The World Outside, 23
Questions
to see all chapters of The World Outside, click here
NOW
Throughout that winter and into the early spring, the relationship between Erik and Joanna developed without either of them really addressing it. They saw each other three or four times a week, meeting for dinner, movies, hikes, ice skating, Grace High basketball games. She invited him to join Poppa and her for a performance of Handel’s Messiah in the week before Christmas; Erik invited her to join him and his mother for Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, an annual tradition that began with a fireside feast and mulled cider at Mrs. Donovan’s home. She stood with them while they lit a candle and said a prayer for his father. To be included in something so foreign to her, yet so familiar to him, allowed her to see him in a new light. She liked how he interacted with people, how he held himself. She liked seeing him in a place that was unfamiliar to her; she liked having to lean on him—a realization that embarrassed her but one she couldn’t deny.
Their time together was sweet, but it wasn’t always easy. One day in March, they were at the cottage, and Joanna asked out of the blue whether Erik had dated anyone after they’d broken up. He didn’t say Alison’s name, which surprised and reassured her in equal measure. But he did say that he’d had a few dates with a woman he’d met at the bar by the Wal-Mart (if there was a more Maine phrase than we met at the bar by the Wal-Mart, Joanna didn’t know it), and that there had been an older woman—twenty-eight—from South Thomaston that he’d dated for about four months. Four months!
“I didn’t sleep with her,” he assured her. “It never got that serious. She was more just…someone to pass the time with.”
Joanna surprised herself by crying, just a little bit. She honestly thought she wouldn’t have cared either way—after all, she’d been the one to break it off with him. And then she felt like a hypocrite when he returned the question, and she couldn’t even remember the number of guys she’d gone out with. Her reassurance, that she’d never liked any of them much, didn’t help.
“Let’s get it all out now,” he said. “Let’s ask whatever questions we want and get it all over with, because I’m never going to want to talk about this again.” So they did. It was a hard conversation, for both of them.
Regardless of the ease of their growing relationship (or maybe precisely because of it), Joanna was nervous for much of the winter that she was settling too easily. The intensity of the Our Town rehearsal schedule, followed by the holidays, had broken up her job search; Mike, too, had been hinting that the job was hers again the following year if she wanted it. But she didn’t want to want it and so, in January, she forced herself, again, to sit in front of the computer for two or three hours every day, researching her options. These sessions were as depressing and uninteresting as they’d been three months prior.
Complaining to Erik about the situation didn’t do any good. “Stay here,” he’d say, as if it could be that simple in her own mind too. “Teach the kids, get Mike his coffee or whatever, be with me—what else is there?” The infuriating thing was that what he described was, at least on some level, exactly what she wanted. But Ronnie’s words and Coop’s words kept her from admitting it. Would she turn out to be as dumb as Ronnie’s mother? Or as unfocused as Coop thought?
“What do you want?” Erik would demand of her. “If I’m holding you back from something so fantastic, what is it?” She could never answer him; she just felt like this couldn’t be it. She was terrified of turning out to be just like everybody else, to learn that she wasn’t as interesting as she’d always thought she was. Josh had left Grace. Even Mary had left Grace! Why couldn’t she?
“Who are you competing with?” he would ask, over and over again. “There’s no one who needs to love this life, except you and me.”
“What life?” she would shout, exasperated. “We don’t have a life—that’s what this whole fight is about!”
More than once, he stomped away from her, completely fed up. She did the same to him. More than once.
But he made her better too. Her proclivity to generosity tended to grow in direct proportion to the time she spent with him. Once, just because, she bought him an antique map of the United States; together, they tacked it up over his mantel, behind the radio, and drew a circle around all the places he’d taken Ro. For his twenty-fifth birthday, she signed him up for a six-week woodworking class, which thrilled him beyond speech. He thanked her by building her a low, wide bookshelf for the scripts and notebooks and props she was accumulating. He stained it a deep, rich color and presented it to her the night after they closed the One Act Festival that March. She paid attention to his schedule and sometimes surprised him with lunch or a case of beer at his worksite, and when he was on a trip with Ro, she sometimes re-stocked his refrigerator or straightened up the cottage while he was gone.
She wasn’t sure when it happened—maybe the day that she instinctively put mustard in her basket at the market because she knew he was running low, or maybe it was the day she ran into Alison Daly at the bookstore and felt nothing but a friendly detachment for this former rival—but, eventually, Joanna had to admit to herself that she had fallen in love with Erik all over again.
True to form, she responded to this realization by doubling down on her efforts to leave. She spent two long weekends with Shoshana in Brooklyn and spent hours searching for anything that was more compelling than her options at home. She made dozens of pro/con lists. She talked with Poppa. She spent spring break in Virginia with Mary, with an eye toward long-term residence. She crunched numbers for various graduate programs around the country and in Canada.
Grace always came out on top.
If asked, Joanna would not have been able to say why she felt the need to keep pretending she might leave at any moment, other than to say that she couldn’t conjure certainty where it didn’t exist. For better or worse, she had to feel it out.