We Wish You Luck

by Caroline Zancan

  None of us knew at the time, being childless graduate students, for the most part, how universal this fussy period is in infants. We assumed Leslie was exaggerating for the sake of the story, an unavoidable habit in writers, even when we’re only telling stories socially. It was only later, when we had children of our own, that we realized Leslie had been telling the truth. First Melissa, in that wintry midwestern stretch of early nights and the absence of light, and then Tanner, who married the first woman who ever responded favorably to a pickup line dropped at jury duty, with whom he would have a son. And Tammy, who never had children of her own, but filled her retirement with fostering children after she tired of writing. And Joni, finally, who gave birth to a sturdy little girl almost five years to the day of the reading. Jenny Ritter, whose kids were nearing junior high by the time we exchanged these field notes, just bobbed her head with closed, knowing eyes, too tired, or maybe empathetic, by then to point out how much earlier she had known these things than we did.

  Even those of us without kids would think of Leslie’s story when we heard stray notes of a baby’s wail at a mall, or across a crowded restaurant, confusing our dinner dates with our private smiles at background noise most people would consider a nuisance. He’s just trying to remember, we’d think, and then count our own loved ones while we still could without any effort. We saw even the most good-natured babies make this turn, however short-lived it is, which made us think of Hannah and Leslie yet again. We all leaned forward to see if we could find any trace of it in their newborn eyes—the name of the bus driver who got in trouble for telling a fourth-grader to shut up, or what the light was like on the beach where they retired with their second wife. When we saw any trace of knowingness in their looks it gave credence to every strange thing Leslie had ever said, and in our sleep-deprived new-parent comas we wondered if she had been real at all, or maybe something from another world or life herself.

  The protagonist of Leslie’s story was a man who had only one happy memory to take with him from his old life when he started the new: the face of a girl he had seen through the window of a bus she was riding, stopped at a red light as he pedaled past on his bike. She was carrying a bunch of grocery store daisies wrapped in cellophane, and even though she was wearing what was almost certainly a secondhand shirt and she had a ten-dollar haircut and the daisies were already starting to wilt, she was clearly happy, heading toward people who loved her, to a place that would be made incalculably better by those half-dead grocery store daisies and the smile that arrived just behind them. And he saw for one second how divorced happiness was from one’s lot in life, or could be. That you could rise above your circumstances in life through the sheer power of your constitution, or a gritty resolve toward happiness. For the rest of his life, the boy would remind himself that the girl could have spent the five dollars those daisies cost toward any number of more practical but less cheerful items she was in dire need of, but hadn’t. And he carried that girl and her bouquet through every other miserable year of his life.

  In the early days of the boy’s new life, the scarcity of happy memories from his old one didn’t make him cling to it with any less stubborn resistance to the new situation he had been born into, one considerably more privileged than the one he had left. Instead he cried harder than any baby ever had for the girl, because he had spent an entire life guarding her memory, keeping it so much fresher than her flowers. He screamed his throat raw every night, knowing that once he went to sleep the girl’s face would be fuzzier when he woke, and that it wouldn’t be long before he forgot that the window he saw her through had been on a city bus in Detroit at the turn of the twenty-first century, or that the flowers she had been holding were daisies. He came up with all kinds of clever ways to store her memory in thoughts and details of this new life, and promised himself he would find the girl here in this life, whether she was a dog or a senator or a flower herself now.

  As they are on campus, the bar readings were supposed to be capped at ten minutes. Each reading was “hosted” by a different student moderator, who was supposed to ring a bell when the reader was a minute away from their time cap, and again once their time was over. There was no protocol for what to do when a reader went over the allotted time, because no one ever had. That night at the bar, Stacy Tallecio, the Margaret Jibs of someone else’s class, had been enlisted for the job of timekeeper. She had come in from Long Island, and was the color of schoolhouse brick even though it was the middle of March. Leslie didn’t nod or smile when she heard the one-minute warning bell, the way most of us did. She pretended not to hear the bell even when she hit the twelve-minute mark, when Stacy got out of her seat just to the left of the microphone and leaned forward to ring it just inches from Leslie’s face. Leslie finally stopped reading after fifteen minutes, just before she got to the part about whether the boy found the girl. By then even Stacy was over the gall that reading past the bell had entailed, as engrossed as everyone else in the boy’s hunt, which Leslie must have sensed.

  Just as she was getting to the big, juicy reunion the entire bar was waiting for, Leslie stopped reading to make room for a big, naughty laugh that advertised but didn’t reveal all the things she knew that we didn’t, and everyone realized she was drunker than she had initially seemed. She looked back at Hannah, still in the last row, leaning forward, as if she were hearing all this for the first time, too. If Leslie was softer off campus, Hannah was lighter—a girl with less on her mind. She gave Leslie a what am I gonna do with you? shake of the head, which Leslie took as a summons, and once again they were gone.

  We never found out if he found her. The boy in the story. Leslie never published it, even when she started publishing stories regularly.

  Mimi claims that when she met Leslie for drinks one January when she was in New York for a real reading years after all of this happened, and Mimi got drunk enough to ask about the story, Leslie denied any memory of it. She told Mimi she must be thinking of someone else, or some other story, even after Mimi kept insisting past the point of politeness. Mimi wasted no time in reaching out to the rest of us for confirmation, which we all gave her readily, even though the story wasn’t ours to confirm, of course—Mimi and Joni were the ones who had told it to us. What we were really confirming was that Mimi’s story hadn’t changed—she remembered it the way we did from her original telling, from the hole in the left elbow of Leslie’s blouse that waved at her listeners while she read, to Hannah’s little school of minnow sneezes halfway through the story. What she was really asking us to confirm, we knew, was that we had been carrying the story with us all those years, too.

  Once Mimi’s outreach started us comparing notes again, we realized it wasn’t just the existence of the story we agreed upon, or its details. But that the face of the boy on the bike we pictured was always Jimmy’s, and that, while it was the more sentimental, less artful ending, in our minds he always found the girl in his new life.

  June

  Once again, we arrived on campus to find news waiting for us, and were relieved to discover that it was happier this time. It was apparent as soon as our airport and train shuttles and rental cars rolled up to the top of the hill the campus sat on, where, instead of finding the married accountants chucking Frisbees at one another like fraternal undergraduates, cheap beer melting in the grass not far away, we found catering vans and light installations and women with clipboards and headsets. There was money in the air.

  We had known that this June would mark the twenty-year anniversary of the program’s founding, and that graduates from years past would be invited to campus for certain residency events. The literature that appeared in our mailboxes between residencies chirped about the milestone with exclamation points and cheerful language that we never would’ve gotten away with in our fiction.

  Once we had picked up our schedules and welcome packets with faculty bios and headshots, and scanned them for details about anniversary events, we saw there was more. Not
only did Simone’s novel now have a title, and a publication date, Professor Pearl had finally finished and sold his second novel. Because he would be going on a book tour, and because, as the flyer in our packets announcing his retirement party quoted him as having said, “I’m old,” he would be stepping down as the head of the program, to serve instead as its first writer in residence after a one-year sabbatical.

  We thought at first that the clouds of bustling bodies that seemed to fill even the emptiest stretches on campus could be explained by the caterers and other uniformed people who would be setting up for all the celebratory events and ensuring they ran smoothly. But it took only half a day to realize that service personnel didn’t normally come dressed in blazers or glasses with five-hundred-dollar frames, or handbags made from Italian leather. Though to us our professors existed only on campus, we knew they had peers and colleagues and old friends out there in the Real World—friends who reviewed books for publication that even our practical fathers had heard of and who taught at institutions we never could have afforded, and wrote books of their own, some of which we had read in college courses and seen on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. Friends who would want to raise a glass to twenty years of hard work, and the start of whatever was to come next.

  At first, we weren’t sure how to react to these intimidating interlopers. It felt a little like someone had invited our crushes to the kickoff dance at fat camp without telling us. We were grateful, but we weren’t ready yet—we had thought we’d have all summer to lose weight. Or, in our case, to purge our writing of the long list of sins that our professors reminded us of regularly, a concept that felt less absurd and heady with every packet, but still not entirely within reach. The off-campus guests weren’t there to read our work, we knew, but their proximity alone felt like access to some precious, elusive opportunity, and left us feeling vulnerable to the possibility that we’d waste it.

  It became impossible not to be happy after seeing Pearl, though. He displayed a physical, sprightly happiness most closely associated with puppies, happiness that was the essence of contagion. It also made us a little sad, though, seeing him direct lost first-termers to their dorms with a friendly hand on the back like the camp counselor who had taken the time to invite all those crushes. We had thought the stern gait and distant demeanor we associated with him as closely as we did his famous novel were hardwired into him rather than a function of any emotion. That he was capable of happiness of this caliber meant that he had been unhappy for as long as we’d known him, and probably far longer.

  Once we decided to take his happiness as permission to get excited about the term and the extra dose of glamour that we now saw the residencies before had been lacking, the rumors began. Jamie Brigham heard that the book editor for the Guardian would be there, which meant that the roster of fancy, recognizable names had dual citizenship at least. Mimi Kim said an unnamed source had told her that Simone would be named the new head of the program, which probably meant her squad of restaurateurs and B-list actors would come to campus for the announcement itself. That we all knew this was likely hopeful conjecture rather than something anyone had actually suggested to her did nothing to stop any of us from repeating it.

  All the unprecedented campus activity was more than enough of an excuse for Penny to reprise her one-woman committee. It had been just long enough since she had forgotten poor Jimmy’s name for her to be comfortable emailing us to suggest we reconvene to come up with a class gift for Professor Pearl. We resisted, of course, and complained, both inwardly and to one another when Tammy was out of earshot, even as we knew we’d go in the end, because it would be easier than skipping.

  We were relieved when an additional piece of news kept us from having to dwell on how much time Penny’s meetings were going to take. It was no more than an hour after we read her email that we learned that there were surprises waiting for us beyond those catering vans and light installations and even, eventually, an ice sculpture in the shape of Moby-Dick—Pearl’s favorite book. The most shocking news we heard in our first twenty-four hours on campus wasn’t that Simone had something ready to publish so quickly after her debut—no sophomore slump for her—or even that Pearl had finally finished his drawer novel so long after everyone had given up hope for it that you had to invent a new word, because slump didn’t really get at it the way we all knew the perfect word gets at something. The thing that made us abandon our silent litany of justifications for boycotting Penny’s meeting, and kept our tongues moving at rates faster than even rumors of Michiko Kakutani’s attendance at the graduation ceremony, or an alleged sighting of Jeffrey Eugenides, was the news that Hannah and Leslie had signed up to volunteer as part of the orientation and welcome committee. This was a job that came with no perks or pay outside of the favor of the program administration. The girls weren’t joiners; once we had understood the extent of their grief and their rage, we had counted on it only pulling them closer together, and further away from us. This new, outward-facing willingness to join the rest of the student body seemed promising, like the darkness Jimmy had left behind was finally starting to lift. What we had forgotten was that even in our first term, before what happened to Jimmy, they wouldn’t have signed up for volunteer work, or anything that didn’t directly strengthen their writing, or contribute to the amount of time they spent together. We wouldn’t think anything of it until later, though. At the time it was only happiness that we felt.

  It was June again, and thank God for that.

  * * *

  Though we couldn’t identify which important tweedster was which—author photos lie—we didn’t have to wait long for an eyeful of Leslie in the bright yellow T-shirt the orientation committee members wore, the word volunteer written across the chest in bold capital letters. It was the first and only T-shirt Leslie owned, as far as we knew. She managed to make it look ironic even though she actually was a volunteer, sitting next to Joni Kleinman at the table where students were supposed to pick up their dorm keys and room assignments.

  We had expected, when we heard about the girls’ decision to willingly take on this scut work, that they would execute it side by side, but Leslie’s head was bent over something we later identified as a piece of fabric she was cross-stitching to be a decorative throw pillow, and Joni was the only other person at her table. Leslie kept calling out to Linda, the program secretary who had apparently become Leslie’s cross-stich mentor while we had looked briefly away. Outside of that first cross-campus car ride with Jimmy and the pep talk she had given him, it was so rare to see Linda interact with anyone that we were more surprised at the speed and enthusiasm with which she answered Leslie’s questions about how to switch thread colors and how to keep from bleeding on the fabric when you poked yourself than we were at the fact that Leslie would want to know the answers to these questions. Linda was manning a table clear on the other side of the room, and had to keep shouting her answers back to Leslie to be heard, but still managed to sound unprecedentedly cheerful. At one point Linda actually held up her finger to silence a fourth-year in the middle of a question to tell Leslie that, no, spitting on the thread to wet it wouldn’t make it easier to get it through the needle. Joni made the small talk with students that Leslie and Linda wouldn’t even pretend to humor with thin smiles and uh-huh, that’s nice but I really have to go eyes, but kept looking over at Leslie’s lap to laugh. She later told us that Leslie was embroidering her pillow to read “He just farted” above an arrow pointing left.

  Leslie and Linda were so gripped in their cross-stitching projects that when Simone walked into the room five minutes after the key registration had closed they didn’t notice her, or look up. By then Linda had come over to sit with Leslie and Joni and had taken back up her own pillow project, which was always tucked somewhere close by, and while Joni wasn’t working on anything herself, she had taken up Leslie’s role of question asking, which both Leslie and Linda were now answering, Leslie apparently clas
sifying herself an expert after only a day’s practice, which was probably the least surprising part of all this. They must have just been three bobbing, faceless crowns, which probably only made Simone, who had come to complain, angrier. Joni would later tell us that Simone was radiating the kind of cool anger we had long assumed radiated around her commons conversation with Jimmy, but she had learned better than to verbalize it by then. Her voice, when she spoke, was all flesh-tone, elevator-music decorum.

  “Um, yeah, excuse me, I just got back from my room, and the key you guys gave me doesn’t work.”

  Linda was the first to look up.

  “Well, that’s strange, honey. No one else reported having the wrong key. So it’s not that it was a swap.” She picked up Simone’s key to examine it, at which point the unlikelihood of this solving the problem was, according to Joni, clear on Simone’s face. “There are extra rooms with working keys, but I know you specially requested the room you have.” She looked down to consult her master copy of room assignments. “You’re all the way out in Lefferts, which they mostly keep empty for these graduate residencies. It looks like you’re the only one in the building. I can put you somewhere closer to central campus if you want? Might be a little cozier and less remote anyway. It gets dark out there by the woods.”