How I Met My Husband

“Mrs. Peebles had an automatic washer and dryer, the first I ever saw. I have had those in my own home for such a long time now it’s hard to remember how much of a miracle it was to me, not having to struggle with the wringer and hang up and haul down. Let alone not having to heat water.”

This passage gives a sense of elapsed time between the narrator and the girl she was at the time of her story. There is the sense that her younger self felt transported to the future with her new job; whereas now, she has gotten so used to these conveniences that she can take them for granted. This distance emphasizes and foreshadows Edie’s growth after the experiences of the story.

“The light had a rosy cast and the mat sank under your feet like snow, except that it was warm. The mirror was three-way. With the mirror all steamed up and the air like a perfume cloud, from the things I was allowed to use, I stood up on the side of the tub and admired myself naked, from three directions.”

The pink bathroom represents a type of decorative femininity that Edie has been estranged from during her hard life at the farm. The fact that Edie is “allowed to use” the bathing things indicates that she is borrowing this luxury rather than owning it. Nevertheless, the bathroom also gives her a new sense of her sexuality, as she inspects and admires herself naked for the first time.

“I wouldn’t have looked in her drawers, but a closet is open to anybody. That’s a lie. I would have looked in drawers, but I would have felt worse doing it and been more scared she could tell.”

This passage reveals the gap between Edie the mature narrator and Edie the young-girl protagonist. The narrator retracts her proclamation of morality and gives a more honest evaluation: she would have had the curiosity and daring, but it is fear of being caught out that stops her from doing so. This also foreshadows Edie’s decision to pursue Chris, despite it being considered inappropriate.

“I wasn’t old enough to realise or to say anything back, or in fact to do anything but wish he would go away. Not that I didn’t like him, but just that it upset me so, having him look at me, and me trying to think of something to say.”

Edie’s first encounter with Chris Watters is one of embarrassment and shame. Edie is more conscious of her behavior than of Chris’s and at this point, and the older narrator puts her younger self’s reaction down to age and inexperience. This initial reaction paves the way for character development, as Edie’s behavior towards Chris changes during the course of the narrative.

“This was the first place I ever worked but I already had picked up things about the way people feel when you are working for them. They like to think you aren’t curious. Not just that you aren’t dishonest, that isn’t enough. They like to think you don’t notice things, that you don’t think or wonder about anything but what they liked to eat and how they like things ironed, and so on.”

This passage reveals Edie’s thoughts on how middle-class employers dehumanize their servants. While they like others to perform manual tasks for them, they do not like those same people to be witnesses and have opinions about how they conduct their lives. Edie’s capacity to notice this at a young age indicates both her precocious understanding of human character and her people-pleasing tendencies.

“We got used to the excitement of the plane coming in and taking off, it wasn’t excitement any more. I never went over, after that one time, but would see him when he came to get his water. I would be our on the steps doing sitting-down work, like preparing vegetables, if I could.”

This passage shows Edie bargaining with herself. While she does not go directly to the pilot in his tent and make herself an object of moral scrutiny, she takes care to position herself where he can easily access her, taking her work to the outside steps. The detail of the plane becoming less exciting and more something that Edie can take in her stride, symbolizes how she is becoming more confident in her dealings with this strange man.

“All that happened was that Chris go out of the car on one side and she got out on the other and they walked off separately—him towards the fairgrounds and her towards the house. I got back in bed and imagined about me coming home with him, not like that.”

Edie expects a display of sexual passion from the engaged couple. She positions herself as a love rival to Alice when she imagines herself coming home with Chris instead. In her imagination, Edie sets herself up as a better lover to Chris than Alice.

“He […] sat beside me and started those little kisses, so soft, I can’t ever let myself think about them, such kindness in his face and lovely kisses, all over my eyelids and neck and eyes, all over, then me kissing back as well as I could (I had only kissed a boy on a dare before, and kissed my own arms for practice) and we lay back on the cot and pressed together, just gently, and he did some other things, not bad things or not in a bad way.”

This passage is characterized by repetition. Firstly, the repetition of “kisses” implies the large number of them exchanged between Edie and the pilot. Edie’s finding that she cannot give herself permission to think about the kisses, even in the present tense, indicates their lasting impact on her. Regardless of the man she married, these kisses remain her most potent sensual experience.

 “I was really glad I think to get away from him, it was like he was piling presents on me I couldn’t get the pleasure of till I considered them alone.”

Here, the narrator alerts us to the enhancing gloss that memory bestows on events, as the pleasures of the mind may be greater than those of the moment. There is the sense that the encounter was condensed with pleasurable activity to the point that it overwhelmed Edie. She wants to unspool the events in her own time in order to have more control over how she experiences them.

“You’d think I’d be ashamed of myself, setting her on the wrong track […] I lied for him, and I also, I have to admit, for me. Women should stick together and not do things like that. I see that now, but didn’t then. I never thought of myself as being in any way like her, or coming to the same troubles, ever.”

Here, the narrator traces the starkest boundary between her young and mature selves. In the moment, Edie regards herself favorably as young and attractive, while she considers Alice old and washed-up. It is beyond the scope of young Edie’s imagination that she will ever come to resemble Alice, in either person or fate. However, the mature Edie sees that both she and Alice are women wronged by Chris, and that she should have had compassion for the older woman.

“We have to put them in a special ward because of their diseases. Little country tramps. Fourteen and fifteen years old. You should see the babies they have, too.”

When Alice hears that Edie has been over to see Chris, she immediately assumes she has had sex with him and classifies her as a “little country tramp.” She then paints a horrifying picture of social segregation, when she describes a special ward populated by teenage mothers with venereal disease and deformed babies. Alice’s stereotyped and highly prejudiced description contrasts with the deep, personal tone of Edie’s experience.

“One day walking back with the hydro bill stuck in my hand, that was all, looking across at the fairgrounds with the full-blown milkweed and dark teasels, so much like fall, it just struck me: No letter was ever going to come.” 

Edie contemplates how fall has changed the fairground landscape where the plane was and considers a similar changeability in Chris. Although he promised her the letter, she realizes that things have changed and that the letter will never arrive. This moment represents a loss of innocence for Edie, as she sees that she has been feeling the romantic and passionate emotions of the love affair on her own.

“There were women doing this with their lives, all over. There were women just waiting and waiting by mailboxes for one letter or another. I imagined me making this journey day after day and year after year, and my hair starting to go grey, and I thought, I was never made to go on like that.”

Edie expands her vision to see herself as one of many women waiting by the mailbox for a man to send them a letter and metaphorically decide their fates. The image of her growing old and grey waiting indicates a loss of youthful potential. In deciding that she was “never made to go on like that”, Edie judges that waiting is against her nature and determines to go on with her life without Chris.