/ / / / / / / / /
-
Meet Maisie Pembroke: spirited, cheerful, reckless. Always ready to lend a friend a hand; sometimes, but not always, ready to lend a stranger one, too. Working her way up through the firefighter ranks, despite comments ranging from frequent hints to outright demands from her parents that they'd rather she choose a more traditional career route. More traditionally feminine, that is: they're absolutely hopeless, so stuck in the past. Perennially single — but that's by choice. Maybe by the time she's thirty, she'll settle down. Then again, maybe not. After all, getting into trouble (either by her own hand or together with her bestie Gigi) is kind of a blast.
-
Maisie decided on something like a whim to become a firefighter after a personality quiz told her her best attribute was her ability to keep a cool head in a crisis. (Maybe if it had told her her best attribute was bravery, she would have become a lion tamer instead.) Her parents would rather have seen her in a different role, something intangible in nature but more generally sedate and demure: this is not a secret, not even close. In fact it is a relatively constant point of contention in the Pembroke household. Turns out, though, that although the career decision initially was borne of a whim, Maisie really enjoys the firefighting life: the high tempo; the sense of doing something important; even the exacting physical demands she gives her all to meet and the way her eyes sear with heat, adrenaline pounding through the tree of her veins. She's hardly rescuing toddlers out of collapsing buildings on a regular Tuesday, the way she'd envisioned herself doing, but that’s all right. It’s worthwhile; her colleagues are a good bunch; the paycheck’s enough to get by; above all, even when it’s grueling, it’s fucking fun. Work takes up so much of your time. Why not choose something you enjoy?
It’s too bad that her parents will never be happy with it. Yeah, you can’t structure your life around pleasing your family, but the fraught atmosphere around the table at the weekly Pembroke Sunday dinners is getting old. Maisie’s not gonna quit her job. She’s not gonna become a society wife (“I’m not even married, mother, and anyway I think there’s other qualifications involved”) or a museum curator (“I don’t even like going to museums”) or a famous authoress of breezy, none-too-provocative women’s lit (“What?”) — she’s gonna be the best firefighter she can be.
-
Then, once alternative career options have been pushed and dismissed, come the other questions and comments Maisie dreads almost as much, such as:
- “What happened to that nice boy you were seeing?”
- “Why do you never bring anyone home?”
- “Your sister never gave us trouble like this.”
Sometimes, with a few too many wines in her, Maisie thinks about the nuclear option of retorting that her sister never had time to give them trouble ‘like this,’ because Marianne, of course, had died just minutes before she’d turned twenty-one.
Even with a few too many wines in her, though, she knows saying it would be irrevocable. Inexcusable.
- “Tawny Armstrong's eldest just got engaged, you know. Delightful boy. A CEO, I think."
- “Don't you think you should consider starting a family? You’re not getting any younger, poppet.”
- “How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child.”
Downright exhausting and so annoying. Almost annoying enough to actually start dating seriously, even though Maisie quite enjoys her life of one-night-stands and short-term entanglements and barely has time for more than the odd fling. Almost annoying enough to do something else, then; something drastic. But what?
- “What happened to that nice boy you were seeing?”