Emily

Emily is the narrator’s high-school girlfriend and secret wife, whose relationship with him spans young love, a marriage arranged before his deployment to Iraq, estrangement, and a later life together marked by heroin addiction. Her story is also a study in the limits of his knowledge: he is repeatedly certain that he understands her, then discovers that her feelings, choices, and experience have not been his to interpret.

Identity and Early Life

The narrator first remembers Emily at eighteen, wearing a white ribbon around her neck and speaking softly. He was drawn to her but already had a girlfriend and was shy; his uncertainty about whether Emily was sexually knowing or simply gentle belongs to his first, uncertain reading of her, not to any settled account of who she was. They had met in high school. Emily noticed his gray Gap cardigan, a three-button wool sweater she called the clothing of a sad old bastard, and that observation gave them a way to start talking.

Their early exchanges brought different tastes and different kinds of attention into the relationship. Emily liked Modest Mouse and introduced him to Night on the Sun; she also had him read two plays by Edward Albee. He listened as she described where she had grown up: abandoned factories, a cemetery, and places where she had scraped her knees. Her green eyes seemed bright and kind to him, but not entirely innocent. He was captivated by her voice, while the uncertainty of his impressions remained part of the attraction.

Emily’s material circumstances were more precarious than his. She worked nights in the science building, cleaning cages and killing laboratory mice with a small guillotine because the scientists required her to do it. She disliked the work but regarded the mice as already doomed, and needed the money. Her father was a prosperous specialist dentist who gave her no money; because of his income, she could not expect help from financial-aid providers. Her mother did not help either. Emily therefore watched small expenses closely, including walking eight hundred metres in the rain to buy cheaper popcorn and diet soda. The narrator, by contrast, had parents who provided what he needed and could supplement his money by selling drugs to high-school students. She distrusted him and sometimes laughed off his attempts at kindness, a guardedness that stood against his relative ease.

Courtship and Secret Marriage

At the end of the first semester, Emily was preparing to go home to Elba for winter break. She lay on the narrator’s bed while they waited to say goodbye. He remembers her as light and delicate, with a calm, enigmatic expression; he also imagined that she could have killed him if she wished. What mattered in the moment was his fear that something might happen to her. He told her he loved her, a declaration that marked a change in a relationship he had until then approached with hesitation and fascination.

Two years after they met, they were older, working, and saving money. Emily would turn twenty-one the following month. During a rainy autumn weekend in Elba, she proposed marriage before his departure for Iraq. Her stated reasoning was practical: marriage would increase his pay and give her access to his health insurance. The narrator welcomed the prospect of marrying Emily, though she also said they would divorce. He agreed. Their decision thus held both intimacy and an acknowledged limit from the start: the marriage was meant to serve an immediate purpose, not to promise permanence.

They married privately in Elba before a justice of the peace on the Tuesday after Veterans Day. Almost no one knew; Emily did not want the marriage made public. The ceremony came amid an awkward visit from Joe and Roy, who had driven from Cleveland. Joe had head-butted the narrator without knowing that he and Emily planned to marry. The narrator’s nose was broken and his windbreaker bloody; they had no wedding rings. Emily wore a blue mechanic’s jacket with the name MARIO on its pocket. He remembers them, for a few minutes at least, as the two most beautiful people in the world. Afterward, she drove him to the airport. They stayed in her car in the parking lot, crying until it was time for him to leave.

Distance During the Iraq Deployment

The marriage’s secrecy and practical purpose did not protect it from the strain of separation. During the deployment, the narrator tried to read Emily’s responses to messages as evidence of how she felt. After he sent her an orchid, she said it was foolish; his questions about the card and a book by Salinger reveal how much significance he attached to small replies and how little certainty those replies gave him. He had believed she liked the book, but wondered whether she had read it at all. His suspicion that she was hiding something was an interpretation, not a fact established by what she said.

Emily also sent him a card and letter joking that, if he were killed, she would sleep with Herman Thompson, a football player she had admired in elementary school. The narrator taped the card inside his helmet as a reminder not to get killed. The gesture turned her teasing into something he carried into danger, though it could not resolve the distance between them. On Valentine’s Day, he spent $110 on an orchid and learned that Emily had given it to her grandmother. The gift became another instance in which his attempt at intimacy met a response he experienced as rejection.

Emily’s absences and blunt replies sharpened that mismatch. On a two-week leave, the narrator was disappointed that she was seldom in Cleveland: she had found a job in Washington State, connected with nature, and said she could not pass it up. Although he thought other women were available, he did not sleep with them because he was technically married, even though he was supposed to keep the marriage secret. In Iraq, he often checked email after returning from explosive-device ambushes. Emily frequently did not answer; when she did, she said she was ashamed of what he was doing, though he had not told her what he did and believed she knew no more than before he left.

He tried to create shared life from a distance. He sent Emily a bootleg film about emperor penguins enduring Antarctic conditions and raising their young, then ordered her a copy when he thought she could not get to the first one. She called the film and the penguins stupid. He was hurt, then concluded that she was a good person and that he was the one who had done wrong. After painful emails he imagined furnishing a home with her, saving money and picturing IKEA furniture they might buy when he returned. Those imagined plans sustained his hope, but were built without clear evidence that she wanted the same future.

Emily eventually left Washington State and returned to Elba to attend college, making her reachable again. The narrator paid her fall-term tuition after she asked for the money. He took that request as a sign that things were all right between them, even while recognizing that she might not be looking forward to his return. When he arrived back in Texas and called her drunk, he was angry that she had not been there and accused her of having slept around. His hurt and suspicion exposed how far his picture of their marriage had drifted from what he knew directly.

Divorce and Reunion

The narrator later learned that after their marriage Emily had been waxed and had a succession of lovers. The knowledge that he was roughly the hundredth person to see her waxed pubic area devastated him. He also conceded that he had been away in Iraq and that their marriage had been a lie. He speculated that she might have thought he would be killed and never learn about her lovers, but this remained his conjecture. The account leaves Emily’s reasons unresolved even as it records the consequence for him.

After completing his military service, the narrator returned to Ohio and stopped in Elba. Emily wanted a divorce, and they divorced. He had left the Army and had some money, but began using drugs heavily. Later, after taking a great deal of cocaine, he called her in the middle of the night, said he forgave her, and pleaded that he needed her. His appeal shows that the separation had not ended his attachment, but it does not establish that the earlier marriage had been restored.

Their lives crossed again when the narrator picked Emily up at a Greyhound station during a three-hour stop on her way to Elba. She had been living with her father in Florida and had started injecting drugs there. The narrator says he never would have imagined it. That discovery reverses the earlier pattern in which he had treated her as the person whose choices he could not quite read: now her drug use places them on a common, destructive ground.

On Valentine’s Day, they returned to a shared routine of getting high and watching late-night television. Neither cared about the holiday or felt a need to make the evening a conventional romantic occasion; the drug was what held their attention and, in the narrator’s account, what made them together. The intimacy is real, but it has narrowed around the substance they share.

Shared Addiction and Care

Their later domestic life combines small acts of care with escalating financial pressure. Emily worked, tended plants, prepared meals, and was writing a course while the narrator went around town dealing drugs. When he lost $180, she objected that she was working and keeping up the home while he played a big shot and lost their money. She told him that they spent more than $1,000 a week on drugs and could not continue. Her complaint names the practical cost of their dependence, not merely a disagreement about one loss: the weekly expense had become, in her view, unsustainable.

Emily also proposed getting a dog. They adopted a shy, mixed-breed female from the Brook Park animal shelter for $60 and named her Livinia. Her glossy gray-brown coat and timid manner made them want to protect her. Together, they promised that Livinia would be safe and that things would go well for her from then on. Emily said they needed to stop using drugs, and the narrator said he would; she said she would too. The promise links their care for the dog to an imagined break with addiction, though it is a promise rather than evidence that they succeeded.

During a later attempt to withdraw, they could not lie beside one another. Emily was on a mattress on the floor under a window, wrapped in blankets, while both of them sweated and vomited into small plastic wastebaskets. The narrator stood at the kitchen sink for three quarters of an hour drinking water, which came back up mixed with bile and mucus. They had been without a fix for more than twenty-four hours, had no money, and felt they needed cash. In that crisis, he remained intensely attentive to Emily’s body and sounds: her groans, closed eyes, damp skin, and hair against her cheek drew him toward her even as withdrawal kept them physically apart. The scene gathers the central contradiction of their later relationship: tenderness persists, but it exists inside a dependence that has made both of them sick and desperate.