Under the tiny envelope were my grandfather’s cufflinks and his everyday watch.
Thirty-six
I snuck into my own bedroom where Ethan was sleeping in the twin bed I’d grown up in. Sneaking into your childhood room feels wrong in every way. First, you are only used to sneaking out of it. Second, it has the unsettling suggestion of trying to climb back into the womb or at least back into your childhood. Being five again certainly held some appeal at that moment. I coveted my own past life. So simple. I looked around the room and remembered my mother and grandmother laughing at me while I looked, painstakingly, through every wallpaper sample in the wallpaper store. Then I remembered when they stopped thinking it was cute and went across the street to have lunch and leave me to my own miserable indecision. It had paid off in the end though. Red and purple tulips on a cream background were still cute now. The little girl next to me who had insisted on her first instinct, despite her mother’s protestations, was presumably stuck with pink and green My Little Ponies on her wall forever. Or maybe her parents wallpapered more often than mine did.
My very own room. And my very own bed. One of my first memories is of my parents bringing that bed home to me, trading me for my crib. I had been reluctant to give up the crib, thinking my stuffed animals, who lived there, would disappear with it. Then my father demonstrated that I could get in and out of this bed on my own whenever I wanted like a big girl. My parents must have quickly regretted this point as I spent many of the wee hours of the next three years in their bedroom, but I loved the bed straightaway. Always, coming home from vacations, coming back from college, even from school now, the best part was climbing back into this bed.
Now with a boy in it. This was unsettling. I am only five! I shook him awake.
He shot upright in bed. “Janey?” he whispered, frantic.
“Obviously.”
“You scared the crap out of me.”
“Sorry. Scoot over.”
“Over where?”
“Just over.”
“I’m pretty over. It’s a really small bed.”
I shoved him more over anyway, took off my robe, climbed in next to him in the T-shirt I was wearing underneath.
“This is what my grandmother left me,” I whispered, sitting up against the headboard and holding the box out in front of us.
“What is it?”
“Well, it’s cufflinks for Atlas and something for you.”
“For me?”
“Something she thought you’d like. You will.”
“Why me?”
“She thinks we’re getting married.”
“Right, I forgot.” Then Ethan said nothing, processing this I guess or trying to decide what to say in response. “Well,” he said finally, “I guess I should look.”
He opened the box, took out the watch, held it up to the light coming in off the street. “Wow,” he said. “I do love it. She was absolutely right.”
“She wanted me to hold on to it because she didn’t think she’d be around anymore when you were ready to have it.” I shrugged. “She was right. So were you.”
“How was I right?”
“It wasn’t sudden. She knew.” I showed him the note.
“I’m sorry, Janey,” he said.
“Why? I was the one who was angry and mean and wrong. You were kind and nice and right.”
“Well, I’m sorry for being right.”
We sat like that for a while in the dark, saying nothing, sort of floating.
“We should go to bed,” he whispered, startling me. I had almost forgotten he was there. Maybe I even fell asleep sitting up against the headboard.
“Okay,” I said, but I didn’t go anywhere. I was already in my bed after all.
He put his hands on either side of my face and rested his forehead against mine.
“You have not had a good week,” he said.
“No,” I agreed.
“Next week might not be much better.”
“No,” I said again.
“Maybe the one after that.”
“Let’s hope so.”
And then he kissed me. Soft a very little bit at first just barely so at first I wasn’t even sure it was kissing and then a little more and a little more and it definitely was. And then the part where he opened his mouth and I opened mine and then we closed them again right away like we changed our minds about saying something we shouldn’t and then open again to explore that way a little bit and see what happened next. And then little small tastes of kisses and sideways ones and ones where he moved his hands from my face to my neck and back again. And then where he paused for a bit and drew away and put his hand on my hair and looked at me for a long time and touched me again softly and a little bit sad and looked and looked. And where we smiled at each other. And then the part where we started kissing again, like kiss number two, like this time we know about it beforehand and we mean it and it didn’t just happen. And that way for a while, for a long while, because you never get to do the first night over again, and secret whispered middle of the night kisses don’t happen often enough to rush. And waiting and breathing and breathing and listening, aware of my heartbeat (too fast) and my breath (too shallow) and not thinking of anything at all. Nothing at all.
Eventually, what can you do? More. Or less. Leave or stay.
“I know I said this before but . . . we should really go to bed,” he suggested. “The sun’s coming up.”
“I am not allowed to have boys in my bed,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. And lay down on his back, and I lay down on his front (it really is a very small bed) and slept for the first time in days.
Not very many hours later, I snuck back into bed with Katie while Ethan—and everyone else—was still asleep. I tried very hard to stay in my half-sleep place, lightly buzzed from predawn kissing and its swirling implications, lightly numb as well and so holding my grandmother, Jill, Atlas at bay, ready to slip back into that bright sleep you find on summer mornings when it’s already fully light and yet still entirely too early to be up. Having finally slept, my body remembered what it was like and wanted more. It was not to be. I slipped into bed, laid my head on the pillow, closed my eyes, and would have been asleep again within moments except Katie was having none of it. Up on one elbow, she whisper-hissed over my gratefully closing eyes, “Janey, what is going on with you and Ethan?”
I lay perfectly still and would not open my eyes, feigning the very edges of sleep, trying still to keep them with me. “What brought that up at this hour of the morning?”
“You did when you snuck into bed like I wouldn’t notice at five A.M. Where else would you be?”
“Really?”
“Yeah really.”
“I could have been in the garden crying. I could have been downstairs watching TV, unable to sleep. I could have been in the kitchen having a snack.”
“You don’t eat when you’re upset. The window’s open so I would have heard you crying in the garden. Lucas and Jason are on the sofa in the TV room downstairs. Also, clearly something is going on between you and Ethan.”
I kept my eyes clamped shut. But I couldn’t help giggling. “What makes you think so?”
She flung herself back against the pillows, also giggling. “The last month of my life. Looking at him looking at you. Looking at you looking at him. Living in the house with you. Being alive in the world.”
I explained to her about my grandmother’s box, about opening it in the middle of the night, about the watch and my sudden need to deliver it right away. “Then he kissed me.”
Katie squealed. Loudly. I clamped a hand over her mouth.
“How was it?”
“You know. You kissed him.”
“I forget,” she said. “Tell me everything.”
“No.” Then, “It was nice.” Then, “He is very nice.”
“What does this mean?”
“It doesn’t mean anything.” Then, “I don’t know what it means.” Then, “I
’m sorry, Katie.”
“Why?”
“I kissed your ex-boyfriend. That’s the number one rule of dating. Don’t kiss your friends’ ex-boyfriends.”
“That’s your number one rule, not mine. I believe in vetting my friends’ boyfriends first.”
“Still.”
“If it weren’t for not dating Ethan, I would never have gotten to date Peter.”
“Still.”
“I think it’s great. I’m really happy for you.” Then she added, “Both!”
“If it makes you uncomfortable, I’ll stop right away. I don’t have to do it again.” She looked at me skeptically like I was an addict who claimed to be able to stop anytime. “I can’t lose another friend. You’re my best friend too. Nothing’s worth losing you too.”
“You haven’t lost Jill,” Katie said. Then she added, “We.”
“Then why has she taken Atlas we don’t know where?”
“She’s freaking out,” said Katie. “But it’s not because we’ve lost her. And you could never lose me. Definitely not over a boy.” She was quiet. I thought we might go back to sleep then, but instead she asked, “Why did your grandmother leave him a watch?”
“It has a baseball on it.” Then, “It was my grandfather’s.” Then, “She thinks we’re getting married.”
Katie squealed again. “We could have a double wedding!”
“Katie, you are actually insane,” I said.
There was a soft knock on our door. Jason stuck his head in.
“I heard squealing,” he said. “I came up to get the dirt.” He climbed in bed with us.
“Go away,” I said. “There is no dirt. We’re trying to sleep.”
“You hooked up with Ethan,” he guessed.
“No!” I said. Then, “We kissed.” Then, “How did you know?”
“Oh Janey, it’s so obvious.” He rolled his eyes. “Even Lucas knew. Tell me everything.”
There was a soft knock on our door. Ethan stuck his head in, eyes blurry, hair sticking up in a thousand directions, squinting at us. “What’s going on? Why are you guys so loud? It’s five o’clock in the morning.”
Thirty-seven
Not very many hours later, Ethan went home to meet with his students. Katie and Peter and Jason and Lucas went home as well—to work, to cook, to plan a wedding, to cover my class, to otherwise get back to their lives. Though Katie was missing Atlas and promised to talk to Jill and demand . . . something, I could also already see him, us, ebbing from her life. She was getting married in a week, beginning a new life, starting to think about having children of her own. Since getting married—to a man and not her roommates—had never been in doubt for her, since having babies of her own—and not her roommate’s—hadn’t either, maybe she was more willing to let all of this go. She loved Atlas like a babysitter? She loved me and Jill like roommates? She could put all this behind her for a guy she’d known for a month? It seemed unthinkable to me.
Unthinkable like impossible. But also unthinkable like I couldn’t think about it. I had another life to pack up as well. Though my dad argued for renting my grandmother’s apartment for another month to give us time before we had to either find a place for or toss everything my grandmother had owned, my mother wanted to get it done right away, not drag it out, add searing pain to searing pain rather than what would be, in a month or so, searing pain to miserable absence, numb resignation, and regret. It was horrible.
Things don’t seem like novels, but they are. If I’d been at school, I’d have been explaining this to my students. Since I wasn’t, I distracted myself with these ruminations while I packed. Things don’t exist on their own. They don’t exist at all without being owned. And in being owned, they have a story. Some are remarkable of course. “My father brought these candlesticks back for her from Paris when he was stationed there during the war,” my mother told me as she packed them up in bubble wrap. “He used to remember, laughing, how everyone else bought perfume or jewelry for their girls and they teased him, but he told them how beautiful my mother looked by candlelight, and even though they were big and heavy, he carried them throughout his time there, picturing how they would light her face when he got them finally home.”
But other things, endlessly everyday and mundane, have stories worth telling in them too. “Are we really saving these hideous things?” I asked, pulling puke green velvet curtains with huge orange flowers embroidered over them off her windows.
“Ugh, no, toss them,” said my mother. “She found them in the remainder bin at an outlet store and liked the price. You know your grandmother. I told her they were ugly, but she said she was an old lady and wouldn’t live long enough for it to be worth paying for expensive curtains.”
“When was that?” I asked.
“Must have been more than fifteen years ago,” said my mother, laughing. But then she dissolved in tears, regretting that she hadn’t bought her prettier curtains for a birthday present or something in between.
“What about the card table?” asked my dad.
“Bring it across the hall,” said my mother. “Mary and Mabel always played over here. They probably don’t have a card table of their own.” And we thought about my grandmother playing bridge—and hostess—into her final week on earth. “Give them the chip and dip plate too,” added my mother. “They’ll need it.” See? Like a novel. Card table as character development. Candlesticks as memory.
In between sorting and packing sessions, we went back to our house, and people came and ate and remembered and forgot. Jews do this, sit shiva, spend a week sitting around hosting well-wishers and reminiscers, plying everyone with food. In some ways, it’s very nice—this insistence that no, not yet, we aren’t ready to move on. But it’s also a long time to sit and look at the same sad faces and hear the same stories and eat bagels. I spent most of the week at home helping my parents, visiting with their friends and distant relatives, packing food out of and then back into Tupperware containers more or less hourly, and trying to talk myself into my new world. Nico came over one night, and we went for a long walk.
“What will I do without her?” I said.
“You won’t be without her. You’ll have your memories of her, her wisdom. Whenever I cook for a holiday or special occasion, I put a photo up on my fridge of my grandmother in an apron holding me on her hip with one hand and waving a huge spoon in the other.”
“When did she die?” I had never met any of Nico’s grandparents. By the time I met him, they were already gone.
“I was in middle school. But taking that picture, cooking with her that day, it’s one of my earliest memories. She gave me the best cooking advice I ever received that day. It was because I wanted to add an entire bag of chocolate chips to the Rice Krispies treats we were making. She told me, ‘You can always add more, but you can never add less.’ ”
“So that’s where that came from,” I laughed. “I think about that all the time when I cook.” Then I admitted, “I guess I’m lucky really. I got to keep my grandmother for such a long time. I didn’t lose her like you did so early.”
“Yeah, but maybe that’s bullshit,” said Nico. “It sucks. You had more time. But you also have to feel it harder. All those years we didn’t get are sad for me and my grandmother, but on the other hand, I was twelve. I was sad but also I just wanted to run around with my cousins in the backyard and forget about it. And I did. So it was easier for me in that way.”
We thought about that for a bit. Then right before we got back to the house, Nico took my hand.
“I have one more thing to tell you,” he said. “Caroline’s pregnant.”
I hugged him. I said I am so happy for you both. I said you will be a great father. He would be. But my heart wasn’t in it. I was feeling anti-baby. I was feeling anti-family.
“We want you to be the godmother,” said Nico.
“I’m not Catholic,” I said.
“It’s more ceremonial than that for us obviously. We aren’t even marri
ed, so I’m not sure the church’s biggest hang-up here is going to be that the godmother is a Jew. Really, there are only two criteria. It should be the person who’s your favorite friend. And it should be the person who you’d want to take care of your child if you both die somehow. That’s you.”
“Why me?”
“Because you’re my favorite friend. And you’re a very good mother.”
“I’m not a mother,” I said quietly.
“But you’ve been being a mother. And someday you will be.”
I snorted. “What makes you think so?”
“Because you’re my favorite friend. And you’re a very good mother,” said Nico.
Late that night, Ethan called. To see how I was doing. To update me on things at home. And to tell me this:
“I don’t want to alarm you or anything, but we made out.”
“I noticed,” I whispered so as not to wake my folks. “I was there.” Then, “It was nice.”
“I thought so too.” He was also whispering for no apparent reason. “But also kind of crazy.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know.”
“I agree but me neither.”
“What would you like to do about it?” he asked.
“I think I’d like to do it some more.”
“This sounds like a good plan,” he said. “You come home and we’ll put it into action.” Then we didn’t say anything for quite a long time, just sat and felt the heart swell that came with the echo of our whispers, the memory of the kissing, and the promise we’d just made of there being more. Finally he whispered, “Do you want me to come up? Just for company? Support?”
The Atlas of Love Page 24