Graduates in Wonderland

by Jessica Pan

  I had crammed for the past week and miraculously, the lesson seemed to flow and I solved all the problems correctly on the first try. This may be because Josh is bearlike and comforting, and I did not feel threatened by him at all. Thank God he’s not my type—­curly dark hair, very tall and stocky, and wears sneakers. Very American.

  My final step to securing the job is retaking the SAT. This Saturday, I’m going to spend four and a half hours being seventeen again.

  It’s the moment of truth: Did Brown make me smarter or dumber?

  After I passed the audition, Josh sat with me and gave me recommendations for the city, even though I’ve been here for a year. I only remember two things he said:

  1.Don’t date Frenchmen. I don’t trust them.

  2.You’ll get a lot of shit if you speak English loudly in public, so suppress it the best you can.

  Thanks, Josh. However, that advice was too little, too late.

  Love,

  Rach

  YEAR THREE

  OCTOBER 1

  Jess to Rachel

  I just spent the last hour cowering away from my window because it sounded like there was a wheezing old man dying on my porch. Or people with emphysema having sex. Either way, I did not know how to handle the situation. Finally I ran to get Dylan, my six-­foot-­five Irish housemate. I pushed him outside. He looked around and figured out that the noise was coming from a tree outside my window.

  “It’s a wombat,” he said. “They’re like little Australian bears that live in trees and hiss.”

  I’ve never seen one before. In photos it looks like a cuddly bear, but all I know is that its moan sounds like a raspy death rattle. So many new animals in Australia.

  I had to fetch Dylan instead of Sam because Sam flew back to Sydney this morning. We’re still trying to see each other every other weekend and every time he leaves, I always pull him back for one more kiss or try to keep him in my bed for a few minutes longer. After he’s gone, everything seems bleak and lonely for a few hours.

  We are living two lives. On the weekends we get to be together and I tell him everything about my week as we walk around trying all the delicious brunch places in Melbourne, and at night we fall asleep in each other’s arms.

  The remainder of the time, I’m alone, listless, texting him from my unmade bed about how much I miss him because he is all the way in Sydney. But I get over it eventually, because this is what normal is for us when he lives five hundred miles away.

  I’m still getting used to calling him my boyfriend. Even saying boyfriend just sounds foreign to me. That is something else that other people say. I’ve just realized that I’ve never really been a girlfriend before and I have no idea how to do this. Is it just kissing and sex as well as going to dinner? Birthday presents? Bringing them chicken soup when they’re sick?

  I’ve spent my life with long spells of being single interspersed with very short relationships, and then being single again, looking for someone new. Now I’m committed to Sam, and it feels serious and real for the first time in my life. But despite all the loving feelings I have for Sam, I still don’t know if I’m doing this right. How do other people in relationships feel? I know that I feel safe with him. He calls me, without fail, every night, and always texts back.

  My days in Melbourne are spent at class, and then my nights are spent alone. The only people I really see on a regular basis are people from my program. One guy, Callum, always tries to sit by me. He’s extremely loud—­the kind of guy who will walk across a crowded room and try to fall down to get attention. The kind of guy who gets pantsed and finds it hilarious. The kind of guy who will raise his hand to purposely deliver the wrong answer in a deadpan voice. When I first met him, I felt like I was in high school and the class clown was sitting by me.

  Lately, I feel like all of his gags are within my sight line and are for the sole purpose of getting my attention. He has taken to calling me “America,” in my program full of Australians, especially during class debates during our journalism ethics class. “Uh-­oh,” he’ll tell the class. “America’s getting riled up again.” When I’m walking through campus, he’ll appear from nowhere, running at me at full speed, yelling, “Calm down, America!! It’s just me, for Chrissakes.” And then he’ll linger, accompanying me to wherever I’m going. I feel like he is thisclose to offering to carry my books.

  I haven’t told Sam about this. I don’t know what I would even say. “There’s a guy at school who likes to fall down in front of me. I thought you should know.” So instead I say nothing. And so it goes on: Callum always tries to sit by me in class, and I let him. He knows I have a boyfriend—­when he overheard me talking about Sam, he jumped into the conversation and asked hundreds of questions about Sam: “What does he look like? What does he do? Where does he live? How did you meet? What color is his hair?” He asked so many questions that I ended up walking away from the conversation feeling like I’d somehow done Sam a disservice by answering Callum’s reductive questions.

  I could also see what Callum was doing. I’ve done the same thing myself—­trying to find out everything about some disagreeable situation, because if I can break it down into a handful of facts, there must be some way to reverse it. It’s just strange to suddenly be on the receiving end of this.

  Sam’s on a flight back to Sydney as I write this. Every weekend Callum invites me out with him and some of our classmates. “Come on, America. I know you don’t know anyone else in this city.” And he’s right. I have no friends. I’ve resisted going so far, but that’s also because I’m usually with Sam.

  I’m so confused right now. I like Callum’s attention. Callum both confuses and enhances my feelings for Sam. He’s irresponsible and not as kind as Sam, but he does make me laugh so much. And yet, when Sam left this morning, I wanted to follow him to Sydney and never come back here.

  Do other girlfriends feel this way?

  Love,

  Jess

  P.S. My Australian housemate just came home. I told her there was a wombat in my tree and she told me there was an idiot in my brain because it’s actually a possum (wombats live in the countryside and can’t climb trees). It turns out Dylan knew all along. Stupid Irish humor.

  OCTOBER 5

  Rachel to Jess

  I also have no idea how to be a girlfriend. I love sleeping alone and I avoid sick people at all costs. I don’t even cook for myself, so I need someone who appreciates a lovingly baked frozen pizza. In exchange, I would like somebody who would chase a fake wombat out of a tree for me. Is Dylan available for travel?

  However, it has been a long time since I have been a girlfriend, but, based on my observations, you just have to add friendship to a torrid romance. Or a torrid romance to an existing friendship. Hence, girl friend.

  Okay, I don’t actually know. That formula totally failed for me and Olivier. I keep thinking that the second Olivier considered me his girlfriend, he immediately saw everything bad about me and found me wanting.

  So...I’m not over him yet. To try and move on, I’ve taken to ignoring him. Please adopt this same “He does not exist” attitude toward Callum. I feel like you and Sam are still trying to figure out your own version of normal.

  Everywhere I go in Paris, I see couples. Even now, I’m sitting across from a doe-­eyed pair in a café called Merci, which is full of books, oriental carpets, and chandeliers, eating a tartine, which you would love (French bread with butter and jam).

  I’m about to begin classes again. Marie has graduated, the exchange students I knew last year have left, but I now know things like where the bathroom is and that French professors never answer their e-mails. I’m spending more time alone now because I’m avoiding run-­ins with Olivier, which means I haven’t seen Jacques, Marc, and Sasha lately either. It’s a fresh, if slightly lonely, start.

  Last week was my final session of teacher training at the Am
erican Prep center. On my way there, I always pass a bunch of American establishments, like the Hard Rock Café, Starbucks, and McDonald’s. It jolts me out of my French train of thought when I walk by. “New York? Is that you? You look bad.”

  Whenever I walk in to meet my boss, Josh, an actual New Yorker, for a while, I do forget I’m in Paris. Last week, he grinned at me as he tried to coax me into teaching my first official class. I thought I would be training to teach the SAT, but instead I was assigned to teach English...for the Ministry of Defense. Instead of fifteen-­year-­old boys and girls, I have to teach twenty-­five French military men who need to pass an English test to be promoted to lieutenant.

  Josh saw my face when he broke the news to me and tried to make it out that I was tough enough to handle them. I had pictured myself teaching awkward teenagers, and now I was supposed to face rows of soldiers? But it was the only class that hadn’t been filled, and I figured it was now or never.

  When I walked into my first class, I realized that I was younger than all of my student soldiers by at least ten years. Thank God they didn’t come in uniform, but they did all have the same haircut, with the sides of their heads shaved. They were all chattering away in French, and I cleared my throat. They didn’t realize I was the teacher and kept talking. I wrote my name and the syllabus on the board and cleared my throat again.

  Finally, I just shouted, “Hey!” and they shut up. As soon as I started the lesson, it wasn’t scary anymore, because I can speak English and they can’t.

  Their English is at the level where they can string together full sentences when put on the spot, but when I ask a question, it takes...a lot...of time...to get an...answer...? (This is exactly how I used to speak French.) Also, when they ask some questions, I struggle to answer, because teaching English is like being asked to describe how breathing works. You can do it, but you don’t know how to describe how. The lungs? Try to suck the air in and then push it out. In...and out...and that’s why we use the past participle! No more questions.

  Nevertheless, I didn’t think that I would have this much fun teaching. I like seeing them get better at English. It was satisfying when during our lesson on animals, they finally stopped talking about the different “races” of dogs and started saying “breeds.” And also, I like having all the answers for once. I like teaching something in which there are correct answers, as opposed to writing vague essays about French film philosophy.

  I know it’s hard to believe, but I’m not shy when I’m in front of a class, holding a black marker and writing on a whiteboard. In class, I get great reception and consider becoming a stand-­up comic for about thirty seconds before I realize that my jokes are all about gerunds versus infinitives.

  Josh asked me how long I think I’ll be in Paris for, and I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I have nine more months left in my film studies program and then what? What the hell do you do with a master’s degree in film?

  The idea of being a professor has slowly taken root in my mind. I really like being in front of a classroom of students, and in my fantasy, I’m a professor instructing a lecture hall about Casablanca and Singin’ in the Rain and Blow-­Up. I like that idea. A lot.

  Professors have always seemed like magical keepers of knowledge, and I know that I’ll feel young and over my head, at least at first. But then I remember that visiting art history professor at Brown who kept tripping over the microphone and kept confusing Manet with Monet. I know I’m at least as good as her, right?

  I think film might be something I want to study for a long time. Film itself is only a century old, and there’s still so much to add to the field, unlike English literature or art history. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about an area that nobody’s researched fully yet—­the fluctuating popularity of European actresses in 1930s Hollywood due to complex relationships between America and Europe. The idea came to me after watching Greta Garbo in Ninotchka, when she plays a ridiculous Soviet comrade; after this movie, her Hollywood career plummeted because tensions in Europe made Americans start to distrust Europeans and immigrants.

  Maybe I could even trick somebody into paying me to research it.

  So I met with my advisor, Pierre, to discuss pursuing a PhD in film studies.

  “Do it,” he said. “But don’t do it here.”

  “Why not?” I felt panicked. In my mind, I’d already planned my next decade in France. I would have a nice little summer house in Normandy (nothing ostentatious—­wouldn’t want to be gaudy) and a horse named Maurice, and eventually marry a Parisian director who makes perfect crème brûlée.

  “I wouldn’t recommend that anybody do their PhD in France if they don’t have absolutely bilingual, beautiful, academic written French.” He leaned forward over his desk. “Think about where the academic thought is exciting and new. Where it really fits your specialty. And go there.”

  As soon as he said it, I knew that Pierre was right about my having to leave France if I really want to continue this work. But I want my life here to last forever!

  For the moment, I’m talking a lot more about split infinitives than about Gene Kelly, but maybe that will change one day.

  Love,

  Marlene Dietrich, showing her legs to the troops

  OCTOBER 7

  Jess to Rachel

  Teaching military men sounds scary, until I imagine you making them do push-­ups every time they misconjugate a verb. “You TELLED him the command? NO. Get down and give me vingt push-­ups!” (I just had to Google “twenty” in French.)

  I haven’t seen Sam for two weeks and even though we talk every night, the distance is wearing on me. I really am starting to feel like we are leading different lives, and it’s so frustrating when all I want to do is just be in the same room for once.

  I can’t stop thinking: Can I be with one man for the rest of my life? Is one person ever enough? And why am I just now thinking of these things? Maybe it’s because my friend from home Paige is engaged. I felt like that was something other people did, and now that my oldest friend is taking the plunge, suddenly it feels like I need to suddenly get my shit together.

  Callum has started texting me. He began by sending me questions about our writing assignments, but now his messages have progressed into funny asides that are really specific to me. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know the boundaries! And he’s funny, so I text him back.

  He’s the kind of guy I used to like. The kind of guy I used to date. The kind of guy I thought I’d outgrown.

  Last night, a bunch of my classmates went to a pub. Australians can drink, and I have no hope of keeping up. I drink about half a pint for every three they can down. My classmates like to gossip about everyone in our program and make wild projections about our lecturers (we like to imagine most of them have had scandalous affairs with politicians and media moguls here). Australians have a very laid-­back attitude and everyone is always over-­the-­top with teasing, but last night things might have gone too far.

  Callum got very drunk and announced to everyone at the table that he likes to pretend that I am his girlfriend. WHAT THE FUCK? The only reply I could think of was, “But I have a boyfriend,” and he said, “Yes, I know. But I also like to pretend that he does not exist.”

  Everyone at the table awkwardly shifted in their seats and then changed the conversation.

  I was stunned by his announcement, but the absolute truth is also this: I felt flattered. I felt acknowledged. Especially because I’ve been feeling neglected by Sam’s absence. And more than that, though—­I felt a flickering attraction toward Callum. This was immediately snuffed out by overwhelming guilt. I didn’t talk to him for the rest of the night, but when I got up to leave the pub, he jumped up to offer to walk me to my tram stop. On the walk over, he said, “I’m just going to pretend that we’re holding hands.”

  Finally, I stopped him.

  “You can’t say s
hit like that. I have a boyfriend.”

  “I know, I know! I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. Look, I just...” He trailed off before he feigned stealing my purse, which he thinks is a funny joke for onlookers. He laughed a lot, and so did I, because it was funny, and laughing made the flirtation feel harmless again. My tram arrived and I got on it alone.

  We do not hug good-­bye. We do not touch at all. And yet, I have to keep telling myself that I’ve done nothing wrong, which makes me feel like I have done something really wrong.

  He’s getting to me.

  How do I know if Sam is The One? Why do I even think there is a “One”? Sam’s the first guy I’ve ever made a real commitment to, but I don’t actually know if I can even keep a commitment. I don’t yet know what kind of girlfriend I am—­the kind who stays forever or the kind who could leave her boyfriend for another man.

  Not that that man is necessarily Callum. Callum’s just fun. He loves to make a fool out of himself, but I’m not sure there’s more to his personality than that. What I do know is that Callum looks at me like I’m the shiniest object in the room, like he’s never met anyone like me before. Maybe he does this because I’m an American girl, maybe because he’s never left Melbourne in his entire life, maybe because he sees me as a challenge. I’m not really sure why. He even enjoys it when I tell him to fuck off when he’s annoying me in the library. In turn, I find his unflappability attractive, even though I’m not naturally attracted to him physically. He’s losing his hair and he chews his fingernails and he has very thick eyebrows that look like caterpillars, but I find him amusing. I find myself looking forward to seeing him at class.

  How do I pretend he doesn’t exist when he constantly seeks me out?

  J

  OCTOBER 11

  Rachel to Jess

  You know, what’s strange is that I can easily put myself in Callum’s place. I can hear what he is thinking: “I make her laugh. We have the same interests. I just need to push hard enough. That boyfriend will fade away at some point—­most boyfriends do.”