She Matters by Susanna Sonnenberg Page B

lovely as my shoulders dipped under the surface, the compound forgotten. I let the muck and silt push up around each toe, my fingers sifting the dark water.
    â€œIsn’t this worth it?” Claudia said. “No one ever comes up here. I can relax, I can breathe.” She didn’t look like she was breathing or relaxing. She never did. What’s Mick’s story, anyway? I thought. What’s his job ? But I didn’t ask, afraid I’d betray my disapproval, which was weird, because usually we said everything. “ Total honesty,” we always promised. Bravery in front of each other, because of each other. Even if we were faking.
    â€œYou feel okay?” I said. “The cramps?”
    â€œHe was right,” she said, dreamy. “They’re gone.”
    We stayed another night. I fell asleep before I could hear them. Mick drove us down the mountain and dropped me at the house of a friend whom I lied about seeing before I went to the plane I lied about catching. “She’ll give me a ride,” I said. “Bye! Thanks! Love you!” They drove away, and I used a pay phone to give my teacher the address, and when he got there, grinning behind glassas he slowed the car, I told him all of it—the homemade root cellar and the dull food in cans and Claudia’s creepy older boyfriend. My teacher shook his head and said, “I wouldn’t expect our friend to make such poor choices. When will she know how much she has to offer?” We spent the next days in a motel—more anonymous after all, he said, than the bed-and-breakfast—where I was restored by wrapped soaps, wall sockets reliably inset, and the immense body of my lover bearing down on me.

Aware.

Roommate
    E sther and I connected again, twenty years gone by, an exciting burst of solved mystery. Well, not mystery. Curiosity. From time to time I would put quotation marks around her name to search for her on Google. Driven and political, what great station would she now command, my first housemate? She wouldn’t still be wearing those dropsy cotton blouses and Indian print skirts, would she, but that was the picture I sought and expected, my life’s own bookmark. I accrued bits of her personal file, outdated announcements, a string of cities, and I’d deduced she was a rabbi. This fit. Esther had been fierce with morality. But I never got in touch, an old intimidation preventing me.
    I lived with Esther in an antique three-bedroom in Waltham, Massachusetts, an upstairs apartment on a long, bleak street. The house was gray, among other elderly houses of grays or blues, the block lined with aging cars. Although I stayed a year in this house, into a bleak winter, a summer, I remember late fall as perpetual: I walk home after classes, and the sky is darkening in metallic contrast to the orange maple leaves, the red-leafed oaks; I am becoming.
    My friend Rachel lived downstairs—I’ll tell you more about her later—and in the beginning I would stop at her door when I came home, before I headed up, hellos in the mahogany-paneled entryway. I was a little scared of Esther with her convictions andactivism, her feminism, and docile Rachel shored me up. But I lived with Esther, which bid us into friendship, and we depended on each other with an affability that grew smoother, at least through the first months. We went to the supermarket in my car. We made a household and negotiated interlocking needs. We ate her lentils and yogurt, we drank my white wine. We took turns with chores—how central they were—washing the dishes, the rice pot, feeding the cats. Monday I’ll do it, then Tuesday you. The two cats made tender parents of us.
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    Eventually, it was Esther who called me. She’d stumbled across my memoir at the library, the audio version I’d recorded, and she’d sped through a cross-country trip with my voice filling the car. “There you were,