officially done.
Except the thought of that makes me so depressed, I could cry.
“Hi, Ellie!” Sadie says cheerfully. “Are you going out with your suitor tonight?”
“Um,” I say. “I don’t have a suitor, Sadie.”
“Of course she doesn’t!” Ethel pipes up. “Don’t be dumb, Sadie.”
I stare at Ethel in surprise. I always thought Ethel was a nice-enough lady, so I didn’t expect her to insult me (or Sadie) that way.
“How could you say that?” Sadie cries in my defense. “Ellie is beautiful!” She bites her lip. “Well, except for her hips. But she’s working on that.”
Great.
“Oh, Sadie,” Ethel sighs. “Don’t you know anything?” She gives me a knowing look. “Ellie is a lesbian. She’s not interested in having any suitors.”
Seriously?
“No!” Sadie gasps. “Is that true, Ellie?”
I start to tell her that it absolutely is not true, but Ethel quickly cuts me off: “Ellie, you don’t have to stay in the closet. Just because we’re old, it doesn’t mean we’re not understanding about this stuff.” She smiles proudly. “My granddaughter is a lesbian, you know. I could set you up if you’d like. She’s really pretty.”
Okay, I have to put an end to this right now. “I’m not a lesbian,” I say. Ethel looks very skeptical, so I add, “Really.”
“I told you,” Sadie says smugly.
“Oh,” Ethel says. She seems really disappointed. “So why are you still single then?”
“It’s her hips,” Sadie says.
I don’t want to discuss why I’m single with these women, considering I haven’t entirely figured it out myself. I suspect this is going to get very insulting and possibly end up with my having to take home another tub of pot roast. So I excuse myself and slip into my apartment.
When I get inside, my cleaning woman, Angela, is finishing up with her bimonthly session. It feels decadent to hire a cleaning woman, but I work long hours, and I hate cleaning and can afford it, so why not? Also, Angela does a much better job than I could ever do. Also, when she comes, she brings me a delicious homemade casserole that she stores in the fridge.
“All set!” Angela announces as she pulls off the blue latex gloves that she uses when she cleans. “Everything is spic and span.”
I look around my apartment, which is indeed sparkling clean. “Thank you so much! It looks great.”
Angela gathers her cleaning supplies to leave and I inhale the smells of Pine-Sol. I love a clean apartment. I’ve been hiring people to clean for me ever since college, even when I actually couldn’t afford it. After I worked as a bathroom cleaner in college, I swore I would never do it again.
One big thing that separated the poor/smart kids from the rich/dumb kids at Harvard was how we paid for our education. I’m sure Luke Thayer’s dad (also named Luke, I guess) just withdrew his petty change from one of his Swiss bank accounts to pay Luke’s tuition, but my grade school teacher parents didn’t have enough money to afford their third child’s private college tuition. So I ended up with loans and work scholarships. The work scholarships meant I got to pay off some of my tuition by scrubbing the toilets of my classmates.
It was the ultimate humiliation. I had to go into the dorms and clean the toilets of the students I had just been sharing a lecture hall with hours earlier. I preferred it when I was assigned the upperclassmen dorms because it meant I at least wouldn’t recognize them. But because all the freshman dorms were in Harvard Yard and that was where I lived as well, my assignments were almost invariably to the freshman rooms.
Whenever I got assigned to clean bathrooms in Thayer House, I’d think about Luke. Every day, Dr. Cole let him dominate the class discussions, and no matter how valiantly I fought against him, I always left the class feeling like he’d gotten the better of me. Worst of all, he always argued on the side of the most despicable character in the story, as if they were a personal friend of his.
It was so blatantly obnoxious, there were times when I wanted to get up and punch him in the face. But then I’d go off to my Computation Theory class and he’d go off to his Macroeconomics class and we’d never be forced to talk again, thank God.
It was good to think about Luke as I scrubbed toilets. I’d think about our most recent class discussion, the things I said, and the things I