funny and kind—I find that attractive! He’s older than me—yes, I find that attractive, too! He’s the most beautiful man I have ever known—and that—”
“Yes, yes, we get your point,” Dad hurries to interrupt me, evidently afraid of where my enumeration will take me.
“—but none of that is why I love him!”
“Love! Almighty!” My mother groans and throws up her hands.
“I’m not going to justify this to you. I’m not.” I couldn’t, even if I wanted to, because I’m so upset that tears are clogging up my voice. If there is one thing guaranteed to fend off my mother’s enquiries, it is tears.
“You’re thirty years old, I’m sure you know best.” End of discussion. When emotions boil over, my mother flees from the kitchen.
“No, I don’t know best!” I fire up. “The whole thing is a complete mess, Mom, and I have no idea how this is going to end! I’m frightened what will happen if we go on, and I’m frightened what will happen if we end it! And I knew beforehand that talking to you about it wouldn’t help me resolve anything—that’s why I almost didn’t come home! I knew I’d have to sit here for two weeks, pretending that I’m fine, when this is…choking me!”
That night I stay at Sheena’s because the girl who rents my old room has flown home to Ohio to see her family over Christmas. I feel like a nomad, with my rucksack and my laptop. No, worse. I feel like a tourist. Irene and Jacques, like a lot of couples that are thinking about breaking up, have rented an apartment together, and I stay with them for another couple of nights. When Irene hears that I’ll be flying to England for ten days, she is immediately suspicious.
“Are you going to see him there?”
“No.”
“Then why are you going?”
“To see Debbie and Dave in Bristol, and Lisa and Gavin in London, and hopefully Kate Allard for tea one day. I haven’t been for ages. Eighteen months.”
Irene watches me play with my salad.
“But you have been seeing him, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“And nothing. Nothing you didn’t know before.”
“I think you are going to see him,” she decides. “Is that the plan from now on, to fly to England for dirty weekends with your colleague?”
“I am not going to see Giles over there! I’m going for a job interview.”
Irene’s reaction—a long sigh and a long pause—is worse than I had expected, though less vociferous.
“If you must, you must, Anna. There’s obviously not enough here to keep you, and that place down there is a madhouse.”
“You did hear that I said job interview, right? I may stay at Ardrossan a good while yet, provided they don’t fire me. Which they might, given the fact that—” I hesitate. “Given the fact that some of my students have accused me of sexual harassment. Oh, and you know who Selena, the girl in the observatory, has sex with? And who got her pregnant?”
Predictably, this distracts her attention, and even Jacques gets involved in our debate about the various words I will have to have with various people when I get back to Ardrossan. It’s the most enjoyable evening I spent with them in years.
But when my plane circles in a holding stack above Buckinghamshire and we approach Heathrow from the west, with the Thames glistening like a silver snake in the sun and the pilot alerting us to the fact that visibility is good enough to see Windsor Castle, tears are running down my cheeks. I don’t even try to stop them.
“Sorry—are you all right?” my neighbor asks me. He has been sleeping or reading the whole time, while I have been sleeping and staring out the window the whole time. This is the first sentence he has addressed to me.
“Yes, I’m sorry.” I brush away the tears with my sleeve. “I’m just realizing that I will have to come and live here.”
“That is, indeed, a prospect to reduce anyone to tears,” he says dryly and hands me a paper tissue.
Before I make my way to East London, I travel down to Bristol for a few days’ coaching and counseling.
“Look, I’m gonna do what I do, okay? And either it’s enough or not. I may not even want this job!”
“That’s your strength,” Dave says, punching the air. “You can go in confident and strong! But don’t come across as too American—well, you know that, don’t you? But don’t try to be English, either. You’re fine as you are!”
“So…what about your beshert?” Debbie