The Atlas of Love

by Laurie Frankel

  “Not next year. This year.”

  We looked at her like she’d lost her mind.

  “That’s in a month,” said Jill.

  “Yeah I know,” said Katie happily. “Isn’t it great?”

  “Why the rush?”

  “We’re not rushing. We just didn’t see any reason to wait. Our bishop has the date open. We’re going to do it in the backyard instead of in Utah at the Temple so you guys can all come. You can have a really nice wedding with hardly any notice if you’re a good planner. And I am.”

  “You just want to have sex,” Jill said. “You’re both horny. That’s why you’re in such a hurry.”

  “Why the big party bag then?” I asked. It stood three feet high in the corner where I’d had to drag it (lifting it was out of the question).

  “What do you mean? We have to plan the wedding.”

  “But you won’t have time to order invitations or cakes or flowers. Caterers and wedding sites and photographers will all be booked. You have to do this stuff months in advance. When my cousin got married, she ordered her dress a year and a half before the wedding.”

  “You wait and see,” said Katie. “Mormons are very industrious. We are excellent at pulling together beautiful, blow-your-mind, last-minute weddings.”

  “Yeah,” said Jill, “because you’re all so horny.”

  Twenty-seven

  The other thing about short stories is, of course, they’re short. Novels, movies, even plays pull you down and hold you under until you stop struggling. You get to know voices, characters, intricate motives, and complicated plots intimately. You live a book for weeks at a time, carrying it around in your bag, thinking about its characters like friends, worrying about their worries as your own. Not so short stories because as soon as you get to know the characters and voices and plots and complications, they’re over. Resolved or unresolved, clear or still completely obfuscated, either way, there’s nothing more . . . unless you’re taking a class in which case you’ve probably been assigned five or so a night. The result is jarring. As soon as you get into one story, it’s suddenly, cruelly over, and, worse still, you have to jump right into another one. It’s like serial dating. The short story unit renders all of us sluts.

  For the short story unit, my students write one mini-paper a day. These daily essays are short, but they still have a brain-scrambling effect, and by the end of the week, no one—not me, not my students—can keep track of anything. What we’re reading, what we’re writing, what we’re learning, what we’re doing next—it all jumbles together until we have class discussions that feature Alice Walker characters in Eudora Welty stories, star heros such as, “You know. That guy with the candy? His name starts with J?”, and yield comments during workshopping sessions such as, “This is a really smart paper, but the event you reference in paragraph three isn’t from this story but that other one we read on Tuesday.” It’s tempting to cut something, but the department is insistent that three credits is three credits, however jammed together, and we must accomplish in a week what usually takes three.

  On the other hand, grading the short story papers tends to have the opposite effect on one’s life. There isn’t time for much else—no wedding planning, no Daniel-crisising, no thinking about Nico, no fighting with roommates, no solo-Atlasing for more than an hour or so at a time. I was still running with Ethan, and I did make time for a midweek lunch with Jason to update him on developments and see sonograms (plus one photo of Jason and Lucas grinning on either side of a belly—“The before picture,” Jason said as he handed it to me). But otherwise, grading. And while everyone will tell you (and be right) that the grading is the absolute worst part of the job, it was also a nice distraction from everything else.

  By the end of week two, things seemed okay. Wedding plans progressed apace, and more important, Katie and Peter seemed still to like each other. Daniel called once more but only once more. The conversation seemed to be better. More quiet afterwards. No blowups. My students felt they’d come through the hard part, and it was all downhill from here. They were right. After the marathon of poems and short stories, they had in front of them drama, film, novel—easier to make meaning if more difficult to understand. We bid goodbye Friday like old friends, wishing each other not good weekends but long ones. I went running with Ethan. Then he walked me home. The whole time, running through my head as my feet pounded pavement and my breath struggled to keep pace, was one word over and over. O-kay. O-kay. OkayOkayokayokay. It was going to be fine.

  And it was. At home, Katie and Jill were at the kitchen table going through the big binders of sample invitations, and Atlas was on the floor chewing on Tupperware. Ethan and I sat down and started looking through invitations too. Then we all switched to wedding dresses. Then it was towards dinnertime, and I didn’t feel like cooking, and Jason called and offered to drive up with Lucas and lunch leftovers from the restaurant, and Peter knocked on the door with iced coffees all around plus Sprites for him and Katie, and Daniel did not call, and Atlas went to bed without a fuss, and everything was okay.

  Then the phone rang, and it was my mom, and my grandmother was in the hospital.

  “Okay okay okay,” I repeated again, over and over, all the way north, though this time it was less a tentative observation of the situation and more a fervent prayer. My mother, reflecting on my sleepless week grading, begged me to wait until morning to come up.

  “There is no point in coming now,” she said. “She’s fine. She’s sleeping. She won’t even know you’re here.”

  “But you will,” I said.

  “You haven’t even showered since we ran,” said Ethan. “You haven’t even eaten. You should eat something.”

  “I am never going to be hungry again,” I said.

  All the way up—okay okay okay okay. Night drives have that quality to them anyway, lend themselves to bisyllabic mantras as miles tick past, as two axles follow each other over seams in the asphalt, over lane dividers and road reflectors, as evenly spaced streetlights illuminate one stretch of road after another and alternate bright with darkness as if half the time you’re only guessing where you are, where you’re going. Light dark hump bump okay okay okay. She had not collapsed, so that was good. She had not stopped breathing or suffered heart failure, been rushed in a wailing ambulance, been rescued from a crowded restaurant or resuscitated on the floor of some public place by a stranger. She would have hated any of that. She had been to the doctor Monday. He had called this afternoon and suggested she check into the hospital for some tests. She had calmly driven herself over, checked herself in, called my mother once she was roomed and begowned. This made my mother insane and was classically my grandmother, so that boded well for everything being okay okay okay. But it seemed to me, the more I drove, that when the doctor called with test results and instead of giving them asked you to check yourself into the hospital for more, things were rarely okay.

  I got there. I found my parents. I cried. They cried. Then, almost immediately, the doctor came out. It was like that Far Side cartoon where the owner is yelling at the dog, telling her what she’s done wrong and how frustrated he is and what will happen if she does it again, but all the dog hears is “blah blah Ginger blah blah blah blah.” I was that dog. The doctor said a great many things, and he said them kindly and patiently, but the only one I heard was “cancer.”

  After the doctor, after my parents went downstairs to find some coffee, I went into my grandmother’s room where indeed she was asleep. Under covers tucked tightly around hospital gown and bracelet, she looked . . . old. It was this setting finally which insisted I realize how different she was than the picture I carried of her in my mind, a picture no doubt formed in childhood, a twenty-plus-year-old composite much larger, more colorful, more robust than the woman whose sleeping hand I held, whose face was sunken and pale as her sheets, whose brow was wrinkled, whose tiny form barely moved the blankets around it. How long had she looked like this? How had no one noticed? She had a
lways been old—grandmothers are old by definition—but I was certain that word didn’t mean this. I stroked her hand and whispered—though without her hearing aids, she had long since stopped being able to hear anything that wasn’t shouted at her—“okay okay okay okay okay.”

  I called home. Jill picked up on the first ring.

  “Is everything okay?”

  “Nothing is okay.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “She has cancer.” A rustling as this information was relayed to Katie and whoever else was still there.

  “Oh Janey, I’m so sorry. What else did they say?”

  “About what?”

  “You know, how she is.”

  “She has cancer,” I repeated.

  “I know, sweetie. That’s terrible. Did they say what happens next?”

  “Next?”

  “Is it operable? Is it treatable? Will she have surgery or radiation or chemo or what?”

  “I don’t know.” This must have been what else the doctor was saying. The good news, the hopeful part if there were any.

  “Let me talk.” Katie. Then more rustling with the phone.

  “Oh Janey, I’m so sorry. Is she okay?” she said. “We’ll do whatever we can. Is there anything you need? Peter and I could run some clothes up to you tomorrow. We could just come sit with you?”

  “No, my folks are here. I’ll borrow some clothes from my mom. It will be fine. I’ll be home soon—I have to teach Monday morning.”

  “We can cover your class for you,” Katie said, “or whatever you need. We’ll pray for your grandma,” she added, and this seemed, honestly, like the best idea I’d heard in days, maybe weeks.

  Five minutes later, my phone rang. It was Ethan.

  “Oh Janey, I’m so sorry.” Everyone was sorry.

  “That was fast.”

  “I asked them to call me when they heard from you. I didn’t want to bug you, but I was worried. Are you okay?”

  Was I okay? Was I? No one had asked this of me yet, not even me, and since the answer was so unambiguously, totally, screamingly NO, I immediately started crying again. Jill would have pestered me with questions. (Are you freaking out? What happened? What are you thinking? What changed?) Katie would have rambled until she turned blue just to distract us both. But Ethan just waited and was quiet with me. When I was done, he said very quietly, “My grandmother lived for years with cancer. Lots of them.” And he told me many things about new treatments and really good drugs, how advanced medicine was treating this disease, how she didn’t suffer, wasn’t in pain. It was comforting that there were things to realistically hope for, things to be done. And it was more so just listening to him tell me about them softly over the phone.

  “What will you do now?” he asked.

  “Go back to my folks’. Try to sleep. Come back in the morning.”

  “Maybe you’ll call me later? Chat a little more before bed? Might help you sleep.”

  “It’ll be late.”

  “There’s no one here to wake up.”

  “Except for you.”

  “Except for me,” he admitted, “but that’s okay. I don’t mind.”

  Twenty-eight

  The next morning when my parents and I got to the hospital ten minutes in advance of visiting hours bearing flowers, cream sodas, salt and vinegar potato chips, cheese sandwiches, and chocolate covered pretzels—my grandmother’s favorites—Katie and Atlas were already in the waiting area, Atlas sound asleep against Katie, Katie sound asleep, head back against the wall behind her, mouth wide open. I laughed out loud, waking Atlas, whose face lit up when he saw me, who reached out his little arms to me to be picked up. But in the half beat I took to savor that moment, I lost the opportunity. Too slow. Already, my mom had scooped him up and was kissing his cheeks, his belly, the bottoms of his feet. He was laughing and squealing and reaching for her mouth, wriggly and pink and overjoyed. Katie roused more slowly.

  “What are you guys doing here?” I was delighted to see them.

  “We thought you might like some company,” said Katie. “And we thought your grandma might need some Atlas-love.”

  “Where’s Jill?”

  Katie’s eyebrows did a little dance. “Out with Dan,” she whispered under her breath. “Went late last night right after we talked to you. Stayed out all night. Called at like five A.M. to ask if I could watch Atlas all day too. We were up, so we got in the car and came here.”

  “How did that happen?” I hiss-whispered back.

  Katie shrugged. “Her phone rang around eleven, and she just left.”

  “Are you all going to bring me that baby or just stand out in the hall chatting amongst yourselves?” my grandmother’s voice boomed out from her room.

  She was a different woman from the one whose hand I’d held the night before. She sat up against fluffed pillows on a made bed, fully dressed with brushed hair, rouged cheeks, and street shoes on feet crossed casually at the ankles (the sin of shoes on the bed lost to the sin of looking weak in front of one’s granddaughter I guess). In the shuffle of depositing flowers and food, fetching water for the former and ice for the drinks, much hugging and settling, I noticed that her eyes shone warmly, that her smile was real and easy, that she seemed herself again. She brushed off the hushed how-are-yous, looked me right in the eye. “Child, I’m fine.” Certain, decided, nearly annoyed that anyone would suggest otherwise. “Now give me that baby.” My mother relinquished Atlas to her mother’s arms.

  And there followed, finally, okay okay okay. My grandmother babbled at Atlas who babbled back. My mom and dad asked Katie questions about Peter, about Ethan, about what was up with Jill and Daniel and Diane, about Jason and Lucas’s soon-to-be-baby, about wedding plans, about school. My grandmother chimed in too, never taking her eyes off Atlas. She knew a great seamstress who could do a last-minute wedding dress. She was sure Diane was sorry and had only everyone’s best interest at heart. (“It’s hard work sometimes to be a grandmother,” she said. “You wait. You’ll see.”) She thought it was just great that two nice young men could have a baby nowadays, and nobody could say boo about it. She was feeding Atlas tiny pieces of cheese sandwich—pushing them into his mouth and then scooping them off his chin for reinsertion, her own tongue miming the intake and rejection.

  When the doctor walked in, we all jumped up in a fumble of lunch leftovers, scooping at the corners of our mouths with napkins, hurriedly tucking food boxes and trash out of sight, wiping the traces of laugh from our faces like we’d been caught sneaking food in class or laughing too loudly in the stacks at the library or passing notes during the (I sweartogod so mind-numbingly boring) lecture on “Verse and Vertigo” by a visiting Ivy League professor of Victorian poetry. Not that anything like that has ever happened to me.

  “I’m glad to see you’re feeling better.” The doctor nodded at my grandmother though to me he leaked insincerity and seemed to be saying, “I’m glad you’re feeling better because what I am about to say will ruin the rest of your life.” Or, “How on earth can any of you be smiling when this is the worst news ever in the worst place ever, and none of you has any reason whatsoever to feel any joy ever again?” Or, “RWAAA, HAAAA, HAAAAA.” What he was actually saying was, “We have to wait for the oncologist, who won’t be in until Monday, and for the results of some tests which we should have by morning. We would like to keep you here for at least the rest of the weekend so you can get some rest, and we can keep an eye on you.”

  “If anyone in this hospital thinks I am staying here another night, they are going to be sorely disappointed since there is no way in hell,” said my grandmother calmly. “As you can see, I am already packed and ready to go. My family is here to take me home. You can call me when you get the test results. In the meantime, I will rest very nicely at home thank you very much.”

  The doctor looked taken aback. He was probably not used to anyone, let alone a tiny old lady, talking to him like that. I wanted to take her determination to be hom
e as sure sign that she was healthy, that the kind of cancer she had was the kind you could live with, symptom free, for years and years. But a nagging voice where my spine hit my brain pointed out two things: (1) her determination to be home might as well be a bad sign as a good one, a secret knowledge that there was nothing they could do for her here, that she’d rather spend her time at home, that there was much there she suddenly had to take care of, and (2) that it didn’t matter how much pain she was in, my grandmother would grit her teeth and ignore it. She would have her way.

  We brought her home. My parents spent the afternoon getting her settled and resettled. Katie and Atlas headed south. I called Nico and told him to meet me on the beach at Stanley Park. Our beach. “Come alone,” I said. I waited for him against the log where we first kissed. (Was it actually the same log? It was close enough.) I looked out across English Bay, sunlight pirouetting on the water, over the kayakers and water taxis and tourists towards the mountains out beyond. It was beautiful. Did I feel the majesty of nature, the mystery of God, the tiny insignificance of life and humanity and the brief flash of time during which they overlap for us? I did not. I felt bitter and angry, closed off, small, and miserable.

  “Do you want to cry?” said Nico, hugging me, holding me.

  “No,” I said.

  “Do you want to drink?”

  “No.”

  “She’ll be okay,” said Nico, bless him. “She’s a very strong woman. She’s got a lot of fight in her.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You’ll be okay too,” said Nico. “You’re also very strong. You have lots of people who love you.”

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  “What can I do?” said Nico.

  “Sit with me,” I said. “We don’t have to say anything. I don’t want to say anything.”

  So we sat and didn’t talk, sat and remembered, sat and thought about other things. Living with women and babies, you forget how nice it is sometimes just to sit and be, quietly. Finally, Nico said softly, squeezing my hand, “We need comfort food. Let’s go get Indian.”