“What do you mean?”
“You don’t always get it right the first time. And not all mistakes can be undone. You’re too young to see what you have when you have it. And then when you realize it, you get it in your head that it’s just too late, and then it is. Dan’s lucky. Atlas is his free pass. Since there’s a baby, he has an excuse to come back.”
“He wants to come back for the baby,” I said.
“No he doesn’t. He’s willing to come back despite the baby. It’s not the same. He wants to come back for Jill. Trust me.”
“How do you know?” I asked. But he wouldn’t say.
Later, I was in Atlas’s room stuffing all the wedding brochures back into the laundry bag they had miraculously come out of. Usually, I am not scrupulous about my own mess, let alone someone else’s, but I had this horrifying vision of someone rushing in to a crying Atlas in the middle of the night and fatally tripping over one of the four million pieces of bridal literature on the floor. Except for Atlas, I was alone in the house, and so I was comforting him aloud, even though he was asleep and couldn’t understand. “It’ll be okay,” I promised him in whispers. “We’ll all always love you and always be there for you. We’re not going anywhere. We’d never let anything bad happen to you. Your mom’s not really crazy. She’s just having some stress. Your dad’s not really evil. He’s just . . . confused. Your mom’s not really mad at Grandma or at me. She’s confused too. You’re a lucky kid. You are much loved. You live with a bunch of crazy people, but you are much loved.” He just slept unperturbed, unconcerned. I felt actually, viscerally even, jealous of him. I envied him his rest and his ignorance and his powerlessness.
And the literalness with which he lived his life whereas I was mired again in metaphor. Maybe Ethan had been right—Jill and Katie, Daniel and Peter, weren’t textual foils after all. Maybe Jill and I were the mirrors with wayward, prodigal, onetime lovers hinting about changing their minds. Being confusing. Being missed.
“Thanks for the cake,” said Jill behind me. She was holding the plate in one hand and stuffing fistfuls of cake into her mouth with the other. “Mmfff gwaaaay,” which I thought meant, “It’s great,” but could have been anything. “Look who I found making out on the porch,” she swallowed, pulling an abashed Katie in by a sleeve. She had called Peter an hour ago to go for a walk. Apparently, they hadn’t made it quite that far. “He came to pick me up, and we got distracted,” she explained.
“That is a really big bag,” Jill observed, red eyed but smiling, chastened, making up.
“Planning a wedding is a lot of work,” said Katie gravely though neither Jill nor I were buying this. Katie loved planning parties. She thought it might have been her calling. If her two-doctorates-chaired-professor father wouldn’t have thrown the biggest fit Salt Lake City had ever seen, she would have been a wedding planner for a living. “In all the excitement this evening, I forgot to tell you guys we picked a date. June twenty-ninth. We decided to do it right after Summer One ends, so no one would have a conflict.”
“I don’t think the Summer One schedule is the same next year,” said Jill. “Did you ask someone in the Registrar’s Office?”
“Not next year. This year.”
We looked at her like she’d lost her mind.
“That’s in a month,” said Jill.
“Yeah I know,” said Katie happily. “Isn’t it great?”
“Why the rush?”
“We’re not rushing. We just didn’t see any reason to wait. Our bishop has the date open. We’re going to do it in the backyard instead of in Utah at the Temple so you guys can all come. You can have a really nice wedding with hardly any notice if you’re a good planner. And I am.”
“You just want to have sex,” Jill said. “You’re both horny. That’s why you’re in such a hurry.”
“Why the big party bag then?” I asked. It stood three feet high in the corner where I’d had to drag it (lifting it was out of the question).
“What do you mean? We have to plan the wedding.”
“But you won’t have time to order invitations or cakes or flowers. Caterers and wedding sites and photographers will all be booked. You have to do this stuff months in advance. When my cousin got married, she ordered her dress a year and a half before the wedding.”
“You wait and see,” said Katie. “Mormons are very industrious. We are excellent at pulling together beautiful, blow-your-mind, last-minute weddings.”
“Yeah,” said Jill, “because you’re all so horny.”
Twenty-seven
The other thing about short stories is, of course, they’re short. Novels, movies, even plays pull you down and hold you under until you stop struggling. You get to know voices, characters, intricate motives, and complicated plots intimately. You live a book for weeks at a time, carrying it around in your bag, thinking about its characters like friends, worrying about their worries as your own. Not so short stories because as soon as you get to know the characters and voices and plots and complications, they’re over. Resolved or unresolved, clear or still completely obfuscated, either way, there’s nothing more . . . unless you’re taking a class in which case you’ve probably been assigned five or so a night. The result is jarring. As soon as you get into one story, it’s suddenly, cruelly over, and, worse still, you have to jump right into another one. It’s like serial dating. The short story unit renders all of us sluts.
For the short story unit, my students write one mini-paper a day. These daily essays are short, but they still have a brain-scrambling effect, and by the end of the week, no one—not me, not my students—can keep track of anything. What we’re reading, what we’re writing, what we’re learning, what we’re doing next—it all jumbles together until we have class discussions that feature Alice Walker characters in Eudora Welty stories, star heros such as, “You know. That guy with the candy? His name starts with J?”, and yield comments during workshopping sessions such as, “This is a really smart paper, but the event you reference in paragraph three isn’t from this story but that other one we read on Tuesday.” It’s tempting to cut something, but the department is insistent that three credits is three credits, however jammed together, and we must accomplish in a week what usually takes three.
On the other hand, grading the short story papers tends to have the opposite effect on one’s life. There isn’t time for much else—no wedding planning, no Daniel-crisising, no thinking about Nico, no fighting with roommates, no solo-Atlasing for more than an hour or so at a time. I was still running with Ethan, and I did make time for a midweek lunch with Jason to update him on developments and see sonograms (plus one photo of Jason and Lucas grinning on either side of a belly—“The before picture,” Jason said as he handed it to me). But otherwise, grading. And while everyone will tell you (and be right) that the grading is the absolute worst part of the job, it was also a nice distraction from everything else.
By the end of week two, things seemed okay. Wedding plans progressed apace, and more important, Katie and Peter seemed still to like each other. Daniel called once more but only once more. The conversation seemed to be better. More quiet afterwards. No blowups. My students felt they’d come through the hard part, and it was all downhill from here. They were right. After the marathon of poems and short stories, they had in front of them drama, film, novel—easier to make meaning if more difficult to understand. We bid goodbye Friday like old friends, wishing each other not good weekends but long ones. I went running with Ethan. Then he walked me home. The whole time, running through my head as my feet pounded pavement and my breath struggled to keep pace, was one word over and over. O-kay. O-kay. OkayOkayokayokay. It was going to be fine.