The Engagements by J. Courtney Sullivan Page A

years. The strangest story came from a kid named Ed, who claimed his parents were the envy of all their friends, with a beautiful home, three children, and a lake house in New Hampshire. Every night his dad came home from work at six on the nose, cheery and kind. He kissed his wife, brought the trash barrels out to the curb, and carried the toys in from the yard. Then one evening he sat down to dinner as usual. When his wife placed the food on the table, out of nowhere, he yelled, “I hate chicken.” He walked out, never to return.
    For Kate, it was a matter of getting drBut not becaus

Diagnostic research revealed that the women viewed engagement as “only the beginning” of the wedding process, with the DER as “part” of that process. As a result, DER price competed against all other marriage and household preparation expenses. Women, therefore, often exerted downward pressure on the DER price.
    By contrast, for men, engagement was seen as a momentous occasion, signaling a major life change. To them, the DER was viewed as the true mark of adulthood and all the responsibility that goes with it—family, home, a steady job, a lifestyle of permanence. Because men invested the DER with so much importance and meaning, it was also a source of pride that had to be sufficiently expressive of the occasion. Men were willing to spend more/make financial sacrifices to show the importance of their intent in this, the first public affirmation of their obligation to the relationship. They were, however, lacking in confidence about purchasing a diamond since they had no reference for price expectations or diamond quality.
    Two months’ salary is a price guideline which both respects income differences and sets an aspirational price goal.
    —Internal Memo, Case History, N. W. Ayer, 1990
The Engagements

1988
    Frances was up late, stewing. She held a cup of coffee in her hand. Most women her age avoided caffeine after noon, but she had been an insomniac all her life, and she found that it didn’t make a bit of difference whether she drank coffee or not. Either way, she wouldn’t sleep.
    The television droned in the background. Her black Lab, Blazer, lay on the rug at her feet, his head on Frances’s toes. She was working on her Christmas cards, which she had just gotten back from the printer’s. They featured a photograph of the dog wearing a pair of reindeer antlers. One by one, she signed them, even though the printer said no one bothered to do that anymore. They had a typeface that looked like handwriting now, he said. The thought of this depressed her enormously.
    She was thinking about Howard Davis and his very surprising proposal. Weighing whether she ought to accept.
    A few days earlier, when good old Howard called to say that he and his wife were driving from Manhattan all the way to the Main Line to take her to lunch, Frances knew it must be something important. She hadn’t seen Howard in eighteen years, not since her last day at Ayer. She hated to think about that day, even now. There had been no fanfare, no farewell party. She walked out alone, with a box under each arm, somehow unable to make herself switch off the lamp, as if leaving it on meant she would come back tomorrow and do it all again.
    The world had changed by leaps and bounds since then; even the Philadelphia office, which had seemed somehow eternal, was gone. The first building ever constructed to house an advertising agency in America, the building she had walked into and out of five days a week for twenty-seven years, now stood empty.
    Ultimately, Ayer had joined all the others in Manhattan. But the agency came to the party too late, and was now a shadow of the powerhouse it had once been. No one cared that they started it all. Advertising was about the here and now, and sometimes the future, but never the past.
    When Howard and his wife, Hana, arrived in Wayne that afternoon, Frances saw that they too had aged, though they were her juniors by a decade