“That’s stupid,” said Jill.
“Why?”
“Because then I’d just have an abortion. Why would I give my child to somebody else to raise?”
“If someone else could do a better job of taking care of it—”
“Why do you guys think I can’t raise a baby?”
“I don’t think you can’t raise a baby,” I said. “But I don’t know if you want to either. And if you don’t want to, you’ll do a bad job. This is important, Jill. You can’t screw it up. You keep saying, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ And you have to know, or you have to choose something else, and that something else might be the responsible thing to do in this case.”
She thought about it. And Katie thought about it. And I thought about it. It was like we were in a fight, but we weren’t really. Jill finished her Cheerios and slammed her spoon down. “I have to talk to Dan,” she said. “I won’t know anything until I do. I’m not even thinking about it until then.” She picked up her things and left. She didn’t even put her bowl in the sink.
“What do you think she’s going to do?” asked Katie.
“I think she’s going to have a baby. What do you think she’s going to do?”
“I think she’s going to have a baby.”
Five
Daniel Davison was one of those people for whom everything seems effortless. Walking across campus with him to get coffee took twice as long as it did with anyone else because everyone stopped to talk to him because everyone was his friend. The cool kids were his friends and the athletes, the Greeks and the poets, the theater kids, the marching band, the scientists. Deans and vice presidents and board members who knew only seven students by name knew Dan. They all stopped to say hi and to chat, and for each, Dan would know a little something. “How’d you do on that test you were stressing about?” he’d say, or, “I heard your party was awesome. I’m sorry I missed it,” or, “How’d things go on that date you had last week?” Dan played intramural volleyball. He wrote for the student newspaper and the literary magazine. He was usually starring in a play or two each semester. He DJ’d for the campus radio station from one to two A.M. on Mondays. He was always in at least a couple bands.
We tend to think people like this can take anything in stride. But for Dan, as for all people like this I suspect, it meant he couldn’t accommodate anything unexpected—it was all balanced, all perfectly timed, all completely interdependent on everything else. Any addition throws everything off.
I knew all this because Dan was a student of mine my first semester in the classroom, his first semester at college. He was a smart kid and a good writer, warm, funny, the student who wins over the rest of the class for you because they figure if he likes you, you must be worth liking. He got As. On every assignment, every essay. Nonetheless, he came weekly to office hours. To go over my comments on his essays. To read me his rough drafts. To get explanations about semicolons, about passive voice. I couldn’t figure this out. About midterm, I realized, amused, that he was already sitting in my office when I got there most days, that he wasn’t talking to me or even listening to my responses to his questions nearly as much as he was flirting with my officemate. Jill ignored him all semester. “Stupid freshman. Like that’s ever going to happen.”
Three years later, Jill was bribed by the dean into being the faculty advisor for the Student Government Association. He didn’t offer her very much money, but it was still more than she could refuse.
“It’s not going to be worth it,” I warned her.
“How much work can it be?” said Jill. “Besides, it’s not my money being divvied up, so what do I care?”
I was right, and she was wrong of course. It was a lot of work. It was a lot of budget balancing and number crunching and spreadsheet making, none of which are the strong suits of English Ph.D. candidates. It was a lot of listening to presentations by an endless parade of student groups asking for more money. “It’s weird,” Jill marveled. “It’s like they think I give a crap.” But mostly, it was a lot of refereeing between government geeks and fraternity reps. “The GGs think nothing on earth is as important as SGA,” Jill reported. “The FRs just want to give all the money to each other for beer. This is the stupidest thing I have ever done in my life.” Meetings consisted of yelling and nothing else.
Jill tried not caring, her usual approach to such things, until she started getting slightly threatening messages from the Dean of Students. “It is vital that you succeed. Your graduate career depends on it,” one said. “We have entrusted you with a sacred duty and responsibility.”
“No one told me it was sacred!” Jill protested. Desperate, she decided they needed new blood, people who were neither self-important GGs nor FRs just in it for the cash. She fairly begged for volunteers.
And so when Daniel Davison wandered calmly into the melee of the last SGA meeting before midterm, she had to admit she was pretty happy to see him. A senior now, he looked exactly the same as he had sitting in our office three years before in every way that she could put her finger on, but in some ways that she could not quite, he had changed. When she proposed they all start fresh and do introductions and say why they were there, most people offered some variation of either a testy, “Participation in a democracy is an honor and a venerated duty,” or, “I’m here representing [three random Greek letters] because I [drew the short straw; fell asleep at the meeting; lost at beer pong; am being hazed].” Daniel said simply, “Hi, I’m Dan. I came to help.”
He was easy—easy smiles, easy ideas, easy friends. He was very comfortable. He seemed to like everyone so much that they all started liking each other too. And since he clearly adored the advisor, there was a bipartisan movement towards cooperation. The advisor, for her part, wondered whether he “came to help” SGA or her, but both clearly needed it, so she decided to be grateful and not find out. Her question was whether he’d stay or was there to make a show for one day only. But stay he did. He came faithfully to meetings, helped mediate and plan activities, and became wildly popular among student groups who came to beg for money. Best of all, he could do the math involved in the budget. Soon, SGA was running smoothly, and there was peace in all the land. Everything was back to normal. Except one thing.
“Shit,” said Jill, “I think I’m in love with an undergraduate.”
“Hurrah,” said Katie, willing to overlook the swear word in favor of the sentiment.
“He’s twenty.” Dan had skipped a grade somewhere along the line.
“So?” Because everyone who’s single is fair game at church, many of the men Katie dated were about that age.
“I am twenty-seven,” said Jill.
“And?”
“And I am twenty-seven. I am in graduate school. I do not like to party all the time. I do not like to get drunk four nights a week. I don’t want to rock all day with my band and experiment with drugs afterwards.”
“Does Dan?” I asked.
“We couldn’t even go out for a drink,” she said, ignoring me. “He can’t even buy a beer.”