Girls in White Dresses - JENNIFER CLOSE [74]
Isabella and Harrison walked around holding hands, and Isabella pointed out the dorms she’d lived in and different buildings to Harrison. He was bored, she knew, and she didn’t care.
“Isn’t it pretty here?” she asked. “Isn’t it prettier than Tufts? It’s really the prettiest campus I’ve ever seen.”
Finally he laughed and put his arm around her shoulders. “You might be a little biased, don’t you think?” he asked. He was talking to her in his aren’t you cute voice, which he used to use a lot more at the beginning of their relationship. He hadn’t used it much recently and Isabella wasn’t sure if this was normal or not.
Isabella had realized a couple of weeks ago that this was the longest relationship she had ever had. She was now twenty-nine. She could no longer compare this to crazy Will from college or Ben the Stoner. Now this had turned into her “real relationship,” the one she would have to compare every other relationship to. Or not compare it to, if it was the one that would last.
In college, twenty-nine had seemed impossibly old. By now, she’d thought, she’d be married and have kids. But as each year went by, she didn’t feel much different than she had before. Time kept going by and she was just here, the same.
It seemed like it all happened easier for everyone else. Look at Harrison’s friends. They just got married and had kids and didn’t seem to think about it too much. Maybe that was her problem. Maybe she was thinking about it too much. Or maybe the fact that she was thinking about it meant it wasn’t right.
There was one morning recently when they were lounging in bed, which was unusual for Harrison. Sundays were his day to go running, and he was usually up and out the door before she woke up. But this Sunday he didn’t go anywhere. They ordered breakfast in from the Bagelry and watched Meet the Press with the New York Times spread all over the bed.
It bothered her that he was such a go-getter on the weekend. It made her feel lazy to stay in bed when he was out running. That morning she was ready to pick a fight with him over leaving the apartment. And then, like he knew what she was thinking, he didn’t go anywhere.
“No run today?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Don’t really feel like it,” he said.
Isabella had two tiny stuffed pigs that she kept on her night-stand, named Buster and Stinky. Harrison had always thought it was odd, the way she loved stuffed animals, the way she was drawn to little figurines and fuzzy things. “You’re so weird,” he said, laughing, when she made a stuffed frog ribbit at him. And she knew he meant it.
Boyfriends in her past had found this trait cute and charming. They had indulged her with little fuzzy animals as presents. Ben had even gone so far as to give them little voices (usually when he was stoned) and march them across the bed to make her laugh.
Harrison had largely ignored Buster and Stinky, except once when he had used Buster as a Hacky Sack during a long phone call. But that morning, Isabella came back from the bathroom to find the two pigs in the middle of the bed in a compromising pose. She stared at them for a minute before it registered that they were in the 69 position.
She stood at the end of the bed until Harrison finally looked up.
“Good Lord,” he said. “Bunch of dirty pigs around here. They must have learned it from watching you.”
“You know,” she said, “that they are both boys, right?”
“Are you saying that two male pigs can’t be in love? Did you learn nothing from the penguins at the zoo?”
Isabella laughed and climbed back into bed with him. For the rest of the day, anytime she left the room Harrison arranged the pigs in another dirty pose. Yes, she thought at the end of the day. Okay, I could be with him forever.
She worried