nsadoodle.blogg.se

Neither had asked her to stand with them at the altar, and Elsa understood.

She was “too” everything-too tall, too thin, too pale, too unsure of herself.Įlsa had attended both of her sisters’ weddings. On her best day, in her best dress, a stranger might say she was handsome, but never more. They must think she was deaf, the way they talked about her.

Usually people wondered why, what had turned a perfectly ordinary woman from a good family into a spinster. “On the shelf,” they called her, shaking heads and tsking at her lost opportunities. By twenty-two, the whispers in town and at church would have begun, the long, sad looks. Hope began to dim for a woman when she turned twenty. An age when men drank bathtub gin and drove recklessly and listened to ragtime music and danced with women who wore headbands and fringed dresses. The Age of Innocence had awakened something in her, reminded her keenly of the passage of time. She knew it had nothing to do with the illness to which her rejection was usually ascribed.īut now, as she sat in the parlor, in her favorite chair, she closed the book in her lap and thought about it. The hurt had become so commonplace, she rarely noticed it. Elsa had survived it by being quiet, by not demanding or seeking attention, by accepting that she was loved, but unliked. There was a pain that came with constant disapproval a sense of having lost something unnamed, unknown.

They had sensed the lack in her early on, seen that she didn’t fit in.

On bad days, like today, she knew that she had always been an outsider in her own family. Her family repeatedly told her that it was the illness she’d survived in childhood that had transformed her life and left it fragile and solitary, and on good days, she believed it. In her lonely bedroom, surrounded by the novels that had become her friends, she sometimes dared to dream of an adventure of her own, but not often. Elsa Wolcott had spent years in enforced solitude, reading fictional adventures and imagining other lives.