The Atlas of Love

by Laurie Frankel

  It was also sick. Literally. When I was in second grade on a field trip to the zoo, I started a chain reaction on a bus that inspired the resignation of my first-year teacher, a woman who, by all accounts, was quite gifted in the classroom but simply chose, once I had revealed it to her, something other than the reality of seven-year-olds. Robbie Stafford, sitting across the bus from me and three rows up, leaned calmly into the center aisle about fifteen minutes into the trip and threw up his breakfast. “Ewwww,” said Lizzie Donavan next to him. “Epic,” said Mark Manther, whose boots were splashed but only a little and whose older brother supplied a steady stream of slang we were mostly too young to understand. “Gross,” said Monica Sorrenson behind him. “Uuuuuurrrrrreeeeph,” I said and leaned over into the aisle with my breakfast as well.

  One vomiting kid seemed gross or cool, depending on your perspective. Two, though, boded ill in our collective seven-year-old brain. Perhaps we were being poisoned. Perhaps the bus was leaking dangerous fumes because it wasn’t really a bus at all, and we weren’t actually headed to the zoo but to a secret site for kidnapped kids. Maybe it was just the smell. But Eric Hynes behind me, Susan Jenson, Kelly Levine, and Harold Potter (I wonder where that kid is and what his life’s like now, considering), all leaned over and threw up too. Maybe even other kids after that. By then I was pretty unwell and had lost count. Chain reaction second-grade vomiting, much of it unaimed, would drive anyone out of teaching. On my worst days in the classroom, I give thanks that at least I am not Miss Avramson.

  The point of all of which is that other people throwing up makes me throw up. It’s not so much the smell, though that doesn’t help, as the sound—the retching, the violent cough just before it happens, the smack of all that digestive matter meeting porcelain/sidewalk/bus floor. Jill’s latent morning sickness, awakened by Elise’s miscarriage, never went back to sleep. Nor did it restrict itself to mornings. Jill yacked most days until about month seven. And therefore, so did I. I couldn’t help it. Vomit is very unsettling. It would make anyone want to puke. I don’t care how ridiculous that sounds.

  So much throwing up, so much rumination, so much packing and unpacking, so many roommates again for the first time since I was a sophomore in college. I was drowning a little bit in everything. I was overwhelmed. And there was only one thing for it. The first thing all the responsibilities and machinations of motherhood made me realize was that I still needed mine. So the first Friday after we all moved in together, I got in the car and drove north over the border to see my folks.

  I found my parents on the porch with my grandmother who was pretending to inspect the flower boxes but was really having a cigarette. They all smiled when they saw me, but their faces lit up when Uncle Claude trotted around the corner of the house at my feet.

  “Hey baby,” said my grandmother, and then bending down, “Who’s this?”

  “Meet Uncle Claude,” I said, “your great-grandpuppy.”

  “You got a dog,” squealed my grandmother, rubbing Uncle Claude’s upturned belly with her non-cigarette hand.

  “He’s adorable,” said my mom, elbowing to get some Uncle Claude space too.

  “She,” I corrected, pointing.

  “Uncle Claude is a boy’s name,” my father said reasonably.

  “Nonetheless.”

  “Oooo, who are you? Are you a girl? I’m so happy to meet you,” my grandmother cooed to the dog.

  “What possessed you?” my dad asked.

  “Well, we have a house with a yard now so we could.”

  “If you can have a dog,” my grandmother said, “you should. There’s something wrong with people who can have dogs but don’t.” This was one of her rules of which there were many (such as not dating Yankee fans—her dating advice long before it was mine).

  “Big yard,” I said. “And I needed a silver lining.”

  “How is the new housing situation going?” my mother asked, still not looking up from the dog. “How’s living together so far?”

  “It’s good,” I said, but not very convincingly. “It’s fine. A little hectic. A few more people around than I’m used to. They never go home after dinner anymore.”

  “You know I love Jill and Katie,” said my grandmother, “but I’m not sure I’d want to live with them. Or raise their babies.”

  “Babies are a lot of work,” my mom added, by which I didn’t know if she meant “So it’s a good thing you’re helping out” or “So I can’t imagine why you’d get yourself into this.” She stood up from the dog and put her arms around me. I had been thinking mostly about Jill and the baby. My own family was much more interested in me. Which, of course, was why I’d come home. To be first to somebody.

  “You’re a wonderful kid,” my mother said.

  “We better go shopping,” said my grandmother.

  At the baby store, my grandmother threw teeny pastel towels and sheets and blankets and many hooded and footed things into a cart with reckless abandon. In contrast, my mother ignored the practical altogether in favor of the pedagogical and chose toys with mirrors, with bells, with balls, with crinkly stuff inside, toys to stimulate the eye, the ear, the first reach of tiny fingers, toys to cuddle and love. True to form, I tossed in books. The Complete Tales and Poems of Winnie-the-Pooh, Where the Sidewalk Ends, collections of bedtime stories to read aloud, soft books with only ten words total meant, evidently, to cuddle or maybe gnaw (I loved the idea that before you could really digest literature at least you could chew on it).

  I was having nostalgia in the book section, surrounded by my literary formatives, covers I hadn’t seen in years whose interiors I still knew by heart. Before I even knew what they meant, their words had inspired a love for more words, for reading and storytelling, that had yet to abate, and I welcomed back into my life Ping and Max who makes mischief and Ferdinand and Mr. and Mrs. Mallard like old friends, for they were. In the book section, I was deluded and nostalgia-ed into imagining that hundreds of nights up at three A.M., hundreds of dirty diapers, hundreds of evenings we would rather go out to the movies, would all be worth it for the chance to read Now We Are Six to our own little one.

  It was also all a little less scary now. If my parents and my grandmother had been horrified or even discouraging, I would have panicked about what I’d gotten myself into. I would have brought to the day what I only allowed myself to half consider in the dark—that we couldn’t really make this work, that single motherhood was incompatible with being balanced and sane, that graduate school was a hopeless indulgence, that I was tying myself emotionally to a baby who would never be mine, a family which would never be a family. And if all of those fears eventually came true to greater and lesser extents, they still weren’t good enough reasons not to do it.

  I spent a few days at home then drove back to school with a carload of baby stuff. It was these supplies—not the vomiting, not the growing panic, not the ever expansion of Jill—that made it real. Katie and Jill were ecstatic at first—like I’d brought toys for them—and set it all up in a frenzy of Pooh curtains and mini bookshelves and heated debates about where to put the crib/changing table/swing in relation to the window/door/duck mobile. But soon we were all subdued, quiet, not sad, just thoughtful, setting up tiny furniture, arranging little plastic hangers with tiny outfits in order of months. (My father’s point was that we weren’t going to be any more eager or able to shop when the baby was three/six/nine months old than during week one though Katie doubted she would ever be unable or unwilling to shop.) It was still months before Jill was due, and once we had it set up, the room became sort of unofficially off limits. We didn’t want to screw with its newness, its ecstatic energy, by studying in there, reading, grading papers. Still, sometimes I’d get up in the middle of the night to pee and find Jill curled up asleep in there on the floor or propped up against the wall looking up through the window at the stars.

  A week after I got back with all the baby stuff, a huge box came in the mail. Inside were two new shirts for summ
er, a mug that said, “No. 1 Granddaughter,” a package of my favorite licorice, two boxes of chocolate covered pretzels, and three rawhide bones. The card read, “For my baby (and her puppy)—Sorry we forgot about you in all the excitement. You’re still my favorite baby of all. Love you. Guess who?” My grandmother signed everything “Guess who?” which made it pretty easy to guess.

  People are always really gushy about nothing being more important than family and about real friends being like family. She’s like a sister to me, we say of close friends, like family’s not about blood or laws anymore but only love. Real family is much less sentimental than that though. Family is who you’re stuck with. Jason’s family disowned him when he told them he was gay. His father said he’d get AIDS and deserve it. His mother said he made her want to throw up. His sister said she’d pray for him but never wanted to see him again. Years of letters and tears and awkward conversations later, they achieved a sorry truce. Jason is welcome at holidays a few times a year as long as he never says anything that indicates he’s gay. They’ve never met Lucas. They’ve never even seen a picture. But when I ask him why he even bothers, he scoffs, “Don’t be naïve, Janey. They’re family.” Family, this technicality, mitigates all ills, no matter how diseased.

  And mine, meanwhile, my grandmother and mother and father, I knew they would always love me first and best of all. Friends, even good ones, sometimes wouldn’t, not just because friends sometimes get mad and leave your life, but also because friends are sometimes their own priority. Sometimes they put me first, for sure, when they can. But they also have their own families, their own needs. There’s not the same non-negotiation with friends as with family. And it begged the question whether this baby would be family or friend and which, really, were Jill and Katie. Going in, I knew that no matter how hard this was, no matter what disasters happened as a result, if later I lost my best friends and a child who was like my own and all my money and all my sanity and everything that meant anything, whatever else happened, my grandmother would always love me best of all. I could only hope that would be enough.

  Those nine months (six by the time we moved in together) felt electric. When school started up again, we all felt at the center of huge goings-on. Every time I left the house with Jill, I thought everyone was looking at us, noticing us. I was sure my students were whispering to each other about my living situation though I’d told them nothing of it. I felt like a minor celebrity around the department, at the center of everyone’s gossip. And stranger still, I felt like I was getting closer and closer to birth with every passing week. I felt pregnant myself. I’d catch myself stroking my (more or less) flat belly while I read a book or sat in class or waited for water to boil or the grill to heat. I tried to talk about this once or twice with Katie, but she evidently wasn’t feeling the same thing. It wasn’t that I wanted to steal Jill’s thunder, but I was so caught up in everything. It was the closest I’d ever come to scandal. It was the first time I’d made a major life change for someone else. It was my first baby and maybe my last.

  In fact, of course, I wasn’t pregnant. And in fact, no one really noticed us anyway. We didn’t spend a lot of time out and about, and when we did, people just assumed I was Jill’s friend, which, in fact, was true. We were gossiped about department-wide for about a week and a half before people moved on to other dramas. My students failed utterly to imagine that I had a life at all beyond the walls of the classroom. And though I was sleepless, breathless, about what we’d undertaken, about how it would transpire, this, truly, was the waiting part, the calm. The waiting I’d named before—waiting to find out if Jill was really pregnant, waiting to see what Daniel would say, waiting for a plan—was nothing like this. Every day, practically, she was bigger, rounder, less subtly pregnant. Every day, she would say feel how hard this part is here, or its feet are on my bladder, or my shoes won’t go on anymore. We ticked off the seeming miles of those months in inches. We felt each morning one day closer to never sleeping again. We felt each morning the incremental loss of freedom and sanity. We felt almost moment by moment closer to a responsibility that would never go away and was so much bigger than we could handle. But only on some mornings was it oppressive. Others, I was full of joy at the prospect and promise of it all. I had that healthy pregnant glow about me.

  They were a blur, those months. We took classes, taught classes, wrote, and read. For practice, we watched Sesame Street and Caillou and Reading Rainbow. In fact, we started calling the baby Caillou as a working title, finding both the name and the cartoon character appropriately gender ambiguous. Jill would say, “Caillou will not settle down today,” or “Caillou kept me up all night,” or if she ate something gross she’d say, “Caillou did not like that salmon,” or, “I like Caesar salad, but Caillou, evidently, does not.” For real, we considered Anna Dana Megan Greta Rosalind Morgan Cora Hope Lanae. In case it was a boy, we threw around Will Pierre Oliver Dashiell Casper Nat Alexander. The Yankees won the World Series as they will. Katie dated two guys named Adam, plus David, Don, and Jeffrey. None were the ones. We got a car seat. I cooked enormous, balanced meals for all, determined to stuff Jill with protein, vitamins, and good eating habits. Daniel did not call. A week or so before Thanksgiving, we sequestered ourselves to study for orals, miserable exams where we picked one hundred authors from four different literary periods and read their complete oeuvres. We spent five weeks studying and doing nearly nothing else. We were only even showering every third day. For five weeks, all the time we weren’t in class, we wandered around in sweatpants, reading while cooking, reading while walking the dog, taking turns reading aloud over breakfast so the other two could rest their eyes. The knowledge was useless and destined to be ephemeral. The process was worse. Jill mostly read lying on the sofa, feet propped on top of the armrest, so uncomfortable was she in any vertical position at all. Orals were ninety minutes in front of a four-person committee just after classes ended for the semester. On December 21, my exam was at nine A.M. Katie’s was at noon. At three o’clock, Jill went in. At 4:30 she finished. At 4:31, she went into labor.

  Twelve

  I was home fixing dinner, and I mean really fixing it. I had every window in the house open, never mind it was both freezing and raining, to air the place out. I don’t know if it was really stuffy and smelly—though certainly it could have been what with our showering only every third day, our laundry piling up on most of the chairs in the house, dishes left soaking but undone, trash cans unemptied—or if it was just the stress and anxiety and misery of studying for those exams that I wanted to get rid of. I had both the stereo and the heat turned all the way up, a full oven, and a stovetop simmering with relief, boiling over with freedom from the printed word. We had stopped delivery of the newspaper the previous weeks so as not to be tempted to read something besides exam material, but now I was loath to start it again, repulsed by the idea of reading anything at all (exactly what our graduate program in literature hoped to inspire I’m sure).

  I had called my parents to tell them I had passed. I had spoken to my grandmother. I was on the phone with Nico, my college boyfriend. Jill objected to my calling him that—“It’s like you’re still with him in an alternate universe”—but truly that’s how we still thought of each other. He didn’t feel like my ex-boyfriend, like someone over or finished or angry; he just felt like my not-at-the-moment boyfriend. “Maybe I am still with him in an alternate universe,” I usually offered. I’d called him to tell him I’d passed but also because suddenly I missed him so much and longed to talk about something else—not books, not babies—with someone who knew that once—before the books, before the baby—there had been me with my own identity, interesting things to talk about, a life.

  “How’s your love life?” Nico asked. Well, okay, so not much of a life.

  “Not even a hint of one.” Nico, of course, was happily, stably, maddeningly partnered. Caroline. “It’s okay though. It’s not like I’m bored or anything.”

  “But it wo
uld be nice,” said Nico.

  “It would be nice,” I admitted.

  Nico and I met our first night of college at the requisite party for everyone who doesn’t know anyone or have anything else to do. We were friends instantly. Nico came into school with a declared major in psychology, knowing that afterwards he wanted to go to graduate school for social work. He never changed his major or his goal, got into his top choice graduate school, finished a semester early, landed the job he’d fantasized about since he was four, bought a fabulous condo in downtown Vancouver overlooking the park, and was generally always leading a perfect life. Our first week of school, Nico felt a little stressed and overwhelmed, pressed for time, but he reasoned that there were 168 hours in a week, and there was no way he had more than 168 hours worth of things to do. So he sat down every Sunday night and made a chart. Twelve hours a week for class, eight hours a night for sleep, thirty hours for homework, five for intramural soccer, fourteen for eating, fifteen for socializing, two for psych club, four for choir, and so on. He figured in how many hours he wanted to sit on the bed shooting the shit with his roommate (four per week), how many he wanted to spend on the phone each week with his folks (one), how many he wanted for hanging out with me in the library not working (two at the beginning though that increased later when we started making out in the stacks). Every week, without fail, he had hours left over. That’s the kind of person Nico is.