Work Text:
I ARGUE THEE
THAT LOVE IS LIFE
AND LIFE HATH IMMORTALITY
~~~~
“So sweet and still, and thee, oh Sue, what need I more to make my heaven whole? Sweet hour, blessed hour, to carry me to you, and to bring you back to me, long enough to snatch one kiss, and whisper goodbye again…”
i.
Sue and Austin go to the Dickinson’s for supper a couple of times a week. It allows Mrs. Dickinson to fawn over the baby and for Austin and his father to talk about cases and the firm.
She wears that pretty red, white, and gold sun dress that Sue likes so much.
They all exchange pleasantries over baked potatoes and roast, and talk about how the light snow outside, though lovely, is so late for the time of year. Lavinia bats a ribbon at the cat in her lap, and Austin starts talking about how Worcester and Springfield are quickly becoming industrial cities and important centers in textile machinery, blah blah blah.
Their eyes find each other’s silently in the surrounding conversation and the clinking of silverware. What experts they’ve become at communicating through glances across the table, eyeing things like “I hate this” or “I miss you” or “You look so pretty” without ever actually saying the words or being given away.
The candles burn lower, and the men retire, full-bellied, to Mr. Dickinson’s office where they can get lost in legal documents and a cloud of smoke from matching pipes. Mrs. Dickinson coos at the baby in her arms, wrapped in blankets and a laced white bonnet, cozied close in a corner rocking chair.
In the kitchen, Sue puts a half-empty bowl of peas on the table, leaving the rest of the dinner dishes and washing for Maggie and Vinnie, pulling Emily into the hallway between the kitchen and the foyer where they can, for a short time, finally be alone.
Sue pushes her gently up against the wall, takes her face in her hands and her upper lip in her mouth, earnest and quiet all the while, and Emily’s breath catches in her throat. Her eyes roll closed, and Sue nuzzles her neck for a moment, breathing in the sweet scent of lemon scones and flowers.
“I thought about you all day,” she whispers, fingering the gold and red patterns on the sleeves of her cotton dress.
Emily smiles wistfully, kissing her again, encircling her hands on the back of Sue’s neck.
Sue sighs into her hair. “I hate that we have to sneak around like this. To see you and be around you and have to pretend like my body isn’t humming…it all feels too much sometimes.”
But Emily smirks at her cheekily. “It is kind of exciting though, isn’t it?” She captures Sue’s lips again, lingering. “How could it be bad when it feels so good?”
They stay there, against the wall in a shadowy, hushed corner, eyes sometimes peering all around in fear of being caught…if only for one moment more.
ii.
On a Sunday in June, the church is especially hot. Women undo their bonnets and men sit in the pews jacketless, everyone lightly sweating and doing their best to listen to the hymns.
Austin and Sue sit three pews ahead of Emily and the others, and one row over, and Emily spends a lot of the mass looking at the back of Sue, observing her as a wife and mother in this public space. The baby, like everyone else, is hot and cranky, and before communion, Emily watches Sue and Austin collect their things and slip out of the pew as to not cause a scene while the baby fusses.
Emily’s eyes meet the front of the church again, wishing she could slip away quietly, too.
“I made up words and kept singing how I loved you, and you had gone, while all the rest of the choir were singing Hallelujahs. I presume nobody heard me because I sang so small, but it was a kind of comfort to think I might put them out, singing of you.”
iii.
It rains buckets for most of July.
Austin has to attend a series of conferences in South Hadley, so he and Sue go away for two weeks.
Emily daydreams about how lovely it would be to sit together on the porch, just her and Sue, and spend these afternoons listening to the rain’s patter against leaves. She looks up at the lightning in the sky and identifies with its angry electricity.
“Sue, will you indeed come home next Saturday, and be my own again, and kiss me like you used to? My darling, how near I seem to you, that I disdain this pen, and wait for a warmer language. With Vinnie’s love, and my love, I am once more Your Emily.”
iv.
When the weather turns, Austin goes camping with George and the other guys from the Lit Club.
Emily excitedly invites herself over to stay the night at their house on the pretense of helping Sue with the baby while Austin’s away. And so Sue won’t have to be in the house “alone.”
She goes over at 1:00. They bake an apple pie and a honey cake, sweep the whole kitchen and entryway, add firewood to the hearth to keep the baby warm while he rests, and sink into the couch cushions with matching sighs as the sun begins to set.
“What a lovely day indeed,” Sue murmurs in the fading light. “It’ll be another little while before the baby wakes for supper.”
Emily, who normally hates to clean and do other chores, especially for any extended period of time, can’t help but think about how the day today had passed in such joy and contentedness with Sue. And she notes the fact that Sue and Austin have the most comfortable couch she’s ever sat on.
She catches Sue’s fingers before she can reach for the cross-stitch piece she started yesterday.
“Touch me.”
Sue’s hand disappears under her skirt.
v.
The reoccurring nightmare wakes Emily from sleep that night; the one on the ship in the middle of the storm. Just her and Sue and the sideways rain in the dark.
Her heart pounds in her chest as she comes to, being pulled out of this frightful dream, and she feels cool sheets with her hands, breathing and beginning to relax. She turns her face toward the window, where the moonbeams gently illuminate the shape of Sue’s profile while she sleeps, and for a moment, looking at her, Emily is so relieved and so genuinely happy, she feels like crying.
“I wake up saying ‘Precious treasure, thou art mine,’ and there you were all right, my Sue, and I hardly dared to sleep lest some one steal you away…”
vi.
In mid-October, they take the baby on a foliage walk. The leaves began to turn in late September, and every year, the vibrant oranges and yellows soothe Emily’s soul until the very last one falls.
She was explaining to Sue how Mrs. Dickinson had invited two more suitors to the house to meet her that week, and how she had to sit through yet another lecture about “accepting love into her life lest she never marry and become an old maid.”
“Love and marriage don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand,” Sue says, crunching leaves beneath her shoes. “I mean, I’m not married to you, and you’re the love of my life.”
Emily pauses in her tracks, but Sue keeps walking as if she doesn’t even register the gravity of what she just said. After a couple of strides, she stops, too, and looks back.
“What?”
Emily blinks at her. “Say it again.”
vii.
For Sue’s birthday, Emily bakes her her favorite cake and leaves it on the doorstep of the Evergreens.
They have a small celebration with the family, but Emily wishes they had even a short amount of private time together. Austin seems to have a vice-like grip on Sue’s hand and waist these days, and when it’s not him, it’s the baby tugging at the bottom of her dress.
Emily doesn’t see Sue for three days. But during a chore with Maggie, she finds a folded note in the seam of the fence where Sue takes the baby to play in the barn. Emily smiles fondly at the scrolled sentence written in Sue’s hand.
At the desk in her room, she writes on the back of Sue’s note.
“You thank me for the rice cake – you tell me you’ve just been tasting it. And how happy I am to send you anything you love…”
viii.
She doesn’t hear from Sue for a week. There’s a terrible, bitter chill in the air, and the town is especially quiet as people stay inside to keep warm.
But she braves the cold between the house and the barn for a third time that day anyway, checking the seam in the fence and hoping that the walk there will be worth it, and that she’ll see a folded note waiting for her there, maybe still warm with Sue’s touch.
“I have intended to write you, Emily, today, but quiet has not been mine. I send you this, lest I should seem to have turned away from a kiss.”
Emily’s tear drops onto the page and bleeds the ink.
ix.
Austin gets really angry with Sue one day. He whines that she never says, “I love you” – she just hugs him or simply murmurs “Love you” when he says it first. Maybe she’ll call him “dear” here and there, but his point is that the affection in their marriage feels overwhelmingly one-sided.
He storms out of their house.
She soothes the baby, who began to stir and cry after the sounds of Austin’s shouting and the door’s slam.
And then Emily is there, having heard the commotion from next door.
“Are you okay? Let me take the baby.”
And Sue watches as Emily’s soothing touch and voice quickly turn the baby’s frightened, irritated cries to gurgles. Her humming and swaying put the baby back to sleep like magic.
And Sue can’t help but pull her in once the baby is down.
“Sue -”
“Shhh. Take off your dress.”
x.
A full moon rises in the sky. Emily lies on her stomach with the sheet covering her bottom, but with her bare back out in the chill of the room. Her hair falls in a wave across the pillowcase. Sue grazes the tips of her fingers over the lines and curves of her spine, appreciating Emily’s delicate softness in place of her brother’s rugged, hairy skin.
They should dress and collect themselves. Austin could, after all, come home at any time now.
But they just continue to lie there in the afterglow.
Emily looks at her dreamily, half asleep now, eyes soft in the flickering candlelight. Sue pulls the sheet up around Emily’s shoulders, letting it, in her hand, rest between Emily’s shoulder blades.
Sue swallows hard. “I love you.”
~~~~
UNABLE ARE THE LOVED TO DIE
FOR LOVE IS IMMORTALITY