”
    As much as we had in common, I was reminded with a jolt, we came from different worlds. I’d been raised Catholic but not in a Catholic country. I wondered how many combinations of five women you’d have to pull together in the United States to produce a group in which not one but three had seriously considered becoming nuns. Quite a lot, I suspect.
    We transitioned from how little interaction they’d had with men while growing up to how one adjusts to living with the troublesome creatures (male readers, please reverse the genders here). Our conversation then began fracturing off into chat between pairs. Somebody began a juicy story about somebody’s sister getting pregnant by some real so-and-so,