Friends and Strangers - J. Courtney Sullivan Page 0,11
the plight of the common man. Andrew was annoyed that instead of getting a new job, and facing what had happened, George now spent all his free time on this pointless endeavor. Elisabeth thought the whole exercise was a kind of therapy, a means of exploring what had happened to him, without having to make it personal, which wasn’t George’s way.
“If you still hate it here in a year, we’ll go back,” Andrew said now, in the car.
“I don’t hate it, exactly,” she said. “Besides, I’ve seen Bridges of Madison County. Once the wife moves to her husband’s hometown, she never leaves. All she gets is one weekend of passionate infidelity with Clint Eastwood.”
“At least you have that to look forward to.”
They didn’t actually live in his hometown, which was run-down and somehow perpetually gray no matter the weather. Their house was twenty minutes away in the nearest college town, a place where Elisabeth had imagined attending lectures and eating Ethiopian food, and availing herself of all the best parts of an intellectual-adjacent life.
In reality, it felt strange to live in a place that revolved around a college campus when you yourself had nothing to do with it. Everyone in town referred to it as the college, just as in their world, New York was the city and Gilbert was the baby—you knew there were others, but they didn’t matter.
So far, Elisabeth had gone to exactly one reading, given by a poet she liked. She expected the room to be full of older women in long cashmere cardigans, but everyone in attendance was a student. They swiveled their heads as one when she entered, taking her in as you might a space alien.
There were three colleges within fifteen miles of their house. The women’s college around the block; a state university that was so large she had mistaken it for a city the first time she saw it; and the hippie college where Andrew spent his days, a place where they didn’t believe in grades or even desks. During class, students sat on mats on the floor.
After spending so many years in Brooklyn, they had believed themselves to be as progressive as was humanly possible. But they were learning now that they’d been mistaken.
“This kid in my lab told me today that he’s pansexual,” Andrew said over dinner one night.
“What’s that mean?” she asked.
“It means he’s attracted to all genders.”
“So he’s bi.”
“No.”
“How is he not bi?”
“He doesn’t see gender. Or maybe he sees it, but it’s not part of what attracts him to a person.”
“Okay. But he’s attracted to both genders, so basically—bi. Right?”
“No, because gender is a spectrum, not a binary. He said the only reason babies are assigned one gender or the other at birth is because the American medical establishment is stuck in a heteropatriarchal view of said binary. So really, we shouldn’t force Gil to subscribe to these norms. We should let him make up his own mind.”
“Huh,” she said, considering this.
It felt to her like humanity was on the cusp of something. Maybe the world was becoming a more tolerant place, and their child would grow up with entirely different boundaries than the ones they’d known. Gender-neutral toys were all the rage. Her friends would sooner give their daughters hard drugs than Barbies. She wanted to know how this would shape them as they grew, how Gil’s generation would come to think about their own bodies, and one another’s.
For a moment, Elisabeth glimpsed her former self—the curiosity, the thrill, that came from asking questions of people whose lives were nothing like her own. It had always amazed her how willing strangers were to open up to a journalist, even on the worst days of their lives. Maybe especially then.
“I’m so jealous of you,” she told Andrew. “My most interesting conversation of the last week was with the FedEx guy. I told him our address was 32 Laurel Street. He insisted it was 23.”
Locals like her in-laws complained about the colleges. They caused too much traffic; they were full of self-important academics who looked down on regular people. But whatever money those students and their parents pumped into restaurants and hotels and gas stations and grocery stores was the only thing keeping this corner of the world afloat. Each campus was abutted by a few blocks of pretty houses and a downtown full of quirky shops and music venues and vegan cafés. Then, abruptly, things dropped off.