by Elise Juska
Anna was lying in bed, toes hooked in the coils on the underside of Alexis’s mattress frame. “That’s a little extreme, isn’t it?”
“Did you get my messages?”
“I got them,” she admitted. “I’ve just been really busy.”
“You need to call me, Anna,” her mother said, and though this irritated her a little, she said, “I know. Sorry.”
“I was getting worried.”
“I said I was sorry,” she added, but then felt guilty, hearing the fretfulness in her mother’s voice. She pictured her alone in that quiet kitchen, sink ledge lined with ragged balls of steel wool, a pile of bruised oranges in the cracked blue bowl on the table. Then the reception grew fuzzy, and she felt another pang of annoyance: That entire house was a technological black hole.
“So,” her mother asked. “How are you doing?”
“Good,” Anna quipped. “Great, actually.” She provided a quick inventory of her classes: Intro to Psychology, Nineteenth-Century American Novelists, World History, Preoccupations of Poets. “My first-year seminar,” she explained.
“Ah.”
“It’s taught by a grad student.”
“Is it?”
“That’s how it is here,” Anna hastened to add. She’d heard her mother criticize some of the younger teachers in her department for being too casual with students, too friendlike, and even though she still smarted a little, thinking of Siena and her paper, she didn’t want Maggie to get the wrong idea. “She’s really smart,” she said.
“I’m sure she is,” her mother replied. “And the workload? It’s manageable?”
“Totally,” she said, digging a finger into the mattress frame. She wasn’t going to mention the B-. She considered mentioning James—her mother, she thought, would probably appreciate his intellect. She’d always thought Gavin cared too little about the world, but James was Gavin’s opposite: He seemed to care almost too much.
Then her mother asked, “How’s that roommate?”
That roommate: So she hadn’t liked Alexis. Anna wasn’t surprised. “She’s great, actually,” Anna told her. “You kind of have to get to know her.” As if on cue, the door opened and Alexis walked in, tossing her backpack on the floor and saying, “Can we go to lunch, please? I’m starving.”
Anna pointed at the phone.
“And it’s going well?” her mother asked. “Living with someone?”
“It’s bueno,” Anna replied. Her mother paused at this, but Alexis smiled. “She’s the perfect roommate,” she added, prompting Alexis to arch one brow. Anna mouthed, My mom.
“Well,” her mother said, then lapsed into quiet. Anna heard a crackle of static on the line. “It sounds like you’re really settling in there,” she said, and despite the poor reception, Anna thought she sounded a little forlorn, compelling her to ask: “So what’s going on at home?”
Immediately, she regretted it. As soon as her mother started talking, Anna’s patience began to ebb away. It was always this way. Whatever sympathy she felt for her mother in the abstract, or sitting in Theresa’s office, tended to erode in the wake of actual life—the hours she spent marking papers, or the way she clutched the steering wheel when driving, or her habit of editing her sentences while she spoke.
“Some of them are promising,” her mother was saying. “They have promise. So they’ll come around. They always do.”
She was talking about her classes, of course. About her students.
“It’s still early. Not even October—”
Alexis was rolling her wrist in impatient circles—hurry, hurry, hurry. Anna winced, holding up one finger. Then the phone quivered, a text message incoming. Anna held the screen away from her face and registered the 607 area code—Can’t stop thinking about you, it said.
She bolted upright, banging her head on Alexis’s mattress frame. “Um, crazy person?” Alexis laughed, and Anna extended the phone, widening her eyes. Alexis peered at the screen, then let out a scream and clapped a hand over her mouth. It buzzed twice more.
Hope that doesn’t freak you out
This is James btw
Anna’s mother’s voice was still leaking from the phone. “Oh my God, hang up,” Alexis whispered. “Hang up, hang up, hang up.” Anna pressed the phone to her pulsing ear. Her mother was saying, “So it seems to have died down but—”
“Mom,” she interrupted, “I’m sorry, but I kind of have to go.”
Her mother paused, but when she spoke again, she sounded wounded. “Go?”
“It’s just that I have class—”
“But I just asked you a question, Anna,” her mother said.
“What was it?”
“Weren’t you listening?”
“I was, but I didn’t hear it,” she said. “It must be the reception.”
“I asked if you ever saw this Facebook post,” her mother said.
“Facebook post?” Anna asked, rolling her eyes at Alexis, who was looking at her, incredulous.
“A post on Facebook, Anna,” her mother said. “Did you not hear what I just said?”
“Sorry, I just didn’t hear the last part—”
“I left you a message about it,” she said. “Days ago.”
“I must have just forgot.”
Her mother paused, then spoke evenly. “This post,” she said, “was written by one of my former students. On the day of the shooting,” she said, and Anna felt a spike of alarm. Alexis was still staring at her, but Anna looked away. “His name is Luke Finch. He was in my class. Nathan Dugan’s class. He wrote about him—Nathan—and what he wrote was viral, evidently—” But Anna could feel herself tuning out, in self-defense. She kept her eyes on the floor, the carpet with its pattern of brightly colored squares, avoiding her roommate’s eyes. Alexis had been part of that terrible conversation, their first day on campus, but the shooting hadn’t come up since then, and Anna preferred to keep it that way. Conveniently, Alexis didn’t appear too interested in knowing. She didn’t seem anywhere near as affected by these sorts of things as Anna was—Alexis paid attention in the moment but then had the ability to get beyond it, to let troubling things flow past her and move on.
“It’s subsided now, it seems. I just wondered if you’d seen it. I take it that you didn’t,” her mother was saying, just as the phone buzzed again—What are you doing in 15?
Alexis grabbed the phone, read it, then thrust it back toward Anna’s ear. “Seriously,” she hissed. “Hang up now.”
“Mom, listen,” Anna said. “I really have to go.”
Her mother fell silent again. The phone burned against Anna’s cheek. The reception was still crackling, like a small fire hidden somewhere along the invisible tunnel that connected school and home. She closed her eyes, blocking out Alexis’s frantic gestures. She felt sorry for her mother, attempting to navigate that intense Facebook post on the slow computer in her study, but she couldn’t afford to keep worrying about it, not when she was getting overwhelmed herself. “I’ll call you later,” Anna told her. “But I wouldn’t worry about it. That kind of thing is popular for twelve hours and disappears. It sounds like it already has.”
James proposed they meet at a coffee shop six blocks from campus. It had brick walls and exposed copper pipes and faded furniture with embroidered pillows, some with little sayings sewn on them: HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS and IGNORANCE IS BLISS. People were lounging on chairs and couches, tapping on their laptops; most looked like they’d been living there for days. James was waiting by the counter, wearing another in his collection of wrinkled button-downs. His appearance seemed deliberately haphazard; or maybe it was the lack of deliberation that was deliberate.
Anna ordered a nonfat latte, James a rooibos tea.
“Really?” she laughed, but he looked serious.
“What?” he said.
“I don’t know. I guess I assumed you were more of a black coffee guy.”
He wagged a finger at her. “Shallow generalization of the brooding artist. Ts
k, Anna. Tsk.” Then he picked up his mug, a stainless-steel one he’d brought with him, and headed for an empty couch. She followed, worried she’d offended him—she blamed Stafford. She blamed Gavin. She blamed Gavin and his incessant, generic Coke-drinking.
As they sat, James leaned toward her, whispering, “You know I was kidding.”
“Oh,” she said. “Honestly, I wasn’t sure.”
“It takes way more than that to offend me,” James said. Then he leaned back on the couch, crossing his legs at the knee. “Okay,” he said. “Pick a topic.”
“A topic?”
“A good one.”
“Um. Okay.” She skimmed through her mental inventory about James, wanting to avoid anything that might betray the depths of her online research. Finally she said, “Where are you from?” realizing even as she asked the question how uninteresting it was.
But James smacked a palm on his knee. “Right. Yes. Let’s get the basics out of the way so we can talk about the real stuff,” he said. “I’m from New York, but not New York City. Lest you assume I’m a black-coffee-drinking Williamsburg hipster. I grew up three hours from Manhattan in a rich, culturally bankrupt suburb filled with people who prefer to ignore how fucked-up the world is in favor of watching the Real Housewives and Fox News.” He smiled. “Now you.”
“Me.” She was trying to orient herself, to fall into his rhythm, volley back.
“You’re from Maine,” he said.
“Yes.” She was flattered that he knew this. “From a town called Stafford. It’s pretty small. And pretty rural.”
“How small and how rural?”
“I’m not sure, population-wise—”
“Livestock?”
“No livestock,” she said. “We have a barn, though. It’s red. And more or less dilapidated.”
“Nice,” he said approvingly. “Actual rustic, not that fake countrified bullshit. Number of minutes to the nearest Starbucks?”
“Probably fifteen,” she said, and winced. “But that’s because we’re also right next to a college town—”
“Oh, right, right. Because your mom’s a professor.” He tapped his temple. “See? I pay attention.” He pried the top off his mug and removed the dripping tea bag, one of those fancy silken ones with leaves inside, and laid it on a napkin, which it devoured in a quick red stain. “Is she any good?”
“Is who?” Anna said.
“Your mother.”
“What, as a professor?”
“Sure.” He shrugged, stirring a finger in his tea. “Is she challenging? Liberal? Open-minded?”
“How would I know?” Anna said, but of course she did. She had observed her mother’s classes, times when she was off from school and spent the day with her on campus. She was always surprised by how animated her mother would become in front of students, gesturing emphatically and pacing around the room. In such moments, Anna found it hard to imagine her back home marking papers, tucked into the rocking chair, head bowed, scribbling comments so ardently her whole arm shook. “I mean, her students seem to like her,” Anna said. “I hope they do. They’re, like, her whole life.”
James smiled. “Jealous?”
“Yeah,” Anna said sarcastically, though she sometimes was.
“She teaches literature, right?”
“Composition, mostly. It’s a requirement. All students have to take it.”
“Oh,” he said with a knowing nod. “You mean Personal Tragedy 101.”
Anna laughed. Growing up, she and Kim and Janie had frequently sneaked looks at her mother’s students’ papers, piled on the coffee table or the kitchen counter, covered in her tiny handwriting. Her mother hadn’t known, and wouldn’t have liked it if she had, but it was impossible to resist. Reading those papers was like peeking inside someone’s diary. There were your standard-issue personal experiences, grandparents’ deaths and parents’ divorces and eating disorders. Then there was the boy who burned his arms with matches, the girl who had been raped by her babysitter, another girl so anorexic she’d grown fur. That students would divulge such personal things to a teacher, to her mother, Anna had found incredible, though also kind of painful—that these students, kids not so much older than she was, confided in her mother so much more openly than she did. (The fact that the anorexia essay was where she’d gotten some of her own ideas was something she’d never admitted to anyone, not even Janie and Kim.)
“My brother had a class like that,” James was saying. “At his community college. It was a joke. I mean, it’s a tragedy contest, right?”
Anna shook her head. “I know.”
“You just exploit the shitty stuff that’s happened to you, because how can you write about your lifesaving stay in rehab and get less than a B plus?” As Anna wondered if he was still referring to his brother, James continued, “Your mom must read some crazy shit.”
“Honestly,” Anna said, lowering her voice conspiratorially, “you wouldn’t believe some of the things they write.”
“Try me.” James sat forward, rubbing his palms together in anticipation. “Tell me about the worst offender.”
“Alison Bower,” Anna said—she didn’t have to think. But in the next moment, a memory returned: her mother in the barn, the morning after the shooting, Nathan Dugan’s paper curled on her knees.
James said, “Motherfucking Alison Bower,” and slammed a fist on the table in mock outrage. Anna forced a laugh. “What was her problem? Misbegotten Tinder hookup? Parents didn’t love her enough?”
“Actually, she was suicidal,” Anna said. James paused; his face seemed caught between expressions. Anna straightened the smile off her face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I take it back. It isn’t funny. It’s just that my mom got kind of obsessed with her.” Another image came rushing back, this one honed through repeated analysis in Theresa’s office: the November night her mother had come home late from taking Alison Bower to some kind of campus crisis center. She’d curled on the end of the couch, visibly shaken, while Anna had felt annoyed, invisible, hungry; she hadn’t eaten for two days.
“How did she deal with it?” James asked.
“She didn’t—I mean, she’s fine. She’s alive.”
“No, I meant your mom.”
“My mom?” Anna paused. “I mean, she got her help. And I guess, saved her life, basically.” She didn’t admit to all the rest: how Anna had come to resent Alison Bower, and also envy Alison Bower. How, over the years, she’d loomed as this enigmatic and (according to Theresa) symbolic figure: the troubled, talented teenager her mother had rushed to save. It occurred to Anna that Alison Bower—that all her mothers’ students, years of them, stacks and stacks of them—had been, always, the same age she was right now.
“She got lucky then,” James said. “Most of the time, the people who really need help can’t get it. It all depends who you are.” He seemed about to say more, but instead shook his head hard, as if clearing water from his ears. “Too dark for a first date, right?”
“Not at all,” she said quickly.
“You should know I have a tendency to take things way too seriously.”
“So do I,” Anna said, and James paused to smile at her, linger on her. She smiled back, savoring his use of the word date.
“Okay,” he said finally, picking up his mug again. “So your mom is a willing receptacle for eighteen-year-olds’ personal tragedies. What about your dad?”
They talked for the next two hours. Anna told James that her dad was a graphic designer living in Portland and had a newish girlfriend who was the exact opposite of her mom. She learned that James’s parents were both remarried (divorced when he was six) and that he had one brother (older, recovering addict, college dropout, currently living with his mother), plus three half-siblings, his father’s kids from marriage number two. They touched briefly on their past relationships (Anna calling Gavin kind of mainstream, James describing his ex as chronically victimized, which Anna absorbed with a concerned nod, not letting on that she’d s
earched for her picture online), then alighted on politics (Anna vaguely identifying herself as liberal, and James speaking passionately about democratic socialism, which she made a mental note to Google later on), and they compared their hyphenated last names. James’s mother’s last name was the one after the hyphen, which was less common—she used to be a feminist, he said, a freethinker, before she moved to the suburbs with his soul-sucking corporate dad. Anna told him how, in Stafford, her last name was such a novelty that her classmates had nicknamed her D-B.
“Sounds pretty fucking insular,” he said.
“Oh my God,” she breathed. “It was.”
Then James leaned forward, pressing one finger to her knee. “Can I ask you something?”
“Yes.”
“This is a very important thing I’ve been thinking about.”
Anna nodded, aware of the pressure of his fingertip, the size of a dime.
“What do you think will happen when all the kids with the hyphenated names start reproducing? What will their last names be?”
She smiled a little. “This is a very important thing you’ve been thinking about?”
“Why not? I mean, just say, for the sake of example, we get married.”
Anna’s heart dove in her chest, but she stayed composed. “You and me,” she said.
“You and me. What would our strategy be? Combine all four?”
“No way,” she said. “Too cruel. Think about how hard it would be to monogram towels.”
“Oh, right.” He nodded. “I hadn’t fully considered the towel angle.”
“Maybe we’d have to choose our two favorites.”
“Or fuse all four into one giant portmanteau.”
Portmanteau—it was one of her favorite words.
“And here’s another thing,” he said, cupping her knee. His thumbnail was inked with blue. “What do you make of the ratio of kids with hyphenated names to kids with divorced parents? Because it seems to me, in my carefully conducted anecdotal research, more kids with hyphens have parents who are divorced. Do you agree?”
“I guess I’ve never really thought about it.”
“So, say I’m right.” He smiled. “Then the question becomes, are the parents who go with the hyphen less mainstream to begin with, so they’re more willing to break up if the marriage goes off the rails, or did they hyphenate because they sensed at the beginning they wouldn’t stay together? So both spouses were preemptively staking their claim?”
