Джули Салливан - Friends and Strangers

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.

On Monday mornings when Sam opened the fridge to get Gil’s bottle, there were leftovers from Sunday dinner wrapped in cellophane—roast chicken stuffed with lemons, red potato wedges sprinkled with dill. She envied Elisabeth then most of all.

Before she left for college, her mother bought her something called Dinner For One. It was a box containing four pieces of matching blue china—a dinner plate, a bread plate, a bowl, a cup. In years past, Sam had put the set to use, but now it sat at the back of the closet. Something about it depressed her.

From what she had seen, most people’s twenties were much closer to Dinner For One than they were to Sunday Roast Chicken. Roommates seemed so odd, the more she thought of it. Strangers with whom the only thing you had in common was that none of you could afford to live alone. Sam wanted to skip all that and be settled.

Clive talked about moving to the country. A little house with a room upstairs where she could paint. Children, not right away, but someday. It sounded both wonderful and terrifying.

When Sam saw a used pregnancy test in the dorm bathroom, she thought of how nobody here was hoping for a positive result. She wished she had reached that place in life, when the reaction could be what they showed in the commercials: a happy couple jumping up and down.

“Wear my black halter dress!” Isabella shouted at someone, pulling Sam’s attention back to the party. “Keep it! I’m serious! It would look amazing on you.”

Isabella was already drunk. Giving her stuff away was a telltale sign. In a week or two, she would search both their closets, asking if Sam had seen her black halter anywhere.

A bunch of them had pooled their money for pizza. Sam went to the stack of boxes on her desk, removed two slices of cheese, and put them on a paper plate. She brought it to her roommate.

“Eat,” she said.

Isabella took one bite, then another, and then put the plate on the floor.

“Thank you, Mom,” she said. “Do you promise to look after me forever?”

“Yes,” Sam said.

“Even when you and Clive are married and raising five kids in England and I’m the mistress of some corporate tycoon in Dubai?”

“Even then,” Sam said.

They smiled, because, she thought, they both sort of liked the sound of it.

Isabella took Sam’s face in her hands. “I love you so much it hurts.”

Sam swore she could feel the grease working its way off Isabella’s fingertips and straight into her pores.

“Love you too,” she said.

—

By ten, Isabella was fully sobbing.

A normal occurrence after so many drinks, but it irked Sam. This was supposed to be her night to freak out, to be on the receiving end of the pep talk. She needed to leave for the airport soon.

They went into their room and closed the door.

“What’s up?” Sam said.

Isabella looked like she was trying to remember.

“I miss Darryl,” she said, finally.

“Darryl?”

“Darren.”

“The guy you dated senior year of high school?”

“We started dating at the end of junior year, Sam. He was the only boy who ever accepted me as I was.”

Isabella must have seen something on Sam’s face. She added, “I’m serious.”

“I believe you,” Sam said. “Though the story would be more compelling if you’d remembered his name.”

Isabella pursed her lips, deciding whether or not to protest. Then she flung her head back and laughed.

She had cheated on Darren her first Saturday at college. She called him immediately to confess. They broke up by the time orientation ended. As far as Sam knew, they hadn’t spoken since.