When I flew back to New Haven the day after the Texas wedding, my landlady’s house had acquired the smell of homecoming. She—my landlady—poked her head through my bedroom door and asked: “Are you in love?” rolling her eyes up and wide like a cartoon character. I shook my head. “Oh,” she said and took my little present, a miniature bronze fawn polished from a succession of past owners, surprisingly weighty.
She started down the stairs as if expecting me to follow. I found her in her bedroom, a dark, north-facing corner of the house that enjoyed neither morning light nor the view on the garden. She had placed the heavy trinket on her bedside table.
“I barely know the guy,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t last long,” she said, contemplating her bedside scene. “As long as there’s romance.”
Tuesday was shopping day, and the radio in the kitchen was blurting out its aggressive pop, Rosie’s choice of volume and station, intended to make us get out of the house faster. She grabbed a pair of black trousers from her wardrobe and unfolded them on the bed. “Could these fit you?” she asked me. We gathered keys, sunscreen, sunglasses. “They’re basically new but they won’t fit me—I’ve put on so much weight lately, hello, have you seen my thighs.”
In the car on the way to the store we reviewed disapprovingly the bodies of the male pedestrians that ambled in plain sight along the sidewalk. Meat eaters, Rosie said, sweat buckets. And they’re red in the face, too. From the alcohol. That’s why these people need the air conditioning on trains.
“I had a Japanese lover once,” she said as we were speeding past the old campus green. Shops grew larger and larger on either side of us, parking lots exploding around them into infinity. “Dry as a bone, cool as a cucumber. He spoiled my taste in men!”
Rosie was a school teacher, an early riser, a compulsive cleaner who exercised twice daily, a lapsed vegan with a fondness for restrictive diets, an Italian-American who was learning Italian—with remarkable difficulty—from a morose, Italian-born Yalie who came to the house every Tuesday night to practice “conversation.” Years spent living in Japan had left Rosie with a level of Japanese approaching fluency. This was something I learned about her quite early on. In this other idiom, she whispered playfully enunciated words into late-hour phone calls, pacing in the doorway that connected the entrance hall with the TV room. I would catch only fragments of those conversations as I walked up the stairs with a glass of plant milk for dinner, having no personal calls to claim, only an audio recording of Moby Dick, which I took to bed for several weeks. The resounding recurrence of the word harpoon stuck dangerously in my head from these first nights as I slept and woke early, friendless, disoriented, and hungry.
There’s what women want, and then there’s what women deserve, Rosie would say sometimes, unprompted, reviewing some of her contradictory life decisions. When her mother got sick, years ago, the Japanese man had said to her:
“Please go now. Do not return. You don’t need me anymore.”
I had no relations in America except a lover who taught at UT Austin and flew me across the country for weddings and conventions. Swerving through the parking lot of the supermarket, she told me I would never get the philosophy professor to fall in love with me if I persisted in trying to pay for my half of every meal. “I don’t know how masculinity works in your country, but this is the United States.”
But as I had already told Rosie, I hoped to be asked to stay in America indefinitely; not for marriage, not for love, but for my research. Every year, The American Society for Reproductive Medicine took on a new crop of international affiliates and secured their temporary positions in Ivy League institutions. I hoped to be one of them, and thus for my career to be made. There was no better place on earth to study chronic benign gynecological diseases like endometriosis, which is what I specialized in. Endometriosis is a condition characterized by the presence of endometrial tissue in places where it should not be, from the ovaries to the rectovaginal septum. Sometimes it grows in the brain. Poorly diagnosed, endometriosis does not currently have a cure, other than pregnancy and menopause.
Should Rosie have begged the Japanese man not to let her go? She was a single, childless woman of a certain age. To some people at least that’s what she was. She was also the first and, so far, only member of her family to have become economically solvent and to have acquired property.
Her house was an incredible piece of local architecture: a miniature villa (Victorian, Italianate), dark on the outside, dim on the inside, unusual and austere whichever way you looked at it. It secured her social standing in a neighborhood of lean executives and gauche professors, all property owners. The house, small in comparison to some of the neighborhood’s brick-and-slate mansions, gave her a considerable amount of labor. Traces of my existence were systematically erased in my wake—bins emptied twice a day and the bed I slept in always remade upon my departure to the Laboratory of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Science. I wasn’t her only guest. Nor was she the only lady in the neighborhood who rented spare bedrooms to visiting academics. She was the only one, I suspected, who had turned the property into her main source of income. I was the one guest who had stayed on for more than a year.
“I have something to tell you,” she said, putting the brown grocery bags down as we walked into the cool, airy shade of the kitchen. Slow season was upon us. Flowing in the breeze as we came home were the last remaining traces of a late-Spring guest: persistent blueberry stains on the freshly washed bedlinen drying on the line under the back porch. She gave out a long sigh. “It’s my birthday,” she said. “My family is taking me for lunch. I tried to get out of it.” She threw her arms in the air. She took a gluten-free, sliced cinnamon and raisin loaf from her bags and stored it in the freezer. She saved these for days of craving.
“They will expect cake to be served here after lunch. Sicilians. Forget about it, they’re nuts.”
I waited in my room while they were out at the restaurant. During the next hour, the professor called three times. I picked up and told him I was thinking of retreating from conventional dating practices, at least for a little while. He said he was sorry if he’d hurt or upset me in any way.
I did not have much clinical experience, but I worked a lot to normalize refining the diagnosis of endometriosis on the basis of hurt. The most widely used classification system takes only visible lesions into account, which is why it typically ascribes a low score to deep endometriosis, regardless of the pain severity. I told the professor he did not know what he was talking about. Pain, to him, was merely a concept.
About two hours later Rosie’s electric car pulled into the driveway, followed by a white Audi. A door slammed, then there was a sharp scream followed by restrained and intermittent swearing. When I came out on the porch Rosie was holding her wrist and shaking her head. She had injured herself, she said, an incident which could have been avoided had it not been for the fuss of the occasion.
Her two siblings, her niece, her niece’s partner, and their ten-year-old twin children lazily and gradually emerged at her side. They put me in charge of carrying the large cake box they had fetched from the local Italian deli. “It’s the best in town,” one of them said to me, sternly, before entering the house. I leaned against the mosquito screen while Rosie headed upstairs, and somehow coffee was served without her help. She came back, her wrist wrapped in a bandage, looking furious. Family members, now all settled with plates, cups, cake, and coffee, began to consider me with lazy interest, asking where I was from and whether I had a boyfriend.
Rosie consented to a creamy halved strawberry which she placed on her plate and inspected from time to time, licking her knife.
“Alice’s research,” she began proudly, “has established a correlation between retrograde menstruation and the consumption of dairy products. Also sugar.”
“If you don’t have a boyfriend,” someone asked, as if helping me out of a tricky situation, “maybe you have a girlfriend?”
I told them, simply and without beating around the bush, that I’d been engaged once.
The conversation shifted when one of the twin children asked what would happen to them if their parents suddenly passed away.
“Well I suppose you would come and live with me,” Rosie said after a considered pause.
We all helped clear the plates. Rosie insisted on doing the washing up herself.
“If there is a God,” she said, holding out her bandaged wrist once more for all to consider, “I swear He did this to humble me. Next thing you guys will tell me is I need a man around the house!”
That afternoon, she asked the neighbor’s husband to help carry a wooden cabinet to the upstairs bathroom.
“Did you see that poor devil sweat?” she said, beaming, as he was leaving the house.
The Italian language teacher was at the front door at 7 p.m. sharp and like every week was made to feel as though she’d showed up unannounced.
And just like that, it was summer. New Haven, frozen with new blossoms, suddenly bereft of academic life. Every week brought an electric storm, the promise of a barbecue or party in someone else’s garden, and a road trip to one remote farmer’s market or other local attraction. Short drives; lush, leafy Connecticut. Friends whom Rosie had met online a long time ago now but with whom there had never been any sparks.
“Stay until late August,” she said one day, catching me off-guard. “If you want to.” We were trying to keep ourselves warm on a very insulated, very air-conditioned train back from the New York Botanical Garden. “A friend of mine from Japan will be staying with us through July. He’s a man, by the way. That ok?”
If the man in question was her long-lost lover from Tokyo, she never said. Just like she never told me how old she was, or when the Fall semester’s guests were due to arrive. As the evenings became warmer, I would settle in a garden chair and sniff out the breeze, the idea of New England still dancing in my head from that whaling novel, which the prof told me was the “only truly compulsory American classic.” If I lived here enough, maybe one day I, too, would long for the ocean, fish stew or any kind of balanced meal made with local ingredients, or even for the company of men.
The professor went on writing emails, reflecting on the abrupt ending of our relationship. He admitted that, even as we were having so much fun together visiting libraries and antique shops around Texas, he had never felt very close to me, either.
“Don’t stray from the neighborhood,” Rosie said every time she saw me lace up my trainers at dusk. “Anyone here could tell you’re a foreigner, even from a mile!”
But I did stray, often, and ended up venturing out of East Rock into neighborhoods where reported violent crime had exceeded that of New Haven as a whole by 49% the previous year. Seeing women there standing on their front porches, or sitting out on their stoops, I wondered what the texture of their lives could be like in the middle of ambient and constant policing, wondered if they lived with self-defense tools close at hand at all times—stakes from picket fences, baseball bats, harpoons.
“Oh sugar,” said one of them one day when I had tree fluff in my eye and looked like I had been crying.
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Elsa Court is a Franco-British writer and translator based in Southeast London. Her short stories and essays have appeared — or are forthcoming — in Granta, Brixton Review of Books, The White Review, and Worms. Court teaches Creative Writing and Translation at the University of London. She is currently working on her first short story collection, as well as a nonfiction novel about her infatuation with the English language.