I should have reread Anne of Ingleside before I went with Derek to his 10-year high school reunion, when I almost worried myself sick beforehand about making small talk with Christine Stuart types who would see me as just a perpetually pregnant “little woman” married to the Valedictorian with the impressive-sounding legal career…
“Anne Shirley! You haven’t changed as much as I’ve been told…though I don’t think I’d have known you if we’d just happened to meet on the street…They tell me you have seven children,” said Christine, speaking to Anne but looking at Gilbert.
“Only six living,” said Anne wincing. Even yet she could never think of little white Joyce without pain.
“What a family!” said Christine.
Instantly it seemed a disgraceful and absurd thing to have a large family.
“You, I think, have none,” said Anne.
“I never cared for children, you know.” Christine shrugged her remarkably fine shoulders but her voice was a little hard. “I’m afraid I’m not the maternal type. I really never thought it was woman’s sole mission to bring children into an already overcrowded world.”
… “Have you ever been to Obermmergau?” Christine asked Anne.
When she knew perfectly well Anne hadn’t! Why did the simplest question sound insolent when Christine asked it?
“Of course a family ties you down terribly,” said Christine. “Oh, whom do you think I saw last month when I was in Halifax? That little friend of yours…the one who married the ugly minister…Poor Phillipa!”
Christine’s use of “poor” was very effective.
“Why poor?” asked Anne. “I think she and Jonas have been very happy.”
“Happy! My dear, if you could see the place where they live in! A wretched little fishing village where it was an excitement if the pigs broke into the garden! I was told that the Jonas-man had had a good church in Kingsport and had given it up because he thought it his ‘duty’ to go to the fishermen who ‘needed’ him. I have no use for such fanatics. ‘How can you live in such an isolated, out-of-the-way place as this?’ I asked Philippa. Do you know what she said?”
Christine threw out her beringed hands expressively.
“Perhaps what I would say of Glen St. Mary,” said Anne. “That it was the only place in the world to live in.”
“Fancy you being contented there,” smiled Christine. “Do you really never feel that you want a broader life? You used to be quite ambitious, if I remember aright. Didn’t you write some rather clever little things when you were at Redmond? A bit fantastic and whimsical, of coure, but still…”
“I wrote them for the people who still believe in fairy-land. There is a surprising lot of them, you know, and they like to get news from that country.”
“And you’ve quite given it up?”
“Not altogether…but I’m writing living epistles now,” said Anne, thinking of Jem and Co.
Three cheers for Anne! I can’t call Tommy and Elizabeth “living epistles” without sounding fanciful, but I think I need to come up with a similar line next time I start fretting about being judged by people whose opinion of me doesn’t matter, anyway. (And to be fair, Derek’s old high school girlfriend was nothing like Christine (nor are any of my own friends!)–we actually bonded over being stay-at-home-moms who don’t get to shower every day.)