Free Goodbye Without Leaving by Laurie Colwin Page A

you is a nature that hates compromises, but you don’t have anything you do with that nature except not compromise, so you ought to learn how it’s done.”
    â€œWhat you’re saying is I’m worthless.”
    â€œDon’t be a jerk,” said Mary. “What I’m saying is that temperament has to be attached to action. You did your thing when you went off with Ruby. If it’s going to take you a million years to find out what you ought to be doing next, you ought to marry Johnny because he’ll help you.”
    â€œAnd then I’ll be a sellout like all those nice pals of his.”
    â€œIf you think his pals are sellouts, don’t marry him,” Mary said. “Or do you just mean they know what they want and how to get it?”
    â€œI guess I mean that. I mean, I hate to go to these parties where everybody is something except me. I used to be something. It’s like once having been an alchemist or a dairymaid. My era has passed.”
    â€œYou poor thing. So young and so washed up.”
    This conversation took place at what was increasingly Mary’s apartment. My tiny room was so seldom used that Mary sorted her clothes in it. Each month, however, I gave her half the rent. I did not want to be stranded. I did not want to be forced to get married. I wanted a place of my own even if I never stayed in it.
    Mary’s room was positively austere, mine was underused, and the living room functioned as Mary’s study. Unlike me, she knew what she was doing. She was writing her dissertation on the civil rights movement. Then she would get her Ph.D. and teach at a university. Her books and typewriter took up a large table, while her papers were generally spread out over our secondhand couch.
    This was not a setting Johnny liked very much. Although his apartment was in what both our mothers thought of as a dicey part of town, it had a kind of raffish bachelor charm. The cast-offs of his parents’ house—they had sold it to a nice young couple and moved into the city—were all good, solid and attractive. The building he lived in was on a street lined with trees and inhabited by old Ukrainians who sat outside their buildings on lawn chairs.
    More than a year slipped by me. I watched the snow drift down in big, lazy flakes, stalling the traffic, quieting the street and forming white pelts on the fire escapes. I watched the little buds come out on the trees in the park. I watched children cooling themselves in fire hydrants in the summer. Then the leaves turned yellow and fell off the branches. Then it was winter and another year was gone.
    Inside Johnny’s apartment we were snug as a pair of mice. We were finally learning to cook. Thursday nights we practiced, and each Friday night we had a dinner party. On Saturdays we slunk around the neighborhood buying Russian jam, Hungarian sausage, Egyptian beans in cans, Latvian bread and Black Forest cake, which we snacked on over the weekend. On Saturday and Sunday we went to the movies or we kicked around with Johnny’s childhood friend Ben Sennett. On Tuesday nights Johnny and Ben played squash, and I stayed at my old apartment with Mary.
    Once a month we had dinner with my parents, and once a month with Johnny’s. In the summer we motored up to Johnny’s parents’ house in Wickham, where I tried my best to be a sporting and energetic future daughter-in-law, but all I really felt was overwhelming exhaustion.
    Johnny’s mother, Dolly, was small and trim and full of energy. She was on the Wickham Library Committee, and she had formed a committee of weekenders (as opposed to year-round residents) to help the town council. People said over and over that there was no animosity in Wickham between weekenders and year-rounders because of people like Dolly.
    Her society in Wickham was extensive. She knew the old residents, the founding families, the artists who had settled there in the thirties, the young