Continue the Story What is Going to Happen to Emily I Stand Here Ironing
Emily is the oldest daughter of the narrator. At the time of the story's telling, Emily is nineteen years old and seems to be thriving; her mother describes her as lovely and notes her popularity as a comedian at school. However, the narrator also receives a call, presumably from Emily's school, stating that Emily needs help, which suggests that she may be struggling socially or academically. Emily had a difficult childhood characterized by anxiety and illness, and at times, because of poverty or nervous illness, she had to live away from her mother in childcare that she hated. Emily also had a strained relationship with her sister Susan, who was pretty and carefree while Emily was quiet, nervous, and worried about her appearance. The narrator states that Emily often had to help take care of her younger siblings and that, due to economic challenges and her mother's overwhelming responsibilities, she did not enjoy the warm, stable home life that her siblings did.
Emily Quotes in I Stand Here Ironing
The I Stand Here Ironing quotes below are all either spoken by Emily or refer to Emily. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total? I will start and there will be an interruption and I will have to gather it all together again. Or I will become engulfed with all I did or did not do, with what should have been and what cannot be helped.
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I nursed her. They feel that's important nowadays. I nursed all the children, but with her, with all the fierce rigidity of first motherhood, I did like the books then said. Though her cries battered me to trembling and my breasts ached with swollenness, I waited till the clock decreed.
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Except that it would have made no difference if I had known. It was the only place there was. It was the only way we could be together, the only way I could hold a job.
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I think of our others in their three-, four-year-oldness—the explosions, the tempers, the denunciations, the demands—and I feel suddenly ill. I put the iron down. What in me demanded that goodness in her? And what was the cost, the cost to her of such goodness?
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"It wasn't just a little while. I didn't cry. Three times I called you, just three times, and then I ran downstairs to open the door so you could come faster. The clock talked loud. I threw it away, it scared me what it talked."
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There was a boy she loved painfully through two school semesters. Months later she told me how she had taken pennies from my purse to buy him candy. "Licorice was his favorite and I brought him some every day, but he still liked Jennifer better'n me. Why, Mommy?" The kind of question for which there is no answer.
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Oh there are conflicts between the others too, each one human, needing, demanding, hurting, taking—but only between Emily and Susan, no, Emily toward Susan that corroding resentment. It seems so obvious on the surface, yet it is not obvious. Susan, the second child, Susan, golden- and curly-haired and chubby, quick and articulate and assured, everything in manner and appearance that Emily was not.
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In this and other ways she leaves her seal, I say aloud. And startle at my saying it. What do I mean? What did I start to gather together, to try and make coherent? I was at the terrible, growing years. War years. I do not remember them well. I was working, there were four smaller ones now, there was not time for her. She had to help be a mother, and housekeeper, and shopper. She had to set her seal.
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Afterwards: You ought to do something about her with a gift like that—but without money or knowing how, what does one do? We have left it all to her, and the gift has as often eddied inside, clogged and clotted, as been used and growing.
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I will never total it all. I will never come in to say: She was a child seldom smiled at. Her father left me before she was a year old. I had to work her first six years when there was work, or I sent her home and to his relatives. There were years she had care she hated. She was dark and thin and foreign-looking in a world where the prestige went to blondeness and curly hair and dimples, she was slow where glibness was prized. She was a child of anxious, not proud, love. We were poor and could not afford for her the soil of easy growth. I was a young mother, I was a distracted mother. There were the other children pushing up, demanding. Her younger sister seemed all that she was not. There were years she did not let me touch her. She kept too much in herself, her life was such she had to keep too much in herself. My wisdom came too late. She has much to her and probably little will come of it. She is a child of her age, of depression, of war, of fear.
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Emily Character Timeline in I Stand Here Ironing
The timeline below shows where the character Emily appears in I Stand Here Ironing. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
...irons, she addresses an unidentified person who has asked her to discuss her nineteen-year-old daughter Emily, since Emily "needs help." The request torments the narrator—just because she is Emily's mother does... (full context)
Emily, the oldest of the narrator's five children, "was a beautiful baby," even though she spent... (full context)
Emily was a "miracle" to the narrator, but at eight months old, she had to start... (full context)
While living with her father's family, Emily got chicken pox and she returned to the narrator seeming thin and nervous, with "all... (full context)
The narrator did know that Emily hated school, because she often made excuses not to go. While other children often rebelled... (full context)
...the neighbor's advice about smiling to parenting her other children, it was "too late for Emily." Now, as a teenager, Emily doesn't "smile easily," and she is "closed and somber," except... (full context)
The clock "talked loud again" the night the narrator gave birth to Emily's sister Susan. Emily became sick with measles then and prone to nightmares but, with a... (full context)
At one point, Emily's doctors convinced the narrator to send Emily to live at "a convalescent home in the... (full context)
As Emily got older, she continued to worry about her appearance: "thin and dark and foreign-looking," rather... (full context)
In school, Emily was not "glib or quick," which made people think she was a "slow learner." The... (full context)
...changed, interrupting the narrator's recollections. While cuddling with his mother, he uses a nonsense word—"shoogily"—which Emily invented years before to express the idea of comfort, leading the narrator to remark on... (full context)
The narrator remarks that Emily's newfound gift made her "Somebody," but it left her "as imprisoned in her difference as... (full context)
Emily runs happily up the stairs and enters the room where the narrator is ironing. Cheerful... (full context)
...can no longer endure "dredging up the past," and she can never "total it all": Emily was "seldom smiled at," her father left, her mother worked, she was thin and dark... (full context)
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