And that was only week one. Week two: the short story. The challenge of the poetry unit is making any meaning at all; short stories are much harder. That’s why they come second. They seem much clearer than poems, but that’s only insidiously so. Poems are surmountable. They have rhymes and rhythms to help you make meaning. They’re short enough (at least the ones you do during Summer One are) to read and reread until you’ve made some sense of them. Short stories are a different ballgame. You read them and understand the words completely. You know what happens in each sentence. You follow the dialogue and action. At the end, you know exactly what’s happened. And also you have no idea. Or sometimes, you get to the end, and you think there must be more to it, but no, it’s not that kind of short story. It really is just describing a walk through the woods or the memories associated with a quilt or old age. Short stories scare students because with poems they know there’s more than they’re getting at first, and they’re game for finding it. It’s like a scavenger hunt. With short stories, there may be more or there may not. And if there is, you have to find it like a reflection in one of those fun house mirrors—it’s there but in pieces and odd angles, and reconstructing it involves as much seeing as looking, as much imagination as observation.
Talking about layers of meanings, digging them out, thinking about how stories can mean one thing and also their opposite, thinking about how details can mean everything or not much at all, it was hard to talk about these things in class all morning and think they applied only to short stories and not to my life. Once you start doing literary analysis, you see it everywhere. You can’t turn it off.
I walked home after class wondering about the coincidence of incident and timing, what it meant that Peter had proposed, one week in, the same night as Daniel came back into our lives, one year absent, that the fulfillment of Katie’s longest and strongest desire came with Jill’s . . . what? Darkest nightmare? Deepest dread? Or was it her ultimate desire too? I realized I had no idea. We had simply stopped talking about Dan. His leaving his would-be baby had seemed so much more monumental than Jill and her boyfriend breaking up that we’d never addressed it, never mourned it, never really even thought about it after. The usual girl commiseration (ice cream followed by margaritas followed by till-dawn-dancing; photo-burning session optional) had never happened. It was too lighthearted I guess. You don’t really hate all men. You don’t really foresee a time when you’ll need them only for sperm. You probably don’t even really crave double fudge mocha swirl chocolate chunk brownies (with real chocolate chips), but it’s a time-honored female bonding tradition, and it jump-starts the healing by performing, well, friendship. Even if you get dumped, even when you’re sad, it’s okay because you have girlfriends. Girlfriends mean your life is not completely over.
In Jill’s case, she’d been cheated. We’d all been so torn between understanding and anger when Dan left, between sympathy to his feelings and our own sense, deep down, that it was not okay, that we’d dropped it entirely. Besides, needing Daniel, even wanting him, felt weak in our we-can-raise-a-baby-just-the-three-of-us psych-up. And truly we’d needed to believe that, but we’d missed something too, and I wondered how often Jill thought of him and how. With anger or longing, loathing or love? Probably all of these.
Behind me there was pounding and panting, and I moved absently to my right to let whoever it was run by. It was Ethan.
“Hey, I’ve been calling to you for a mile. Where are you?”
“Lost in my head,” I apologized.
“Yeah. It’s Monday? We were supposed to run?”
“Shit. Ethan, I’m sorry. I totally forgot.”
“That’s okay. Kind of a mind-blowing weekend. I think I’m still full from last night anyway.”
“Walk with me?”
“Sure. What are you lost in your head over? I mean specifically. I can guess the topic.”
“We started short stories today in class. I’m trying to look at this situation as if it were anthologized. We could read Daniel’s return the same night Katie gets engaged to mean he’s ready to settle down forever and be a family. Or we could read Peter’s proposal the same night as Dan’s reappearance to suggest that men in general are unstable and the institution of marriage is rarely right for anyone.”
“Those are opposites,” Ethan observed.
“Yes.”
“You poor lost children of Derrida,” he mused sadly. “He has you guys all screwed up.”
“Versus the discipline of history which would be really helpful to us here?”
“Not unless Atlas grows up to be an emperor or Peter and Katie are going to empower peasants or start an era of war or peace or industrialization or something. Otherwise, they’re just statistics, patterns. History does teach you though that threads and connections are trickier than they seem.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning what seems relevant and meaningful now isn’t a very good indicator of anything. Things that look like signs usually aren’t. For instance, Jill and Katie could not be more different. What makes you think they’re textual foils?”
“They’re mirrors,” I explained. “Opposite but the same.”
“And you? Where do you fit in? No wayward boyfriend, no proposal or engagement, no baby of your own?”
“I’m the unreliable narrator,” I said, sounding miserable even to myself.
We were quiet for a block.
“Do you feel sad because everything is in upheaval, and you’re worried that one friend is rushing into marriage with a man she barely knows, and the other is about to be mired in a custody fight that’s totally unfair because he had a chance to stay and instead was a coward and deserted? Or is it because no one proposed to you, and you don’t have a baby?”
I couldn’t think what to say. First because I didn’t know the answer. Also because it was alarming how well Ethan was starting to see all of us. Also because none of these answers seemed good. He took my silence. At the end of our driveway, he said, “Cheer up. It’s not so bad. You’re forgetting about Jason and Lucas. They’re going to be parents. What does that signify?”
“Loss of babysitting?” I guessed.
“You’re so literal,” said Ethan.
“Do you want to come in?”
“Are you kidding? And get more involved in all this drama? I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Inside, Jill and Atlas were both looking pale. “He threw up,” Jill reported, first thing. “I think it’s a symbol, a sign.” In a house full of English majors, no one is immune.
“Things that look like signs usually aren’t,” I said. “Babies throw up sometimes.” I took Atlas from her and hoped we wouldn’t both be puking all afternoon. He was a little clammy. It was unclear if this was because he was indeed ill or because Jill, herself looking pretty unwell, had had him clutched like death against her. Or maybe it was a sign. He was calm though, in which state, judging from Jill’s wild eyes (not to mention hair), my spacey brain, and a kitchen still not cleaned up from the night before, he was alone.
I rocked him against me. Atlas was sometimes very calming. Better than yoga, better than meditation. When he was peaceful, you looked into his angel face, felt his perfect weight and perfect warmth, listened to his even baby breath and knew, knew, that as long as he was all right, nothing else could be all that wrong. It wasn’t just because he was so lovely and all-consuming though he was both. He just put everything in perspective. He made me feel like I was stepping up to take my place in the great wide history of time. Everyone had a baby, and this was mine. Everyone felt this way about her baby, and indeed, this was how I felt about mine. However confused our situation became or seemed from outside of it, holding Atlas in my arms felt timeless. It didn’t matter who he was or who I was or where or when we were. We took our place among mothers and sons, and nothing else mattered. This was not true when he was screaming for no discernible reason (or throwing up for that matter), but there were also these perfect moments in between, and already I was trying to hold on to them as if they were in limited supply.
Jill, in contrast, was not having a moment of any kind. She was freaking out. So I kept Atlas and put her on washing dishes. She looked at me wide-eyed when I suggested it like it had never occurred to her that dinner for nine needed to be cleaned up after, but it was the most wonderful idea she’d ever heard. She plunged in with something akin to delight. It took her two and a half hours to dig down to the bottom of the kitchen, but when she finished, it was well and truly clean. She talked through it, almost nonstop, which was clearly what she most needed to do, and Atlas cooled and dried and slept soundly in my arms, neither feverish nor vomity, and it seemed that a kitchen full of dishes was all anyone needed to surmount any problem the world could devise. And devise it did.
“I talked to my mom,” she began. “I couldn’t not talk to her. I was so mad, but I was a shit for like three years when I was a teenager and she forgave me, so I was just being a bitch sending her away all angry like that. I thought if she got in a car accident on the way home, and we ended like that, I’d just kill myself. So I called her. She said she was trying to teach him how to be a man. You know, like she thought he was essentially, ultimately worthy and better than that, really a great guy for me and for Atlas. She said she always thought so, but he wasn’t ready yet. He was too immature. He was confused. She thought confusion shouldn’t be a deal breaker, shouldn’t be a fatal flaw. Confusion was to be corrected and forgiven as perfectly understandable, not punishable by Atlas doesn’t get a father, I don’t get the love of my life—these are her words you understand—he spends all eternity feeling guilty for youth and a brief lapse of judgment, for abandoning his family.
“She wanted to fix it. But she couldn’t tell me that because she thought I would freak out, and I would have. I did. And she couldn’t tell him that because you can never really hear something like that about yourself. So she tried to . . . tutor him I guess. Teach him to care about his son, to think about me while he thought about himself, to think of us as one unit rather than me and my needs versus him and his. That being a father wasn’t that scary. He could still play volleyball. He could still be in a band. That everyday life wouldn’t be that different, just better, fuller. He would sacrifice some freedom, sure, but what’s he really doing with it anyway, and adulthood is different than purported, and what he’d get in return would be so worth it. She didn’t lecture him or anything. She just showed him pictures, told him about us, told him lots of stories about when I was little, about being a parent and what she gave up and what she gained and what she maintained—her friends and social life and whatever. She said she gave him some stuff to read. I don’t know—allegories or poems or letters I wrote when I was a kid or something? Literature about single mothers? I have no idea. Anyway, that was the upshot. Some sort of reeducation. To make him worthy. How can I be angry with her about that?”
“That’s what happens to all the guys in Shakespeare,” I said.
“Everyone dies in Shakespeare. They learn and then they die. How does that help me?”
“Only in the tragedies,” I said. “In the comedies, they learn and then get married. There are these guys, and they’re so flawed. They’re untrusting and untrustworthy. They’re mean and spiteful. They have these completely unrealistic ideas of love and relationships or totally screwed up priorities where they only care about beauty and money. Or they’re so into their guy friends and messing around they can’t be adult men. And these women, they’re so amazing. They see through all that to the good men these guys can be. The women see the strong, kind, intelligent people these guys will mature into, and they know for a little investment of time and effort, a little patience, these men will be worthy for the rest of their lives. So they train them. They tease and tutor them and whip them into shape. They dress up like other boys to tell them because you’re right—no one wants to hear this about themselves and least of all from someone they love. But eventually, these guys grow up and come into their own. They do learn, and it’s a testament to how right and wise these women are that they can see what we don’t at first. And they’re all rewarded with love and marriage.”
“But you feel like shit when you leave those plays,” Jill objected. “Hero is stuck with this guy who’s totally untrusting and mean. Helena marries her awful ex-boyfriend who only loves her again because of magic fairy dust. Viola ends up with this sappy, pouty dude who’s probably gay anyway.”
“Well, okay, but that’s the point. Those guys didn’t learn, so they get married at the end, but you don’t feel good or happy about it. But think about Beatrice, think about Rosalind. These are marriages you do feel good about, not because the guys or even the heroines were perfect at the beginning but because they’ve learned. No one’s perfect going in—no one’s ever perfect—it’s the ones who hear their detractions and can put them to mending who you’re happy for.”
“Yeah, but doesn’t that mean my mom and Daniel are going to get married?” Jill giggled.
“It’s just a metaphor, Jilly.”
“What do you think I have to learn then?” she asked.
“What do you think you have to learn?”
“Isn’t someone supposed to help me figure that out?”
“Sometimes. But usually the women have to come into it all on their own.”
“Isn’t there supposed to be a sidekick? Someone to tell the heroine the answers?”
“No one can tell her the answers. Figuring it out is her job. Fixing it isn’t the hard part. It’s learning what it is needs fixing in the first place. Beatrice learns that being harsh and afraid does her no good. She decides to love and let herself be loved—and she is. Rosalind realizes that time is short and love is precious. She finally gets that she doesn’t have unlimited time to screw around pretending to be a boy and messing about in the woods. She’s afraid Orlando won’t love her anymore when she’s not so young and pretty and the novelty wears off. She has to learn to trust that he’ll always love her even when she’s old and gray and they’ve been together for eighty years.”
“But I wasn’t afraid to let myself be loved. I was ready. He said no.”
“Then that’s not your thing,” I said.
“What is?”
“Can’t tell you.” I shrugged. I didn’t know. And it was her journey besides. The difference between Shakespeare and life is the absence of fairies, long lost twins, and really knowledgeable cross-dressers to solve all your unsolvable problems. On the other hand, the kitchen was clean, the dishes dried and put away, the counters scrubbed, and Atlas sound asleep and not even throwing up.