The Republic of Love by Carol Shields

now she wonders if she made a mistake, if she and Peter shouldn’t have persevered, making the best of things, as most people seem to do. “What do you think?” Fay asks Onion.
    Of all the people in the world, she can speak most directly to Onion. It’s always been like this. Onion is not quite family, not quite friend, but a presence that hovers between the two. Their investment in each other’s lives rests on consideration rather than instinct, on something that has been constructed out of happy accident and allowed to have its way. Fay loves her but would never formulate the thought in words, never say, I love Onion. It would embarrass them both.
    At 9:30 in the evening there is still enough tattered sunlight to coat the river, a pink border meeting a band of blue and bending out of sight. Fay keeps her eyes on the large window and waits for Onion to respond with her usual snagging, ironic voice, to say something dissonant and loyal, like “I always did have my doubts about that man” or “I never thought he was good enough for you.” She seems about to speak, a pulse starting behind her lips, but all she does is lean back on the headrest of her chair and close her eyes, sighing.
    Fay has seen this chair a thousand times, but tonight she notices how ill-proportioned it is, one of those ubiquitous Danish designs from the late fifties. Doesn’t Onion mind that aggressively grained teak and hard-souled orange upholstery? Why does she hang on to something this ugly?
    She is a lean old obdurate woman with legs like sticks of chalk. Lunch for her is an apple. Dinner is a boiled egg. No scent of any kind attaches to her. To speak of devotion to the world of the senses would make her sniff. Her face is spare, clean, organized, alert, but tonight her half-closed eyes are adrift. Fay wonders if she is thinking about Strom in his hospital room across the river.Can she be grieving as she sits there, feeling her loss, her injury, that shell of the self that breaks against another? Perhaps. Probably. Yes.
    “I really came by,” Fay says, “to invite you to Sunday lunch. I’m having the whole family. Even Bibbi’s coming. Promise me, Onion, that you’ll come.”
    L IKE HER MOTHER , and even her sister, Bibbi, Fay attaches importance to her immediate surroundings. She likes white walls, dark polished floors, brilliant handmade rugs, interesting furniture, comfortable chairs, good reading lamps, plenty of books and pictures, and, when she can afford it, fresh cut flowers on the coffee table. In her apartment, which has been carved out of a former house, there are nine-foot ceilings and angles of wall that darken subtly in lamplight, and here and there remnants of the original stained glass. She particularly likes the colored window in the kitchen, a design of interlocking leaves and curled yellow flowers dating from the twenties, which casts bright blobby reflections on the kitchen floor and also serves to block out the rundown brick apartment building across the street.
    On Saturdays she cleans her apartment. She notices, with a measure of detachment, that she’s been cleaning more thoroughly lately, since her thirty-fifth birthday, since Peter’s departure, since Fletcher Conrad. With her rubber gloves, her brushes and rags and chemicals, she cleans not just avidly but furiously. Jabbing at corners. Scouring. Bashing. Today she finds a trail of black grease on the floor of the utility room and experiences a perverse shiver of satisfaction. She will annihilate it with steel wool, then buff the white tiles back to gloss and perfection.
    Such triumph is obscurely worrying, but she’s not yet willing to think about what it means.
    Briskly she irons a red cotton tablecloth for tomorrow’s lunch. She loves to see a dining table with a red cloth. Her dining room is small, really only a corner by a window, but in a pinch she can seat ten, though Matthew and Gordon, her nephews, will have to sit on the oak coffee table, raised