“What’s he doing? Where the hell has he been?”
“He got a job. He’s living in Renton, alone. He’s playing in a band.” I could hear Jill’s snort from upstairs.
“Why didn’t you tell me? And don’t say you were afraid I’d be mad. You’ve never been afraid to talk to me before. And of course I’m mad.”
“I was waiting to see. Waiting to see if he was serious, if he’d matured, if he was worthy or could be made worthy . . .”
“How are those your decisions?”
“Because they were offered to me.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“And is he worthy?”
“He’s getting closer. Honestly, there’s probably no one in the world I’d consider good enough for my daughter, my grandson. But I’m working on it.”
“So . . . what? He can come back?”
“That really wouldn’t be my decision,” said Diane.
“But that’s what you want.”
“Not quite. More like if it turns out that that’s what he wants and that’s what you want, what I want is for him to be a better guy, a better partner, a better father. Mothers never get that opportunity once the decision’s been made. So I took it in prelude.”
They sat quietly for a while. Atlas and I did too. For a minute, the only sounds were Atlas breathing and Katie and Peter whispering downstairs.
But then, “What if he wants custody?” Jill shouted. “What if I have to let Atlas spend weekends and holidays and every Wednesday and all of summer break with him? What if I can never move more than fifty miles from Daniel fucking Davison?”
“Maybe we can’t have this conversation anymore tonight,” Diane said gently.
I heard Jill slam the front door behind her mother and spend twenty then thirty then forty-five minutes violently banging dishes in the sink and leftovers into Tupperwares (though, upon further inspection later, the kitchen didn’t look much cleaner than it had when she started). Then I heard her bang into the living room.
“You’re still here?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re talking about me?”
“Um. Yeah.”
“Well, what do you think?”
“I really . . . don’t know.”
“WHAT DO YOU THINK?”
“I think your mother loves you. She just wants what’s best for you and Atlas. She found herself in the middle of a hard, awkward situation and did the best she could. But I also totally get why you feel angry and betrayed. I mean, I would. She should have told you right away.”
“Why would you want to be part of this totally fucked up family?”
“I feel like I already am.”
“Fine. Then I give you my fucking blessing,” said Jill.
“Thank you,” said Peter.
Atlas sighed and smiled in his sleep as if all were right in the world, as if his weren’t about to turn upside down.
Twenty-five
And that was only week one. Week two: the short story. The challenge of the poetry unit is making any meaning at all; short stories are much harder. That’s why they come second. They seem much clearer than poems, but that’s only insidiously so. Poems are surmountable. They have rhymes and rhythms to help you make meaning. They’re short enough (at least the ones you do during Summer One are) to read and reread until you’ve made some sense of them. Short stories are a different ballgame. You read them and understand the words completely. You know what happens in each sentence. You follow the dialogue and action. At the end, you know exactly what’s happened. And also you have no idea. Or sometimes, you get to the end, and you think there must be more to it, but no, it’s not that kind of short story. It really is just describing a walk through the woods or the memories associated with a quilt or old age. Short stories scare students because with poems they know there’s more than they’re getting at first, and they’re game for finding it. It’s like a scavenger hunt. With short stories, there may be more or there may not. And if there is, you have to find it like a reflection in one of those fun house mirrors—it’s there but in pieces and odd angles, and reconstructing it involves as much seeing as looking, as much imagination as observation.
Talking about layers of meanings, digging them out, thinking about how stories can mean one thing and also their opposite, thinking about how details can mean everything or not much at all, it was hard to talk about these things in class all morning and think they applied only to short stories and not to my life. Once you start doing literary analysis, you see it everywhere. You can’t turn it off.
I walked home after class wondering about the coincidence of incident and timing, what it meant that Peter had proposed, one week in, the same night as Daniel came back into our lives, one year absent, that the fulfillment of Katie’s longest and strongest desire came with Jill’s . . . what? Darkest nightmare? Deepest dread? Or was it her ultimate desire too? I realized I had no idea. We had simply stopped talking about Dan. His leaving his would-be baby had seemed so much more monumental than Jill and her boyfriend breaking up that we’d never addressed it, never mourned it, never really even thought about it after. The usual girl commiseration (ice cream followed by margaritas followed by till-dawn-dancing; photo-burning session optional) had never happened. It was too lighthearted I guess. You don’t really hate all men. You don’t really foresee a time when you’ll need them only for sperm. You probably don’t even really crave double fudge mocha swirl chocolate chunk brownies (with real chocolate chips), but it’s a time-honored female bonding tradition, and it jump-starts the healing by performing, well, friendship. Even if you get dumped, even when you’re sad, it’s okay because you have girlfriends. Girlfriends mean your life is not completely over.
In Jill’s case, she’d been cheated. We’d all been so torn between understanding and anger when Dan left, between sympathy to his feelings and our own sense, deep down, that it was not okay, that we’d dropped it entirely. Besides, needing Daniel, even wanting him, felt weak in our we-can-raise-a-baby-just-the-three-of-us psych-up. And truly we’d needed to believe that, but we’d missed something too, and I wondered how often Jill thought of him and how. With anger or longing, loathing or love? Probably all of these.
Behind me there was pounding and panting, and I moved absently to my right to let whoever it was run by. It was Ethan.
“Hey, I’ve been calling to you for a mile. Where are you?”
“Lost in my head,” I apologized.
“Yeah. It’s Monday? We were supposed to run?”
“Shit. Ethan, I’m sorry. I totally forgot.”
“That’s okay. Kind of a mind-blowing weekend. I think I’m still full from last night anyway.”
“Walk with me?”
“Sure. What are you lost in your head over? I mean specifically. I can guess the topic.”
“We started short stories today in class. I’m trying to look at this situation as if it were anthologized. We could read Daniel’s return the same night Katie gets engaged to mean he’s ready to settle down forever and be a family. Or we could read Peter’s proposal the same night as Dan’s reappearance to suggest that men in general are unstable and the institution of marriage is rarely right for anyone.”