A Satisfactory Life
Robb Forman Dew
Eva had come to know her house so well, each room of it, that on Sunday morning she knew when the church bells were ringing even though, with the windows tightly shut and the snow muffling every sound, she did not hear them. As she sat at the table, she registered automatically the slightly tremulous quality of the air as the reverberations shimmered over the glass of the windows and trembled through the vast rooms. She knew without thinking of it or even turning her head to see, that the leaves of the potted fig tree quivered minutely at the end of each branch. In fact, Eva could anticipate all the slight changes and alterations within her house in the space of a day and even with each season. But she didn't think she regarded her house with undue sentiment; it was only that she lived quietly, and she thrived in the spaces marked off for her by these large rooms leading one into another and enclosing her here in the New England countryside. Solitude had become Eva's forte.
But this Sunday morning she came down to the dining room, where she had set a place for herself the night before, and found that the paper had not arrived. She sat in her chair fiddling absently with the silverware and watched the driveway for the arrival of the paperboy, because she could only enjoy Sunday breakfast with the Times before her. She sat looking out at the still, winter landscape—there was no sun yet this morning—and thought of the day ahead. It was not exactly that she had mastered pleasure in solitude, but she found that now, in any case, pleasure was no longer what she anticipated day by day, no more than she anticipated melancholy. Her life had come to this just as it was bound to; she
