The Atlas of Love

by Laurie Frankel

  “No, I’ll be home tomorrow. It’s a little crazy up here. But thanks.”

  “One more thing, Janey. I have this wedding to go to this weekend—an ex of mine is getting married—and I wondered if you’d be my date.”

  “I’m in,” I said.

  Thirty-eight

  By the time I got home, we had only two days left to start and finish the novel unit in my class. Katie had introduced it, and she and Ethan had tag-teamed the discussion, but there was still so much to cover. It had not been a good Summer One for me. But I had Summer Two to make up for it. In exchange for teaching so much of my class, I was taking the first week of Katie’s so that she could honeymoon. Who would have imagined in October when we signed up for summer session classes that my grandmother would die in the middle of mine, that Katie would get married the weekend before hers? When I posed this rhetorical question to Ethan, he mused that actually both would have been pretty good bets. True, maybe, but not my point.

  My point, as I discussed with my students, was that of course what happens in a novel is going to be momentous because that’s why we’re getting this story. Every day, every moment has its own story, but most of them are boring. The novel has culled all those cloudy moments into one crystal narrative worth telling. When I was a kid, I thought it so improbable that the poor boy I’d met in chapter one turned out to be the one kid in a million who unwrapped his chocolate bar and found the last golden ticket. But of course that was missing the point. A story where a kid unwraps a chocolate bar, finds no ticket, eats it, and goes home is not a narrative worth telling. And so we never find it in novel form. Maybe that kid goes home and finds, instead, a purple rabbit eating strappy sandals in his armoire; that would be remarkable indeed and then we would get that story instead.

  My students thought this was obvious, but it’s also somehow a sticking point to getting our heads entirely around the novel. We are, so often, lured in with the promise of a story about us, and indeed we meet people like us, only their lives are so exciting, so devastating and improbable, so full of intrigue and significance and coincidence that we cannot relate anymore. We know though that the narrator isn’t going to tell about the summer when nothing happened; the narrator is going to tell about the summer when everything happened, when everything changed. In the end, maybe it’s that one word—change—that is the point of the novel. Not what happened, maybe not even why so much, but what changed and what we learn as a result. And that “we” is so big. It’s the major characters; it’s the narrator; it’s the minor characters too and the bit parts; it’s the author; and, maybe most important of all, it’s the reader as well because the reader has been on a journey too. But the journey itself is only half the battle. The other half—the take-home half—is figuring out what you learned along the way.

  My students welcomed me back like old friends, and I don’t mean that as metaphor alone. They were sorry about my grandmother, asked how my folks were doing, asked how I was doing. They were worried about Atlas. They asked about Katie’s wedding plans (about which they knew a startling amount). For people with whom my relationship was pretty clearly not friendship (they work; I give them grades), for people I had met, en masse, just a few weeks ago, they knew an awful lot about my life. That happens sometimes, in some classrooms, with some groups. It happens especially during summer sessions—brief, intimate, intense—and especially, evidently, during summer sessions with crises. You’d think having three teachers—any one of whom could appear on any given day—would have unsettled them, but instead it had drawn them in. Just as we were dispensing with details for last days—portfolio requirements, when to turn in what, how to get final grades—Eliza Alford, speaking for the group, raised her hand, giggling, and said, “Can I ask one more thing? What’s going on with you and Ethan?”

  I tried but couldn’t quite suppress the smile. I did, however, decline to answer the question.

  At home, Katie, Jason, and Peter were packing Katie’s stuff because of course when she got married, she wasn’t going to keep living with me, a fact I should have realized long before I finally did. They were also packing what remained of Jill’s and Atlas’s stuff. I made them stop. I felt they could throw Jill’s stuff out the window. And I maintained that Atlas might come back—would come back—and would need blankets and toys and books when he did. Jill and Daniel had missed the point entirely when they concluded that bringing Atlas’s furniture to a new place with new people would be familiar to him, as if we weren’t the home, as if home weren’t where Katie and I were too. But he’d still need his things when he came back, and I refused to wrap them up and cram them into a box. I had done that once already this week, and I wasn’t about to do it again. Instead, I went upstairs to grade.

  Later, we rented movies about weddings and ordered pizza and sat on the floor in the living room, since there was no furniture there anymore, and tied birdseed and lavender into miniature squares of tulle with tiny green and purple ribbons that would have delighted Atlas had he been there to try to eat them. Lucas came by later, and he and Jason wanted to take Peter out somewhere (“Tying tulle is the lamest bachelor party ever,” said Jason), but no one seemed much interested. Ethan had to grade and couldn’t come over either. It was very quiet in the house. There was no Jill to yell or fight or slam doors. There was no Atlas screaming or crying or laughing. We did not have a house full of people. We didn’t even have any furniture. And even though Atlas would have been sleeping, his quiet was always very loud, holding as it did the threat of waking and screaming or waking and wanting to be held or sleeping through the night and waking beaming and laughing at some ridiculous hour of the morning. The lack of Atlas’s quiet was deafening.

  Katie and I left the boys downstairs and went to try on her dress with various combinations of hair up/hair down, pearls/diamonds, veil/no veil. And then hair up, diamonds, no veil. Or hair down, diamonds, veil. Or no, what about hair up, pearls, no veil. Et cetera. It was fun, but it also felt like faking it, like it was supposed to be the happiest day of her life and mine, as her best friend, by extension, except it was dampened to the point of saturation.

  The phone rang, but for the first time in weeks, my heart didn’t pause when it did. I didn’t even care. The bad news had already happened. It couldn’t get any worse. It could only be mundane. “I’m coming over,” said the telephone without preamble or pleasantry. “Get rid of everybody else.” Jill. Of course. We told the boys they didn’t have to leave, but there was no convincing them to stay.

  Jill walked in without knocking about forty minutes later. (A clue to where she was living? Or had she stalled for time to throw us off her trail? Stopped for a snack? No way to know.) Katie and I were standing in the middle of our empty living room walking down the aisle to see whether we preferred with bouquet/empty-handed in combination with hair up/hair down and veil/no veil. The door banged open, and in walked Jill, hands on hips.

  “Katie, you look ridiculous,” she said.

  “So . . . no bouquet then?”

  “Why are you wearing that?”

  “I’m getting married?”

  “Not tonight.”

  “We’re trying to figure out what to do with my hair and jewelry and stuff.”

  This was getting off to an unfortunate start. It was also, of course, entirely missing the point.

  “You didn’t bring Atlas,” I said.

  “He’s asleep,” said Jill, angry, like I should have known that, but that wasn’t my question. She figured this out. “He’s at home with his father.”

  “His home is here,” I said.

  “There isn’t even any furniture here,” said Jill, like that was why she wouldn’t bring him over. Like the reason we had no furniture was because we were unfit parents rather than because Atlas’s own unfit parents had stolen it all. No one knew what to say to that. Jill softened a little bit.

  “You look really beautiful, Katie. I was just surprised to see you dressed already,” she said. “I’v
e always liked your hair up.”

  “Thank you,” said Katie. “Could you try to be a little nicer?”

  Jill considered whether or not she could. Finally she said, “Do you guys have any food? I’m starved.”

  I offered her the tub of birdseed and lavender. Katie went to warm up the rest of the pizza. I suggested that she change first, but she said she’d be careful. Katie liked being in a wedding dress.

  “I’m sorry about taking the furniture,” said Jill. Like we cared about the furniture.

  “Like we care about the furniture, Jill,” I said.

  “Look, Janey, I’m trying here. But you scared me. You were way too attached. I thought you might actually try to take Atlas away from me. I couldn’t figure out why you’d lie. I couldn’t figure out why you’d be back there with him trying to keep me away.”

  “Janey wouldn’t do that,” Katie broke in. “Janey was never trying to take the baby away. You took the baby away—”

  “He’s my baby,” Jill interrupted.

  “Yeah, now he is. Now that you have someone else to babysit—”

  “Dan isn’t babysitting. He’s the father.”

  “Now that you have someone else to pick up the slack and support your nervous breakdowns and your mood swings, someone else to rearrange his life to take care of your responsibilities, someone else to do diapers and go to Atlas when he wakes up in the middle of the night and pick him up when he wakes up in the morning before dawn.”

  “You’re getting married the day after tomorrow,” said Jill. “You weren’t sticking around anyway.”

  “You are deluding yourself,” said Katie, “if you think that we wouldn’t have rented a house right in the neighborhood, taken late shifts and early shifts, continued to arrange our lives around all of our schedules so we could keep taking care of Atlas.”

  “He’s our baby too, Jill,” I added. “Just because we didn’t give birth to him doesn’t mean that isn’t true. You know this. I wasn’t trying to keep him from you. He was sick. He needed his mother. I was the mother that was there. It wasn’t even a lie. That’s good parenting, not bad parenting. It’s what he needed so it’s what I did.”

  “The only person thinking about taking a baby,” Katie said to Jill, “was you.”

  Jill said nothing. She looked dark. Then she said very, very quietly, “I had a chance to get Daniel back.” And then, even more quietly, “We have a chance to be a real family.”

  “We were a real family,” Katie and I said simultaneously. And Katie added, “You’re the only one who seems not to have noticed.”

  Thirty-nine

  Summer one’s final project is a creative assignment. During regular term, everyone’s brains are fried with final exams and the ends of four or five classes and a zillion other worries, none of them conducive to creativity. But during summer session, students aren’t also taking calculus and chemistry and Latin American history, so they can dedicate all of their brain power to making meaning of their own. And Seattle summer is enchanting, inspiring; there’s something magic about all that sun, all that long daylight. It enkindles creativity. I give them lots of choices—a few poems, a short story, a one-act, an essay, the start of a screenplay or novel. But mostly I get memoir, sometimes cloaked as something else but their own stories nonetheless. They think their lives are epic—and maybe they are, maybe all our lives are—and so they take the opportunity to get it all down.

  I had missed a lot of time with these students. In recompense, whether in the spirit of guilt or solidarity, I have tried as well. Hence this story—my Summer One final exam. Somewhere between memoir, autobiography, literary theory, and pedagogical treatise, but isn’t everything?

  Last days are always a little bit sad. They are mostly joyful—I was about to have almost two months off—but even in the worst of classes, there are a few students you will miss. In this case, I was going to miss the whole bunch of them. Everyone shared snippets of their writing projects—read a poem or a chapter, an excerpt of an in-progress memoir or part of a short story. A couple of them cajoled classmates into performing part of a screenplay or one-act. It was amazing, not because they were all brilliant—they were varying levels of decent and not, rough drafts all of course—but because they were all so personal and heartfelt and dramatic. My students were right; their lives—or the lives they imagined—were epic, full of drama, full of plot. It wasn’t just me. Many of them had had a crazy five weeks.

  Last days also, of course, inspire reflection. I looked back with them on the five weeks we’d spent together and wondered at all that had changed, wondered, in fact, at how little had stayed the same.

  I met Ethan on the steps outside, after all the goodbyes, just as we had on the first day of class.

  “How’d it go?” I asked.

  “Fine. I gave a lecture on the import of the study of history, reflected on what we learned in the course of human progress through the five hundred or so years we covered. You know, big-picture stuff. How about you?”

  “Same.”

  “Really?”

  “Everyone read excerpts from their creative writing projects.”

  “How is that the same?”

  “It’s the point of literature. What’s changed. What we’ve learned.”

  “Interesting,” mused Ethan. “Well, I can’t give you five hundred years, but I can give you five weeks. What have you learned?”

  “Me?”

  “Everyone.”

  I thought about this. “Katie learned how to plan a last-minute wedding, a skill I’m sure she’ll use again and again.”

  “Jason and Lucas learned crisis parenting,” Ethan offered. “A skill they probably will use again and again.”

  “My grandmother learned to predict the future.”

  Ethan smiled. “Peter learned what he’s in for.”

  “You too,” I said.

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “Jill learned she’s mean and insane. She learned she doesn’t care about me or trust me or even really like me.”

  “I don’t think that’s quite it.”

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “I learned I do care about you and trust you. I even really like you,” said Ethan. We sat quietly, eyes closed against the sun, legs leaning lightly against one another’s, hands touching but not holding. “You?” he asked quietly after a long time.

  “That,” I said. “And, in the last thirty seconds or so, that it’s warranted.” He smiled again. “And some other stuff I haven’t quite figured out yet.”

  “Atlas?” he asked.

  I laughed and also teared up a little. “Atlas learned to make bubbles with his spit. He learned he likes wedding cake. He learned to chew blocks. He learned to bang on things with other things. He met his father. His lost his great-grandmother. He lost me and Katie. It’s been quite a five weeks for Atlas.”

  “For Atlas,” Ethan agreed, “it’s only the beginning.”

  Ethan walked me home. Then Katie and I spent the afternoon on the phone making last-minute arrangements, answering questions for friends, giving relatives directions, reminding caterers about various dietary restrictions, and finding something blue. At some point, we realized we were starved.

  “We should just carry out of somewhere,” I said.

  “No,” said Katie, suddenly horrified. “You have to teach me how to cook. Before I get married.”

  “I tried,” I reminded her. “You weren’t really interested.”

  “I didn’t really want to learn how to cook back then. I just said I did. Really, I just wanted to be friends with you and Jill.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Of course.”

  “Can Peter cook?”

  “I have no idea,” she said blankly. And then under her breath, a little giggly, “I’ve only known him for a few weeks.”

  “You’re not going far, and you’re only getting married, not turning into a new person. I’ll teach you how to cook next week.” />
  The door opened suddenly, and it was Jill with a peace offering—pizza—having forgotten, evidently, that we’d had pizza last night for dinner. She also had Atlas.

  “I want to come to the wedding tomorrow. I can’t imagine you could get married and I wouldn’t be there. I gave my blessing after all. Well, I can imagine that you could get married and I wouldn’t be there, but I don’t like it.”

  I walked directly over and took Atlas from her. He let out a squeal of delight. I turned around and walked straight up to his room, still mostly set up, slammed the door, and collapsed in the corner sobbing, rocking and rocking and rocking him in my lap. I expected Jill on my heels, but she had evidently concluded this was a cost of doing business or had forgiven me or chose just to let this one go. In any case, we had some time alone. “I love you and will always love you,” I whispered to his hair. “I will never let you go. It may seem like I’m not there, but I am there. I will always be there. I am always there. You are mine. You are always mine. We are always family, you and I.” Atlas did not seem to mind my hysteria or his newly sodden shirt. Atlas was entirely distracted by his yellow rabbit whom he’d evidently missed. Atlas seemed wholly healthy and well, happy, eating, repaired, and well. Atlas seemed home, but I knew he couldn’t stay for long.

  After a while, Jill and Katie came in and joined us on the floor. Jill had a speech. She delivered it while playing with the blocks, stacking and unstacking and restacking, but never looking at any of the three of us. We looked at the blocks too. “I’m sorry but not entirely sorry. I’m sorry I yelled, but I was angry. I’m sorry I had you arrested, but I was scared. I’m sorry I overreacted, but I was angry and scared. I’m sorry I took all the furniture—I was feeling vindictive. I’m sorry I wouldn’t tell you where we were—I was being dramatic. Those are the things I am sorry for but not entirely. I also had a right to be scared and angry. And I have a right to do whatever I want with Atlas even if you don’t agree with it, even if it’s crazy.