Free Lillian on Life by Alison Jean Lester

yourself.”
    I thought for a second. “Maybe they thought it was gallant that a Yank signed up to help.” I put on an English accent. “Jolly good show, soldier.”
    He laughed. “Maybe. Come here. I’ll show you a jolly good show.”
    â€œOh yeah?” I said. “I’ll show you exemplary gallantry.”
    So you see? You see how right he was? You see how the design was just right? And how Willis and I weren’t just right? Willis bought me beautiful clothes and took me beautiful places, but he got angry and said crazy stuff and was embarrassing when behavior mattered. I tried to imagine marrying him, but the idea was ridiculous. He would have been fun at the reception but a nightmare at the ceremony.
    The transfer to London saved me. I remember packing, stuffing my suitcases with the clothes he’d given me. I even had to buy some webbing to tie them shut with. And then unpacking everything, and all of it looking so out of place in my dowdy little tenement.
    When he came over to England to ask me to reconsider, the familiarity I felt when I was with him paled in comparison to the relief I felt at having the Channel betweenus. Actually, the familiarity had simply paled, even without the comparison. It didn’t take long. When you’re in a relationship you mold yourself to it. You curve your body around it and you curve your mind around it, in order to maintain it. Sometimes you don’t realize you’re crippled until it’s too late.
    That’s not how I worded it to myself back then, of course. I was so unclear on things. But my heart was tender, and I knew that he chafed it.
    We had dinner when he came over to London, and he looked different to me. I knew all the clothes he was wearing, and his hair was still the same, neatly trimmed, lightly oiled, as always belying his interior volcano. But he was no longer someone I adapted to. I chattered about my new job for a while, fiddling with my bread, until he couldn’t stand it.
    â€œYour new boss handsome?” he finally asked.
    â€œNot especially,” I said.
    â€œUh-huh,” he said, and stretched a leg out to the side and looked at it.
    We didn’t talk or eat much after that. On the walk back to where I was staying it pained me so much that I had caused such a noisy man to fall silent. I wanted to put my hand on his shoulder, or on his heart. But of course I didn’treach out to him. If you touch them, it means they are allowed to touch you, and if he had touched me I would have screamed.
    I was staying temporarily in what the English call a bedsit. It was on the second floor of a drab terrace house and had its own door at street level. I left Willis at the bottom of the stairs and turned at the top. He still had his hand on the door, keeping it open.
    â€œSure?” he said, after a moment.
    I nodded. After another moment he let the door close and left.
    I don’t want that to happen with this kitchen. I don’t want that horrible, exhausting confusion of moving away from the old but being unclear about the new. I want to see a design, and I want to
know
, because in my experience the new
has been an extremely mixedbag.

On the Food ofLove

J ohn, for example. My first beau in London after my transfer there. The relationship lasted less than two years, but I had to try so hard in that short time that it felt like much longer.
    He had an unusually sweet singing voice, and favored Italian art songs and Henry Purcell. Particularly Purcell in the morning, and particularly the charming one that goes,
“If music be the food of love sing on, sing on, sing on, sing on till I am fill’d, am fill’d with joy.”
His voice rang like bells against the bathroom tile.
    Food is the food of love, though, not music. I’ve known that ever since Mary spoiled me with snacks between meals. Ever since Laszlo came up the stairs with his arms around a bag of groceries before throwing