Alice in Bed by Judith Hooper

were permitted, if at all,only in the night-world, but as soon as we had clothes on we had to snap back into our public characters. If I accidentally smiled too yearningly at Sara at breakfast or addressed her in fond tones, I’d pay for it with a week’s shunning. It was clear now, if not before, that I would never be happy as Sara’s lover.
    And since grand tours lasted for a year at the minimum, I would have to consider Sara dead and go through all the mourning associated with that. Because I was already losing her forever, or so it seemed to me, I dared for once to press her on the great taboo, the question of Sara and Alice.
    â€œHow can you say ‘There is no us,’ Sara, after our nights together? If you found it so trivial, you have hidden it well. But maybe you are just a liar. Perhaps everything is only a game to you.”
    A vein throbbed at her temple, and her voice trembled. Fixing her gaze on the milk pitcher, she explained that “what we do at night” was a momentary experience of the eternal, which afterwards scattered like mercury. You should never discuss it— discuss meant tedious and ponderous in Sara-world—because that made it dead. “The eternal is like water; it flows through your fingers, you cannot hold onto it.”
    I didn’t know about the eternal, where it flowed. All I knew was that, whatever intimacies took place between us, Sara could be counted on to ignore me the next day. Most people (Fanny Morse, for instance) would probably live and die in the Boston virtues, never dreaming there were embraces that could make you weak in the knees. I sincerely wished I were one of the unawakened ones now. Sara was leaving me for a year, as if it were nothing. It was a bitter truth: the one who loves less (or not at all) has all the power, and this is why love is so painful.
    After going through the motions of bidding good-bye to Sara’s aunts, I set off down Kirkland Street, arriving at 20 Quincy Street a quarter hour later. I waved to old Mrs. Lowell, dead-heading the day lilies in her perennial bed, and went inside and waited for the tears to flow. Instead, I was dry-eyed, feeling nothing at all.
    Perhaps this was the answer. Train yourself to be a Spartan mother to your emotions. If you do have feelings, for heaven’s sake keep them to yourself. My spirits brightened at the prospect of becominga different sort of person—healthy-minded, unemotional, detached. Whenever Sara came to mind, I dismissed her like an appointment that must be cancelled. I made a list of her annoying traits and consulted it whenever I felt stabs of longing.
    It wasn’t just Sara, either. Everyone disappointed me. Harry, who went around feeling superior to Cambridge, which he considered quite good enough for me—a mere girl, belonging to the domestic sphere. And William! Complaining in his letters from Dresden about not hearing from me and begging me to write. As if I could write in the state I was in! I still hadn’t forgiven him for deserting me without even bothering to say good-bye.
    His first letters from Germany were read aloud by Father on the verandah with the oil lamp hissing in the perfumed dark. They were passed around to family friends and read at gatherings, where everyone roared with laughter at William’s depictions of the residents of his Dresden lodging house. The landlady who kept exclaiming wunderschön about everything. The “Hamburg spinster” who queried William about a people we had with us called ‘Yankees’ about whom she had heard such strange stories and who seemed to be, if reports were true, of all the people in the world the very worst.
    His letters always made us laugh. I savored a sweet one to me in which he portrayed himself as a lovesick troubadour pursued by lovely women but remaining true to one woman, whose name he muttered under his breath— the peerless child of Quincy Street, i.e. Thou . Fanny