They were a blur, those months. We took classes, taught classes, wrote, and read. For practice, we watched Sesame Street and Caillou and Reading Rainbow. In fact, we started calling the baby Caillou as a working title, finding both the name and the cartoon character appropriately gender ambiguous. Jill would say, “Caillou will not settle down today,” or “Caillou kept me up all night,” or if she ate something gross she’d say, “Caillou did not like that salmon,” or, “I like Caesar salad, but Caillou, evidently, does not.” For real, we considered Anna Dana Megan Greta Rosalind Morgan Cora Hope Lanae. In case it was a boy, we threw around Will Pierre Oliver Dashiell Casper Nat Alexander. The Yankees won the World Series as they will. Katie dated two guys named Adam, plus David, Don, and Jeffrey. None were the ones. We got a car seat. I cooked enormous, balanced meals for all, determined to stuff Jill with protein, vitamins, and good eating habits. Daniel did not call. A week or so before Thanksgiving, we sequestered ourselves to study for orals, miserable exams where we picked one hundred authors from four different literary periods and read their complete oeuvres. We spent five weeks studying and doing nearly nothing else. We were only even showering every third day. For five weeks, all the time we weren’t in class, we wandered around in sweatpants, reading while cooking, reading while walking the dog, taking turns reading aloud over breakfast so the other two could rest their eyes. The knowledge was useless and destined to be ephemeral. The process was worse. Jill mostly read lying on the sofa, feet propped on top of the armrest, so uncomfortable was she in any vertical position at all. Orals were ninety minutes in front of a four-person committee just after classes ended for the semester. On December 21, my exam was at nine A.M. Katie’s was at noon. At three o’clock, Jill went in. At 4:30 she finished. At 4:31, she went into labor.
Twelve
I was home fixing dinner, and I mean really fixing it. I had every window in the house open, never mind it was both freezing and raining, to air the place out. I don’t know if it was really stuffy and smelly—though certainly it could have been what with our showering only every third day, our laundry piling up on most of the chairs in the house, dishes left soaking but undone, trash cans unemptied—or if it was just the stress and anxiety and misery of studying for those exams that I wanted to get rid of. I had both the stereo and the heat turned all the way up, a full oven, and a stovetop simmering with relief, boiling over with freedom from the printed word. We had stopped delivery of the newspaper the previous weeks so as not to be tempted to read something besides exam material, but now I was loath to start it again, repulsed by the idea of reading anything at all (exactly what our graduate program in literature hoped to inspire I’m sure).
I had called my parents to tell them I had passed. I had spoken to my grandmother. I was on the phone with Nico, my college boyfriend. Jill objected to my calling him that—“It’s like you’re still with him in an alternate universe”—but truly that’s how we still thought of each other. He didn’t feel like my ex-boyfriend, like someone over or finished or angry; he just felt like my not-at-the-moment boyfriend. “Maybe I am still with him in an alternate universe,” I usually offered. I’d called him to tell him I’d passed but also because suddenly I missed him so much and longed to talk about something else—not books, not babies—with someone who knew that once—before the books, before the baby—there had been me with my own identity, interesting things to talk about, a life.
“How’s your love life?” Nico asked. Well, okay, so not much of a life.
“Not even a hint of one.” Nico, of course, was happily, stably, maddeningly partnered. Caroline. “It’s okay though. It’s not like I’m bored or anything.”
“But it would be nice,” said Nico.
“It would be nice,” I admitted.
Nico and I met our first night of college at the requisite party for everyone who doesn’t know anyone or have anything else to do. We were friends instantly. Nico came into school with a declared major in psychology, knowing that afterwards he wanted to go to graduate school for social work. He never changed his major or his goal, got into his top choice graduate school, finished a semester early, landed the job he’d fantasized about since he was four, bought a fabulous condo in downtown Vancouver overlooking the park, and was generally always leading a perfect life. Our first week of school, Nico felt a little stressed and overwhelmed, pressed for time, but he reasoned that there were 168 hours in a week, and there was no way he had more than 168 hours worth of things to do. So he sat down every Sunday night and made a chart. Twelve hours a week for class, eight hours a night for sleep, thirty hours for homework, five for intramural soccer, fourteen for eating, fifteen for socializing, two for psych club, four for choir, and so on. He figured in how many hours he wanted to sit on the bed shooting the shit with his roommate (four per week), how many he wanted to spend on the phone each week with his folks (one), how many he wanted for hanging out with me in the library not working (two at the beginning though that increased later when we started making out in the stacks). Every week, without fail, he had hours left over. That’s the kind of person Nico is.
I tried to map out my 168 hours with him that first week, but I couldn’t stick to it at all. I failed utterly to figure in time in the student union trying to decide if I wanted strawberry yogurt or strawberry-banana yogurt (about an hour a week), time to lie on my bed/sit at my desk/lounge at the library staring into space, reading glasses on my face, pencil in my hand, book on my lap, not reading anything (maybe five hours a week), time to feel guilty about how far off schedule I was (so many hours). I abandoned the project almost at once. We were not similar people, so we were perfect friends.
Which lasted for a whole semester and a half. We congratulated ourselves on how mature we were to have a “just friend” of the opposite sex. We sniffed pityingly at our friends’ apparent lack of imagination, their insinuations and giggled suggestions that it was only a matter of time, that sex was inevitable, that one day we would get drunk and just take off all our clothes. Then one day we did. We were sitting against a log on the beach, watching the sun set over English Bay, hunkered down in the sand and huddled against each other for warmth—so cliché, I know—and one minute we weren’t kissing and one minute we were. It was very sweet. We were blissed out enough not to mind the avalanche of I-knew-its and I-told-you-sos. We were blissed out enough not to mind anything at all. We were blissed out enough, in fact, to stay in that state for the rest of college. That’s what I mean by college boyfriend; from beginning to end really, it was me and Nico.
But it was also a very present relationship. We never lived farther away from each other than a two-minute walk. We spent the night together most nights, ate most meals together, walked to class and home again, hung out in between and after. We shared the same friends and parties and activities. It wasn’t as gross as it sounds; we hung out with lots of other people too, had loads of friends. But college is like that—we had few other responsibilities, a manageable workload, a small, tight community, dorm rooms in adjacent buildings, and the sleep needs of nineteen-year-olds. We saw a lot of each other. Which meant that graduate schools three thousand miles apart felt very far indeed. That much time on the phone, that many months without seeing each other, a relationship that had suddenly to rely entirely on words and memory with no touch at all, we had no basis for it. We’d never learned how. We tried, but we just couldn’t do it. But we’d been together long enough to say gently to each other, “We’ll always always be friends,” and mean it. Sometimes though I wondered how it would be if we’d stuck it out. Sometimes I missed him so much it was like drawstrings between the organs in my chest and the ones in my stomach. In fairness though, I would have hated Caroline anyway.