Friends and Strangers - J. Courtney Sullivan Page 0,24
pointless. It was the same thing they had done last Friday, and the Friday before that. At ten-thirty, they would go as a group to the actual party downstairs, never as much fun as the hours spent preparing for it. Tomorrow, they would wake up late, hungover or still slightly drunk, and stumble down to the dining hall for bagels.
After Sam’s summer in London, it no longer seemed normal to live in a hall of near-identical rooms, distinguished one from the other only by curtains or a floral bedspread someone’s mother had chosen. It felt absurd to be told what she would eat, and when.
Sam could waste an hour wandering around Beekman Market downtown, picking up tiny soaps and silver tubes of overpriced hand cream, mentally decorating a house she didn’t have but could picture herself living in with Clive. She never bought anything. Those soaps would look ridiculous in a plastic shower caddy. The hand cream would get used by every person who entered her room, making Sam stressed at the thought of the cost.
The home she imagined was the one in which she had spent the last few weeks nannying. Elisabeth’s house. The rooms, light filled and beautifully furnished, had an air of calm that seemed to spring from Elisabeth herself.
Sam had decided not to work in the dining hall this year as she had in years past. In part, because weekend shifts would impede her ability to see Clive. And if she was honest, she wanted to experience college without washing her friends’ dinner plates for once.
She had planned to work two full days a week off campus, but Elisabeth needed three. Sam rearranged her schedule. Now her Tuesdays and Wednesdays were booked with classes from 8:00 a.m. until 6:00, but it was worth it. She had never worked for someone like Elisabeth before. Some days she would pour them both a cup of coffee before she left for work and sit and chat for fifteen minutes, like she wasn’t paying Sam to watch her child. Elisabeth wanted to know all about Sam’s art and her travels and her plans.
While she was there, Sam often pretended the house was hers, and the baby too. She went to the bookcase in Elisabeth’s upstairs hall that held copies of each of her books in hardcover, plus several foreign-language editions, and imagined what it would feel like to have accomplished something like that. Sam thought it must be a relief, among other things.
She loved to wash her hands in Elisabeth’s downstairs powder room, with the soft white towels and the wallpaper covered in oversize green leaves. The hand soap was peony scented. Sam felt like a slightly better version of herself each time she used it.
She asked Elisabeth where she’d gotten it.
Elisabeth shrugged and said she couldn’t remember.
“The drugstore, I think,” she said.
That was her—effortless, uncultivated.
Elisabeth was pretty without having to try. She hardly ever wore makeup. She was a wisp of a woman with a boy’s slender build, the body Sam had wanted all her life. Of the two of them, Sam looked more likely to have given birth in the last five months. She wished she could be this kind of woman for a day, an hour. The type who didn’t have to roll her jeans up over her belly when she sat, or suffer the indignity of bouncing boobs if ever she went for a jog.
Sam had spotted Elisabeth in the wild once, when she and Isabella were downtown. Isabella saw Sam looking and asked, “Who’s that?”
“My boss,” Sam had said.
“Are you gonna say hi?”
“No.”
“She’s cute,” Isabella said.
“Please don’t hit on my boss.”
“How old is she? Like Clive’s age?”
“No,” Sam said. “I don’t know. Older than that, I assume. She’s married with a kid.”
“When my mother was Clive’s age, she had an eight-year-old,” Isabella said.
“Don’t tell me that,” Sam said.
Elisabeth’s friends sent extravagant gifts. She received a box of truffles from a chocolate shop in Manhattan as a thank-you for introducing a writer she knew to her agent. Once, her best friend sent flowers, cut short and arranged in a glass vase, because Elisabeth was having a bad day. None of it seemed to matter much to her. When a giant box from Williams Sonoma arrived, Elisabeth didn’t open it for a week.
Even her ice cubes were the nicest Sam had ever seen. They were exceptionally cube-like, instead of those cloudy half circles that popped out of normal people’s refrigerator doors.