Free Home Leave: A Novel by Brittani Sonnenberg Page A

rather than when he’s gone.
    Part of it has to do with accountability: when Chris is around, Elise feels observed. Before, this struck her as one of the most beautiful things about marriage, this daily witnessing. Now it feels intrusive. Elise’s repatriation was accompanied by a new sense of recklessness. In Germany, she had been so careful: cautious not to offend, not to mispronounce, not to leave a bad impression. Here the stakes are much lower: in Wynnside, a small suburb of Philadelphia, Elise feels deliciously anonymous.
    Elise tried to explain this new feeling to Chris, hoping he would relate. It came up over a discussion about finding a babysitter for Leah. Elise was going to need some hours each day away from Leah, which Chris didn’t understand. She hadn’t craved this in Hamburg, he pointed out. But now she did, she responded. Why? She tried to describe the new feeling, the new urges, the new apathy towards mothering that reminded her of the clarinet when she was twelve. For three years Elise had devoted herself to the instrument, and then one day she simply couldn’t summon the desire to practice. She never missed it afterwards, either.
    Elise omitted mentioning this final comparison to Chris, sensing it would not go over well. In truth, this inclination towards both overachievement and abandonment frightens her: you can’t just drop a child the way you drop band class. She still loves Leah deeply, of course. But she just can’t give from the same place that she used to.
    Do you miss teaching? Chris asked. Elise nearly said yes out of wanting this to be the case. But she doesn’t miss teaching, at least not yet. She believes it will all come back: her relentless sense of obligation and responsibility, her tireless caretaking, her real self , in other words. But for now the absence of all these duties feels wonderful—when Chris is gone, that is. When he is there, the new, irresponsible impulses feel embarrassing, like growing breasts at eleven: a private development made public. Then Elise feels ashamed by her new habits: Since when is she someone who leaves a fourteen-month-old with a sitter to have lunch, alone, at an expensive restaurant downtown? But her craving for these clandestine indulgences—she only glancingly mentions them to Chris—overwhelms her hesitation.
    Elise discovered masturbation when she was fourteen. She shared a room with Ivy, who was seven. It was the year she tried to tell her mother about Paps. It was the year Elise masked herself with religion the way other girls in her grade masked themselves with makeup, the year Elise burned all her Beatles records at the summer revival. But even as she was desperately trying to give her soul to Jesus, Elise discovered that when she pressed down hard on one part, sucked her muscles in, and put a finger inside, elation happened, which Paps’s wandering grip had never wrought. Glorious. When Ivy was asleep, Elise would explore. When Ivy was awake, Elise’s impatience made her feel rackingly guilty. Something similar feels like it is happening with Chris now. The only place that Elise feels natural with him lately is in the bedroom. She is wilder, hungrier. He is both excited and baffled by it, she can tell. Yet she cannot bring this ease or abandon to breakfast the next morning—she sits as stiffly through cereal as though their sex the night before were a one-night stand.
    Elise has begun traveling, too, when Chris travels. Since her father suddenly passed away, she has some money and a private account. Given Charles Ebert’s extreme thriftiness, it is not a small sum, yet it feels sinful to spend it on beach cottages on the New Jersey shore, or a night in New York City. This sinfulness is one of Elise’s greatest pleasures. Sometimes she brings Leah along; more often she leaves her with the babysitter, Becky. So far, Chris hasn’t caught on: Elise has trained Becky to say, if Chris calls, that Elise is out shopping or with a