Fran and Anne’s combined seniority at Granby meant they’d been promoted from dorm apartments to a house, one of the three old stone ones down by the front gate. I felt bad ringing the bell empty-handed—I’d forgotten to have the Blue Cab stop at the wine shop—but it was their son Jacob who opened the door, letting the golden retriever out to bruise my thighs and slobber on my jeans.
I hope you remember Fran, because Fran deserves remembering. Fran Hoffnung—although now it’s Hoffbart, since she and her wife combined their last names. You at least remember the Hoffnungs: Deb Hoffnung taught English, Sam Hoffnung taught math, and Fran and her three older sisters grew up in the front apartment attached to Singer-Baird, the girls’ dorm with that funny steep roof. She was the loud kid who’d emcee Lip Sync, the one whose hair was always pink or purple with Manic Panic. Nowadays it’s brown with streaks of gray, somehow as cool as the pink once was.
Their Christmas tree was still up, and after I hugged his moms, Jacob needed me to come admire it—big, old-fashioned colored bulbs and sparse ornaments from Fran’s and Anne’s own childhoods: a painted Snoopy doghouse, a tiny silver cup with Anne’s name, a needlepoint owl. One obviously newer addition, an RBG figurine with lace collar.
Jacob, whom I’d met as a red-faced and colicky newborn, was nearly five, and had a little brother I’d seen only online, a two-year-old who kept staggering up to drive his trains down my leg until Anne bribed both boys with PAW Patrol on the iPad. Anne made us vegetarian tacos. I ate more than I normally would just because Fran was always worried I didn’t eat enough. Fran mixed a pitcher of margaritas, and we listened to Bob Marley, which didn’t match the food but still came from a warm place. Fran couldn’t let go of the fact that I’d arrived from LA right as it had gotten so cold. “You’re gonna resent me,” she said. “I’ll be a constant guilt puddle.”
I said, “A frozen guilt puddle. A tiny skating rink of guilt.”
Anne asked if I’d need extra socks, extra blankets, extra anything.
“Maybe a couple sweaters?” I said. “I forgot it gets cold inside.”
Anne scuttled off and reappeared with a whole reusable grocery bag of sweaters and sweatshirts and a pair of Granby green-and-gold-plaid pajama pants.
Fran herself had mini-mester off; she’d taught her Vietnam War class three years in a row and it was her turn for “professional development,” which meant reading books and catching up on email and drinking with me. “We don’t have to hang every night,” she said, “but if you aren’t over here I’ll assume you’re laid up in that guest suite watching sad straight porn and thinking about work.” Fran had dorm duty on Wednesdays, but “every other night,” she said, “we’re gonna party like it’s 1995.”
“With Zima and SnackWell’s?”
“I was thinking Sassy magazine and lukewarm Natty Light.”
I said, “I’ll have grading,” but Fran knew she didn’t have to talk me into it.
“Every other other night, at least. And Friday there’s this party, so you have to come. Everyone wants to meet you. We call it the Midi-Mini because, you know, halfway through mini-mester.”
“We can’t resist wordplay here,” Anne said.
Anne had long blond curls, and a runner’s build that made Fran look squat in comparison. Anne coached cross-country in the fall and track in the spring and was, in general, the perfect combination of audience, straight man, and manager for Fran. If you needed an idea for a party, Fran would have twenty. If you needed someone to order the pizzas and buy ice and clean the living room while Fran was making the playlist, that was Anne. They’d met here at Granby, Anne having started in Admissions while Fran was off having her brief life outside the boarding school world. When Fran came back they were friends, resisting everyone’s urge to set them up, commiserating about the impossibility of meeting anyone. Then they rode down to Boston together one long weekend, and came back in love.
And now Anne was the one shuffling the boys off to bed, telling them they could skip their baths if they were quiet, while Fran leaned across the table and said, as if we’d only been waiting for her wife to leave the room, “Tell me everything.”
She meant everything about Jerome, because I’d mentioned, when we emailed a few weeks back, that Jerome had moved out and was living next door. And now Fran needed all the information, including why I hadn’t told her already. “We’re still married,” I said. “It’s just not what our grandparents would have considered marriage.” It happened so slowly that it didn’t seem a thing to announce on social media, text old friends about.
“We went through a rough patch,” I said, leaving out that this was two years ago, when the kids were five and three, that their loud ubiquity was part of the stress. We got to the point where everything I said to Jerome was the wrong thing, came out in the wrong voice. Everything he said to me was worse. We’d slowly grown allergic to each other, eventually realized we were each unfairly shackled to a person who was sick of our face. “And right around then,” I did tell her, “Jerome’s mom went into hospice. She’d been in the other half of our duplex, so he moved over there.” He’s a painter, and the decision was partly practical: He could use the second bedroom as a studio and stop paying rent on the one downtown. We could stay married, with one address, for tax reasons and convenience—and, honestly, out of sheer laziness. The kids could go back and forth, we figured, but really Jerome ended up going back and forth, and so, for instance, while I was at Granby he stayed in my bed, which was our old bed, which occasionally he also stayed in when I was in it, because he was good at sex and now that we didn’t see each other all day, we didn’t hate each other. I was actually enormously fond of him: grateful when he took the kids, nostalgic when we slept together, bemused by his dating life, equal parts flattered and revolted and possessive when he came to me for romantic advice. I found everyone he dated borderline crazy, couldn’t figure out if that was on him or on me.
Fran said, “You know I love how you never give up on people, but it’s kind of hilarious that your way of breaking up involves him still living in your house.”
“Well, next door.”
“So the upshot is,” she said, “you’re single?”
“Essentially. Married but single.”
“It’s funny that my marriage is more traditional than yours.”
I hadn’t told her about Yahav, maybe because I didn’t want to jinx it. Yahav was skittish and unpredictable, a handsome Israeli bunny rabbit, equally likely to drive straight here as to vanish into the woods forever. I’d texted him from the airport that afternoon: As warned, I’ve invaded New England. He texted back only an exclamation point.
I had not yet been sleeping with Yahav when I split from Jerome, but his friendship then had been a helpful reminder that not everyone was tired of me, not everyone blamed me for the weather. Yahav had enormous, warm hands. He had dark stubble so thick it consumed his chin and neck, more darkness than light, more night sky than stars.