The Engagements Read Online Free PDF

the sofa in the den was the same, and the brass poster bed in the master suite. Jean’s kids from her first marriage had grown up with a deadbeat dad they never saw, so they looked to Kate’s father as their own in a way, even though they were in their twenties. This could be hard to take.
You should call your brother and congratulate him on the new job
, her father might say over the phone, and it would take Kate a moment to figure out what the hell he was talking about.
Brother?
She didn’t have a brother.
    Her mother never remarried. Mona was married to her life—her work and her friends. She had once told Kate that after women got out of lousy marriages, they generally had the good sense to stay away from the institution altogether. While men just kept trying to get it right because they were incapable of being alone.
    Despite this, Mona wanted her daughters to get married. She had obsessed over planning May’s wedding like there was an award to be won. Like her sister, so many of Kate’s friends had watched their parents languish in bad marriages or go through painful divorces, only to jump right into marriage themselves, as if they could fix the whole messy business of their elders’ mistakes with a next-generation do-over.
    Early on, even as far back as high school, Kate was distrustful of marriage. The popular perception was so sad and discouraging, so
Everybody Loves Raymond
. After the divorce, her father started reciting a Rita Rudner quote whenever the subject came up: “Men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for marriage—they’ve experienced pain and bought jewelry.” Each time he said it and laughed, Kate felt slightly ill.
    The fall of her sophomore year at UVM, she took a class called “The History of Marriage,” in which she learned that, historically speaking, marriage wasn’t about love at all. It was essentially a business transaction.
    Through centuries and across cultures, women were intimidated and coerced into marriage through horrible means—kidnapping, physicalviolence, even gang rape. In eighteenth-century England, the doctrine of coverture dictated that a woman had no legal rights within a marriage, other than those afforded her by her husband. Early American laws replicated this idea, and did not change until the 1960s. Before then, most states had “head and master” laws, giving husbands the right to beat their wives and take full control of family decision making and finances, including the woman’s own property.
    Every bit of new information sickened her. This was marriage?
    While home for Thanksgiving, Kate made her feelings known: she wanted to have a family someday, but she knew in her heart that she would never get married.
    “Marriage is a construct,” she said as she poured gravy over her turkey breast. “It’s been sold as a way to keep women safe or make their lives better, but for the most part it’s been used to keep them down. In Afghanistan today, a woman might be encouraged to marry her rapist.”
    “This isn’t Afghanistan,” her mother said, looking embarrassed.
    “Well, here in America, a woman couldn’t get a” Ava saidal droppedl f credit card or a bank loan without written permission from her husband until the seventies. And until then, a man could also force his wife to have sex with him. There was no such thing as marital rape.”
    “Please stop saying
rape
at the dinner table,” her mother said. “Grandpa, would you pass the cranberry sauce?”
    Everyone thought it was just a phase, including her college boyfriend, Todd. They were together for five years, moving to New York after graduation and breaking up the summer they both turned twenty-five. When he proposed to her on a weekend drive to Burlington, Kate was shocked. She had told him hundreds of times why she didn’t want to get married, and he had seemed to agree. For a long time, he acted as if he had hit the jackpot by finding a woman who wasn’t interested in all that. But