The Atlas of Love Read online

  Later, much later, like my grandmother, he will also wonder how it started. He, who will know us all so intimately, will wonder how such different people came together. And why. That will be his real question. And so I will skip the Waldorf-Astoria and tell him this story instead, for here is where his story really begins, somewhere between the wild things and the cream puffs, with a friendship. Well before the eggs and sperms, I will tell him, there was this at the beginning: brilliant, beautiful, glaringly bright, embarrassingly blind, unspeakable faith.

  Three

  T. S. Eliot must have been in graduate school when he concluded that April is the cruelest month. In April, I had two twenty-five-page seminar papers to write, roughly a dozen books per paper to read (and not the good kind; the literary criticism kind), and fifty research papers to grade, at about forty-five minutes apiece, for the two Intro to Composition courses I was teaching. It’s because, nearly four years on from the cracker aisle and the start of grad school, though I had figured out what I was doing, I had not figured out how to make it doable. On the one hand, I was teaching at Rainier University, an A-list institution if ever there were one, and reading and thinking about literature for a living, however meager. On the other hand, I was distinctly not a professor, never mind the hours and hours every week I spent planning lessons and meeting with students and grading and grading and grading. My professors are teaching at the same school I am, teaching, as I am, two courses per semester, and being paid, as I am, to teach and read books and write about them for a living—except there are two major differences. One, they really are paid enough to qualify as a living. Sometimes they even go out to a nice restaurant for dinner. Two, though they are teachers by profession, their priority is their research not their classrooms. Some of them don’t even like to teach. Some of them are very old and have forgotten how. Some of them have ceased to care at all. In contrast, I never go out to a nice restaurant. But I do care quite a lot.

  My students sense this. Apart from their English class, most of my students’ first year of school is spent in enormous halls with three hundred other people listening to a professor lecture while they furiously scribble it all down. So when these students have a crisis, which is often because they are eighteen, away from home for the first time, and living in a dorm with about five hundred other eighteen-year-olds away from home for the first time, they come see me. During office hours, I usually have a relatively small number of rough drafts but a steady stream of students in crisis.

  For instance, on the day from which I will really start telling this story, a day which was another kind of beginning, Isabel Rallings was in my office in tears. Through the snuffling, I came to understand that her boyfriend hadn’t been calling (typical), hadn’t visited in a few weeks despite promising to do so (typical), didn’t sound very excited to hear from her when she called him (typical), and that she thought she might be pregnant (not so typical, but not unusual either; I average about two pregnancy scares a semester). Relatively easy, maybe not for Isabel, but for me. I’ve had practice. We talked about the importance of communication. We talked about how cycles become irregular by this time of the semester. We concluded with how pregnancy tests are fifteen bucks, a fortune for an undergraduate (and, hell, me) but worth it maybe for her peace of mind. I handed her Kleenex, made kind soft sympathies, and sent her on her way.

  “Next,” she said, smiling tearfully at James Rains, sitting in the hallway against the wall waiting for her to be done. He slunk ruefully, half ashamed, half already smiling, into my office. James was the third of these that week. I knew what he wanted before he even said anything. “So,” he started, “you’re gonna think this is really funny.” For sure, I was already amused though I doubted this was what he meant. He was grinning but wouldn’t look up from his shoes. “We went out last night, but I came home early to start writing my paper, but then my roommates came home, and they were all drunk, and I had just finished my essay, and one of them accidentally sat on my computer, and I lost the whole thing.” I mocked him for a little while, so he knew I knew he was full of crap, and then I gave him a one-day extension. It’s not like I was going to grade them all in one night anyway. Plus I felt sorry for him. If it was true, it was a very sad story. Imagine doing all that hard work—and giving up a night of partying besides—and losing it all. If it was a lie, I pitied him anyway—I felt sorry he couldn’t come up with a better excuse and had to embarrass himself with that one.

  At the ends of semesters, there is a steady stream of James Rainses seeking extensions. To me at least, the women come with more involved, sadder excuses (sick roommates, crying little sisters, relationships in need of repair), the guys with a flurry of technical problems (lost flash drives, broken laptops, beers on keyboards—there are endless permutations of these as well). It’s not that one or the other of these excuses is more likely to be true—there’s no way to tell for sure. And it’s not that the guys don’t have emotional crises too; it’s that I’m less likely to hear about them. These excuses annoy my colleagues, but I don’t mind so much. My slacking students make me feel on the ball.

  Which I never am. At the ends of semesters, I can’t even carry all the grading I have to do let alone all the books I have to read. Faced, as I was that afternoon, with a couple hours of free time, I should have gone home and read. I should have canceled office hours in the first place. I shouldn’t even have been allowed out of the house—that was how much reading I had to do. But you don’t get through graduate school by plowing through. You get through graduate school by taking breaks. At least that’s what I tell myself. Thursdays, after classes, after office hours, before the weekend, I met my breaks for drinks.

  “Drinks” is something of a misnomer. Half the time, we couldn’t afford drinks. All of the time, we couldn’t afford the depressant. The last thing I needed was to go home and fall asleep at a decent hour. I’d never make up that time. Jill likes to get a beer and a coffee and figures they’ll balance each other out. Katie just eats pastries. But in Seattle, strange religious tenets notwithstanding, even the Mormons go to coffee shops. As in England, where everyone has their pub, in Seattle, everyone has their coffee shop. Ours is away from campus, minimizing the chance of running into our classmates, or worse, our students, or much worse, our professors. Most coffee shops are kept a bit cool—in part because it’s hard to insulate against so much rain and chill but really to encourage you to buy more hot beverages. Joe Bar, however, is warm, dark, and nooky. It also has tables out front for when it gets finally sunny. April is usually not quite spring in spirit in Seattle, but it had stopped raining, and Katie and Jill were outside braving the chill when I arrived. They were sharing an egg salad sandwich. And fighting about eggs. When I sat down, Jill was saying, “It’s just exactly like we’re eating dead baby chicks on rye.”

  “No it’s not,” Katie insisted. “The eggs you eat aren’t fertilized.”

  “Chickens have sex, and then they lay eggs.”

  “No they don’t.”

  “Of course they do.”

  “No, it’s like fish. She lays the egg and then the rooster comes and fertilizes it. Or, in this case, the farmer grabs it before it gets fertilized. That’s why we’re not eating dead baby chicks.”

  “How does he?”

  “He just takes it out of the henhouse.”

  “Not the farmer. The rooster,” said Jill. “How could he fertilize an egg that was already out of the hen? Does he have a little drill bit on the tip of his penis?”

  “I don’t know,” said Katie. “Maybe the eggs are soft when they first come out and then he sticks it in and then it hardens up later.”

  “No, because if it came out soft, it would get hay and shit in there. The whole point of the shell is to protect the baby chick.”

  “I guess that’s true,” said Katie, resigned, like she couldn’t possibly trump logic that solid. This is a good demonstration of why I don’t eat eggs unless they look like something else. Scrambled, qui
ched, in a cake, or I’m not interested. This is also a good demonstration of why we aren’t in graduate school for biology.

  “What brought up chicken reproduction?” I asked as if there could really be a satisfactory explanation.

  “Katie thinks it’s romantic that chickens mate for life,” said Jill.

  “That’s geese,” I said.

  “Maybe swans,” said Katie. “Maybe cranes?”

  “Why are you talking about animals who mate for life?” I took a stab at getting back to the point.

  “I was thinking about it for my Great Expectations paper,” said Katie, as if that explained everything.

  “How were office hours?” Jill asked. “I can’t believe you’re still holding them. Classes are over. It’s reading period.”

  “How can they make excuses about late papers if I don’t hold office hours? It was fine. One squashed computer, one lost assignment sheet, one actual rough draft to go over, and one pregnancy scare.”

  “Two,” said Jill, her mouth full of egg salad.

  “Two what?”

  “Two pregnancy scares,” said Jill.

  “No,” I said, just one, just Isabel.

  “Also me,” said Jill. And because we were both looking at her blankly, not getting it, she added, “I think I’m pregnant.”

  Katie paled. She had always known, of course, that this is what comes from sex among the unwed. But it seemed a great tragedy to her already. In the couple seconds of silence that followed Jill’s bemused announcement, Katie pictured her wretched and wandering the frozen streets of London circa 1850, torn and dirty shawl wrapped around a screaming, malnourished infant, looking for men to whom to prostitute herself in exchange for a desperate scrap of bread. This is the way for Victorianists. A Shakespearean, I took the news better though what flashed briefly through my brain was a montage of after-school specials on how to avoid this very situation.

  “What makes you think so?” I asked.

  “I’m late,” Jill said.

  “April stress?” Katie suggested hopefully.

  “And we weren’t being especially . . . safe,” Jill admitted.

  “Still . . .” said Katie.

  “And I looked at my cervix. It’s blue.”

  I sighed and rolled my eyes. Probably she didn’t need this display of annoyance, but I couldn’t help it. Foggy though she was on chicken reproduction, Jill had a grossly detailed hold on her own. She thinks she knows when she’s ovulating and all that crap, so she doesn’t use birth control when she thinks she doesn’t need it. Which, obviously, doesn’t always work.

  In conversations like this one, it’s hard to know what to say first. Katie got right to the point, breathing, “What will you do?” at the exact same moment I tried the more practical, “Have you told Dan?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jill, the least fazed of all of us by far. “And not yet. You’re the first.”

  We were pretty well done with Thursday afternoon drinks.

  Four

  On the way home, I stopped at the store for snow peas, asparagus, carrots, and a pregnancy test. At times like these, April times, I deal with almost everything by chopping vegetables into tiny, tiny pieces. The best thing about learning how to cook hadn’t been the vast improvement in meal quality but the unexpected revelation that cooking is insanity management. During especially stressful days, I close my eyes and reassure myself that if I can make it through the afternoon, I get to go home to red peppers and my paring knife.

  Later, while we were waiting in the living room, silent on separate sofas, as Jill limply held a plastic wand she’d just peed on a little bit away from her with a slightly sick expression (Jill, for all her willingness to examine her own cervix regularly, is a bit squeamish about pee, poop, blood, and germs—something she’d probably need to get over if she had a baby), I had a brief, strange flash of wishing it were me. It’s conventional wisdom that it’s best not to have a baby if you are poor, barely employed, absurdly overworked, without plan or direction, and totally single. But it’s also conventional wisdom that you’ll never have a baby if you wait until you’re ready, in fact, that you’ll never do anything if you always wait for conditions to meet ideals, and for me, this wisdom extends to a further important truth—I’ll never do anything if I have to decide. Decision making is not my strong suit. But my strange jealousy was not only about its being appealing to have something so monumental just thrust upon me. I thought it would have been comforting, a relief, to know.

  We waited.

  “Pink,” Jill said, three minutes later, holding it up for us to see. “Flaming pink. Magenta. Fuchsia. Crimson.”

  “It looks pretty sure,” Katie admitted.

  I stood up, removed the wand from Jill’s hand, walked to the kitchen, deposited it unceremoniously in the garbage, washed my hands, started chopping vegetables, and burst into tears. Neither Jill nor Katie was moved by this. Each sat still and stunned. I made dinner while they freaked out alone in their own heads. When half an hour later I returned to the living room with food and nothing had changed, I figured it was my job to bring it up. At a loss, I began this way: “What are the options?” I am a fan of options, of listing them, ruminating over them. Maybe not a fan. More of an addict. I can’t help myself. I have to consider everything. The truth is though, as anyone who has ever been or thought about being pregnant in the whole history of time could tell you, there are only ever, at most, three options, and unless you are delighted about the first, they are very, very difficult to talk about.

  “This is why abortion is still legal,” I said anyway.

  “No it’s not,” Katie snapped.

  “Um, yes. It is.”

  “No, not, no it isn’t legal; no this isn’t why.”

  “I know what you meant, and this is exactly why.”

  “This is a terrible case for abortion.”

  “She doesn’t need to make a case.”

  “She’s not poor; she’s educated; she’s in a stable relationship—”

  “I am poor,” Jill broke in.

  “—no one forced her. She had sex ed in school.”

  “Yeah, but I probably wasn’t paying attention,” said Jill.

  “Abortions are tragic and should not be taken lightly.”

  “Are you running for Congress, Katie? Who’s taking this lightly?”

  “You guys aren’t helping,” said Jill.

  “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation,” said Katie.

  “I can’t believe you’d think we wouldn’t.”

  “I can’t believe this is even on the table.”

  “The only reason to have a baby,” I said, “is because you want to be a parent. Otherwise, that’s why there is abortion.”

  “Or you could try not having sex.”

  “I think that ship has sailed,” said Jill.

  “Right, because a moratorium on sex is totally reasonable.”

  “You should try it sometime, Janey.” Like I have sex all the time. I wish.

  “Or even appropriate. It’s not like she’s twelve.”

  “Twelve?” said Katie. “That’s the cutoff for you? Twelve?”

  “I think we’re getting off topic,” said Jill.

  “The reason to have a baby is because you’re pregnant. That’s what pregnant means,” said Katie. “If she didn’t want to have a baby, she should have thought of that before she got pregnant.”

  “Who says I don’t want to have a baby?” said Jill.

  We stopped and looked at her. We might have forgotten she was there.

  “Do you?” we both asked at the same time.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Well, do you want to . . . stop it?” Katie asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want to be a mother?” I tried.

  “Someday. I think.”

  “Now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does Dan?”

  She just shrugg
ed. We let the “he probably doesn’t want to be a mother” joke lie there untouched.

  “Can we not talk about this right now?” said Jill. “Can we watch a movie instead? Can we do nothing?”

  I thought fleetingly of my so-much-work and realized it was not to be. We watched something stupid. Katie and Jill fell asleep on their separate sofas. I threw blankets over each of them and crawled off to my own bed sometime after midnight.

  I don’t know how long they’d been up and talking, but by the time I wandered in the next morning, Katie was already on “This is your son or daughter we’re talking about.” I sighed loudly. It wasn’t that I desperately wanted Jill to get an abortion or that I thought she’d make a terrible mother or that I was all about all abortions all the time for everyone. But having a baby because it’s against Katie’s religion to have sex is a stupid reason. And since no one else was going to say it, it had to be me. In movies, on TV, abortion’s usually not even an option, not because of the political implications, simply because if she has an abortion, there’s no story, at least not that one. Abortion is a plot hole. Real people have to make the decision.

  “It’s only your son or daughter if you want it to be,” I said, distributing bowls of Cheerios all around. “Only if you let it grow into a baby. Right now, it isn’t a baby. It isn’t anything. It isn’t even a fetus yet.” Jill was crying suddenly, and I couldn’t tell if it was with relief—because this was what she wanted to hear—or disgust, horror, anger, sadness, exhaustion. There were lots of possibilities. In case it was the former though, I kept talking. “If you’re not ready, if Dan’s not ready, you shouldn’t do it. There are lots of good reasons to stop this right here.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like if you’re going to be resentful. Like if Dan’s going to be resentful. Like if you don’t want to set aside your whole life right now to take care of someone else’s. This is not a part-time gig. You can’t change your mind later. If you can’t take care of it—”