Free Goodbye Without Leaving by Laurie Colwin

everything. From long habit as the eldest, she told me what she felt I needed to know. Thus, if she did not want to discuss what looked to me very much like a love affair she was conducting with one of her professors, we did not discuss it. I did not mind this a bit. It was part of what Johnny called Mary’s quite unnecessary mysteriousness.
    She was the oldest of four daughters in a liberal Catholic family that was constantly scrambling to reconcile the teachings of their church with the social problems of their times. They lived in a ramshackle Victorian house in a Connecticut suburb. Mr. Abbott was a chemist, and Mrs. Abbott was a reading teacher. They had a big Irish setter and a number of cats. The front porch was littered with bird and chipmunk guts. The dog, who was extremely stupid, was frequently lost and large search parties were constantly organized on his behalf. While my parents and I lived in slightly reduced grandeur and sat down every night to a formally set table, the Abbotts lived in a charmingly out-of-control messiness. In order to have dinner, any number of child or adult projects had to be pushed out of the way—this would have been quite unheard of in my parents’ house.
    I knew the smell of the Abbott house as well as I knew the house I grew up in. I knew Mary’s likes and dislikes as well as my own. I thought everything about her was original and wonderful, from her taste in music (plainchant, which I found thrillingly exotic, and Tarheel Slim and Little Ann singing “It’s Too Late”) to the fact that she liked to combine hot and cold cereal for breakfast. Before she put her glasses on she was blind as a mole. She had an oldest sibling’s sense of constant responsibility. Nevertheless, she had no fixed opinions, no vested interests, and she was perfectly free to see clearly who was a jerk and who was not. She was awesomely judgmental, but since her judgments matched mine, by and large, this was not much of a problem except when Mary turned her gaze on me.
    She said that my good qualities were my bad qualities—this I have come to realize is true of everyone. On the one hand, I was game, eager and perfectly ready to see what was in front of me. On the other hand, I had no sense of direction or destiny.
    When I decided to go on tour with Ruby, which I felt was the most focused decision I had ever made, Mary rightly pointed out that this was a stopgap, a charm on the bracelet of experience but not the bracelet itself.
    â€œWhat will you do after?” she wanted to know.
    And what would she do after? Mary’s life was like a ribbon. She would get her degree. She would teach. She would marry some nice liberal Catholic and have a flock of children who resembled her sisters. She knew what she was: daughter, sister, Catholic, intellectual. And I was a terrible daughter, a lousy graduate student who was unable to cope with the hard stuff such as criticism or critical biographies. A proper graduate student did not lie around eating potato chips and reading Victorian novels for fun. When assigned some crucial critical work, the serious graduate student did not fling it across the room shouting “Oh, who cares ?”
    Mary said, “The fact is, you’re a singer but you don’t want to do all the work that singers do. You don’t want to be ambitious.”
    This was true. I wanted experience to wash over me like a gentle wave. This was not the sort of thing that led to a really good job in later life. When the time came, she felt strongly that I should marry Johnny.
    â€œFor someone like you, he’s the ideal mate,” she said, making me feel like a lone, lame gorilla who had found her other. “The compromises he knows how to make would be good ones for you to be next to.”
    â€œI hate compromises,” I said.
    â€œI know you do,” said Mary. “But the trouble with you is you hate them in a vacuum. What you have going for