Free Higher Ed by Tessa McWatt

pictures, and she does not want to be stupid in this. But he is kind. He looks at her as though anything she says will be a poem. She tries not to disappoint him.
    “In Poland film is so poor they light it with candles, and this is what made Kieslowski so famous.” She waits. He smiles, and now she can too. She sips her Spanish wine. Plum and vanilla.
    “And where will you live when your mother comes?” he asks her, this fact about her remembered from weeks ago as she stood at his table, drawing her out, drawing her in.
    “She will live with me, where I am.” The waiter puts paella in front of her.
    “It’s a bedsit, right?” he says, with neither judgment nor pity.
    “We have been in much smaller, it’s fine.” She doesn’t want to talk about herself any more. “And you,” she says, “you live alone?”
    Behind glasses his eyes dart left towards a poster of the Alhambra. She adjusts her hair, runs her finger over her ear, before he looks at her again; something is not the same.
    “I might be moving soon,” he says. Her stomach bends.
    “I’m coming back,” she says as she stands up, not too fast, so that he will not be worried.
    In the toilet she tells her face in the mirror that this is nothing, nothing. That her
matka
is coming, that she has a job in the day, that England is not Poland, that there are many fish in the lake, that this is Robin, named for something that flies, and that she must ignore this
czekam
feeling like she is the pet at the door when he is turning a key to come in.
    She washes her hands.
    “Are you okay?” he asks when she is back in front of his kind face.
    “Yes, fine, thank you,” she says and smiles.
    “I’m not avoiding your question. I live alone right now,” he says. The
czekam
swells and she takes a sip of wine. She must not drink too much because she will be stupid with wine.

FRANCINE
    Galumphing—is that what she’s doing? When she first met John he would tease her, telling her that her walk was a waddle, but then when she gained weight he started to call it a galumph. She feels her hips and tenses her thigh muscles so that she doesn’t galumph along the pavement from the underground, where she has just emerged from Covent Garden tube station. Driving only on completely confident days seems to be working out for her nerves, and all this walking will work for her thighs. But right this moment she is naked in the middle of London’s west end. Naked to the smells. What does soot smell like? Like damp potatoes. Naked to that woman in the hijab who has looked at Francine’s legs in these stretchy trousers that expose every single bulge. Naked to the voice of the man with his head down, mumbling (
Dog Chow makes me very happy
 …). Covent Garden station is a joke of pressing bodies, and she is exposed to them all.
    It begins to rain.
    She pulls her scarf tight around her, dips her chin, raises her shoulders, and looks out for the restaurant as she heads towards the Royal Opera House.
    Patricia loves opera. Patricia can
Così-fan-tutte
with the bestof them, and tonight they are seeing
Rigoletto
, and, when Francine asked to be briefed on the basic story and if there’d be tunes she’d recognize, Patricia corrected, “Not tunes, arias.”
    Of course Patricia is already at the restaurant when she arrives and this, Francine knows, is what women her age do now, what it means to be past the pause, with no time for pausing, no time to be late. You’ve gone all meno, Cindy used to say to her mother when she and Francine were teenagers. She never got to pause, Francine would say of her own mother. Meno-pause: the lying in wait … for what?
    The restaurant Patricia has chosen is French, and Francine feels uneasy about the tablecloths and soft lighting because flickering up through the romantic chroma is Dario’s bent leg. She pulls her chair out to take her seat across from Patricia. The knife, spoon, fork are a quivering silver (one of Dario’s arms was tucked