Free Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie

full of meaning.
    Soon he no longer cared if Roo’s pictures and Roo’s conversation shocked his kith or kin. Indeed he privately enjoyed it, as she pointed out later: “You know something: you use me to say things you’re too polite to say yourself. It’s like that ventriloquist I used to watch on TV when I was a little kid. He wore this big crazy puppet on his arm, sort of a woolly yellow bear with goggle eyes and a big pumpkin mouth, that was always making smartass cracks and insulting everybody else on the show. And the guy always pretended to be suprised, like he had nothing to do with it: ‘Ow, that’s awful! I can’t control him, he’s so naughty!’ . . . Hell no, I don’t mind. It’s a good act.”
    “Besides, it’s reciprocal,” Fred told her. “You use me to say all the conventional things you don’t want to say. For instance, last week you got me to tell your mother we were getting married and take the blame for being a square.” The reaction of Roo’s mother was: “Really? How come? I thought nobody your age got married anymore unless—Oh, hey! Are you two having a baby? . . . Well then, I don’t get it, but it’s fine by me if you want to.” (Needless to say, on the one occasion when Roo and Fred had stayed overnight with her mother and stepfather, due to blizzard conditions following a party, they were put in the same room.)
    It had in fact been Fred’s suggestion that they might get married, ostensibly to simplify his relations with his students and hers with his colleagues (“This is Fred’s er-friend.”). But it was also a way of proving to everyone that he took Roo seriously—that she wasn’t just, as one of his cousins had suggested, the kind of girl you can have a lot of fun with for a while. And Roo, he thought, had wanted to marry him because in spite of appearances (her radical views and getups, her tough manner) she was deeply romantic.
    As their plans progressed it became clear that he had been cast in another of her youthful fantasies: the Perfect Wedding. Sunlight on the lawn, massed bouquets of flowers, Mozart and Bartók, strawberries, homemade wedding cake and elderflower champagne. Romantic, but still a radical feminist. Roo had, for instance, refused to take his name; nor would she remain Ruth Zimmern. Her relations with her father, L. D. Zimmern, an English professor and critic of some reputation in New York, were friendly; but still, why should any feminist go through life with a patronymic, particularly that of a pater who had walked out on his familias when Roo was a small child? Instead, she used the occasion of her marriage to become legally Ruth March. The new surname was chosen because it was the month of her birth; and also in tribute to the favorite book of her childhood, Little Women , with whose heroine Jo March she had deeply identified. (She was determined that if they had children, the boys would take his ancestral surname and the girls her new one, establishing a matrilineal line of descent.)
    Just as Fred is beginning to wonder if the Northern—or as the London papers call it, the Misery—Line has stopped running, a train arrives. He gets into it, is carried by slow stages to Tottenham Court Road station, and makes his way through a series of cold tiled sewerlike tunnels plastered with posters advertising cultural attractions available in London in February. He pays them no heed. Because of the desperate condition of his finances he cannot afford to go to any of these concerts, plays, films, exhibitions, or sporting events; nor can he afford to travel anywhere outside of London. Last fall when he and Roo were planning their trip together, counting on his study leave, both their savings, and the sublet of their apartment, it seemed as if time were the only barrier to their plans for exploring London, and beyond: Oxford, Cambridge; Cornwall, Wales, Scotland; Ireland; the Continent. He wanted to see everything then, to travel forever; he felt