Graduates in Wonderland

by Jessica Pan

  I caught the bouquet this morning. I leapt into the air above the nine other single bridesmaids. There’s a photo in which I can actually see my calves flexing as I leap into the air. If you can’t tell, I’m so proud of myself.

  I wonder what Sam’s reaction will be when I tell him.

  As the afternoon faded, Paige and her new husband got into a car and drove away toward their honeymoon. I got into a car with my parents. As my dad drove us home on the familiar roads, I felt very young again, until I looked down at my lap and the bridal bouquet. We drove past the local bookstore where I imagined my alternate homebody self working the cash register—­my dad told me that it was now closed. Also, my favorite field is now a used-­car lot. Life back home has not stood still without me as I had hoped.

  I don’t know what to do with myself at this moment. Wish you were here right now. I miss you so much. I’m flying back to Australia tomorrow, which isn’t any closer to Paris at all. The world feels too big tonight.

  Love,

  Jess

  APRIL 20

  Rachel to Jess

  Today, after I got back from my film class, Josh came to my apartment. He’s borrowing my air mattress for when his parents visit Paris next week. Sylvia does not know this, though. We are still not supposed to be alone together per her instructions, but Josh initiated it, and I’ve missed him. Missed our conversations about Hemingway and grand adventures.

  We sat down to talk for a moment, and I offered him some wine that was on the table. He refused but reached past me with one arm to pick up the bottle and examine it. For a second, seeing his face coming toward me, I thought he was going to kiss me. The blood rushed out of my face and I lost all feeling in my hands. Then he said something about the wine and I laughed super hard. I don’t even know if he made a joke.

  After that, he stayed just long enough to get the mattress and browse my books.

  His eyes immediately fell on my copy of Fiesta, the Cuban edition of The Sun Also Rises I bought on a class trip to Havana ten years ago.

  I told him its story: I spent one hot morning at the book markets, where I found this volume and zeroed in on it. I opened the cover and saw that it was published in 1964. First Cuban edition. And it had a name scrawled in the front.

  My heart racing, I asked in Spanish, “Hemingway write here? HEMINGWAY WRITE HERE?” pointing to the signature on the front page.

  “Si, si.”

  So I bought it for what seemed like an amazingly cheap twenty-­five dollars. When I got home, I showed it to my father, who immediately pointed out that Hemingway died in 1961...three years before this book was published.

  Side note: Also during this trip, a prostitute asked me if my breasts were real. And I got food poisoning and had to have an antinausea shot in my butt in front of a bunch of Cubans. It was also the first time I ever drank rum. I take this book on all of my travels, because it was my first real adventure. I almost never open the book anymore, but I carry it around with me when I travel. I guess that I also had dreams of being epic.

  Josh listened to my experiences in Cuba, laughing a lot in his big-­hearted way. The story of the book seemed to touch some chord in him. Then he stood up and left my apartment in order to make it home to Sylvia on time.

  I sat on my bed thinking for a long time after he left. I would still have bought that book today, full of the illicit pleasure of being in Cuba, but I no longer believe that people actually live the way they do in its story—­all pithy words and dramatic adventures.

  In a way, that’s what London would be for me: embracing a feasible life even though it may not be as grand as I had imagined when I was fifteen. I find myself hoping to get the good news from England that my PhD will be funded. But the idea of living in a larger-­than-­life Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, Janis Joplin kind of way is hard to let go.

  All my love,

  Hemingway Write Here

  APRIL 24

  Jess to Rachel

  I like that story. You’ve never told me any of those things about Cuba. Sort of makes me want to go. I’m kind of up for anywhere right now because it’s getting harder and harder to settle here.

  Since I’ve been back from Texas, Sam and I have been talking about our future together. We might want to stay in Melbourne—­Australia is our shaky middle ground. He can’t work in America; I can’t work in the United Kingdom. I can stay here for a few months after my program ends, looking for someone to sponsor my work visa. We’ve been talking about this a lot lately and there’s been a very sudden, bizarre development. As a UK citizen, he can stay here too, under one very big condition.

  The only way to extend Sam’s current visa is if he spends the next three months doing manual labor or agricultural work in the country. There’s a shortage of willing agricultural workers in Australia and so the government’s solution is to put sad Englishmen who want to stay in the country for their girlfriends to work on farms, cattle stations, and vineyards. Apparently, most farms have a few Irish or English guys doing anything from picking fruit to working with livestock for minimum wage, just so they can stay in Australia for another year.

  Doesn’t this sound so old-­timey? Ye shall sow, ye shall reap, and ye shall be rewarded with...another year in Surfers Paradise!

  We’d both been trying to avoid this option, but time has run out. If Sam wants to stay in Australia with me, he’ll have to leave next week for the countryside. Every online description of the dull, physically taxing jobs, like fruit picking, is tempered by the phrase, “but if you are working with fun people, it’ll be a laugh!” The photos are all of guys picking oranges or shoveling manure, doubled over with laughter.

  It’s winter in Australia, and Sam has figured out that the least taxing work would be to go to Australia’s wine country and work trimming the branches or stems of the grapevines on a vineyard (known as pruning). He must head to the bush (the countryside) or the outback, because the final condition of his visa is that he can’t work near a city.

  He made a few phone calls to some wineries and is headed to a town in New South Wales called Canowindra.

  Canowindra, population 1,500.

  Sam spoke with the owner of the organic vineyard, which is on the outskirts of the town, and mail only gets delivered once or twice a week. To get food other than basics, they have to drive to a town three hours away. The closest big city is Sydney, which is two hundred miles away.

  And so this is our only option if we want to remain in Australia together. Sam seems very stoic and resigned to the manual labor that I just know will ruin his good hands.

  Three months feels like an eternity to me, especially because we’ll be apart for most of it. After he gets settled there, I’m going to visit him in Canowindra for a week.

  Unfortunately, everything I know about the country comes from Little House on the Prairie: the dog dies, Mary goes blind, and I need to hoard all of my food.

  Love,

  The Pruner’s Girlfriend

  APRIL 26

  Rachel to Jess

  What? Pruning to stay in the country? That is the strangest rule I’ve ever heard of. Are you sure it’s real? Did your Irish housemate tell you that?

  I’m from Wisconsin, where Little House on the Prairie is from, and I read the entire series, so here’s some advice: If rural Australia’s anything like those books, you can look forward to spending your nights listening to fiddle music and sitting around in sewing circles.

  It feels like just yesterday that you two were secretly in love with each other from afar, and now he’s willing to sacrifice three months of his life for the good of your relationship. It’s kind of amazing, actually—­three months of manual labor is like nine years doing anything else.

  It’s impossible to think that far in the future for me. In three months, I might be gone from Paris if my funding comes through.

  Oh—­and
so will Josh.

  Yesterday Josh and I went to sit on the steps of the stock exchange. This is, of course, forbidden, but we have the same lunch break and he wanted to talk to me. But instead of laughing at the tourists or gossiping about the teachers at work, he got weird—­quiet and excited at the same time—­and told me that he is engaged.

  He asked Sylvia to marry him last week. It wasn’t that it was out of nowhere, but it still took me aback. I had to suppress a gasp and then compensated by acting a little too happy for him.

  “Eeek, Josh, how exciting, omigod, I can’t believe it! That’s amazing! When is the wedding?!?!”

  It was me on fifteen cups of coffee.

  His fiancée’s dream is to move to New York, and they’ve been planning their life there for several months. And now their departure is only a few weeks away.

  I can’t believe that he’s leaving.

  And also—­Josh! I always said Paris was worth a million New Yorks!

  He’s going to work for a competing education company, and he already gave his notice at American Prep. I had no idea. Was he afraid to confide in me at all, having been forbidden by Sylvia?

  I do kind of hate Sylvia for that. I know that if I were her, I would act the same way, but Josh and I were good friends and I feel like she kept something really important from growing between the two of us. At the same time, though, I know that whatever he and I could have had would only have infringed upon what they have together, so I guess I understand why she had to stop it. Even if I don’t like it.

  It’s hard to say good-­bye to someone when you haven’t realized the full friendship potential. When we left college, we knew all of our close friends so well. The kind of closeness that grows from spending day after day in six-­hour-­long conversations. The friendships were intense. And now I’ve met—­and am losing—­somebody who had the potential to be this kind of friend, but who will now never be one to me.

  Anyway, the wedding is next summer, in Bordeaux.

  I think if you can make plans that far in advance, you are officially in the adult club. My current life has the same expiration date as my student visa.

  Love,

  Rach

  P.S. A student of mine from an English class for adults asked me out. I finished teaching the class this week. Ethical/unethical to go out with him? Please write your answer in fifty words or less.

  APRIL 27

  Jess to Rachel

  Rachel, I’m the girl who pursued, dated, slept with, and then followed her intern to Australia (but let’s make sure this doesn’t go in my obituary). Do you really have to ask me what I think about dating one of your students?

  I’ve started interning at an evening news show at a national TV station here. I shadow reporters all day and after filming interviews during the morning and afternoon, I sit with them as we edit and put together the video packages. So much of putting together TV reports involves going through the archive, looking for stock footage to fill up airtime while making it somehow relevant to your story. We once resorted to using footage of a man eating a donut for a report on a drought that wiped out the sugarcane crop. Today, I spent all morning with a reporter trying to figure out how to show postpartum depression on the screen.

  “Would a shot of a woman furrowing her eyebrows at her child be over-­the-­top? Should we stick to a generic woman sitting on a park bench, looking out into the distance?”

  But I like the actual reporting aspect—­finding stories and interviewing people. I wonder if I could actually get a job as a TV reporter in Sydney or Melbourne. I worked with a reporter our age and she said it took her three years of grunt work at the station to even get an interview to be a reporter.

  But I’m already twenty-­five! The second-­oldest person in my journalism program! Oh God, I spent my requisite entry-­level time in China editing at a magazine and now it feels like I have to start over again climbing the ladder in the Western world.

  It’s also strange to be an unpaid intern again who doesn’t want to get in anyone’s way. I miss being the one who told the interns what to do. As in, “Write this. File that. Date me.”

  I’m also creating and editing my own TV news stories for school. I sit in a dark editing suite rewinding and fast-­forwarding the footage over and over to cut it just right. I’m slowly losing my mind watching myself on-­screen. After my radio course, I’m finally capable of listening to my own voice—­but this is like watching a news anchor that I really want to make fun of.

  The worst part, though, is filming in public. Whenever I try to look into the camera to say something really serious, a crowd of people gathers around to watch me. It is total hell.

  Maybe I should stick to radio or print. I’m still scrambling to find my next step because my program and my internship finish up in a few weeks. What next?

  I’m trying to book my journey to Canowindra to visit Sam, but I can’t go for some time—­school is still in session. Every night, he calls from the vineyard’s landline and logs our conversations so that he can pay back the vineyard owner for the long-­distance calls. Apparently it is 1900 there.

  I wonder if I’ll show up and he’ll open the door wearing overalls with a wheat stalk hanging from the corner of his mouth and have a twangy Australian accent. I kind of think he’d look dapper in overalls....

  Love,

  Jess

  P.S. If you really do become a professor, though, you can’t date your students. It must be strange to have that rule hanging over you—­at least on TV, you can sleep with anyone, including your boss. Wait, did I just figure out my way to the top?

  MAY 5

  Rachel to Jess

  You know you’re truly in love with someone when you think they look good in overalls. (Or maybe you’re just from Texas.)

  I agreed to go out with the guy from my English class. Although he speaks English with a heavy French accent, it turns out he’s Spanish and his name is Pablo. He’s about four years older than us. He has dark hair, a medium build, and brown eyes.

  For our first date, I met him outside a theater, where we saw a musical comedy show in French and I understood nothing. Literally nothing.

  We were headed back to the Marais together because he lives near me, when all of a sudden, he just pulled my shoulders toward him and dove in for a kiss, but I was smiling and it was unexpected, so we hit our teeth together in the process.

  “Now it won’t be awkward later,” he said, smiling, even though it was totally awkward at that moment.

  It was exciting to finally be kissing someone who seemed to like me so much, but other than that, I just felt disappointed. I had thought I was attracted to him until he kissed me. But first kisses can be weird, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

  Then he invited me back for dinner at his place. He fried up some scallops and then we sat on the couch and we kissed some more, because we didn’t have much to say to each other. We spoke in French, which is the second language for both of us. It feels like 40 percent of the time, I say what I can say, rather than what I really think. What if he is doing the same thing? We could end up married and half of our personalities and thoughts could be obscured because we simply couldn’t be bothered to look up the right word.

  Still, I kept reminding myself that he’s a nice, cute guy. A genuinely good guy who seems to like me a lot. So I agreed to see him again.

  That second date consisted of Pablo making me dinner (again), and then us making out on the couch (again).

  I mean, I like both these things, but I kept being pulled out of the kissing by thinking that Pablo was the Spanish version of British George. And thinking this while we were making out can’t be a good sign. We then slept together, because I was curious, and I really wanted to salvage our relationship with mind-­blowing sex. But it was unremarkable. Only missionary. Sweet but brief.

  He saved the tickets f
rom our first date and ever since I told him that I love pistachio macaroons, he always brought me some. And if someone else did this, I might melt. But with Pablo, I was flattered but indifferent.

  What would the stock footage be for a mediocre relationship? Two people on a couch, staring into space? A guy kissing a woman’s neck while she checks her watch?

  I cooked dinner for myself the other night and ate it sitting at my table, and looking out into my courtyard, I could only think: This is so much better than being with Pablo.

  But I wanted to give him one more chance. He called me and invited me over to his place, where...he made me dinner again. It flashed before me: This could be the rest of my life. Waiting for Pablo to get off work, come home, make me dinner, make out on the couch, and climb into bed. He is so set in his traditional ways that he will not make out anywhere except on the couch or have sex anywhere except his bed.

  Did someone tell him that women love it when you cook dinner for them, make out with them on the couch, and then assume the missionary position?

  After the third date of his cooking dinner, and predictable vanilla sex, I ended it. We went out for coffee, and I had to look him in the face and tell him that the sparks just weren’t there.

  Because Pablo and I speak only French together, I’m not sure the breakup was as subtle as I would have wanted it to be. In English, it’s easy to read the other person’s reactions and respond appropriately—­but in French, instead of saying, “I love spending time with you, but sometimes I have the sense that the spark just isn’t there—­or, if it was there, it’s tapering out,” I have to say things like, “I think we should end our relationship.”

  And, of course, he was nice about it and now our brief courtship is over. I’m not sad, just regretful that the relationship couldn’t be what we wanted it to be. I want fireworks from the start. Pablo told me that he had a crush on me for the entire six weeks I was his teacher. It’s not a good sign when I think, “You were in my class for six weeks and I didn’t even notice you until you asked me out.” (Though this isn’t true with friendship. Remember when you used to confuse me with the ultrareligious good girl down the hall in our freshman dorm? I can’t believe that ever happened.) It’s not like Pablo was going to wake up one morning and turn into a bounding, charismatic, witty Olivier who is madly in love with me.