“Love is transformative,” I said.
“But he’s fundamentally different from her. Religion’s not just about what you believe. It’s cultural. It’s like saying race is just about skin color.”
“They’ll share other values,” I said. “Education. Scholarship. Whatever.”
“You just like him because he’s a Mets fan, and he made you feel vindicated about Parker Tamlin.”
“Stupid Parker Tamlin,” I said. “Stupid Yankees.”
“Plus he’s a historian,” said Jill.
“True.” Jill and I share a distrust of history and people who study it. It wasn’t like dating a Republican, but it was still good to be alert.
“It would be fun to have a wedding,” she mused. “Put Atlas in a tiny tuxedo. Have a big shower for her. Sit around bridal stores while she tried on hundreds of huge white dresses.”
“I think you’re putting the cart before the carrot,” I said.
We were still up when Katie got home. Ethan walked her to the door but did not come in. We couldn’t tell if he kissed her or not. Katie came in, took off her coat and shoes, kissed an Atlas sleeping in Jill’s arms, and asked how our evening was.
“Who cares about our evening,” said Jill. “How was yours?”
“Mmm, nice.”
“And?”
“And I don’t know. He’s nice. Did you guys think he was nice?”
“We liked him a lot,” I offered.
“He seems great,” said Jill.
Silence. Nothing.
“What did you do?”
“We went out to dinner. To the Hopvine. And then for dessert at Victrola.”
Huge pause. Nothing forthcoming. This was highly irregular.
“And? Was it fun?”
“He had a beer,” Katie said slowly, and Jill and I exchanged glances. “I didn’t,” she added as if she needed to. “But he didn’t seem to care. He’s doing interesting work. With Professor Carlson. He’s nice and funny and cute.”
“But . . .” Jill prompted.
“But not Mormon.”
“Does it matter at this stage?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I tried to feel out what he might think of conversion.”
Jill shot straight up on the couch. “Are you mad?”
“I didn’t come right out and ask him. I just hinted around. He didn’t seem too open to the idea though. He said he believed in God but not religion. I don’t even know what that means.”
“It’s a little early,” I said gently.
“Yeah, we’ll see.”
“Will you?” asked Jill.
“We’re going to have lunch Wednesday. If you can stay an extra hour or so with Atlas,” she added in my direction.
“Yeah, of course,” I said, bewildered. How can you tell someone who doesn’t already know it that a first date is too early to ask someone to convert for you? On the other hand, for someone who knows already that this would be a deal breaker, maybe it isn’t too early to ask; maybe it’s the only possibility.
Seventeen
It wasn’t experiments in dating that did it anyway. It wasn’t amoebas or lack of sleep or our hanging-by-a-hangnail schedule. It was narrative. Narrative rose up and kicked our asses.
Jill’s big project, her soon-to-be-proposed dissertation, was women’s Holocaust narratives. At least it would have been if she were working on it. In fairness, I should emphasize that under normal circumstances, disserters taking months/semesters/years off from writing their dissertations—while claiming instead to be reading, researching, teaching, traveling, exploring other angles, waiting for interlibrary loans, waiting for student loans, waiting for handwriting analyses, psychic readings, a sign from the heavens, and/or the (literal) death of their authors so that they can finally nail down a definitive oeuvre—is not only not unusual, it’s pretty much expected. There are people in our department who started their master’s degrees the year I started middle school. There are people in our department who took a year off from writing their dissertation so they could have a baby, and now that baby is graduating from high school. There are not people in our department—not even one or two—who have finished their dissertation in the purported year it is budgeted for. Writing a dissertation is not a linear process. No one minds. The unfinishable state of dissertations keeps introductory college courses staffed with practically unpaid labor and keeps the job market nearly impossible but not quite so completely impossible that riots ensue. I would go so far as to suggest that they must put something in the water to keep disserters distracted and ever nearer but never quite done, some Sisyphean chemical, except that would make me sound paranoid and insane.
Suffice it to say that Jill’s not doing any work in and of itself wasn’t cause for alarm, at least not to the department or the graduate program. But to we who lived with her, who watched her stop not only writing but also reading and researching to take up instead pursuits pretty much limited to activities that could be accomplished from the couch, including a remarkable amount of really bad TV, it was pretty alarming indeed. And there was lots and lots of crying. Maybe you are thinking that in a house full of women and babies there was bound to be lots of crying. But Jill is not a weepy person nor one easily put off from her goals, and we were worried.
Because it was Wednesday, I’d rushed home from my class to take over Atlasing so Jill could go to hers, but she was sitting in full lotus position on the floor, eyes closed, breathing deeply, listening to a yoga for mothers and babies CD with Atlas wide-eyed in her lap.
“Jill, you’ve got to go. Class starts in ten minutes. I hurried best I could but I ran into Dr. Brown after class and you know how that goes. He would not shut up. You’re not even dressed!” I rushed in, breathless, in a very despite-practically-running-all-the-way-home-I’m-six-unmakeupable-minutes-behind-so-you-have-to-go-go-go place. Jill did not even open her eyes. She inhaled deeply into her navel center then her heart center then her third eye. She was wearing sweatpants. She exhaled slowly.
“I’m not going,” she said as calmly and quietly as if this were normal. Grad seminars meet only once a week. You are expected—highly expected—to be there.
“You’re not going?” Not that cutting class is some kind of tragedy. But I’d just rushed all the way home, and plus I had planned my day around not having my day. “So you’re just going to sit there and do yoga?”
“Mmmhmmm,” said Jill and breathed all the way in, all the way out.
“You’ve already missed this class,” I added lamely. “You can’t miss again.”
In. Out. “I’ve dropped the class.” Calmly. In. Out.
“What?” I shrieked. Uncoolly.
Jill’s head turned towards me. She opened one eye. “We are chilling out,” she said pointedly. Then added, “You are harshing on our mellow.”
I said nothing. I went into the kitchen and made myself lunch. I tried to decide whether the anger I was feeling was virtuous concern or selfish jealousy or the stunning realization that dropping a class probably didn’t portend the end of the world. Eight minutes later, I couldn’t stand it anymore. She was stretched out on her back in savasana, hands upturned towards the ceiling, ready to receive whatever the universe had to offer. I was beginning to regret getting Jill into yoga. Either it worked too well on her or she didn’t need it. She was already too calm.