The Atlas of Love

by Laurie Frankel

  I knew that most of this anger was unfair. I knew that there was nothing I could do about it. I knew that it was interfering with the brief moments I had for uninterrupted, guilt-free work. But I couldn’t make it go away. Jill strayed further and further from school and deeper and deeper into yoga and meditation. I am sure she needed it, and I am sure it helped, but it drove me near to madness to rush home for Atlas and find her sitting placidly in full lotus in the living room, garnering spiritual fulfillment from activities she used to mock me for doing. Katie stayed on top of her work but retreated too into manifest prayer. Church had always been there, of course, but now it was everywhere. She spoke constantly of God and prayer, of His control of all our lives and destinies. Again, I am sure it helped her, brought her peace, saw her through the same struggles I was dealing with, but I found it disingenuous, grating, and besides, I was jealous of the peace it brought her, rendering me none. I would love to think none of this impacted Atlas, but I know that can’t be true. We all tell each other’s stories.

  For solace, for sanity, I started running again in earnest. I ran in college but stopped because it hurt my knees, and yoga seemed a much gentler, much more healing sport. Jill was ruining it for me though, and while I knew that yoga would preach all the ways in which Jill’s doing it in the living room was a good thing for both of us, I couldn’t bring myself to a studio to hear it. Whatever it does to your knees, running calms your spirit too. When all you can hear is your breath, your mind can go anywhere or nowhere as it likes. It’s hard to be mad when you’re gasping for air, when your legs are screaming to stop, but nonetheless everything in your body beats in time, pounds together, and carries on, forward and forward.

  Running through winter also hastens spring and summer simply because running is the one thing it is enjoyable to do outside in February. Though it is dark and cold inside and out, winter allows you to exercise without being too hot. Which is a good silver lining. And which means that, though every other millimeter of your being is screaming for July, one small part of you (probably your thighs) is content with the slow creep of winter, and since, as everyone knows, nothing prolongs anything quite like your desperation to see it end, running brings an early spring.

  Soon enough, there was an end in sight. It is one of the best things about academia—no matter how bad things seem, they end and begin anew every fifteen weeks or so. And you can do anything for fifteen weeks. Never mind that summer would not end Jill’s depression or Katie’s obsession or my anger or Atlas’s muddled family, still it would be a new start, a chance to reevaluate, make a new plan. And whatever else, we wouldn’t be taking classes, which would mean tons more free time comparatively speaking. We’d still have to teach and research and write, but it’s not the same. When you’ve spent as long as we have in school, your body and brain automatically take the summer off.

  Also, the coming of summer felt like completing something, like having survived the first round. It reminded me, of course, of last summer when all this started, and though I spent some time with nostalgia for last spring, my own apartment, my own uncomplicated days before all this, it felt so remote as to have been another life. All that chaos and uncertainty had been replaced in the intervening year with the sick feeling of an unsteady truce, a wobbly, barely holding on, desperate balance. But also in the interim year, chaos had become Atlas, and there was no denying the joy of that development. Things were, if not good, better than before. If not easy, making it. As I say, you can do anything at all for fifteen weeks, and so as weeks eight and nine became ten and eleven and twelve, my anger at the situation began to subside if only because soon this situation would be gone, and there’d be a new one in its stead.

  One afternoon, I left to go running despite waning sunshine, an ominous sky, and foreboding weather forecasts. It was happening more and more that I simply lost track of everything when I was running—how far, how long, and where, and by the time it was really and truly raining, I was miles from home. It is not true that it always rains in Seattle, and when it does, it’s rarely heavy, more like months and months of soupy drizzle. Torrential downpour is the purview of spring around here. I turned around, hot enough by then to be grateful for the rain, and ran home through what was, soon enough, late spring deluge. The streets and sidewalks became rivers of water, tributaries of which coursed down my hair, over my face, straight through my clothes, and into my skin until I was less jogging than jumping in giant, waterlogged sponges from puddle to puddle like a little kid out playing in the rain. Cars honked. Passengers inside them pointed and laughed at me or looked truly concerned for my sanity and safety, but I was breathless with laughter, hysterical to find myself so wet and still getting wetter, running through water, cleansed and cleansed and cleansed.

  And better even still, rare as rainbows, I arrived home finally to a dark, completely empty house. I couldn’t imagine where everyone was, and I couldn’t have cared less. I stood breathing hard and dripping in the middle of my kitchen, listening to nothing, all the lights off, gathering dusk and entrenched rain clouds turning everything an undifferentiated, hidden blue, and considered my options. Taking a bath. Talking uninterrupted and un-overheard on the phone. Cooking dinner just for me. Simplicity matched only by luxury. It had been so long. I hadn’t realized how, more than anything else, I missed this solitude. It’s not selfish to think only of yourself when you’re all alone. I stripped off sopping running clothes and left them in a spreading heap in the middle of the kitchen floor, donned dry sweatpants and sweatshirt, brought junk food to the sofa, and settled into it to watch anything or nothing at all on TV and listen to the rain in the dark all by myself. I closed my eyes and felt muscles I wasn’t even aware of relax for the first time in months.

  The glass door to the porch slid open revealing a grinning, dripping, naked Atlas on the hip of a grinning, dripping, naked Jill. She almost dropped him when she saw me.

  “You scared me to death!” But she was whispering as if not to break the spell.

  “Me too,” I whispered back, shorthand.

  “We were playing in the rain,” she explained.

  “I got caught running,” I said.

  She nodded. Inside, puddles formed around them, and their chill, drenched skin turned bright red. They glowed, slick and shiny, cold and hot. Even in near dark, they were so beautiful I couldn’t take my eyes off them. Atlas laughed still—to be inside again I guess or at his slippery wet mother. Jill laughed too, left over from outside, from the quick scare of seeing me on the sofa, from a little embarrassment at being naked. And then suddenly, she was crying instead, not hard, not loud, not very different from the laughter and the rain except suddenly the water on her face came from inside instead of out.

  “I’m so sorry, Janey.” Barely a whisper. “I didn’t know it would be this way. I didn’t know it would be this hard.”

  “Me neither,” I breathed back.

  “I don’t want to lose you guys.” Into Atlas’s hair as much as anywhere.

  “You never could,” I assured her, meaning it.

  “I just want so much for him,” she said. “It is worth sacrificing anything—even you, even me—for him to be loved.”

  “He always will be. You too. No one’s been sacrificed.”

  “Do you think it’ll be okay?” she asked.

  I wondered what she meant. Our friendship, her career, my sanity, Atlas’s childhood? “It will be okay,” I promised, whatever it was. “It will. It will all be fine and better than fine,” and added as evidence, “It’s spring.”

  She smiled, then grinned, wiped her eyes and nose with one free hand, remembered again that she wasn’t wearing anything, blushed even through her rain-drenched glow.

  “Think this is what they mean by naked love?” she asked.

  “Must be.” I smiled, still entranced but coming back out of it. “You better get dry and warm before you both get sick,” I said, channeling my grandmother. “I’ll get him dressed while you take a bath.
We can have potato pancakes for dinner.” Her favorite. Not mine especially. But it is sometimes not true that the behavior has to shift so much as the attitude. I had to stop being angry more than she and Katie had to change. I had to remember about open, blind, knowing, unreserved, unambiguous, unconditional love—naked love—before any of it could make sense again. I had to find it the many places it hid, drag it out in the open and wrap it all around me, wear it around the house, feel its imprint on my skin, weave it into my hair, let it rain down wet and fresh from the sky before I could feel it, share it, be comfortable in its grasp, and understand, finally, what it all meant, at least this part of it, at least today.

  PART III

  Summer One

  Twenty-two

  Summer one. Altas’s first summer ever. The number one best season of the year. But mostly, in this case, first summer session. These short terms represent a flagrant disregard for natural laws, quantum mechanics, and the rules of physics that otherwise govern time. Cramming what normally takes fifteen weeks into five perhaps does not sound entirely outrageous, but it is, both in what it demands and in the compromises we all make to allow it to happen. I never teach Summer Two. I hate Summer Two. Summer One starts soon after spring semester ends, and it’s easy enough to keep going, especially since the drop-off in workload is significant. Summer Two, by contrast, means you get five weeks off, but then you have to work straight through till Christmas. Christmas.

  When they made me teach Summer Two one year and I complained to Nico about the straight-through-till-Christmas part, he focused exclusively on the five weeks off. People who work nine to five with only ten days off all year tend to fixate on that part. This is unfair. One reason is that people with real jobs get weekends off, and I do not. There’s all that reading and writing and research to do. And then there’s the grading. Two sections of comp, twenty-five students each, five papers per student, five pages per paper, five minutes per page—even I can do the math, but I needn’t. Suffice it to say, it takes all weekend. Another reason only five weeks off till Christmas is unreasonable is that people with real jobs don’t really work nine to five. They take coffee breaks and cigarette breaks and water breaks and go out to lunch and have parties for coworkers and do team building activities such as everyone takes the afternoon off and does a ropes course. We do all that too (not the ropes course), but it doesn’t come out of work time; it comes out of sleep time because all the paper grading and lesson planning still has to get done. Nico’s other point was that it was only five weeks off one way or the other, so what did it matter if it came first or second. Two words: until Christmas.

  Fifteen weeks into five is also the kind of math even I can do. What it amounts to is meeting for two hours every day, no days off, no time for slacking. It means that missing even one day puts students pretty much hopelessly behind even though it also means that they feel they can cut class more often because, jeez, it meets every day. It’s the same amount of class time as a real semester, but it’s only one third the amount of time for homework—one third the time for reading, for research, for writing papers, for completing class projects. One third the time for grading. So it’s a challenge. On the other hand, I love summer sessions. It’s nice to be able to concentrate on one thing instead of fifty. You get really close with the students. You feel like you get a lot done. But mostly, you get out of your house and away from your roommates (both teaching Summer Two) and their baby for the entire morning. If you hold an office hour, meet a friend for lunch, and then go running, you won’t see anyone until late afternoon.

  There is also little as exhausting as summer session. It’s a good thing it’s so fast because you couldn’t keep that pace up for more than a few weeks. Sometimes, you have so much grading and planning and meeting with students to do that you barely have time for anything else. But as I say, it’s not just a quick session. Time bends. Abstract theories of physics come to apply. And so sometimes, summer sessions are strange and eventful despite all the time spent working. And during this one, simply, the whole world changed. Five weeks later, it was a different place, the old one but a memory trace, a whisper of an old life, so remote as to not even be my own.

  I was teaching English 102—Intro to Lit. The first day is always the easiest. It’s when the students most resemble the ones you were fantasizing when you planned the course, when all they have to do is listen and smile, laugh in the appropriate places, and that’s enough. On the first day of class, since they’d not read anything yet for homework, I decided—Atlas-inspired—to read aloud to them. We did The Lorax. Good literature is good literature after all. We moved the chairs into a circle, and I showed them the pictures and everything. The students started off a little dubious, wondering if I thought they were in kindergarten or what. But soon enough, they settled into being read to, remembered how nice it is to be told a story, how when it’s one you’re familiar with you slip out of the narrative and into the cadence, the lull of the reader’s voice, the waiting with joyous anticipation to be told what you already know and understand more than is written. There’s a reason we read to our kids, and it’s not just because they can’t do it themselves. It’s because there’s a difference between reading yourself and being read to. I was tempted to give my new students a metaphor about sex versus masturbation but not on the first day of class. I sent them home with a dozen poems to read and explicate, beamed at the smiles of relief I saw leaving the room (“She seems nice” and “This won’t be so bad”), and went outside to bask in sunshine.

  On the steps, I found Ethan doing the same. “What are you doing on the steps of my building?” I said, sitting down next to him.

  “I didn’t realize it was yours,” he said.

  I turned and looked at the sign above the door.

  “It says ‘English Department,’ ” I pointed out.

  “So it does,” Ethan admitted and shrugged. “Summer session. They’re redoing the history building for fall. Removing all the asbestos or something. Makes you feel really good about the last four years you’ve spent in there. In any case, they moved all our summer classes over here.”

  “What are you teaching?”

  “History 102. You?”

  “English 102,” I answered happily, hugging my knees and grinning at him as if this were just an impossible coincidence. I love the first day of class.

  “You’re teaching The Lorax?” he asked, seeing it in my hands.

  “Just for the first day.”

  “Sounds fun.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Gave a mini-lecture summarizing History 101 in case they forgot or didn’t take it.”

  “What’s that take? About an hour?”

  “Well, History 101 is roughly the dawn of recorded time to about 1499, but it’s only Western civilization, so it’s pretty doable.”

  “Do they seem nice?” I asked.

  “So far,” he said. “Yours?”

  “Yeah, so far.” We sat quietly and shared the mixed high/relief of the first class, coming down off the adrenaline of nerves and into the calm you get before the first homework assignment comes in when you don’t yet know what you’re in for and have nothing so far to grade.

  “Want to have lunch?” he asked finally.

  “I’m about to go running today, but I could do it tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow it is,” he said. Then, “Are you one of those people who likes to run alone? Because I’d love to run with you too. Not today of course”—he looked down at his khakis and tie—“but another day.”

  “What about your ankle?”

  “It was only a sprain. It’s healed. Maybe we can run slowly.”

  “Sounds great,” I said. I don’t in fact always like running with other people. But in the glow of day one, I could deny him—or anyone—nothing.

  “I ran into Ethan,” I reported when I got home. “We’re having lunch tomorrow if you want to join us. And we’re going running Wednesday.”

  “Oh ye
ah, I forgot to tell you he’s teaching right upstairs from you,” Katie apologized.

  “How was day one?” said Jill.

  “Good. They seem nice. Smiley. Participated some.”

  “How did they like The Lorax?” Jill asked but seemed distracted by Katie who herself seemed pretty distracted.

  “They liked it. They got it. They had interesting ideas about . . .” I trailed off. “What’s with you two?” Jill couldn’t keep her eyes off Katie. Katie looked like she might explode.

  “I met a boy,” she shrieked.

  I looked at Jill who suppressed, not quite, a smirk then swallowed it. “She thinks this one is different.” She shrugged at me, bemused, eyebrows raised.

  “His name is Peter. He just moved here from Utah for college. He’s only twenty-one, but it’s okay. He wants to major in zoology. He’s very cute and nice. He paints. He’s tall. He thinks I’m funny. He’s in charge of food for the youth picnic we’re hosting on Thursday, and since I’m in charge of games, we have to work together—”