The Atlas of Love

by Laurie Frankel

  Something you had been looking for that long, you’d think you would recognize it when you saw it; you’d think it would be obvious. Katie’s problem wasn’t that she was in love with a non-Mormon, and it wasn’t that she was dating someone she wasn’t in love with. It was that she couldn’t tell yet and had to keep trying to find out. Their second date, lunch in the food court at Uwajimaya, our Asian mega-grocery store, had gone very well. Ethan had been happy to share everything which is something Katie insists upon—she hates eating her own meal. They had tuna sashimi, miso soup, pad thai, and tofu summer rolls. They had seaweed salad, avocado curry, and a Vietnamese sandwich. For dessert, they had cream puffs and strawberry mochi that tasted like bubblegum. Katie also likes to have lots of options. They walked around and looked at the rows and rows of fish tanks, at the novelty snacks in pastel packaging with Japanese descriptions they could only guess about, at more receptacles for saki delivery than you ever imagined could exist. They held hands. She came home laden with leftovers and beaming. Only Katie could make a date of going to the grocery store.

  “We’re going miniature golfing on Friday night,” she reported. “After he gets his cast off.”

  “You’ll freeze,” I said.

  “Are you twelve?” Jill said.

  “Are you going to the beach?” I said. “There’s no miniature golf around here.”

  “There’s one in Ballard.”

  “Is it indoors?” I asked.

  “How did you talk him into that?” Jill asked, incredulous, nasty even.

  Katie didn’t even notice. “It was his idea,” she said and danced out of the room.

  Miniature golf also went very well—they dressed warmly—and, better still, loosened her tongue on all matters Ethan. I’m not sure what made her decide that she could talk about it without making it too real, without jinxing it, without confronting all the questions without answers, but something did. Miniature golf loosened her tongue in the other way too. They made out on a bench near the hole with the whale. They made out near the hole with the clown and the one with the castle. They went out for ice cream after miniature golf and made out in the car in the parking lot. Then they went to Joe Bar to get hot cocoa and warm up from the ice cream, and they made out there as well.

  “He’s very sweet,” Katie reported, “and very . . . soft. And he smells nice.”

  “What are you doing?” said Jill.

  “He’s really smart. Some of the research he’s doing overlaps with yours,” she said to me.

  “He’s not going to convert for you,” said Jill.

  “You’ll both really like him. He’s funny and so sweet too. He sucks at miniature golf and wasn’t even embarrassed about it. And we can talk about anything. I’ve never dated someone before who I could tell about my work and he understood let alone cared.”

  “And you’re certainly not going to convert for him,” said Jill.

  “We like the same music. We like the same books. We like the same movies. We even like the same ice cream except I had to get sorbet because of the lactose, but back when I used to eat ice cream, I liked the same kind as he does.”

  “Well that’s certainly more important than God,” said Jill.

  “You can’t ruin this for me, Jill,” Katie finally snapped and stormed out of the room.

  “You know she has to work through this on her own,” I said to Jill. “Why are you torturing her?”

  “I’m not torturing her. She’s torturing her,” said Jill.

  I took Atlas and Uncle Claude for a walk so I could call Nico to get a male opinion. And because I was missing him. Nico has this theory about dating that in order for it to work you have to be two things: soul compatible and actually compatible. You have to be attracted to each other and have chemistry and desire and desperation to be together and rip each other’s clothes off and all that, but you also have to wake up on a Sunday morning and, having dispensed with the sex, want to spend the rest of the day doing the same things. A little bit of compromise will always be necessary, but it should be pretty minimal.

  “Like us,” Nico explained, as if this were the first time I’d heard this theory rather than the eightieth. “We were totally soul compatible and could spend hours at a time just gazing into each other’s eyes, but after that, we wanted to spend a free day doing the same things—going to the park or having coffee or kayaking or hiking or going to shows or whatever. It wasn’t like I wanted to go out rocking every night and take drugs, but you wanted to stay home and read and be in bed by nine-thirty. Or I wanted to hunt endangered wolves while you went to Greenpeace meetings.”

  “This is just like that,” I said. “They have soul compatibility—they made out a lot during miniature golf—and they have a lot of actual compatibility. Much more than the guys she usually dates. They could talk about their work or go to the coffee shop and grade or attend, I don’t know, a political rally or just go to the library together. Most of the guys she dates never go to a library. Remember how much fun we used to have in the stacks? Faced with your free-day theory, they want to do the same things.”

  “Not on Sunday.”

  “Who said Sunday is the only day that counts?”

  “She did,” said Nico.

  Nineteen

  She decided to ask before it got worse. She decided to ask before she fell in love and had to worry about hurting him or hurting her. She decided it was better to know than to wonder, to hope if there wasn’t any. She decided Jill was obnoxious but possibly right.

  “I’m not saying now,” Katie told me in rehearsals, pretending I was him. “I’m not saying soon. I’m not saying you even have to decide now. I’m not saying I’ll even ask you to in the future. I’m saying if. I’m saying if we fell in love and if we wanted to be together forever and if we wanted to make a life and a family together, would you be willing to convert? I’m saying if I loved you and you loved me, in a few years, would you be willing to become a Mormon?”

  “Um . . . I don’t know,” I hedged, trying to channel Ethan. “It’s a little soon. I can’t know the answers to those questions right now. But I do like you a lot. I like where this is going. I know that I would like to do things to make you happy and that if you were that important to me and it were that important to you, I’d probably make it happen.”

  But that’s because I was only practice Ethan. Real Ethan said no. Real Ethan said that though he more or less believed in God, he adamantly, vehemently, viscerally did not believe in religion. He said that converting so someone wouldn’t dump you was disingenuous, offensive even to true believers with purer intentions. He said if she loved him, she wouldn’t ask him to do something he didn’t believe in. Converting was only suiting up for battle but was followed, he said, by the war—going to church every week and giving up things he loved and didn’t think were wrong and building a life among people she liked so little she was willing to date a heathen like him. He said love me for who I am, or you don’t love me at all.

  “These are all reasonable points,” said Jill.

  “Why do you want to be so mean to me?” said Katie tearfully.

  “I’m not being mean. I’m being truthful. This is how any normal person would respond. If he had said otherwise, then I would have been worried. What kind of reasonable person says, ‘Yeah, sure, we’ve been on three dates. Let’s talk conversion’? Ask Janey.”

  I looked hard at the floor.

  “He said he would never ask me to give up my religion, just to practice it on my own. He said I should extend him the same courtesy. I said families don’t operate on a ‘live and let live’ mentality. I said I couldn’t be married to a non-Mormon.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said let’s still be friends.”

  Jill laughed and Katie looked like she was considering strangulation.

  “Actually I think it’s sweet he even considered what you were saying,” said Jill. “Most people would have freaked out that you even broached the subject af
ter date three. It’s better that you know.”

  Katie looked miserable.

  “So he’s not the one.” I clapped, aiming for casual. I knew that being “not the one” was not a matter of failure on the part of either of them, just fate, and not a failure of fate, just a delay, and not really a delay as there is a time for every season under heaven. In any case, this situation—dates going nowhere—was not usually cause for alarm.

  “I guess that’s it. Not the one.” She didn’t sound sure.

  “Let’s make a list for him,” Jill offered gamely.

  Usually, there was a long, entirely quantifiable list of reasons why each guy was not the one. She actually wrote them down so that she could compare notes with the other women in her ward for whom he was also not the one (the vast majority) and to advise the one for whom he potentially was. They weren’t bad qualities per se. They were just bad for her. They would be someone else’s dream. So the list did not say things like “Chris: bad conversationalist, bad taste in music, not smart, not well read, boring.” Rather they said, “Chris: talks a lot about football, obsessed with becoming a dentist, likes Led Zeppelin, favorite author—Sports Illustrated.” Doom for Katie. Perfect, as it turned out a week and a half later, for Gracie, a high school senior in Katie’s ward, cheerleader, Seahawks fan, Zeppelin diehard, and in possession of some regrettable teeth.

  “Ethan: historian,” I began.

  “Taunts you with dairy-based ice cream,” supplied Jill.

  “Sucks at mini golf,” I said helpfully.

  “Not a Mormon,” said Jill.

  “Not the one,” Katie sighed. “Except Ethan doesn’t need a list. He’s not going to be my problem to pass on. I don’t know anyone who would date him. Problem is there’s another list. Ethan: smart, funny, enlightened, feminist, liberal, academic. Hard to find all that at church.”

  “Ethan: you weren’t that attached yet anyway,” Jill pointed out.

  “No,” said Katie, “but I really wanted to be. I’m ready.”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” I said.

  “No, that’s exactly how it’s supposed to work. It doesn’t happen until you’re ready, but when you get ready and you least expect it, that’s when it happens.”

  “You are expecting it,” said Jill.

  “Oh my gosh I’m not,” Katie said vehemently. “At this point, I’d be positively shocked.” A lie. I knew what she meant, but dead scared something won’t happen is not the same as actually believing that it isn’t about to.

  “Maybe you aren’t really ready,” said Jill.

  “Of course I’m ready. I want this so much. My body is ready. Marriage and family is the divine plan. It’s what everyone around me is doing. We’re almost done with classes. I want it so badly.”

  “Which is not the same as being ready,” Jill pointed out quietly, so quietly that Katie looked up suddenly, realizing it wasn’t idle musing.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean maybe you aren’t ready. You have to want it less. You have to be able to stand on your own. You have to know that you’ll be okay without a husband. You have to want something else—something just for you, just about you—more.”

  “Thanks,” said Katie. “I took Intro to Women’s Studies. But that was really helpful.”

  Upstairs, Atlas started crying.

  “You don’t get things just because you want them. Just because you want them doesn’t mean you’re ready for them. Love and real relationships are a huge responsibility,” said Jill.

  “Really?” said Katie. “Like motherhood?”

  “Whatever.” Jill was tired of this conversation. She got up to leave the room, not mad, just bored of the petty direction Katie was about to take this. Or maybe going to get Atlas. I don’t know.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Katie. “We weren’t talking about you, were we? Because you get what you want, ready or not. You don’t even have to try for it. You just think about having a baby, and boom—you’ve got it. And you don’t have to be ready for the responsibility because everyone around you ruins their lives to pick up the miles and miles and miles of your slack.”

  “Oh fuck you, Katie,” snapped Jill. Atlas was screaming. I was glued in place. Katie looked like she’d been slapped so seldom did anyone curse in her presence. “I didn’t mean to ruin your life. I made do with a less than perfect situation. I picked the least bad of a bunch of bad options . . .”

  “Gee, I’m so sorry I couldn’t be a better father for you.”

  “. . . whereas you want to sit in this living room and plan out your whole perfect life without any sense at all of what the world is like out there. It’s a pathetic fantasy. You’re not ready for real life—you wouldn’t even recognize it. You’re that idiot walking across the heath in the rain hoping you’ll faint and someone handsome will come rescue you when really you’re just going to catch cold and die.”

  “Yeah, it’s too bad I don’t have your sense of the real world. I see how as a young, single mother you’re working two jobs and spending a fortune on daycare and barely making ends meet. I see how you were so ready for the responsibility of the world that your baby’s father wanted to stay with you.”

  “Daniel wanted to stay with me,” Jill whispered, practically ice.

  “Oh yes, I see him right here.” Katie was yelling. So was Atlas.

  “Daniel left Atlas, not me,” Jill spat.

  Katie shrugged. “If that’s what you have to tell yourself. I don’t see him around though. Haven’t heard from him. Doesn’t seem to be missing either one of you a whole lot.”

  “You are a bitch, Katie,” Jill told her bitterly. “If it makes you feel better, you can knock me about Atlas. You can knock me about Daniel. But at least I’ve loved. And been loved. Maybe I haven’t handled this perfectly, but I’ve handled it. Maybe I haven’t done it by myself, but who ever said you were supposed handle all the shit by yourself? Isn’t that why you want a husband so badly? This is what you have friends for. I wouldn’t even hesitate—I wouldn’t even have thought twice had it been you asking me. I’m sorry if I’ve disappointed you. But I think it’s you who’s disappointed you.” She stormed upstairs, but then we heard her cooing to Atlas, heard his sobs subside.

  Katie paced around the room seething and muttering. “Where does she get off telling me about marriage and family and children? She is the last person qualified to give advice about love and relationships. I do everything for her, and she never does anything for me. Fantasy? She’s the one living a fantasy.” Et cetera. Finally, she turned to me. “What’s your problem?” she snapped. “You think you just get to sit there and not say anything? You think you’re so much better than we are?”

  During all of it, I’d been pressing myself deeper and deeper into the corner of the sofa. Uncle Claude was curled into a tight ball in the corner too, head tucked under her tail. We do not do conflict, the dog and I. I don’t yell. At anyone. Ever. It has literally driven people to drink so frustrated are they that, no matter what, I will not rise to yelling. And I don’t like other people yelling either. When they do it on TV, I turn it off. When they do it in my presence, I leave the room. And when I can’t leave the room, I try to disappear into the sofa. “I don’t have anything to say,” I stammered quietly.

  “Fine,” said Katie. “Me neither.” And left the room too. So it was just me, sitting in the dark. Upstairs, Jill and Katie cooled off, felt better. Downstairs, I felt hot and much, much worse.

  In the morning, Katie came downstairs early with a puffy-eyed Atlas and turned on the TV, plopping down onto the sofa and waking me up.

  “You didn’t sleep here?” she asked despite a good deal of evidence to the contrary.

  “Apparently,” I said, groggy and untrusting, wondering about her mood this morning, resentful that I had to live with such mean, spiteful people. She was puffy eyed too, so I supposed I had to cut her some slack.

  “I’ve decided it’s okay,” she announced, not sorry
for waking me up, not sorry for yelling all night. “I will stay friends with Ethan. I don’t have to date him to be friends with him. He doesn’t have to convert to be friends with me. That way I get all the benefits of hanging out with a guy I like who’s smart and funny and interested in the things I’m interested in, and so if I have to date guys who lack some of those things, I still have a complete set. I just have to split it up between a few different people. Like Jill. She couldn’t find all things daddy in one person. So she had Daniel for sex and sperm and you and me for childcare and support.”

  She sounded unconvinced. But not half as much as I was. “What makes you think Ethan’s going to consent to being half a boyfriend?” I said.

  “He was the one who said let’s be friends.”

  “That’s just something people say, Katie. They don’t mean it.”

  “Who wouldn’t want to be friends with me? With all of us?”

  “Lot of work,” I said.

  “I already e-mailed him to invite him for dinner over here tomorrow night. Sort of a peace offering.”

  “Who’s going to make dinner?” I asked as dryly as I could manage, not because I wondered—I knew—but because, you know, it’s nice to be asked.

  “You’re the cook,” she said because it was true and because she didn’t get it. And, in fairness, because I discourage other people from cooking. Which, also in fairness, is because they aren’t very good at it.

  Twenty

  I thought Ethan might feel outnumbered by girls and English majors. I thought emotions and tensions were running a little high. So I invited Jason and Lucas too. Once you’re doing it, it’s just as easy to cook for four or five or seven. I made lentil soup, squash crepes, and couscous. I made three-pea salad for vitamins and corn bread for grounding. I made apple cake for sweetness and life and new beginnings where one didn’t want to kill one’s roommates. And I made sangria—a triple batch—for practicality. The only way to get through a dinner where Katie and Ethan were trying to be friends, and Katie and Jill and I were at least pretending to do the same, was going to involve alcohol. If Katie didn’t like it, she should try to give me less stress.