The Atlas of Love

by Laurie Frankel

  “Why wouldn’t I be able to take care of it?” Jill looked up at me and wondered with wet, hurt eyes.

  “I’m saying if. I’m saying if that’s true, you know, you know, it’s not fair. To anyone.”

  “It would change my life,” said Jill. An understatement.

  “Having a baby would change your entire life,” I agreed.

  “No. I mean having an abortion would change my life.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I would never forget.”

  “There are lots of things you never forget.”

  “Because what if this is my last chance?”

  “To what?”

  “To be pregnant.”

  “Why would it be your last chance to be pregnant? Clearly you’re fertile.”

  “But what if I just don’t ever get pregnant again for whatever reason?”

  “If you want to, you will.”

  “What if I don’t want to?”

  “Then why would you now?”

  “Because it’s already here now. It’s already decided.” I remembered my flash of jealousy from yesterday afternoon, but I remained unconvinced. Indecisiveness is also not a good enough reason to have a baby.

  “Indecisiveness is not a good enough reason to have a baby,” I said.

  We chewed Cheerios for a little bit and said nothing.

  “How would it be? If you had the baby?” Katie ventured after a pause.

  “You’re changing the subject,” I accused.

  “This is hardly a different subject,” she said.

  “I guess I would drop out of school, get a job somewhere, get daycare all day. Work. Raise a baby.” This sounded desperate and miserable, but it wasn’t really. She wasn’t just a child herself. She was not thinking about dropping out of high school. She was not even thinking of dropping out of college. This was a woman who already had a master’s degree. We were talking about a Ph.D. in literature. We were not talking about her having to take a miserable minimum-wage job or two or three. We were talking about giving up the ten-thousand-dollars-a-year deal that is a graduate assistantship in exchange for a real job like normal people get. It had the ring of terrible, but that was someone else’s version of this story.

  “What about Dan?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what he’ll want to do.” Katie and I exchanged glances and then let this go. I tried, but I honestly couldn’t even put odds on what Dan would want.

  “You could let someone else raise it, put it up for adoption,” Katie offered. That’s such weird phrasing, I thought. Put it up for adoption. Like put it up on an auction pedestal for bidding. Like it’s a vase.

  “That’s stupid,” said Jill.

  “Why?”

  “Because then I’d just have an abortion. Why would I give my child to somebody else to raise?”

  “If someone else could do a better job of taking care of it—”

  “Why do you guys think I can’t raise a baby?”

  “I don’t think you can’t raise a baby,” I said. “But I don’t know if you want to either. And if you don’t want to, you’ll do a bad job. This is important, Jill. You can’t screw it up. You keep saying, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ And you have to know, or you have to choose something else, and that something else might be the responsible thing to do in this case.”

  She thought about it. And Katie thought about it. And I thought about it. It was like we were in a fight, but we weren’t really. Jill finished her Cheerios and slammed her spoon down. “I have to talk to Dan,” she said. “I won’t know anything until I do. I’m not even thinking about it until then.” She picked up her things and left. She didn’t even put her bowl in the sink.

  “What do you think she’s going to do?” asked Katie.

  “I think she’s going to have a baby. What do you think she’s going to do?”

  “I think she’s going to have a baby.”

  Five

  Daniel Davison was one of those people for whom everything seems effortless. Walking across campus with him to get coffee took twice as long as it did with anyone else because everyone stopped to talk to him because everyone was his friend. The cool kids were his friends and the athletes, the Greeks and the poets, the theater kids, the marching band, the scientists. Deans and vice presidents and board members who knew only seven students by name knew Dan. They all stopped to say hi and to chat, and for each, Dan would know a little something. “How’d you do on that test you were stressing about?” he’d say, or, “I heard your party was awesome. I’m sorry I missed it,” or, “How’d things go on that date you had last week?” Dan played intramural volleyball. He wrote for the student newspaper and the literary magazine. He was usually starring in a play or two each semester. He DJ’d for the campus radio station from one to two A.M. on Mondays. He was always in at least a couple bands.

  We tend to think people like this can take anything in stride. But for Dan, as for all people like this I suspect, it meant he couldn’t accommodate anything unexpected—it was all balanced, all perfectly timed, all completely interdependent on everything else. Any addition throws everything off.

  I knew all this because Dan was a student of mine my first semester in the classroom, his first semester at college. He was a smart kid and a good writer, warm, funny, the student who wins over the rest of the class for you because they figure if he likes you, you must be worth liking. He got As. On every assignment, every essay. Nonetheless, he came weekly to office hours. To go over my comments on his essays. To read me his rough drafts. To get explanations about semicolons, about passive voice. I couldn’t figure this out. About midterm, I realized, amused, that he was already sitting in my office when I got there most days, that he wasn’t talking to me or even listening to my responses to his questions nearly as much as he was flirting with my officemate. Jill ignored him all semester. “Stupid freshman. Like that’s ever going to happen.”

  Three years later, Jill was bribed by the dean into being the faculty advisor for the Student Government Association. He didn’t offer her very much money, but it was still more than she could refuse.

  “It’s not going to be worth it,” I warned her.

  “How much work can it be?” said Jill. “Besides, it’s not my money being divvied up, so what do I care?”

  I was right, and she was wrong of course. It was a lot of work. It was a lot of budget balancing and number crunching and spreadsheet making, none of which are the strong suits of English Ph.D. candidates. It was a lot of listening to presentations by an endless parade of student groups asking for more money. “It’s weird,” Jill marveled. “It’s like they think I give a crap.” But mostly, it was a lot of refereeing between government geeks and fraternity reps. “The GGs think nothing on earth is as important as SGA,” Jill reported. “The FRs just want to give all the money to each other for beer. This is the stupidest thing I have ever done in my life.” Meetings consisted of yelling and nothing else.

  Jill tried not caring, her usual approach to such things, until she started getting slightly threatening messages from the Dean of Students. “It is vital that you succeed. Your graduate career depends on it,” one said. “We have entrusted you with a sacred duty and responsibility.”

  “No one told me it was sacred!” Jill protested. Desperate, she decided they needed new blood, people who were neither self-important GGs nor FRs just in it for the cash. She fairly begged for volunteers.

  And so when Daniel Davison wandered calmly into the melee of the last SGA meeting before midterm, she had to admit she was pretty happy to see him. A senior now, he looked exactly the same as he had sitting in our office three years before in every way that she could put her finger on, but in some ways that she could not quite, he had changed. When she proposed they all start fresh and do introductions and say why they were there, most people offered some variation of either a testy, “Participation in a democracy is an honor and a venerated duty,” or, “I’m here represent
ing [three random Greek letters] because I [drew the short straw; fell asleep at the meeting; lost at beer pong; am being hazed].” Daniel said simply, “Hi, I’m Dan. I came to help.”

  He was easy—easy smiles, easy ideas, easy friends. He was very comfortable. He seemed to like everyone so much that they all started liking each other too. And since he clearly adored the advisor, there was a bipartisan movement towards cooperation. The advisor, for her part, wondered whether he “came to help” SGA or her, but both clearly needed it, so she decided to be grateful and not find out. Her question was whether he’d stay or was there to make a show for one day only. But stay he did. He came faithfully to meetings, helped mediate and plan activities, and became wildly popular among student groups who came to beg for money. Best of all, he could do the math involved in the budget. Soon, SGA was running smoothly, and there was peace in all the land. Everything was back to normal. Except one thing.

  “Shit,” said Jill, “I think I’m in love with an undergraduate.”

  “Hurrah,” said Katie, willing to overlook the swear word in favor of the sentiment.

  “He’s twenty.” Dan had skipped a grade somewhere along the line.

  “So?” Because everyone who’s single is fair game at church, many of the men Katie dated were about that age.

  “I am twenty-seven,” said Jill.

  “And?”

  “And I am twenty-seven. I am in graduate school. I do not like to party all the time. I do not like to get drunk four nights a week. I don’t want to rock all day with my band and experiment with drugs afterwards.”

  “Does Dan?” I asked.

  “We couldn’t even go out for a drink,” she said, ignoring me. “He can’t even buy a beer.”

  “He could if he were with you,” I offered. She shot me a very nasty look. “You’re just embarrassed,” I said. “You’re worried about what people will say if you date an undergraduate. That’s not a good enough reason not to do it.”

  “When you’re seventy-nine and he’s seventy-two, it won’t seem like that big an age difference,” Katie giggled. “Your kids will think it’s funny.”

  Jill rolled her eyes. “You’re both idiots,” she said.

  She waited until after break and asked him out the first week of spring semester. She thought it only fair she do the asking and the taking since he had made his feelings clear from the start and had performed the miracle of saving SGA (and her ass). He was so glad, so purely, clearly glad she’d asked him, so happy to have the chance to prove himself worthy of her but also just to be with her. When you looked at him those first few weeks, he radiated simple, pure gladness. It suited him. And though there was some initial whispering around the department, it didn’t last. Most people were just jealous anyway.

  Most of a semester later, they were really happy. We all liked Dan. Jill was starting to think about next year, a thing you should never do when you are dating someone about to graduate from college. She knew this but couldn’t help it. They were young and in love. It had ceased to be weird. But none of us could really guess how Daniel Davison would react to this late-April news. He was a good guy, yes, a nice kid and smart and in love for sure, but from there to graduate-from-college-and-raise-a-baby-with-a-woman-you’ve-been-dating-for-three-and-a-half-months was a long way indeed.

  Six

  The last Saturday night in April no one was working. Jill was having Dan over—to make him dinner and tell him. Katie had a date. I was painting my bathroom purple. Between us, we had more or less a book to write and one to grade before next weekend, but we had, I guess, more pressing things to take care of. Jill was having a baby apparently. Katie was finding a husband. I had predicted that things were going to get more rather than less crazy at the end of this semester, and if I wanted the bathroom painted, I had to do it right away. It was that quiet right before a thunderstorm when you sit on the front porch watching it close in, soaking everything it crosses, unable to work up the energy or desire to move inside. It was coming, but there was nothing I could do about it.

  Student Life folks are fond of saying that you do your best learning in college outside the classroom (I was an RA as an undergrad). What I had learned about personal narrative over those couple days was that as long as it’s boring and mundane, it feels like it belongs to you, but the moment something happens, the moment it starts to look like a book or a movie, it stops feeling like your own. Suddenly, you have only the epic options of literature at your disposal instead of the boring but limitless ones you’re used to. On most Saturday nights, Jill could go out, she could stay home and rent a movie, she could grade, she could read, she could go to the library, she could do countless boring random things, but that night, she had only a few, dramatic options—she could become a mother or have an abortion; she could make Daniel be a father or lose him to fear and bad timing.

  For Katie, life was always like this. She thought the author of her personal narrative was God and considered her lows and highs part of the Grand Plan. So tonight’s date, a setup, a friend of a friend, a guy she had not yet met, was already either (a) the love of her eternal life or (b) someone else sent to help her find the love of her eternal life. Which is a lot of pressure for a first, blind date. We were on the phone, finished with what she should wear—denim skirt, white T-shirt, cardigan (cute, casual but not too casual, layered for a range of temperatures)—and on to what she knew about him already.

  “Dionne says he’s cute, but Jenny thinks he’s weird looking. She has strange taste though.”

  “What does he do?” I asked, hoping he was out of college. The undergrads hadn’t been working out lately.

  “Dental school, first year. He’s twenty-four. Also,” she added very reluctantly, “he’s a Yankee fan.” Not dating Yankee fans is my number two rule of dating. Katie knows this but doesn’t care yet. Later, when he’s no good, she will admit that dating a Yankee fan is stupid, careless even. Truly, this is foolproof relationship advice.

  His name was Chris, her second Chris of the month, which I knew would make him hard to track regardless of what happened on the date (good date or bad, he and the other Chris would remain a topic of conversation for at least six weeks). He went to church in a different ward. He had already been on dates with Annabelle, Alison, Kelly, and Dionne, the woman who set them up in the first place (the rule against dating one’s friends’ ex-boyfriends—my number one rule of dating—does not apply in Katie’s world; a guy may not be in the plans for you because he may be in the plans for someone else).

  “Anyway, we’ll see. Annabelle really didn’t like him, but she was still hung up on Josh, and they got back together the night after she went out with Chris, so he might be fine. Dionne said he’s really nice.” She was not very excited, not holding out high hopes for this one, I could tell. For Katie, like for most of us I suppose, dating is work rather than pleasure. She likes to shop for clothes for dates, likes to talk about dates good and bad, likes to talk to and about boys on the phone—it’s just the actual dating she doesn’t care for. Being friends with Katie is like being in eighth grade again.

  “What are you doing tonight?” she asked.

  “Painting the bathroom.”

  “Finally.” I’d been musing out loud about a purple bathroom since January. “Should I come by when I get home?”

  “Sure. I’ll be up.”

  “When are you going to write?”

  “I’ll start tomorrow.”

  “Me too,” she said. “After church. Ugh.”

  “Ugh,” I agreed. For me though, it’s all anticipation. I dread starting, but once I get writing, it will be fine I know. Katie is happy to do the research, but the actual during of the writing process drives her mad.

  “I guess I better go,” she said. “Good luck painting. Wish me luck with Chris.”

  “Good luck with Chris,” I said. “I hope he’s not really a Yankee fan.”

  “Thanks. I’ll see you later.”

  “Bye.”


  “Bye.” I’d gotten purple paint on the phone. And the rug. And was considering the relative advisability of using nail polish remover on either when the phone rang again. It was Jill. Of course.

  “I’m sautéing fish,” she said, preludeless. “How long?”

  “What kind?”

  “Halibut.”

  “In what?”

  “That’s the next question.”

  “I’d do about two minutes on one side then another five or ten or so, covered, on the other side. Until it looks done in the middle of the thick part.”

  “What am I sautéing it in?” she asked.

  “Butter? Lemon? Some white wine maybe?” It was out of my mouth before I paused to consider that wine wasn’t good for the maybe-baby and then that, really, the alcohol cooks off anyway. But enough? I had no idea. “Uh, let’s say butter, lemon juice, and garlic.”

  “Sounds good. What about potatoes?”

  “What kind?”

  “Those little red ones.”

  “Nice. How about roasting?”

  “How.” More statement than question. She was down to shorthand.

  “Chunk them. Salt, pepper, little bit of olive oil. 375ish. Stir often. Till they’re done.”

  “Excellent. I am also having salad and bread. And I bought a cheesecake.”

  “Very fancy,” I said. “You can knock me up anytime.”

  “Tell me everything will be okay,” said Jill.

  “Everything will be okay,” I said. “He’s a good guy. He’ll be well fed. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  Lull, lull. Quiet before storm. Unknowing before unknowing. The kind of calm you only have when you stop to realize that you are not panicked—something you never do unless you have just been or are about to be. Status quo on borrowed time. No one ever really knows what’s going to happen next, but we’re rarely so acutely aware of that fact because usually it doesn’t matter yet. That night, the future had come strangely near. I sat on the lid of my toilet, getting used to purple paint on the walls, waiting patiently for everything in my life to change.