Read Home Leave: A Novel for Free Online Page A

the dining room tables, or let all the stupid canaries out of their cages in the lobby, or bite the nurse who comes to take my blood pressure. I’m too mad to cry like Frank.
    In school, I never did a thing wrong. I didn’t pass notes, I never skipped class, and I didn’t drink beer at polka dances. But ever since I got in trouble with the article about Beth, I know what a thrill the bad kids must have had. I walk around the halls, and the residents regard me the way I used to look at the delinquents in high school. I think of Jim Laurence, I adopt his slouch, his sighs, his uncaring.
    The only time I drop my new pose is out on the patio. I look at that empty lot, the maples that just turned red at its back border. It says, Be nothing, and slack-jawed, staring at it, I am.

Sei allem Abschied voran
(Be Ahead of All Parting)
    Hamburg, Germany, 1981
    C hris rides his bike to work each weekday. Elise sleeps in, rises around ten, and tries to finish her German homework before class at three. The apartment is always cold. Sometimes she takes three baths a day. This gives her a chance to examine her belly’s growth. She spies on her nakedness with a curiosity that she would not have permitted herself back in Mississippi. This morning, a rare sunny winter day in Hamburg, she lowers herself into the steaming water. She craves the bath as much as breakfast. Shadows from the windowpanes—a fragile cross—play across her stomach and swollen breasts.
    Last summer, when they’d traveled to Munich for a weekend, she’d spied naked sunbathers sprawled across blankets in the English Garden. She had felt repulsed and enticed. She could barely tear her eyes from the bodies, the way she had once stared at an older cousin dressing. Donna, in her early teens, had sensed Elise’s gaze and had turned her back to finish buttoning her blouse, prompting a flood of shame in Elise, one of her earliest memories (aside from the ones that Ada had insisted she forget).
    *  *  *
    The first time Elise visited Chris in Germany, the year he was studying abroad in Stuttgart and she was teaching in Atlanta, they’d attended a birthday party with some of his local basketball team buddies. The party had climaxed in naked swimming at Lake Bissingen, just outside the city. Sitting on a blanket by the shore, Elise had endured a drunken conversation with Sandra, the only other American in Chris’s study abroad program, which was surprisingly dominated by Koreans. The amount of Riesling that Elise, who rarely drank, had imbibed, plus the low-lit surroundings, hadn’t disguised the fact that Sandra was stark naked, which struck Elise as irritatingly exhibitionist. Elise had identified Sandra as an ally earlier in the night, given her compatriot status, but her nakedness now made her more foreign than any of the German women around them, who had generally put on clothes or towels once they’d come out of the water. Elise was shivering in a sopping-wet evening gown from one of Atlanta’s nicest boutiques. It had cost more than she could really afford on her teaching salary, but she’d justified the purchase by imagining where she would wear it: a sophisticated, candlelit restaurant in Stuttgart, which had turned out to be a laughable overestimation of the night’s trajectory. The silk was certainly ruined.
    As Sandra embarked on an extended anecdote about the drugs she’d done during a road trip across America, in between semesters at Berkeley, Elise scanned the crowd for Chris. She didn’t want him coming up and talking to them—the last thing she needed was a memory of him trying to make out Sandra’s naked breasts in the moonlight—but he was at a safe distance, roughhousing in the water with friends. As Sandra continued her monologue, warming now to the theme of LSD episodes with her poetry professor, Elise reflected silently on her own years at Blue Mountain College, a Baptist all-women’s school. There had been streaking—it was 1974, after