It worked, just barely, like this: Jill taught Mondays and Fridays from nine o’clock to noon, and she held office hours from noon to two after class on Mondays. She was taking Holocaust Narratives on Wednesday afternoons from noon to three and Advanced Gender Theory and Praxis on Tuesdays from three to six. Katie taught Tuesday/Thursday from twelve to three and was in Romantic Poets from nine to twelve Thursday and Lesser Known Victorian Novelists on Friday from nine to noon with office hours after Friday’s class (Katie’s point was that having office hours on Friday afternoons ensured that most students wouldn’t come). I taught Monday/Wednesday/Friday from three to five and was taking the Medieval Book Monday mornings and Shakespeare’s Literary London Wednesday mornings with office hours Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Plus we were all taking Early Modern Gender Studies together Tuesday mornings from nine to twelve. This meant someone could always be home, though handoffs were frequently tight, except for Tuesday mornings when Jason stayed with Atlas before he went and taught at one o’clock after Jill rushed home from her noon SGA meeting (alternate weeks only). For about the first week of classes, this seemed reasonable. We were tired—not getting a lot of sleep because Atlas was wanting to eat every two hours or so, and in those early days, when he was up, we were all up—but it mostly seemed like the usual beginning-of-the-semester chaos when everything is madness, but you know that it will settle down soon.
This didn’t settle down though. It settled up; it upsettled. We had had to adopt Nico’s approach of scheduling all our hours, but it soon became clear that all those unscheduled green blocks coded on the chart for free time were not nearly as free as they had seemed in planning. We had figured that we could read while we held the baby. I had had visions of me on sofa, book in one hand, baby in other, foot rubbing Uncle Claude, fabulously multitasking. In fact, it is harder than you’d think to read, take notes, cross-reference, write thoughtful marginalia, and tend to a rarely-asleep-for-more-than-fifteen-minutes baby. Or maybe it’s exactly as hard as you’d think, but what you were imagining was closer to reality than what we were imagining. Like everything that must go exactly according to plan in order to work, this didn’t.
The first thing that went wrong was Katie got sick. She is one of those people. Real or imagined, she is always down with headache, stomachache, cold, flu, sore throat. She has multitudinous, unspecified, shape-shifting allergies, premature arthritis, severe menstrual cramping, a heart murmur, an ulcer, and one leg which is an inch shorter than the other. She is selectively lactose intolerant (ice cream but not pizza, milk in a glass but not over cereal), fainted once due to lack of sleep, gets dizzy when she sits at a computer too long, and develops bumpy red rashes from ant bites no matter how small. My policy was usually to ignore all of it. But when she came down with a mysterious stomach ailment after church on Atlas’s sixty-day birthday, one of whose manifestations included not just complaining but also lots of diarrhea, Jill tried to kick her out of the house.
“I am not leaving the house,” said Katie.
“Atlas cannot get whatever you have,” said Jill.
“Mmmmnnnnuuuhhhhhnnnn,” moaned Katie pathetically, making her difficult to argue with.
“Fine,” said Jill, “but you stay in your bedroom. With your door closed. And only use your bathroom. And don’t come downstairs. Janey will bring you food and whatever else you need.”
“Hey,” I protested, “I don’t want to be sick either.”
“Better you than Atlas,” Jill said without a trace of apology and hurried away from Katie herself.
I made Katie matzo ball soup and sat on her bed chatting about boys. Then I went downstairs to spell Jill. I went upstairs and downstairs all day, but it was Sunday, and it was fine.
The next day though, Katie wasn’t better. I had to go to seminar, and Jill had to teach, and without Katie, there was no one to take Atlas.
“Probably whatever it is isn’t contagious anymore,” I suggested.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” said Jill.
I went up to check on Katie and make her an appointment at the health center. When I came downstairs, Jill had Atlas in fifteen layers and was toting a diaper bag too large to carry on an airplane.
“You’re dropping him at the daycare center at school,” I guessed, incredulous. It was staffed by early childhood ed majors. They were still learning.
“Don’t be absurd,” she scoffed. “I’m taking him to class with me.”
“You can’t.”
“He’s asleep.”
“What if he wakes up and screams and cries?” I asked.
“Then he wakes up and screams and cries,” Jill said.
“What if the only thing that will placate him is your right breast, and you have to nurse him in front of your whole class?”
“Then he wakes up and screams and cries,” Jill said.
The good news was Atlas slept peacefully through class and offered the added bonus of inspiring hushed awe and rapt attention from Jill’s students on that occasion and several others. The bad news was that Katie had amoebas. She walked into the house that night after spending all day at the health center and then at the clinic and then at the hospital where they’d sent her for more tests, collapsed dramatically across the living room floor, and announced the good news.
“The silver lining, if you want to see it, is that as long as I wash my hands real well, I’m not contagious.”
“Hurrah,” said Jill.
“We’re waiting for test results, but they think I have amoebas.”
“What?” said Jill.
“They think I have amoebas. That’s why I’m always sick. That’s why I have diarrhea. That’s why my poop is weird. That’s what it is. Amoebas.” Having a baby, even for only a couple months, not to mention picking up dog shit in a baggy three times a day, makes you remarkably willing to have conversations featuring poop.
“You have amoebas in your shit?” said Jill, alarmed, trying to shove Atlas under her shirt.
“Yes, actually, and also in my intestine,” said Katie. “From Guatemala, from my mission. The water wasn’t very clean there. We boiled it for drinking and cooking, but you never know. One time I was drinking bottled water, and I was almost finished when one of the other missionaries suddenly clapped her hand over her mouth and screamed. There was this huge worm in the bottom of the bottle.”
Jill looked pale. “That would do it I guess.”
“No, that wasn’t the amoebas. That’s just an example of what can be in bottled Guatemalan water. The amoebas are too small to see.”
“When will they go away?” I asked.
“No one’s sure,” said Katie, a little freaked, but also clearly enjoying how grossed out we were. “There are drugs, but sometimes they take years to work.”
“You’d think you’d have shit them all out by now,” said Jill.
“Evidently,” Katie sniffed, “it does not work that way. The symptoms will come and go. There’s nothing I can do. But the doctor said I should feel better from this bout soon. I already feel better. Did you make dinner?”
I started heating leftovers for her.
“When we were kids, we used to play a game called Amoeba Man,” said Jill thoughtfully. “One person would hide under a blanket, like in the middle of the floor while everyone was watching TV or in the yard while we were just sitting around talking, and you’d forget about the person under the blanket and the amoeba man game, and then suddenly, when you least expected it, the amoeba man would jump up and try to tag people, and everyone would run away, but if the amoeba man tagged you, you got sucked under the blanket and became part of the amoeba. As more kids became part of the amoeba, the odds got worse for the kids who were left, but also it got harder to tag them because it was hard to maneuver with all those kids under the blanket. It was a fun game.”
“That’s really weird,” I said.
“Then at some point the game morphed,” Jill added. “And the older kids would capture each other and go under the blanket and make out and not try to capture anybody. They were more like two-celled organisms. Or one-celled ones that split. And the little kids would just giggle and hide and wait all out of breath, ready to run, like they would be tagged at any moment.”
“Amoebas aren’t one-celled organisms, are they?” asked Katie.
“No idea,” said Jill. “You’re the one who has them living in you.”
“When I was in seventh grade, we had this really weird science teacher,” I said. “He was kind of spacey. We were supposed to read chapters from the textbook for homework, but almost no one ever did, so class was never very productive.”
“I’ve taught classes like that,” said Jill.
“Me too,” said Katie.
“Of course, I was a model student, so I always did the reading, but I never admitted it or answered any questions in class because it was seventh grade, and I was a total nerd and didn’t want to make it worse by being an ass kisser or teacher’s pet.”
“I went to that seventh grade,” said Jill.
“Me too,” said Katie.
“So one day in class, he asked what an amoeba was, and no one answered him. He waited and waited, and no one said anything. So he called on this really popular guy all the way in the back and asked him if he was an amoeba, and the guy said, ‘Um, yeah, I guess.’ So Mr. Fields just stood there and looked real thoughtful and rubbed his chin, and then he asked the guy sitting next to the first guy if he was an amoeba, and that guy said yes, he was an amoeba. And so Mr. Fields went right around and asked everyone in the room if they were an amoeba or not, pausing and saying ‘huh’ and ‘hmm’ and ‘I see’ between each person and looking real thoughtful, and everyone said yes, they were amoebas. It was middle school. Everyone was stupid and totally terrified to be different from everyone else. Finally he got to me. ‘Janey, are you an amoeba?’ I was so frustrated and annoyed, having gotten the point half an hour before, that I blurted out, ‘No, I am not an amoeba. An amoeba is a one-celled protozoan consisting of a mass of protoplasm. It moves by means of pseudopods. It is parasitic in humans.’ ”
“Tell me about it,” said Katie.
“You are a nerd,” said Jill.
“I said, ‘Unlike me, an amoeba has no definite form but contains one or more nuclei surrounded by a flexible outer membrane.’ ”
“Actually, that kind of sounds like middle schoolers,” said Jill.
“Why do you remember this?” said Katie.
“Everyone cracked up and was like, ‘You’re such an idiot. You don’t even think you’re an amoeba.’ And Mr. Fields was like, ‘No, you guys are idiots. People aren’t amoebas. Amoebas are one-celled organisms without brains, which you guys would know if you ever used yours and read your homework.’ But it didn’t matter. Everyone made fun of me anyway. All year long I was Amoeba Jane.”
“Middle school sucked,” said Katie.
“If it hadn’t been Amoeba Jane, it would have been something else,” said Jill. “Everyone I know and like now was a loser in middle school. You can either be happy for three years in middle school or be happy sometime after that, but not both.”
“That’s what my guidance counselor said. She cut out a Far Side cartoon from the paper and brought it in for me. It had an amoeba with a lasso and a cowboy hat, and it said, ‘So, until next week, adios amoebas.’ She pasted it on a card and wrote on the inside, ‘For Janey, who says she is not one.’ She said sometime it would all be worth it.”
“I can’t imagine a harder job than middle school guidance counselor,” said Katie.
“Middle school science teacher,” I said.
“I wish we could spare Atlas all that. Since we know it’s coming,” said Jill.
“Guys have it worse,” said Katie. “They get made fun of and beat up.”
“You aren’t helping,” said Jill.
“Can you imagine how frustrating it must have been for our parents?” I wondered.
“I’m starting to,” said Jill.
“When I came home in tears every day? When I thought I was ugly and stupid and no one liked me? What if your little boy came home hurt all the time? You must want to pin the principal against a wall. You must want to barge in and start beating up little kids.”
“Sounds like a plan,” said Jill.
“Agreed,” I said and went upstairs to call my folks.