The Atlas of Love

by Laurie Frankel

  “Trying for a girl?” It was true. A surely-this-time girl was how they'd talked themselves into more after Ben.

  “Getting naked in the middle of the day,” said Penn.

  “What mess?” She smiled.

  “Have you seen the rec room this week?”

  “I never go in the rec room.”

  “Mess would be a generous term. Mess conveys the level of disaster but not the degree of danger. If the rec room were an airport, its security level would be red.”

  “Always,” she said, kissing his mouth and then his neck and then his mouth some more.

  “Always,” he agreed, from around her tongue.

  A short time later, but not too short, Claude happened, in the way these things do, though none of the three of them knew it at the time. It always struck Rosie that it would be a useful human evolution if the female could feel the sperm enter the egg. That way she could stop drinking and eating sushi and the good kind of cheese a whole month or more before she generally actually got around to doing so. Such an important part of life, conception, and you missed it altogether. Also once upon a time, sex was followed by napping in a heap together, tangled legs still tingling, or by deep, meaningful philosophizing late into the night, or sometimes by more sex. Now Penn fetched back his food shortages article and gave himself seven minutes to read it nakedly against the headboard before going down to start dinner for thirty-five minutes before driving to preschool to fetch Rigel and Orion. Rosie got dressed and then ready for work and then went to the bus stop to meet Roo and Ben. All the while, Claude worked quietly at becoming, first arriving together and then, in the days and weeks and months to come, dividing and dividing and dividing.

  What people always said to Rosie was, “What are you, Catholic?” though without raising their voices at the end like you do when you're really asking a question. Or they said, pretending to be joking, “You know there are ways to prevent this sort of thing.” Or they said, “Better you than me,” which they needn't, since this was obviously true, or they said, “Are they all yours?” They all were. A mom at a PTA meeting the year before had taken Rosie aside to advise her not to tack condoms to a bulletin board next to the bed, no matter how convenient a storage solution that seemed, a lesson she confessed, nodding at a first-grader in the corner licking paste off his fingers, she had learned the hard way. Making a family seemed just as intimate to Rosie as the usual kickoff to that process and just as impolite to discuss—never mind openly judge—in polite conversation with acquaintances. But that's what happened to her, usually several times a week. And that's what was happening at the bus stop while she waited for Roo and Ben and one half of almost-Claude raced frantically for the other half.

  “I don't know how you do it.” Heather. Her neighbor. This was another thing people always said, criticism disguised as compliment.

  Rosie laughed. Fake laughed. “Well. You know.”

  “No, I mean seriously.” But she did not mean seriously. “I mean, I guess Penn doesn't have a job. But you do.”

  “Penn works from home,” Rosie said. Again. This was not their first time through this particular conversation. They had it every time the bus was late. Which was every time it snowed. Which was every day some months. She thought Madison Wisconsin's Public Schools should specially train their bus drivers for snowy conditions—was this not just common sense?—but apparently she was all alone with this idea. Now it was September and hot and smelled like a late-afternoon thunderstorm, so who knew why the bus was late.

  “I mean, I know he works.” Heather started almost every sentence with “I mean,” which Rosie felt was implied. “But it's not a job.”

  “Writing's a job.” Penn's work in progress—he called it DN for Damn Novel—was not yet feeding them, but he wrote diligently, every day. “It's just not a nine-to-five sort of job.”

  “Does that really count?”

  “My job isn't nine to five.” She looked at her watch. In fact, she had to be at the hospital in just more than an hour. Night shifts were brutal but easier to schedule around. Sometimes, it was just less painful to forgo sleep than to try to find child care for all the early dismissals and vacations and holidays and staff developments and parent-teacher conference days. It was also true that nights in the ER were often more peaceful than nights at home with her family. Sometimes they even involved less blood.

  “Yeah, but I mean, you're a doctor,” Heather was saying.

  “So?”

  “So doctor's a real job.”

  “So is writer.”

  “I don't know how you do it,” Heather said again, shaking her head. And then added, giggling, “Or why.”

  In fact, how was an easier question than why. How was the same answer as it is for all impossible things you do anyway. One day at a time. One foot in front of the other. All for one and one for all. Anyway, some cliché with the word “one” in it, ironic since it had been so long since she was just a one. She herded the boys—some of the boys—toward the car. If she was going to have to have this conversation with Heather at the bus stop every day, she might just start picking the kids up from school. Driving to and from the bus stop seemed absurd to her. Wasn't the point of the bus to bring kids from their home to the school? She loved their sprawling old farmhouse, their fifteen acres of rangy, overgrown land, going ceaselessly to seed. There was a barn that was only the memory of a barn, a stream that was mysterious and wet enough to be fun, but not deep or fast enough to worry about. The house was designed for a family of farmers, a family with lots of children who rose before dawn to help milk cows or slop livestock or whatever it was farm children did. Rosie and Penn had nothing to milk nor any animals beyond the puppy (Jupiter, a present for the twins’ fourth birthday), but they did, more frequently than not, have children up before dawn. Those children needed lots of bedrooms, and the farmhouse had plenty, plus a perfect nursery off the master which smelled perpetually of talcum powder and was painted yellow, just in case the baby was a girl one of these days. The floors were not even. The walls were not soundproof. The water took a long time to be hot. But Rosie loved the rough-and-tumbleness of the house, which matched the rough-and-tumbleness of her family. Among other things, when the molding got nicked—and it did—no one cared. Some days though, plain old suburbia and a cul-de-sac at the top of which a bus stopped seemed easier. Some days, she just didn't have the energy. This day she felt tired. She didn't know why. But she needed to shake it off anyway. Her workday had not yet begun.

  At home, she proceeded with the business of one foot, one day, one for all. Penn kissed the boys hello, kissed her goodbye, went off to fetch Rigel and Orion. She took over dinner prep—sautéing the vegetables Penn had chopped, seasoning the rice Penn had boiled, grilling the shrimp Penn had marinated. (She did not yet know that the racing-together Claude halves precluded any chance that avoiding red meat would beget a girl.) While the beans simmered, she emptied lunch boxes, checked folders, sorted forms. While the sauce reduced, she finished washing dishes from the night before. While she dried them, she interrupted the roller-skating contest Roo and Ben were holding in the living room three times. (It wasn't that she finally succeeded in getting them to stop. It was that she finally succeeded in not caring anymore.)

  Then Roo set the table. Then Ben poured water into water glasses. Then Penn, Rigel, and Orion came back in, all three of them wet and emotional, Penn from the traffic, which he reported was a mess because of the thunderstorm, Rigel and Orion from something having to do with a sand table that Rosie couldn't make out but made sympathetic noises toward anyway. If traffic was bad, she needed to leave early for work. If she needed to leave early for work, she needed to leave now. Penn pulled the shrimp from the grill and the rice from the pot, threw both in with the vegetables in the wok, combined sauce and beans, and dumped some of all of the above into a giant to-go container, added a spoon, and shoved it into Rosie's hands as she checked to see how many of the many things she absolutely must not forget h
ad actually made it into her bag. Some. She gave quick kisses all around and headed for the car. If traffic was as bad as Penn said, she'd be able to eat dinner on the way to the hospital.

  That was how. One day at a time. One foot in front of the other. All for one. It wasn't so much that she and Penn had set out to practice Zen marriage equality and perfect-balance parenting. It was just that there was way more to do than two could manage, but by their both filling every spare moment, some of what needed to got done.

  One good turn deserves another. Two heads are better than one.

  Why was a harder question. Rosie thought about it all the way to the hospital, not that day, but 257 days later on the one when Claude was born. Labor had begun in earnest during dinner, though she'd known it was coming all morning and afternoon. Her feet itched peculiarly just before contractions started. She knew that sensation from long experience and had figured the baby would come the next day or even the one after that, so even though the contractions came closer and harder, she made dinner. But between passing the salad around and actually finishing the pasta, contractions had gone from every seven minutes to every three. Penn said, “So, how about dessert?” Rosie said, “Instead, maybe the hospital.”

  How they were going to get home was an open question, but for the moment, they all still fit in one car. Rosie installed herself in the front seat, calmly but with no little effort. Penn grabbed the bags. They weren't for Rosie, who needed so little. She had never been the type to prepare a soundtrack or a collage or a special pillow for the delivery room, but by now she realized that even the handful of things she'd brought the first few times were unnecessary. No, the bags were for her mother. They contained provisions to spend hours and perhaps days on end in a waiting room with four small, giddy boys—books, trains, LEGOs, glue sticks, juice boxes, granola bars, stuffies, blankies, and particular pillows. Rosie did not need a special pillow for the hospital. This was the difference between her and her sons.

  One boy's trash is another boy's treasure. Back to square one.

  All the way to the hospital while the kids sang Peter Pan in their car seats and boosters—their babysitter was starring in her high school musical—and Penn squeezed her hand and pretended, unsuccessfully, to be nonchalant by obeying all posted speed limits, and she resisted the temptation to tell him to hurry the hell up, Rosie was thinking one word over and over: Poppy. If the baby was a girl—and surely, surely it had to be: she had eaten fish and cookies; she had had sex in the afternoon facing east; she had done the thing with the spoon, and besides, it was her turn—she would name her Poppy.

  They had had the name picked out from the first pregnancy. Rosie had had it for even longer, since one dark day sitting on her little sister's hospital bed while their parents were in the cafeteria taking a break. Rosie was braiding Poppy's wig hair and Poppy was braiding Poppy's doll's hair when she said, out of nowhere, “I'll never have a little girl whose hair I get to braid.” Her voice was raspy. Rosie knew now it was from the chemotherapy, but at the time it seemed like something inside her little sister was fighting to get out—and winning—a goblin or a witch or a demon, something that was already breaking through in snatches here and there: a croaking voice, red rolling eyes, bruises that raised slowly then seemed to spread and multiply as if peeling back from a sea of purple skin roiling just beneath her ever more delicate surface. Rather than being frightened, Rosie found this idea comforting. She welcomed the demon on its way out of her sister because it was becoming increasingly clear that Poppy could not survive this terrible, unspeakable, unthinkable disease, but maybe the demon could. Demon Poppy seemed much stronger. Demon Poppy had more fight in her.

  “Will you take care of Clover for me?” Poppy croaked. Like all the children in the Walsh home, Poppy's doll was named for a flower.

  Rosie nodded. It was all she could manage. But then Poppy's regular voice came back: “Where should we go on vacation?”

  “When?”

  “When I get out of here.”

  “I dunno.” The only place they'd ever been on vacation so far was their grandparents’ house, which smelled like basement. “Where do you want to go?”

  “Siam,” Poppy said immediately.

  “Siam?”

  “Like The King and I.” The hospital had a poorly stocked video library of which that was the highlight. And Poppy had a lot of lying-around time.

  “We'll go everywhere,” Rosie promised. “As soon as you're out. Well, we probably have to wait four years till I get my license. Is Siam in driving distance?”

  “I dunno. Probably.” Poppy smiled happily. “You're such a good hair braider.” It was the best thing about cancer it turned out. Poppy's wig hair was much longer and less tangled than her real hair. “Your daughter's going to be so lucky.”

  At that very moment, Rosalind Walsh, aged twelve, decided two things: her daughter would have long hair, like really long, like long enough to sit on, and she would name her Poppy. Eventually, Rosie discovered Siam was now called Thailand, but it was several lifetimes later before she got there, and then it was not for vacation. This was the last time she was ever alone with her sister.

  All the way to the hospital, while Penn murmured, “Breathe, breathe,” and Roo sang, “I gotta crow,” and Ben and Rigel and Orion cawed back at the tops of their little boy voices, “Er-er-er-errrrr,” Rosie whispered, “Poppy. Poppy. Poppy. Poppy.”

  Twenty minutes after they pulled up at the front door, the baby was ready.

  “Push,” said the doctor.

  “Breathe,” said Penn.

  “Poppy,” said Rosie. “Poppy. Poppy. Poppy.”

  Was that why? Was she just trying endlessly to make a daughter to fulfill an ancient dream of her sister's, a ten-year-old's dream at that? Did she believe this daughter would grow up and be, at ten, the little girl she'd lost, Poppy herself, picking up where Poppy had left off, fulfilling all the promise of that stymied, hacked-off, stubbed-out little life? As long as she kept her womb full, might Poppy, some version of Poppy—some waiting, watchful, wandering Poppy demon—gather up all her errant atoms and come home again? Was it creepy to imagine your dead sister taking up residence in your uterus? Wasn't it purported to be a sign of insanity to do the same thing over and over expecting different results?

  One card short of a deck. One waffle short of a stack. One horse short of a … group of horses.

  Or was it some long-bred, deep-sown conviction that the more children the better because you never knew when you might lose one? They had all been so broken when Poppy died, Rosie and her mom and dad. One was not enough. One was always out of balance. It was no longer two against two. There was no longer anyone to play with, to run to, to spare. Her mother, she knew, saw double, saw Poppy always at the edges, in Rosie's shadow, at Rosie's side during school plays and dances and graduation ceremonies, Poppy just behind Rosie and Penn at the wedding, Poppy panting quietly at Rosie's side while her babies were all being born. Even when Rosie's father left the world just before Roo came into it, her mother saw Poppy's ghostly outline alongside Rosie's swollen belly at graveside, quietly weeping for all that was lost, and it wasn't just their father. At least then, it was one against one again. Balance restored.

  One is the loneliest number. Never put all your eggs in one basket.

  So maybe that was why. Or maybe Rosie and Penn just liked babies, their promise and chaos and mess, the way babies all started the same and almost instantly became entirely different. Rosie loved the high-pitched pandemonium of her big, sprawling family, muddled love filling up their farmhouse-clubhouse, a cacophony only she could make out, a whirling storm with her and Penn, grinning together, spinning together, at the center.

  “Push,” said the doctor.

  “Breathe,” said Penn.

  “Poppy,” said Rosie.

  And then, soon, “It's a boy! A healthy, beautiful, perfect, impatient baby boy,” the doctor said. “Fast little guy. Good thing you didn't hit traffic.”
r />   One fell swoop, Rosie thought. Once upon a time.

  Takes one to know one. A baby brother. At least the boys would know what to do.

  One Date

  Penn was an only child. On their first date when Rosie said, “So, do you have brothers or sisters?” and Penn said, “Nope. Only child,” Rosie had replied, “Oh, I'm so sorry,” as if he'd said he had only three months to live or had been raised above an artisan deli by vegans.

  “Oh, thanks. It's okay,” he'd said, and realized only a few beats later that that response was entirely wrong. He was having trouble concentrating. He was having trouble doing anything because blood was coursing through him twice as fast and hard as usual owing to the fact that he could not slow his heart, which had been in a state since several hours before he'd driven over to pick her up. Before he'd done so, he couldn't imagine why. Rosie was a friend of a friend of a friend, an arrangement someone he'd not even known had hit upon at a party one night, drunk and silly. He was in grad school at the time, getting an MFA and waking each morning to wonder why he was getting an MFA. A woman from his medieval lit class (what this class had to do with writing a novel he could not even begin to guess) had dragged before him a woman he did not recognize, who had looked him over appraisingly for a bit before finally asking, “So. Want to date a doctor?”

  “I'm sorry?”

  “I know a single doctor who's into poets.”

  “I'm not a poet.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I don't.”

  “She's real cute. I think you might really hit it off.”

  “You don't know my name.”

  “She's not into names.”

  “That wasn't my point.”

  “Still.”

  How could he argue with that logic? Still. There was nothing to say in response to still. He shrugged. He had a policy at the time never to say no to new and potentially peculiar experiences in case he needed things to write about later. Dating a doctor who liked poets because someone he'd never met before thought they'd hit it off seemed like it fell into this category.