The Wedding People

by Alison Espach

two hundred years before Chaucer, there was a street in Oxfordshire called Gropecunt Lane.

Every time she opened her dissertation on the computer, it felt like sitting down for coffee with an old boyfriend she couldn’t imagine ever loving again.

they were suspicious of money, of grand gesture. The bigger the gesture, the emptier the feeling.

She has a contrarian impulse that stirred within her during class or at a party when anybody had the audacity to talk in absolutes.

When Phoebe left for graduate school, she had very clear and beautiful ideas about art, how art is what elevates us, art is the magnificence wrung from the ugly dish towel of existence. Art helps us feel alive. And this had been true for Phoebe—Phoebe used to read books and feel astounded. She used to walk around galleries, inspired by the beautiful human urge to create. But that was years ago. Now she can’t stand the sight of her books. Can’t bear the thought of reading hundreds of pages just to watch Jane Eyre get married again.

When did Phoebe being good become Phoebe being nothing?

That’s when the darkness returns. That’s when she is returned to herself, and she hates always having to return to herself, to live alone inside her nonviable body.

“I like children,” Phoebe said, and why did she feel the need to say this? “It’s just boring to make them the center of attention all the time. It’s like bringing a new toy to dinner and only looking at the new toy and only talking about the new toy and expecting everybody else to care about it.”

“Pretending to be excited. Pretending you haven’t said the same exact joke over and over again. Pretending knowledge is some beautiful, fortuitous interweaving quilt of facts. Pretending that everything that happens can be strung along a satisfying, linear narrative.”

Her dezcribing teaching but i love all of thiz

She likes the part about Jane Eyre getting married in under a sentence. And the paragraph about Jane’s failed wedding being the only wedding that Brontë describes in actual detail. And why would Brontë do that? Why spend more time writing the failed wedding than the successful one?

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