Free The Life Room by Jill Bialosky Page B

own foursome, a group of women from the neighborhood whose husbands had either abandoned them, or died, or divorced them. She learned from them that you could fill an entire lunch talking about fabrics for your couch or the color to paint your walls. She also learned that it was possible to survive disappointment if you chose to, or disappointment could put a dam in the middle of your life and you’d never be able to move forward. She learned that love could last a lifetime or a day, that there were all kinds of possibilities for losing or finding it. She learned that if you did not have faith, if you did not fulfill your dreams, they might hibernate in your head, creating such friction you couldn’t lift it from the pillow. She learned to love the sounds of a piano reverberating through her house, and then the absence of sound.
Why won’t he call me
, she imagined asking these women.
Why do I still care for him? Why can’t I forget him?
But she knew she would put on her cheerful face and leave her questions to herself.
    While her mother basted the turkey, she caught Eleanor up on gossip. Stephen Mason had moved back to town after dropping out of college. He doesn’t trust institutions, Carol had explained. He wants to be a
real writer
. Her mother said he was working for his girlfriend’s father, at one of the restaurants he owned downtown. She looked outside past the backyard at the empty plot of land where the playhouse had once been. Now it was filled with tangled weeds and dusted with a light snow.
    Celia was telling stories about her divorce. “Since when is gaining weight grounds for divorce?” she asked. They had eaten dinner and were sitting by the fire, drinking coffee and still sipping wine. “If you were married to the son of a bitch, you’d gain weight, too.”
    Half listening to the conversation, Eleanor felt sorry for herself. She wondered why she had refused William’s proposal of marriage. If she’d said yes, he would be just now coming to get her and she could forget her worries of always being alone like her mother, of whether she’d actually get through her orals and dissertation, or whether she’d eventually get a job.
    It was the point in a dinner party when everyone senses it’s approaching time to leave, but they also want to linger, to sustain that moment of pleasure where nothing is demanded from you other than to enjoy conversation with friends, slightly intoxicated by wine and cuisine and familiar sentiments. A tap on the windowpane of the front door startled her. Stephen Mason was standing underneath the awning. His coat was wet with snow and his face lit up when she opened the door. She was struck by the incongruities of his face: his chiseled cheekbones, his cautious but intelligent eyes, and the soft, slightly feminine wave of his hair, framing a masculine jaw. Looking at him made her think that people don’t really change, they simply become more themselves.
    “Merry Christmas.” He handed her a bottle of wine and leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “Hey, Eleanor. How come we never keep in touch?”
    The comment surprised her. “I don’t know.”
    “I thought I’d stop by and see if my mom was still here. Is it too late?” He explained that he’d had dinner with his girlfriend Chrissy’s family.
    “No, I’m glad you came,” she said, surprised by her own words.
    When he entered the living room, his mother brightened—the love of her life had walked through the door. “A house full of beautiful women,” Stephen said. “I must have been a fool to have missed dinner. Seriously, it’s good to be here,” he said, looking earnestly at Eleanor’s mother, then at his own mother, and then at Eleanor.
    “We’re glad to have you,” Eleanor’s mother said. “Look how happy you’ve made your mother. She says you’re writing?”
    Stephen explained an idea he had for a novel. Something about a guy who reconnects years later with a girl who used to live in the