Free All the Houses by Karen Olsson

eventually die of boredom and/or mal du pays .
    â€œWhat did you think of him?” she asked.
    â€œI don’t know. I mean, there was something there, but it’s not like he was that curious about me. He mostly talked about himself.”
    â€œSo typical.”
    Maggie had been single for a while, and lately when I asked her whether there were any prospects, she would say no, not really. I’ve just been working so hard, she would tell me. And I would try to tell her not to spend her whole life working, but I knew she believed that I didn’t understand her life and what she had to do to get by. She was right, I didn’t understand it. She started to tell me about a student who thought he knew more than her—there was always at least one—and then she said that maybe he did. “Or not that he knows more than I do, exactly, but in a practical sense he’s probably smarter, he can spend his whole day reading and thinking, with his unspoiled, twenty-year-old brain. He doesn’t have to grade papers or deal with department e-mails. What I know, what I used to know, it’s buried under so much junk at this point.”
    â€œThat’s not true.”
    â€œIt is. I think I kind of have a crush on him. I can’t even look at him because I’m afraid that I do. If he ever comes to my office hours I’ll probably jump out the window.”
    â€œMaybe you’re just not around enough guys.”
    â€œWell yeah, I mean it’s all twenty-year-olds, or the fossils who teach in the department. Courtney thinks I should try Internet dating again.”
    â€œShe’s always saying that,” I said. “She says that to me. It’s because she never actually did it herself, so she doesn’t get how soul-destroying that online shit is.”
    â€œI just feel like there’s this cultural hypocrisy in play when it comes to marriage and family, you know? Like when we were younger we weren’t even supposed to be looking for love. I mean I did go out with Marco for a few years, but I knew he wasn’t, like, a life partner. I remember the one or two friends I had who obsessed about finding husbands—I thought that was so dumb. I wanted to be serious. You were supposed to be serious about your life, and that meant figuring out your career. But then you hit your thirties and if you haven’t found the guy, you start to sense that people are looking at you in a certain way, wondering what’s wrong with you? And so now I’m supposed to make a project out of that, looking for a marriageable man? I already built my life the way it is, I don’t have time to be on some heavy-duty manhunt, and anyway it’s New York City, which is like a smorgasbord of women where all the single men can just pig out all day long. They don’t even want to get married.”
    This sounded revisionist to me—or at least not true to my memory of my own past. For most of my twenties I’d wanted to hang out with men and to sleep with some of them, and twice as a result of those activities I’d fallen in love and stayed with one person for a while, but until recently the notion of “settling down” had been off-putting, and I put it off. I did suspect that I was at a disadvantage compared to the people who’d come around to the concept sooner, but that was my own fault, not the result of cultural forces.
    I didn’t say any of that. “You’ll find someone,” I told Maggie, and I meant it: underneath her harried professor guise, she was the sweetest person in our family, the one who’d played nurse to her dolls and doted on animals and been friends in school with a bunch of gentle, giggly, artistic girls who hugged one another a lot. It had surprised me when she decided on academia—I’d seen her as a doctor or a therapist, tending to people in some way. She was also the prettiest one of us, I’d always thought,