Book club was soul-destroying, she wrote. Where were you??
Uhh…right here where I usually am. You’re the one who moved away, remember?
A minute later, Nomi added a winking emoji to make clear that it was a joke, but Elisabeth knew it wasn’t, not entirely. Nomi was right. What did she expect?
She took a deep breath.
How was your night? she wrote.
I asked Brian to get a vasectomy and he said no, because what if his second wife wants kids. To which I said, fair point. So nothing accomplished there.
Nomi and Brian both had a cool frankness about them. She was the executive director of a national nonprofit that focused on educating girls in the Third World. He worked in politics. They were tough, assertive, blunt. They could be almost cruel to each other at times, and it was fine, because each of them knew the other could take it.
If Brian had decided, shortly before the birth of their first child, to leave his job and become an inventor, Nomi would have said, You’re an idiot. No. That would have been the end of it.
Elisabeth and Andrew’s marriage was nothing like theirs. Andrew was sensitive. In both senses of the word. There were so many things she couldn’t say. Her people only had two speeds: contentedness and sledgehammer. Elisabeth had never learned how to argue without chipping off a piece of the other person. She didn’t want to do that to Andrew. So sometimes she kept things from him, things she only told Nomi or Violet, or both.
I’m worried about Sam, she typed.
I told you the young ones are a nightmare, Nomi replied. They have no fear. The girl I have on the weekends comes late, and walks in with coffee from Blue Bottle, as if to point out that she could have arrived on time if she wanted to. Then she can’t be bothered to throw the cup away. Leaves it on my kitchen table when she goes.
Ha, Elisabeth wrote. But wait, no. I meant I’m worried about Sam’s relationship. She told me tonight that her boyfriend is 33. He’s way too old for her. Oh, and they’re sort of engaged.
A long moment followed, in which she conjured up the face Nomi was making.
Finally, Elisabeth wrote, What?
Nomi replied: I didn’t even know Angela was married for the first three months she worked for us. Be careful. She’s not your friend, she’s your employee.
I know! Elisabeth wrote back. Of course.
8
Sam
THE NEXT THREE SUNDAYS in a row, Sam went to Elisabeth’s house for dinner.
When Elisabeth invited her, Sam had felt a fluttering. It reminded her of the first and only time her middle school crush said her name out loud, in the course of asking to borrow a pencil.
“I bet it’s a trick to get you to babysit for free,” Isabella said.
But each time, Gilbert was in bed when she arrived. If he cried out and she stood to get him, Elisabeth would say, “You’re not on the clock, Sam. You’re our guest,” before leaving the room to tend to the baby herself.
There was music playing whenever Sam got there, something she wouldn’t think to listen to, and yet it was just right—the Beach Boys or Patsy Cline or Otis Redding. When Sam got back to the dorm, she’d play that album over and over for the rest of the week.
It was only the three of them, but they made it special. Place mats and tea candles on the dining room table, small silver bowls of kale chips and Brazil nuts set out on the kitchen island. Simple fresh-cut flowers; like white tulips or yellow roses, with no filler. The flowers would still be there when Sam came to work the next day, but they’d be gone before they had a chance to wilt or turn the water all swampy, as had happened the one time Clive sent her an arrangement.
Sam couldn’t recall her parents ever hosting a dinner party. Only big family gatherings, with sandwich platters and a Crock-Pot full of her mother’s meatballs. Her relatives sat all over the house, wherever they could find a spot. They ate off paper plates, with paper napkins in colors coordinated to the occasion.
Her parents threw a neighborhood cookout once or twice a summer, with too much food—afterward, the family ate burnt hot dogs and steak and macaroni salad for a week. At home, entertaining guests was about filling bellies and making sure the house was presentable: the toilets flushed, the toys put away.
Sam wondered how Andrew and Elisabeth managed to make everything perfect. The house was spotless, but she never saw them clean. When she rang the doorbell on a Sunday, they had usually just gotten back from taking a long walk or a drive to the antique shops in Grantville. It almost seemed as if they’d forgotten she was coming but were glad to see her and fully prepared to host on zero notice. She couldn’t imagine them frantic, screaming at each other five minutes before she arrived to get in the shower already or hide the pile of laundry on the stairs.
Andrew did the cooking. Sam and Elisabeth sat at the counter, drinking wine that was probably ten times nicer than anything Sam drank in the normal course of things, though she couldn’t tell the difference. Their red-wine glasses were stemless. White, Andrew said, required a stem. It bothered him when a restaurant got this backward, as white wine in a stemless glass was inappropriately warmed by the hands of the person drinking it.
“I like white in a stemless glass,” Elisabeth said. “What do you prefer, Sam? Stemless or stem?”
“Not sure I have a preference.”
You never saw an actual wineglass in the dorms. Now Sam considered buying one. It was impossible to feel sophisticated while drinking from a red plastic cup.
Over dinner, they chatted with ease, discussing politics and movies and books. Andrew pointed out which items he bought at the farmers market behind the post office. Every family Sam had ever babysat for in this town was crazy for the farmers market. Never before in her life had she encountered such enthusiasm about buying vegetables.
She told them about the painting class she was taking this semester, how they were supposed to paint the same tomato week after week. It had started off firm and plump and shiny red, and was now wrinkled, sprouting mold.
“Is it a commentary on the brutality of the aging process?” Elisabeth said.
“I think it’s just a tomato,” Sam said.
They laughed.
She felt a thrill when she made them laugh.
“See, this is why no one in the department likes me,” Sam said. “I don’t have an artist’s brain. I just like painting pretty pictures.”
“You sell yourself short,” Elisabeth said.
“I agree,” Andrew said.
Sam studied their interactions. They were sometimes affectionate, but never in a gross way. Once, when “You’re My Best Friend” by Queen started playing, he placed his hand on the small of her back, and she smiled at him, a very private smile, before turning to Sam and saying sheepishly, “Our song.”
Andrew was a compact man, slim, and not much taller than Elisabeth. His brown hair was cut neatly, like the boys Sam remembered from Sunday school. Elisabeth, she thought of as stylish, cool. Andrew was more dad-like. He wore oxford shirts and loafers while hanging around the house.
Elisabeth and Andrew laughed at one another’s stories and respectfully considered each other’s arguments. They went out of their way to be kind to one another. He made her coffee every morning and brought it to her in bed. She was forever mentioning how his shirt made his eyes look even bluer than usual, things like that. This intrigued Sam.
Her own parents never fought, but they regarded each other like sturdy furniture—useful, reliable, there.
While doing her reading for class one morning, she underlined a passage in Edith Wharton: Ours was a robust passion that could give an open-eyed account of itself, and not a beautiful madness shrinking away from the proof.
That was them, Andrew and Elisabeth. It was, Sam realized, what she wanted for herself. She knew people looked at what she and Clive had and saw a
beautiful madness. Madness, anyway.
Sam and Clive had no shared frame of reference. She remembered a night last summer when his friends came over to their flat to play Celebrity. Sam didn’t know who any of the clues were—Patsy Palmer and Nigel Havers and Cilla Black. The rest of them laughed uproariously at the string of impressions, none of which made sense to her.
She hated them in that moment, even Clive. She hated their smugness, as if no one had ever had a group of friends before.
Wanting her to feel included, she supposed, their flatmate, Ian, and his girlfriend, Chevy, insisted Sam try acting out one of the answers. She pulled a slip of paper from a hat and looked at it. Who the hell was Terry Wogan?
“Sorry, I’ve never heard of this person,” she said, flustered. “Someone else should do this. I’ll mess it up.”
“You’re so young,” Chevy said, adoringly.
“No, she’s just American,” Clive said.
But really, it was both.
* * *
—
The best part of dinner at Andrew and Elisabeth’s was what happened afterward. In the den upstairs, Sam and Elisabeth were finally alone and free to get into things. They curled their bare feet under their bodies, facing each other on the couch. They talked not about culture and current events, as it seemed one had to in front of men, but about friends and ex-boyfriends and their families.
Elisabeth had a sister who lived in the Caribbean. “A bit of a wild child,” she said. “A free spirit, I guess you could say. She has this enormous Instagram following.”
(Later, back at the dorm, Sam and Isabella found the page. Elisabeth’s sister was hot. In the most recent image, she stood on a paddleboard in turquoise water, wearing a black bikini with a confusing number of straps. Mantra for Today: Be Here Now. Tortola, you leave me breathless with your beauty. Thank you Stella Maris Hotels for making every journey unforgettable. Isabella said, “Do you think she’s breathless because that bathing suit is so tight?”)
Elisabeth mentioned one night that she was semi-estranged from her parents, but she didn’t provide details. This surprised Sam. She could usually sense when someone came from an unstable family. The college was full of such girls. Elisabeth didn’t give off their sort of energy.
Being semi-estranged sounded impossible, like being semi-pregnant. Sam wondered, but did not ask, what exactly this meant. She never forgot that Elisabeth was her employer. She liked the casual nature of their relationship, but she was careful to let Elisabeth set the boundaries.
She thought about it a lot, though. What it would be like to have a baby and not speak to your parents. Or semi–not speak to them, anyway.
When she eventually gave birth, Sam imagined her family would be there every second. Her mother and sisters in the delivery room, her brother and dad pacing outside the door. Afterward, her cousins and aunts and uncles would crowd around in the hospital room, as it had always been in their family. Set against that, Elisabeth and Andrew seemed so alone in the world.
Every so often, Elisabeth would share some telling detail. She told Sam that her mother was obsessed with being thin, that she prided herself on weighing not an ounce more than she had on her wedding day.
“When my sister and I were in middle school, high school, she’d have all three of us go on a diet and compete to see who could lose the most weight.”
“But you’re so thin to begin with,” Sam said.
“I know. So is my sister. The whole thing really messed her up.”
Elisabeth remembered everything Sam told her. She never failed to follow up on even the most trivial matters.
“What did Hailey say when Isabella confronted her about stealing the shampoo?” she once asked, with genuine interest.
Sam asked how long she and Andrew were together before they got married.
“Six years,” Elisabeth said. “I was in no rush. We probably never would have done it if Andrew hadn’t forced the issue.”
“Really?”
“I’m sure we’d be together. But—marriage. I never thought it was for me. We eloped. My mother-in-law hated that, but she was relieved that we’d no longer be living in sin.”
“I sometimes picture a big wedding, with all my younger cousins as flower girls, in pink poufy dresses, and me with this long veil,” Sam said. “But then when I think about the people involved—Clive waiting at the end of the aisle, our mothers sitting on either side—it all seems highly embarrassing.”
“I tend to break out in hives at weddings,” Elisabeth said. “True story.”
* * *
—
Wherever a conversation led them, they stopped speaking at exactly 8:59. From 9:00 to 10:00 they watched The Dividers in silence. Had Elisabeth talked during the show, Sam would have done the same, but she liked that they didn’t. If a particularly shocking plot twist occurred, they might turn to each other with wide eyes for a second before looking back at the screen, but that was all. When the closing credits rolled, Elisabeth stretched, stood up, and said, “It’s late. I should let you get back,” and Sam went home.
“What makes them think you want to hang out with your bosses at the weekend?” Clive said on the phone one Monday morning. “It’s like they think they own you because they pay you.”
“It’s not like that,” Sam said. “We’re more like friends.”
“Hmm,” he said.
“Last night we were watching TV and Elisabeth’s cell phone rang, and she answered it and said she couldn’t talk because her friend Sam was over.”
In the moment, it made Sam feel kind of proud, though she felt dumb recounting it, holding it up as evidence of something.
“But it’s all on her terms,” Clive said.
“Of course it is. What am I going to do, invite them to dinner in the dining hall? ‘Hey, guys! Come on over. It’s tuna-noodle casserole night.’ ”
Sam knew what he was afraid of, but she also knew that he had no reason to be.
“Once you meet her, you’ll understand,” she said.
Her first year away at college, Sam missed suburban living rooms, the stuffed cupboards of middle-aged people. She missed kids. She started babysitting for the Walkers. They lived on a farm ten miles outside of town and had two moms, Jessica and Ann, who played more stereotypical gender roles than any straight couple Sam knew. Jessica had given birth to their three children, ages four, two, and one. A stay-at-home mom who did everything around the house, she was the disciplinarian. Ann was a doctor. She worked long hours. When she came home, she did things that made Jessica angry, like reaching into her coat pocket to pull out handfuls of gummy bears and giving them to the kids after they had already brushed their teeth.
Jessica often complained to Sam about it.
At the time, Sam was not yet over her high school boyfriend and spent many evenings staring at his screen name on Gchat, willing him to contact her. She was not exactly an expert on marriage. Still, she offered feedback when Jessica asked. Jessica hugged her after, saying, “What would I do without you?”
But it was Jessica who refused to let Ann drive her home the night it snowed and Sam’s clunky old Cutlass got stuck in the mud outside their house. They didn’t have a driveway. They parked in what was basically a field. The same thing had happened twice before, and both times, Ann had pushed her free while Sam sat in the driver’s seat with her foot on the gas.
The night of the snowstorm, they were hosting five lesbian couples and their children for dinner. Jessica was in a tizzy. She said she couldn’t spare Ann for as long as it would take to give Sam a push, and certainly not long enough to drive her home and get back.
She said, “I’m sorry, Sam, but why do you drive that thing? It’s not safe. Call a cab and we’ll pay for it.”
Sam called and went outside and walked down the steep hill that led to their property.
The hill dropped right onto a dark country road. Soon, several pairs of headlights slowed as they approached, but all of them turned in front of her. The dinner guests.
She waited and waited. The snow picked up. She wondered if the cabdriver had gotten lost, or decided not to go out in this weather. Sam hadn’t brought her cell phone, since there was no service out here.
Rage bubbled up in her chest. She wanted to cry, but remembered a story her brother told her about a guy he knew whose eyelids had frozen shut. Sam wasn’t sure whether Brendan had made the story up, but she wasn’t willing to risk it.
She waited until she couldn’t feel her toes inside her boots. When she ran her hand over her hair, it was caked in snow.
Sam told herself she would sooner freeze to death than ask Ann and Jessica for help. But eventually, she had no choice but to hike back up the slick hill and knock at their kitchen door.
The looks on everyone’s faces when they saw her there.
“Sam?” Ann said. “What on earth?”
It turned out she had been waiting in the snow for an hour and a half.
Dinner was winding down by then. The table was set with coffee cups and dessert plates, most of which had a bite or two of chocolate cake left on them. One of the visiting couples drove her home. The next morning, her RA took her back to dig out the car. Sam didn’t announce herself, and the Walkers didn’t come outside. She never spoke to them again.
Sam had cared for many people’s children. She was used to being treated like family when it suited them, and the hired help when it did not. But Elisabeth wasn’t that way. Elisabeth considered her an equal. It was what Sam needed now. A real adult in her life to call a friend.
* * *
Friends and Strangers Page 15