“You’re dropping this class or all of them?” I asked less shrilly.
“Just this one for the moment.” So calmly.
“Can I ask why?”
“In a few minutes,” she murmured from her yogic sleep.
I went back to the kitchen. Had I taken on this ridiculous schedule so that she could drop out of school? Had I consented to surrogate-parent her child so that Jill could sit around doing yoga while I rushed from place to place? Was Atlas not her son and thus her problem, and if so, why was I running madly home in the rain in my good shoes while she achieved enlightenment in the living room?
“Hey there,” she said with a smile, sitting down and helping herself to half my sandwich without asking. I was too annoyed to eat and fed the other half to Uncle Claude.
“Where’s Atlas?”
“Napping.”
I could never—never—get Atlas to nap in the afternoons anyplace but my arms. When I put him down, he wailed and wailed. Jill set him in his crib, closed the door, and walked away.
“I can never get him to nap,” I said, miffed.
“He was very zen from yoga,” said Jill. I considered how killing her would be rude, bad for my karma, and impossible to schedule around.
“So you’re just dropping classes?”
“No, I’m not just dropping classes. I have dropped this class.” Calmly, gently.
“Why?” Annoyed, angry, irrational.
“Because I can’t do it.” Logical, simple, infuriating.
“How can you not do it?” I demanded. “This is your class. It’s taught by your advisor. She’s teaching it for you. It’s the subject of your dissertation.”
“All true, but it turns out I can’t do it. I can’t, I don’t want to, I won’t. That’s it.” Satisfied, smug, offering so little information. I believe the word is “maddening.”
“Jill, how is it that you can’t do it, but Katie and I can? We’re taking on just as much as you are. We have just as many classes and students and pages to read and essays to grade. We aren’t watching stupid TV all day every day. We haven’t completely stopped doing any work at all. We are doing just as much child care as you are, and he isn’t even our kid. How is that reasonable?”
“Because he isn’t your kid,” Jill hissed, suddenly icy. “And because you aren’t studying Holocaust narrative.”
“What the hell has that got to do with anything? I love him like he’s mine. I take care of him like he’s mine. I take time off from my own work like he’s mine. And besides, Holocaust narrative is easier than Shakespeare. You’ve got fifty years of scholarship to go through. I’ve got four hundred and counting.”
She slammed her water glass on the table, grabbed huge fistfuls of hair at her temples, and pulled hard. “There are no dead children in Shakespeare,” she whispered through clenched teeth, too insane, apparently, to talk out loud, and while it is not strictly true that there are no dead children in Shakespeare, I kept my mouth shut as I suspected this was not her point. “I can’t read about the dead babies.” She started crying. “I can’t do the kids starving to death, freezing to death, silent under floorboards waiting to die. I can’t read about the children separated from their parents and marched off to gas chambers. I can’t read about it, and I can’t think about it, and I can’t write about it. Even the survivors, even the happy endings, they’re the kids who were all alone, who hid in latrines and haystacks and the homes of people who never loved them and were only trying to make money, and it’s killing me. It’s hurting my heart. I can’t do it anymore. I don’t even want to try to get over it. I don’t ever want to read this stuff ever again.”
I tried to think of something useful to say, but it’s hard to argue to a going-insane new mother that she should read about mass graves full of dead children.
“Okay,” I tried. “So you’ll study something else.”
“I can’t start over. It’s too late.”
“It’s not too late. You could start a whole new dissertation proposal, a new specialty, a new program altogether. You could switch to math if you wanted and still finish years before half the people here.”
“People will ask why I switched topics. I can’t say, ‘Oh, dead babies,’ because I mean probably if I didn’t want to read about death, I shouldn’t have picked Holocaust narratives.”
“Things are different now,” I said. “Pick something else. There are lots of uplifting literary periods.”
“There are no uplifting literary periods,” said Jill. And then, “I can’t let words on a page ruin my life. So I have to stop reading them. Maybe all of them.”
Part of dedicating your life to studying literature is realizing that storytelling is more than just make-believe and that make-believe is far more important than we all pretend—make believe—it is. One way or another, books tell the stories of their readers. But telling our lives is not the same as shaping them, whittling them away. Suddenly Jill had lost control. Her books had taken over and were in charge.
Later, Jill napped, and I sat with Atlas snug in my lap, reading him Moby-Dick. I don’t especially like Moby-Dick. It is hopelessly long, and whaling is boring, and the allegory is painfully obvious though perhaps it wasn’t before it became total canon fodder and probably not for a nine-week-old anyway. But Moby-Dick is beautiful—good for reading aloud—and it was one of Daniel’s favorites. It seemed like what he’d have read to his son, and I am a firm believer in knowing people by knowing what they read, holding their favorite words in your mouth, running curious fingers along the spines of their books. Atlas watched me intently, eyes clear and bright and wide open, head pressed against my chest, warm and heavy in my arms. The consuming, epic, iconic hatred and passion of Ahab’s quest for that whale seemed nonetheless dwarfed by the love I felt for this small, small person. I failed suddenly to believe in emotions as destructive as hate and obsession when such vast, all-consuming love could emanate from a tiny brand-new being and fill the room, the house, my heart. Atlas watched and listened, breathing in and out quietly, moving in and out as I breathed too, as Ahab paced the decks and watched the waters. Jill came downstairs rubbing her eyes and lay down on the sofa to listen quietly in the half-light. “You’re skipping parts,” she said after a while when I was sure she’d fallen back to sleep.
“Moby-Dick is long,” I said. “And whaling is boring.”
“But you’re missing the point then,” said Jill. “It’s supposed to be long and boring and over-detailed so you feel what it feels like to be at sea for months on end, so you feel what it feels like to be totally lost with no power or control.”
“It’s just a bedtime story. It’s not like he understands it anyway.”
“Yeah, but why read it at all then?”
I didn’t want to tell her I’d chosen it because of Daniel, but I suspected she knew. “It’s pretty,” I answered and added, “but I’ve stopped believing it.”
“Which part?”
“All that hatred and vengeance and myopic anger. It doesn’t seem believable to me. Real people aren’t like that.”