One late spring night, Jane turned to her friend Liz as they finished the quarterly billing for the company, “doesn’t it seem strange that we’re spinsters, Liz? That we do not have the “right” life according to some people?”
Liz knew what her friend was trying to say, that there was no way to have it all as a modern woman. If you had a family, they called you a housewife. If you were single and working, your biological clock was ticking. Have a family and a career, and you’re an absent mother or a distracted employee. Jane wanted to have it all, but Liz knew what could happen to women who tried to have and do it all, and so she told her this story:
There were two women living together; if they were men, they might have been called bachelors. The brunette folded laundry and sang to her baby; the blonde washed dishes and put away shopping. Both had finished work at 5 that day. “Oh, I wish I had some help taking care of my baby; I haven’t slept in days!”
The baby began to cry; dinner began to burn. “I wish I had some help with anything. I’ve been at the hospital for 13 hours straight and will do it again tomorrow.”
The two women sat together and wondered if they should ask for help. They asked family, but they were busy. They asked friends but never heard back. All the friends were working; the two women worked and could never see their friends.
One night they needed help. They prayed and called out: help us! Help! Please help us; we are tired, lonely, a mother with no time, a nurse with no support. Help! HELLLLLLLp!
Crack! The sent of sulfur filled the air. A shadowed figure stood in the kitchen, “you asked for HELL?”
The baby cried; the nurse collapsed from exhaustion. “NO,” the brunette cried, “we wanted help,” emphasizing the P at the end didn’t make a difference to the devil; the devil heard people crying for HELL, felt their hopeless suffering as they tried to have it all.
“Now, I distinctly heard you two ladies calling for hell, and you certainly deserve it. Strangers raise your child while you work all day; I’ll bet you drove the father away too with all your absences. And you? You say that you’re lonely, that you want a loving relationship in addition to your job? Well, relationships take time and care, something you only give to your work.”
The women looked at the devil, stunned that anyone would think that they wanted hell when all they ever wanted was help, that for all their success, they were thought to have equal failures. As the women looked at each other, their confidence shaking, what if it’s true? What if I deserve to go to hell for not devoting my whole life to my baby, or what if I deserve to go to hell because all I’ve done was devote my life to work?
The ground split beneath the women’s feet, swallowing them down to hell. The devil smiled; it wasn’t enough to ask for help, to forget the P and ask for Hell; instead, they had to believe they deserved to go.
I chose Bennett for the simple reason of loving gothic stories, and love writing short stories, this was a perfect combination of the two! What drew me to “Death and the Two Bachelor’s” was that it was beautifully short, there was the concept of someone calling out for something non temporal, and that thing answering the call when it was not expected to. The reason for my change in subject is slightly personal, I am like those women who “want it all” and have faced different opinions. Some people give the advice that family holds you back from success, that being a wife or mother is detrimental to a successful career. I have been told by other people that it’s lonely to focus solely on work, and that if I want to have a family or relationship then I will be making sacrifices and possibly limiting my career advancement. From this turmoil I instantly thought of the contemporary issues women face trying to juggle work-life balance, how old fashioned parts of society like to bat down all the balls women try to keep up in the air. My story is decidedly different from Bennett’s, but it still has a classic gothic moral, be careful what you ask for because you might get it!