Eligible

by Curtis Sittenfeld

“My dear,” said Mr. Bennet, “if a sock puppet with a trust fund and a Harvard medical degree moved here, you’d think he was meant to marry one of our girls.”

“A woman in her forties can give birth,” Mrs. Bennet said, “but it isn’t as easy as the media would have you believe. Phyllis and Bob’s daughter had all sorts of procedures,

Mary, who was thirty,

Kitty was twenty-six,

“He’s thirty-six,” Mrs. Bennet said. “That would make him suitable for Jane or Liz.”

Liz, but at thirty-eight,

“Maybe the reason you’re a journalist is that it gives you a professional justification for being nosy.”

“Congratulations, Auntie Liz.”

“Do you want to be pregnant?” “I did.” Jane’s voice quavered. “Before meeting Chip, I wanted it a lot.”

On the one hand, Liz was enormously relieved; on the other hand, there was still a secret bankruptcy and a secret pregnancy to contend with. How exactly had her family members found themselves in such circumstances?

” Liz said. “I know I mentioned this on the phone, but my dad hasn’t told my mom they need to move.” Such candor about her family’s financial predicament would, Liz knew, particularly displease her mother, but Liz didn’t see how she had the luxury of discretion.

she was at times most able to enjoy her family members when she could sense their presence nearby without actually interacting with them.

I’m not asking for your permission. I’m just doing you the courtesy of telling you.”

“What I said at the Lucases’—and I hope you know that you’re an exceptionally brazen eavesdropper—is that I don’t want to be set up on blind dates at the whims of my supervisors’ wives. That’s hardly putting a moratorium on all Cincinnati women.”

When she’d finished, she carried her full bags into her sisters’ apartment, relieved that she would never be anyone’s mother and thus would never need to pick through the scalp of a child, searching in just this way for lice eggs.

He seemed simultaneously like a stranger and someone she knew extremely well; there was either an enormous amount to say or nothing at all.

Time seemed, as it always does in adulthood after a particular stretch has concluded, no matter how ponderous or unpleasant the stretch was to endure, to have passed quickly indeed.

“There’s a belief that to take care of someone else, or to let someone else take care of you—that both are inherently unfeminist. I don’t agree. There’s no shame in devoting yourself to another person, as long as he devotes himself to you in return.”

Sometimes it amazes me how much these defining parts of our lives hinge on chance.”

it was, apparently, no less rude to speculate about the genitals of a transgender person than about those of a person who was nontransgender, or cisgender.

Liz had concluded that if a Cincinnatian could reinvent herself as a New Yorker, if a child who kept a diary and liked to read could ultimately declare that she was a professional writer, then why was gender not also mutable and elective?

Liz wondered if a stronger sign of a relationship’s essential corruptness could exist than for its official realization to hinge on the demise of another human being.