But other things, endlessly everyday and mundane, have stories worth telling in them too. “Are we really saving these hideous things?” I asked, pulling puke green velvet curtains with huge orange flowers embroidered over them off her windows.
“Ugh, no, toss them,” said my mother. “She found them in the remainder bin at an outlet store and liked the price. You know your grandmother. I told her they were ugly, but she said she was an old lady and wouldn’t live long enough for it to be worth paying for expensive curtains.”
“When was that?” I asked.
“Must have been more than fifteen years ago,” said my mother, laughing. But then she dissolved in tears, regretting that she hadn’t bought her prettier curtains for a birthday present or something in between.
“What about the card table?” asked my dad.
“Bring it across the hall,” said my mother. “Mary and Mabel always played over here. They probably don’t have a card table of their own.” And we thought about my grandmother playing bridge—and hostess—into her final week on earth. “Give them the chip and dip plate too,” added my mother. “They’ll need it.” See? Like a novel. Card table as character development. Candlesticks as memory.
In between sorting and packing sessions, we went back to our house, and people came and ate and remembered and forgot. Jews do this, sit shiva, spend a week sitting around hosting well-wishers and reminiscers, plying everyone with food. In some ways, it’s very nice—this insistence that no, not yet, we aren’t ready to move on. But it’s also a long time to sit and look at the same sad faces and hear the same stories and eat bagels. I spent most of the week at home helping my parents, visiting with their friends and distant relatives, packing food out of and then back into Tupperware containers more or less hourly, and trying to talk myself into my new world. Nico came over one night, and we went for a long walk.
“What will I do without her?” I said.
“You won’t be without her. You’ll have your memories of her, her wisdom. Whenever I cook for a holiday or special occasion, I put a photo up on my fridge of my grandmother in an apron holding me on her hip with one hand and waving a huge spoon in the other.”
“When did she die?” I had never met any of Nico’s grandparents. By the time I met him, they were already gone.
“I was in middle school. But taking that picture, cooking with her that day, it’s one of my earliest memories. She gave me the best cooking advice I ever received that day. It was because I wanted to add an entire bag of chocolate chips to the Rice Krispies treats we were making. She told me, ‘You can always add more, but you can never add less.’ ”
“So that’s where that came from,” I laughed. “I think about that all the time when I cook.” Then I admitted, “I guess I’m lucky really. I got to keep my grandmother for such a long time. I didn’t lose her like you did so early.”
“Yeah, but maybe that’s bullshit,” said Nico. “It sucks. You had more time. But you also have to feel it harder. All those years we didn’t get are sad for me and my grandmother, but on the other hand, I was twelve. I was sad but also I just wanted to run around with my cousins in the backyard and forget about it. And I did. So it was easier for me in that way.”
We thought about that for a bit. Then right before we got back to the house, Nico took my hand.
“I have one more thing to tell you,” he said. “Caroline’s pregnant.”
I hugged him. I said I am so happy for you both. I said you will be a great father. He would be. But my heart wasn’t in it. I was feeling anti-baby. I was feeling anti-family.
“We want you to be the godmother,” said Nico.
“I’m not Catholic,” I said.
“It’s more ceremonial than that for us obviously. We aren’t even married, so I’m not sure the church’s biggest hang-up here is going to be that the godmother is a Jew. Really, there are only two criteria. It should be the person who’s your favorite friend. And it should be the person who you’d want to take care of your child if you both die somehow. That’s you.”
“Why me?”
“Because you’re my favorite friend. And you’re a very good mother.”
“I’m not a mother,” I said quietly.
“But you’ve been being a mother. And someday you will be.”
I snorted. “What makes you think so?”
“Because you’re my favorite friend. And you’re a very good mother,” said Nico.
Late that night, Ethan called. To see how I was doing. To update me on things at home. And to tell me this:
“I don’t want to alarm you or anything, but we made out.”
“I noticed,” I whispered so as not to wake my folks. “I was there.” Then, “It was nice.”
“I thought so too.” He was also whispering for no apparent reason. “But also kind of crazy.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know.”
“I agree but me neither.”
“What would you like to do about it?” he asked.
“I think I’d like to do it some more.”
“This sounds like a good plan,” he said. “You come home and we’ll put it into action.” Then we didn’t say anything for quite a long time, just sat and felt the heart swell that came with the echo of our whispers, the memory of the kissing, and the promise we’d just made of there being more. Finally he whispered, “Do you want me to come up? Just for company? Support?”
“No, I’ll be home tomorrow. It’s a little crazy up here. But thanks.”
“One more thing, Janey. I have this wedding to go to this weekend—an ex of mine is getting married—and I wondered if you’d be my date.”
“I’m in,” I said.
Thirty-eight
By the time I got home, we had only two days left to start and finish the novel unit in my class. Katie had introduced it, and she and Ethan had tag-teamed the discussion, but there was still so much to cover. It had not been a good Summer One for me. But I had Summer Two to make up for it. In exchange for teaching so much of my class, I was taking the first week of Katie’s so that she could honeymoon. Who would have imagined in October when we signed up for summer session classes that my grandmother would die in the middle of mine, that Katie would get married the weekend before hers? When I posed this rhetorical question to Ethan, he mused that actually both would have been pretty good bets. True, maybe, but not my point.
My point, as I discussed with my students, was that of course what happens in a novel is going to be momentous because that’s why we’re getting this story. Every day, every moment has its own story, but most of them are boring. The novel has culled all those cloudy moments into one crystal narrative worth telling. When I was a kid, I thought it so improbable that the poor boy I’d met in chapter one turned out to be the one kid in a million who unwrapped his chocolate bar and found the last golden ticket. But of course that was missing the point. A story where a kid unwraps a chocolate bar, finds no ticket, eats it, and goes home is not a narrative worth telling. And so we never find it in novel form. Maybe that kid goes home and finds, instead, a purple rabbit eating strappy sandals in his armoire; that would be remarkable indeed and then we would get that story instead.