The Harts, the Beaumonts, and the Collapse of the “Roommate” Hypothesis
There had been, Isobel felt, a perfectly good argument for never telling their families that they had moved in together.
It was not shame. It was not secrecy. It was simply that their apartment had at last achieved a delicate ecological balance. Alyx Beaumont occupied the sunny places, left cheerful little avalanches of shoes near the door, and read yuri manga while lying diagonally across any surface intended for two or more people. Isobel Hart occupied the shadowy corners, maintained a strict defensive perimeter of ancient historians, and possessed a nervous system finely calibrated to detect an unexpected parental visit from three counties away.
They were happy.
They were domestic.
They had one serviceable bookcase.
Then Isobel bought another.
It arrived in a box roughly the dimensions of a medieval coffin and the density of a collapsed star.
“My father can assemble that,” Isobel said.
Alyx looked at the box.
Then at Isobel.
Then back at the box.
“Why does that sound less like an offer of assistance,” she asked, “and more like the opening move in a dynastic marriage?”
Isobel took a careful breath.
“Because my parents are coming Saturday.”
Alyx brightened immediately.
“The Harts are coming here?”
“Yes.”
“To meet me officially?”
“They have already met you.”
“They met me when I was your suspiciously frequent botanical-garden companion. Now they’re meeting me as the woman who knows which side of the bed you sleep on.”
“Alyx!”
“And which noises you make when—”
Isobel clapped both hands over Alyx’s mouth.
From behind those hands, Alyx continued speaking with cheerful unintelligibility.
“My younger sister knows,” Isobel admitted when it was safe to release her. “Or at least she has inferred it.”
“What gave us away?”
“The photograph you sent her of our bedroom.”
“I was showing her the curtains!”
“The curtains were not the principal subject of that photograph.”
“Well, no,” Alyx admitted. “You were.”
Isobel covered her face.
Alyx wrapped both arms around her from behind, set her chin upon Isobel’s shoulder, and kissed the exposed tip of one scarlet ear.
“Don’t worry. I’m very good with families.”
This turned out to be an alarmingly accurate statement.
Mr. Hart arrived at precisely ten in the morning wearing work gloves, a canvas tool belt, and the grave expression of a man summoned to rebuild civilization from particle board. Mrs. Hart arrived carrying three covered dishes and enough folded napkins to provision a wedding. Isobel’s younger sister, Chloe, entered last, holding the instruction manual, which she had evidently downloaded, printed, enlarged, color-coded, and annotated.
“Dad,” Chloe said before anyone had removed a coat, “you are not improvising.”
“I’ve assembled bookcases before.”
“You assembled one bookcase in 2007. It leaned six degrees to the left and eventually became a shoe rack.”
“It had character.”
“It had subsidence.”
Mr. Hart shook Alyx’s hand solemnly.
“So. You’re the one who finally got our Isobel to leave the library.”
“Only temporarily,” Alyx said. “I bring her back before closing.”
“I do not require supervised outings,” Isobel muttered.
“You wore two different boots to our first date.”
“They were both black.”
“One had a heel.”
Mr. Hart attempted to conceal a smile. He did not succeed.
He inspected the apartment. His gaze moved from Alyx’s bright cushions and abandoned cardigans to Isobel’s severe ranks of books, then to the two mugs beside the sofa, the paired boots beneath the coat rack, and the framed photograph from their first botanical-garden date.
He gave a small, satisfied nod.
“Well,” he said. “Looks like you’ve made a home.”
That was all.
The simple kindness of it landed so squarely in Isobel’s heart that she had to turn away and pretend to adjust a perfectly straight volume of Xenophon.
The bookcase assembly began.
Mr. Hart opened the box. Chloe took inventory.
“Panels A through H?”
“Present.”
“Dowels?”
“Present.”
“Cam locks?”
Mr. Hart frowned. “These cheap little things?”
“Dad.”
“I’m only observing—”
“Cam locks?”
“Present.”
Alyx sat cross-legged on the floor and offered encouragement of no practical value whatsoever.
“You’re doing wonderfully!”
“I haven’t started,” Mr. Hart said.
“That’s why you haven’t made any mistakes.”
Mrs. Hart followed Alyx into the kitchen, where she began unpacking food.
“I brought a casserole,” she said, “a vegetarian casserole in case you’re vegetarian, and a meat casserole in case you’re not. Also a pie.”
“You didn’t have to do all this.”
“Oh, I know.” Mrs. Hart smiled. “But Isobel forgets meals when she’s reading.”
“A terrible habit,” Alyx said gravely.
Mrs. Hart glanced at the remains of Alyx’s breakfast, abandoned beside an open manga on the counter.
“You forget them too.”
“Yes, but I forget them colorfully.”
Mrs. Hart laughed and touched Alyx’s arm.
“I’m glad she has someone who notices.”
Alyx looked into the living room. Isobel was kneeling beside her father, holding two boards steady while Chloe monitored the angle of every screw.
“I always notice her,” Alyx said softly.
“I know,” said Mrs. Hart.
By lunchtime, the bookcase stood upright, square, and—owing entirely to Chloe’s vigilance—possessing every shelf at the same angle.
Mr. Hart braced it against the wall and tested it with both hands.
“There. Strong enough for books.”
Alyx slipped an arm around Isobel’s waist.
“How strong is it exactly?”
Every Hart turned toward her.
Isobel made a tiny choking noise.
“For books,” Mr. Hart repeated with immense paternal emphasis.
Chloe studied the bookcase.
“Possibly two women,” she said, “but I would need to check the load-bearing specifications.”
“Chloe!” cried three Harts.
Alyx alone looked thoughtful.
The Beaumont visit came two weeks later.
Alyx’s mother, Eleanor Beaumont, arrived with the air of a woman determined to be perfectly modern about something she did not entirely understand. Alyx’s father brought wine. Alyx’s aunt Margaret—Eleanor’s younger sister—brought her longtime roommate, Judith.
Margaret and Judith had lived together for thirty-one years.
They owned a cottage together.
They shared a bank account, two cats, a bedroom, and a Christmas-card photograph in which Judith invariably stood behind Margaret with both arms around her waist.
The Beaumont family had apparently regarded all this as an unusually efficient form of female friendship.
Dinner proceeded beneath a canopy of increasingly fragile politeness.
Afterward, Eleanor stood before the new bookcase and examined its contents. Alyx had arranged her manga collection at eye level, while Isobel’s classics occupied the dignified upper shelves.
“You still read these Japanese comics?” Eleanor asked.
“Manga,” Alyx corrected.
“Yes, darling. I remember. The ones with the very large eyes.”
“Sometimes.”
“And what happens in them?”
Alyx drew out the first volume of a gentle domestic yuri romance.
“In this one, two women live together and gradually fall in love.”
“As roommates?”
Isobel closed her eyes.
“At first,” Alyx replied.
Eleanor accepted the book with the cautious curiosity of someone being introduced to an unfamiliar but potentially respectable cheese.
“And what is this sort called?”
“Yuri manga.”
“Isobel reads these too?”
“Under controlled laboratory conditions,” Alyx said.
“I have read three,” Isobel protested.
“You have read eleven.”
“I have examined eleven. I have read three.”
“You cried over volume six.”
“That was textual criticism.”
Eleanor borrowed the first volume.
Then the second.
Then the remaining four.
At two fourteen the following morning, Alyx’s phone buzzed.
Her mother had sent a message.
THE BLONDE KNEW BY VOLUME TWO. WHY DID SHE NOT SIMPLY SAY SOMETHING?
Before Alyx could answer, another appeared.
ALSO THE DARK-HAIRED ONE IS CLEARLY IN LOVE. THIS IS VERY FRUSTRATING.
Then:
DO YOU HAVE ANY MORE?
Within a month Eleanor Beaumont had read thirty-seven volumes of yuri manga, developed passionate opinions about emotional pacing, and begun telephoning Isobel directly.
“The confession has been delayed for five volumes,” Eleanor complained one Sunday. “At this point it is not tension. It is administrative negligence.”
“I agree,” Isobel said, with the solemnity of a scholar addressing a defective chronology.
Across the room, Alyx watched her girlfriend and her mother discuss romantic subtext over tea and felt that reality had finally achieved its ideal form.
Then came the amazing discovery.
It occurred during a Beaumont family lunch. Margaret and Judith were seated side by side, as they always were. Judith cut Margaret’s roll in half without asking. Margaret removed a crumb from Judith’s lip. Neither seemed aware that they were doing anything remarkable.
Eleanor had brought her latest manga.
“The two women in this one,” she announced, “spend fifteen years insisting they are merely roommates.”
Margaret laughed.
“Oh, goodness. Just like us.”
Silence.
Eleanor lowered the book.
“Like you?”
“Yes,” Margaret said cheerfully. “Everyone thought we were roommates for years.”
Judith buttered Margaret’s roll.
Eleanor stared at their hands.
“But you are roommates.”
Margaret stared back.
“No, Ellie. Judith is my wife.”
The room became so quiet that Alyx could be heard biting into a cucumber sandwich.
Eleanor blinked.
Mr. Beaumont blinked.
Isobel looked toward the ceiling as if requesting intervention from any available deity, Muse, or ancient historian.
“You have a wife?” Eleanor whispered.
“For twenty-three years,” Margaret said.
“You came to our anniversary party,” Judith reminded her.
“I thought that was the anniversary of buying the cottage!”
“It was held at a restaurant.”
“There was a cake!”
“The cake had two brides on it,” Margaret said.
“I thought they represented friendship!”
Alyx made a sound somewhere between a cough and the death cry of a small woodland animal. Isobel kicked her under the table.
Eleanor looked from her sister and Judith to her daughter and Isobel. Then she looked down at the manga in her hand.
“Good Lord,” she said. “They really do live among us.”
“Mother,” Alyx groaned.
“I don’t mean lesbians, darling. I mean oblivious relatives.”
That ended whatever remained of Isobel’s self-control. She folded over the table, shaking with silent laughter. Even Judith began to giggle. Margaret leaned against her wife, looking unbearably pleased with herself.
Eleanor recovered with dignity.
“Well,” she declared, “this explains an enormous number of things.”
“Such as?” Margaret asked.
“The honeymoon photographs.”
“You thought we took a friendship honeymoon?”
“You have always been very close!”
Later, when the families had gone and the apartment had become blessedly quiet again, Isobel stood before the bookcase her father had built.
It now held Thucydides, Xenophon, fourteen new volumes of yuri manga, a framed photograph of the Harts, and another of Aunt Margaret kissing Judith beneath an anniversary banner Eleanor had apparently failed to read for more than two decades.
Alyx came up behind Isobel and rested her blonde head on her shoulder.
“Well,” she said. “That went beautifully.”
“My mother now discusses yuri narrative structure with you.”
“She’s very insightful.”
“Your mother has joined an online yuri reading group.”
“She called Aunt Margaret a ‘late-game canonical reveal.’”
“That is also insightful.”
“My father asked whether we intend to marry.”
Alyx lifted her head.
“And what did you say?”
Isobel turned within her arms. Her face was pink, her eyes uncertain—but she did not retreat.
“I said that if we did, we would tell everyone explicitly.”
“Sensible.”
“And that there would be no cottage.”
“Agreed.”
“And no thirty-one-year ambiguity about whether we were roommates.”
“Absolutely not.”
Alyx drew her closer.
“Although,” she murmured, “I have always thought ‘roommate’ was a very exciting word.”
“You think every word is exciting when you say it like that.”
“Thucydides.”
Isobel shivered despite herself.
Alyx grinned.
From the new bookcase came a small but ominous creak.
Both women froze.
“Books,” Isobel said firmly.
“Books,” Alyx agreed.
They took two prudent steps away from Mr. Hart’s handiwork before kissing.
After all, it was a family bookcase.
And Chloe had never confirmed the load-bearing specifications.
