The Atlas of Love

by Laurie Frankel

  “Okay,” I said. It was too hot for Indian food, but misery made me very agreeable.

  At my parents’ house in the middle of the night, into dead silence, dead sleep, the phone rang (tore, screamed, threw things). Before I was even awake, my brain was screaming, “NOT YET.” I held my breath and from my childhood bed listened to my mother’s half of the conversation. It included sentiments such as, “Thank you so much,” and, “I’ll be right there,” so I knew everything was at least sort of okay. My grandmother had gotten up to go to the bathroom, fallen, and then, unable to get back up, banged on the floor until the folks downstairs finally dragged themselves out of bed to find out what the hell was wrong with this woman and either help her or kill her depending on what they found. They called 911, and only eleven hours after she’d left it, my grandmother found herself back in the hospital.

  We had her back home by eight A.M. Bruised hip, hand, wrist, shoulder, but otherwise okay. Warnings from more doctors. The medicines she was on now were making her weak and dizzy. No walking without a walker. No staying on her own. If she wouldn’t stay in the hospital (she would not), she had to consent to round-the-clock nursing. If she wouldn’t consent to round-the-clock nursing (she would not), she had to consent to one of us staying with her at all times.

  It was in this way that I missed my favorite week of Summer One, my favorite unit of Intro to Lit. Drama is my mode of choice, not just because my life was full of it but because everybody’s is. The drama unit is not just about plays but also play and playing, make-believe and making meaning, not just with words but more real, more solid than that—with sets and costumes, gesture and inflection. The drama unit is where we take back control. We become directors. We embrace the drama in our lives. We embrace the chance to tell our own stories, write our own endings, shape our own morals. Our trials, the hard parts, become opportunities to surmount them. The drama unit is always my favorite part of the term. Nevertheless . . .

  “Go back to school,” said my grandmother.

  “Not on your life,” I snorted.

  “I’m fine, honey.”

  “Me too.”

  “You have school.”

  “There are literally hundreds of people who can cover for me this week.”

  “Do you mean figuratively?” she said.

  “Whatever,” I said.

  My mother and I split up the week. At first, we planned each to take a shift in rotation, but it didn’t turn out to be necessary during the day. My grandmother was a popular woman. It seemed like everyone in the building was her friend. During the day, there was a steady stream of visitors. Two sisters, easily ten years older than my grandmother, lived across the hall and brought over another friend and sat and played bridge with my grandmother for hours. A young couple who lived two floors down showed up one morning with breakfast for maybe fifty people—bagels, spreads, coffee, eggs—and stayed and chatted until afternoon when everyone was hungry again and then ordered pizza. “When we moved in, we didn’t know anyone at all,” the woman explained to me with her hand cupped over the receiver while on hold with the pizza place. “We expected to make friends with lots of people our age, but they just nodded in the elevator and went their own way. Your grandmother brought down a lasagna and salad one night, labeled a huge map for us with her favorite parks and restaurants and movie theaters, and offered to water our plants when we were out of town. She’s an amazing woman.” I nodded mutely. Did they not work or have a holiday or what? “Oh no.” The woman waved me off. “When we heard she was sick, we took the day off.”

  The building’s night security guard came up one morning after work with DVDs tucked under one arm and a bottle of wine under the other. A knock on the door early another morning revealed a haggard-looking woman in scrubs, obviously just off a very long shift, but with a puppy in tow. “I just thought it might cheer her up,” she explained as the dog wriggled all over my grandmother. “She always cheers everyone else up. She’s the friendliest face in this building.” It was like this all day and all evening. Neighbors dropped by with food, flowers, gifts, and stories. She smiled for all of them, welcomed everyone into her home, did her best, ever the hostess, to make sure everyone had something to eat and drink. I mostly sat and watched everyone, sat and savored, but sometimes I left for lunch or went to the library or the coffee shop and worked for a few hours. Mostly I stayed though and alternated nights with my mom.

  Those nights—and there were only three of them—were entirely sleepless though the nights I spent home with my dad I couldn’t sleep either, so it hardly mattered. But painful though those nights were in yet another week without sleep, they were also, somehow, restful, peaceful, calm quiet full of breath. I kept vigil in the other room, out of her way but so that at her first move, I would be up and making sure. My grandmother, however she had consented to having me there nights, would never, never wake me up to say she had to go to the bathroom. She just wasn’t that person. So I stayed up just in case. In truth, two of the nights she slept straight through. One, she wandered off into the bathroom and back again without incident. Still, I couldn’t leave it to chance, and besides fears that she would fall, I kept finding myself in the bedroom, in moonlight, holding my breath to make sure I could still hear hers.

  It wasn’t the middles of the nights that were remarkable anyway. It was earlier than that, the time right before sleep. The first night, she got ready for bed then called for me, and when I came into the room, she patted the bed beside her and said quietly, “Stay with me until I fall asleep?”

  “Really?” I said, amazed at this show of something like vulnerability from my grandmother.

  “No, not really,” she scoffed. “That’s what you used to say when I put you to bed when you were a little girl. ‘Stay with me until I fall asleep.’ You were very cute.”

  “Did it take long?” I asked, curling up beside her in bed anyway.

  “It didn’t usually even take until we had the lights off.” Indeed, I have always been a quick sleeper.

  “Listen,” she said. “When the time comes—I’m not saying it’s now but when it comes—you have to let me go.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “No heroic measures. No feeding tubes or breathing machines.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Let’s change the subject.”

  “No praying by my bedside either. No ridiculous promises to God that will give you stress and guilt for the rest of your life. No weeping and hand wringing and not eating. I don’t want any of that.”

  “Okay,” I said, as noncommittally as possible.

  “I mean it.” She sat up in bed and sounded like she did. “And don’t let your mother do that crap either. Keep her in check. She gets two weeks of feeling sorry for herself after I die and that’s it. You make sure.”

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “Find a way,” said my grandmother. “Once I’m gone, you’ll have to be the toughy in this bunch. Your mother is too emotional. I’m counting on you. I don’t want her miserable for years. I don’t want her wallowing.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I promised.

  “See that you do,” said my grandmother, rolling over to go to sleep. “And don’t think I’m kidding either.”

  I didn’t. Not at all.

  The second night I stayed, just after I kissed her good night and turned the light off, my grandmother called out to me to turn it back on.

  “Look in the top drawer of my bureau,” she said. “I have something for Atlas.”

  I caught on right away. “Save it,” I said. “You can give it to him when you get better.”

  “I want to give it to him now.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Look and see,” she said. I did. It was a black, velvet box (the box alone would send him into shrieking fits of joy) which opened to reveal pearl cufflinks inlaid with onyx and gold. They were beautiful.

  “They were your grandfather’s,” she said. “I
want Atlas to have them.”

  “That’s very sweet,” I said. “When he’s older, you’ll give them to him. He’ll be delighted.”

  “Jane Eleanor Duncan, why are you hell-bent on making me spell this out?”

  “It’s not like you’re dying,” I said. “Maybe you’ll be fine. Maybe you’ll live with cancer for twenty years. Ethan’s grandmother did. Ethan says there are amazing drugs now. Why would we tell ourselves you’re dying when you might be fine?”

  “Because I might be dying,” she said, “and if I am, there won’t be any later when I get a chance to give Atlas these cufflinks. He’s my only great-grandchild—I’m sure that won’t always be true, but he’s probably the only one I’m going to meet—and I want him to have his great-grandfather’s cufflinks, and I can’t give them to him from a coma, and I can’t give them to him from the grave, so I am giving them to you now to give to him later.”

  “Can we change the subject?”

  “You can,” she said. “But I can’t. When you’re dying, it’s hard to think about anything else. When you’re dying, you have a lot of other things to take care of first. It’s very stressful.”

  “You think this is funny?”

  “A little bit. Don’t you?”

  “I don’t. Not at all.”

  “Oh honey, it’s fine. This isn’t a tragedy. If I were thirty, this would be a tragedy. If I were two days from retirement or my pregnant wife were about to give birth to our first child, if I hadn’t lived long enough to know you . . . that would have been tragic. But baby, I’m eighty-seven. I’ve seen my child grown. I’ve seen her child grown. I lived long enough to meet Atlas even. I haven’t been in pain. I haven’t been sick. It’s not looking like I’ll spend a decade and a half in a vegetative state not knowing my name. This isn’t a tragedy, baby; this is just sad. Sometimes things are sad, but that’s nothing we can’t handle. Sometimes, it’s even nice to be sad. It means things have been happy. And that they will be again.”

  “I’m not ready to resign myself to this yet,” I said tearfully.

  “I know you’re not, honey,” said my grandmother, “but that’s too goddamn bad, isn’t it?”

  It didn’t seem entirely appropriate that she (old and sick) should be comforting me (young and well). It seemed like she was the one with the awful thing to come to terms with, like she was the one who needed me to be strong now. But even old and sick, maybe especially old and sick, she remained the adult and I the child. She was the grandmother, and I was curled up next to her, letting her rub my back. She remained the strong, stoic, in-control woman I had always let myself be a little girl with. And I guess, I hope, it was comforting to both of us.

  The last night I stayed over, the night before I went back home, began like this: “Don’t tell yourself this is the last night ever or anything. I’m not going to die tomorrow just because you’re going back to school. Let’s not get mushy.” So we sat and watched the ballgame and drank Cokes and pretended that the reason my grandmother, who always wanted me to cook for her, did not want me to cook for her was because she had had a big lunch (when, in fact, I don’t think she’d eaten solid food in days). And in the middle of the fifth inning, my grandmother looked thoughtful for a moment and, not taking her eyes off the TV, asked, seemingly out of the blue, “Is Ethan a baseball fan?”

  “Yeah,” I said, surprised.

  She narrowed her eyes. “Yankees?”

  “Mets.”

  “Good.” Most people get their love of sports from their fathers. Neither my father nor I particularly like sports at all. But baseball isn’t so much sport as narrative, storytelling, and I get my love of it not from my father but from my grandmother. She and my grandfather were living in Baltimore before they moved to Vancouver when my mom was born, and they were losing too much money at the track betting on horse racing. At some point, they made a conscious decision to become baseball fans instead—first Orioles fans, then Expos fans when they moved to Canada. Into the Expos tradition, I was born. Their poor attendance, their poor play never bothered us. My grandmother and I used to spend one week alone together in Montreal every summer, practicing my French and sitting in the stands at Olympic Stadium with five thousand other fans. My grandmother loved the Expos and the Orioles and the Mariners who she got on the Seattle channel on TV, but most of all, she hated the Yankees. Turns out these things are hereditary.

  She seemed pleased to hear that Ethan wasn’t a Yankee fan, but she dropped it. Then during the seventh-inning stretch, she said, “I have something for Ethan too, but he’s not ready for it yet. When he is, you give it to him. But not yet.”

  Hard to know where to start. “What is it?” I settled for.

  She nodded toward her bureau. “In my top drawer. Grandpa’s watch.”

  “You gave that to Dad years ago.”

  “That was his good watch. This is something else.”

  I went over and retrieved it. We opened the box together. Its face was a silver baseball. Its hands were silver bats. The straps were made of leather and had the curved red lace stitching of a baseball. It was the coolest thing I’d maybe ever seen. On the back was engraved, “With love from your number one fan.” I wanted it.

  “It’s not for you remember,” said my grandmother, reading my mind apparently.

  “How have I never seen this before?”

  “It wasn’t for me either. It’s too big for us,” she said, laying her arm next to mine, comparing our long fingers and nails, our tiny wrists. “I open that box though to look at it almost every day. It brings him back. I see his arm in that watch, his hand, his fingers. That was his everyday watch, not his good one. I see him coming home from work in that watch, eating dinner, playing with your mom. I see him touching me in that watch.”

  “Why do you want Ethan to have it?”

  “Same reason.”

  “Because you see him touching you in it?”

  “Because I might not be around later when it’s time.”

  “Time for what?”

  “I think you know,” she said.

  “Why don’t you give it to him yourself? He’s much older than Atlas. He won’t put it in his mouth or anything.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Same reason.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I think you know.”

  That night while my grandmother slept, I thought about what she thought I knew. She thought Ethan was in love with me, and we would get married and spend the rest of our lives together and be happy forever, that she would be at the wedding only in spirit and so had to offer this family heirloom now, that he and I would have children together, her great-grandchildren, who would be pseudosiblings to Atlas, the one great-grandchild she would ever meet. At least that’s what she wanted to think. She hadn’t even met Ethan but had only heard about him. I did not think that. I did not think Ethan wanted to marry me. I did not feel sure that I would always have Atlas in my life. I worried that I would never have any children of my own. And at the same time, I thought if I did someday get married, of course my grandmother would be there because what was the point of a wedding without her. I thought if I did someday have children, my grandmother would meet them because almost definitely absolutely certainly she wasn’t dying and would be fine. It was a strange collusion of cloudy, wallowing pessimism and blind, ignorant hope: no one loves me or ever will, but as long as I don’t acknowledge that she’s sick, my grandmother will live forever and ever. Everything will be okay okay okay.

  Sometime after midnight, my phone rang, jarring me out of—I couldn’t believe it—sleep. It was Ethan.

  “Oh Janey, I’m so sorry for waking you. You said you’d be up all night. I just wanted to check in.”

  “I wasn’t sleeping,” I slurred.

  “You’re still sleeping,” he laughed. “How are things there?”

  “Good. Nice.” Mmmmm, sleep.

  “How’s your grandmother?” />
  “Very good. Getting stronger. Gonna be fine.”

  He seemed to think this odd and changed the subject. “Listen, I took your class today. Katie had an appointment at the dress shop.”

  “But you teach when I teach.”

  “We did a double class. We talked about literacy in Renaissance England versus the Industrial Revolution in the same place two hundred years later. Very literary and very historical. It was fun actually. Nice and interdisciplinary. We sat out under a tree and talked for a while. Then I paired everyone off with someone from the other class, and they shared ideas about the impact of the printing press on history versus literature and how that correlates with other, later technologies. It was really interesting. Maybe we should do it again when you’re back next week.”

  “My grandmother thinks we’re getting married,” I said sleepily.

  “Who?”

  “You and me.”

  There was a pause during which he said nothing and I think I napped.

  “Okay,” he whispered finally.

  “Okay,” I mumbled and hung up and went back to sleep.

  Twenty-nine

  It was a long, exhausted, miserable ride home. It was rainy, and there was traffic, and I had so much work to do, and Katie (and Ethan) had covered my classes but had not, I was sure, done the grading, but I couldn’t concentrate on lesson plans or anything else. Instead, I was worried about my grandmother. I was worried about me without my grandmother, about how me-without-my-grandmother was even possible. I was worried about falling asleep while I was driving and how much this would piss off my parents who had begged me to wait and go home in the morning. I was worried about how I wasn’t helping Katie enough with her wedding—what kind of a best friend was I? I was worried that Atlas would have forgotten me in the week since I’d seen him. I was worried that Daniel would come and take him away or take him and Jill away, and which would be worse? I was worried about deciding. I was worried about when I would grade and what the hell I might teach next week and when I would figure it out. I was worried about what I was going to find to wear to Katie’s wedding. Did I need a formal dress? Would a sundress do? What about a skirt and a fancy top? How would I decide things like this without a consult from my grandmother who knew all about etiquette and other crap like etiquette? I was worried about how Jason and Lucas were having a baby and Jill had a baby and Katie would probably have like fifteen babies any minute now and even Daniel Davison had a baby, but I might never ever have a baby. I was very, very worried about how, in the middle of the night, from the depths of my first sleep in two weeks, I’d told Ethan that my grandmother thought we were going to get married. You should never talk to people in the middle of the night. And there should always be at least a fifteen-minute window between waking up and getting on the telephone.