The end.
And that had been Phoebe’s story, too—she had been so good. So quiet. So studious. Valedictorian of her high school, then college, and then went off to graduate school to make a life for herself, which she did. She fell in love, got a PhD, got married. Bought a house with her husband. And then, after five grueling cycles of IVF, when all seemed lost, she finally got pregnant using their last embryo. For ten weeks, she rubbed lotion on her belly, and she could feel it, how she was hurtling toward the happy ending that would make everything, even her mother’s death, seem like a necessary part of the story.
But then it was over, in under a sentence. One day she had been pregnant, and then the next day, she was not. She had felt the blood between her legs, and every time she remembered the blood, she thought, No, no, no, this can’t be how it ends. Because this ending made a mockery of her mother’s death. This ending was just tragic. More like a Russian novel, where all the characters go on a great wild adventure just to be killed off in the end.
“The Russians got it right,” Phoebe said the morning of the awards ceremony, and she loved that she could say things like this to Matt. “Maybe I just need to accept that my life is a Russian novel.”
“You forget I haven’t read the Russian novels,” Matt said, pouring coffee in his to-go mug.
“I just mean, a story can be beautiful not because of the way it ends. But because of the way it’s written.”
“That’s true,” Matt said. “But you’re not at the end.”
Matt clearly wasn’t ready to be a character in a Russian novel. He wasn’t ready for his life to be a tragedy, albeit a beautiful one. He was off to work, where he was going to write his speech and pitch a new book to his editor about the philosophy of doing things, while Phoebe stayed at home to write. “Why are all the mothers dead?” she typed, but then felt too depressed to continue. So she got up and made an elaborate breakfast. She touched herself in bed and thought of her husband holding her against a wall by her neck, calling her terrible things. Then, she went for a walk and admired novelty door knockers. She stopped at Joe’s wine shop on the way home. They bought wine exclusively from Joe, a bald man with big thick muscles who asked a lot of questions about the English language every time she purchased something.
“Hey, Professor. Is conversate a word?” Joe asked. “Never heard of it. But girlie over here says it’s a word.”
He pointed to the young girlie, who was always sitting on the stool next to the register, all eyeliner and purple nails. There was always a young girlie—sometimes they worked in the store, and sometimes they just came to visit Joe and sit on a stool for hours because that’s what girlies seemed to like.
“Everything’s a word,” the girlie said. “If you say it enough. Isn’t that right, Dr. Stone?”
This girlie was a student at the university, dark brown hair, dark eyes. Studying psychology. She had never had Phoebe as a professor, but said she had “heard about” her.
“That’s true,” Phoebe said. “Say it for ten years, and it ends up in the dictionary.”
“Ten years,” Joe said. “That’s all it takes?”
Joe wanted Phoebe to like him because Joe wanted all women to like him. Liking him seemed to be the first step to fucking him. And sometimes, she liked Joe. When Joe was railing against the authoritarian undertones of popular politicians or watching a Disney movie on his computer and laughing at all the slapstick. But then she saw the girlie on his stool and the cup in front of the register that said PUSSY FUND.
Right then, it was half-full.
“That’s right,” Phoebe said.
Her husband never commented on the Pussy Fund after they left, as if it were not right to call out another man on his Pussy Fund, or like, if they actually called him out on it, they’d have to find another place to buy wine, and this one was really the most convenient with the best selection. So, she paid for the bottles, and she said, “See ya, Joe,” and she tried not to wonder if her husband ever dropped his spare change in the Pussy Fund when she was not there.
EVERY FEBRUARY, THE awards ceremony, and every year they went, and every time, Phoebe wore the same dress. A black Calvin Klein that she bought years ago for her job orientation. A dress that nobody ever complimented but nobody ever insulted. A dress designed not to be noticed.
She was surprised that it still fit, still made her look the way she always looked, and this depressed her. Tonight, she wanted to feel different. She wanted to walk into the awards ceremony and be noticed. Because if she wasn’t going to have children, she should at least have magnificent dresses. So she drove to the mall and didn’t stop shopping until the emerald dress caught her eye. The silk felt amazing, like cool water dripping down her body—why had she always been afraid to wear silk? To wear color? She looked good in emerald. It highlighted the red tones of her brown hair. The green specks of her eyes. Her olive skin.
She bought it without thinking, without wondering what her husband might think, what Bob might think, what Mia might think. That’s how much she loved it.
But before the dinner, when she put it on again, she felt ridiculous standing on her beige carpet next to her flannel sheets. The silk dress was too much. Five hundred dollars. And the dinner was going to be in the gymnasium. What was she thinking? It was floor-length, a dress meant for a wedding, not for an awards ceremony at a cash-strapped university in Missouri.
She put the black dress on again. She didn’t want to embarrass her husband. She knew she had been embarrassing her husband lately. She knew she had been a little sloppy, sometimes too drunk when he came home.
“Did you write today?” he asked her when he returned to pick her up. He suggested they take one car.
“Yes,” she lied.
She looked at herself in the mirror. There she was again, she thought, and yet, she felt like she was somewhere far away, still in the fertility clinic, watching Matt shake hands with the doctor. Or maybe she was at the River Ouse, watching Virginia Woolf fill her pockets with stones. She wondered how many stones Woolf used. How cold was the water?
“You look beautiful,” he said, and when he said it, she felt it.
She combed her hair and off they went to dinner.
THE DINNER WAS an elaborate affair for a gymnasium. The university paid five grand a year to bring in a guest speaker, some celebrity scholar who could talk both about the crisis in the Middle East and the value of a liberal arts education or the labor conditions in China and the value of a liberal arts education or the recession and the value of a liberal arts education.
“You really look so beautiful,” her husband said again before they entered the gym. He seemed to be telling both of them. He put his arm around her and just like that, they were husband and wife again.
They drank white wine and ate chicken marsala with steamed vegetables. They sat at a table of people just like her husband. People with real jobs. Bob. Susan. Brian. Mia.
Then, a series of speeches and applauses for the various achievements of other people and then, chocolate lava cake. They ate the cake and talked about how the cake was not very lavalike. They talked about their students, their jobs as a whole, and the consensus at the table was that they were very rewarding but also very hard.
“Hard?” Bob’s wife asked. She was a surgeon at a local hospital. “All Bob ever does in his office is drink German beers and listen to Bach.”
“And not to mention your summers off!” said Tom. With his doctor’s schedule, Tom and Mia could only take a one-week vacation each year, and then they talked about that vacation for the rest of the year. “So, no complaining, you professors!”
They laughed. Tom was right. Their jobs were wonderful, her husband confessed with his hands up.
The lights dimmed and the student choir began singing from the stage with candles. But even in the dark, Phoebe could feel the truth: the gym underneath her feet. The foul line that cut across the dance floor. The way they looked at her like she was just Matt’s wife. Especially the ones who didn’t really know her, like Susan from the philosophy department who forgot her name every year. She always had the same question for Phoebe: “And what do you do?”
“I teach,” Phoebe said.
“Phoebe actually teaches here,” her husband said.
“Oh wonderful, what do you teach?” Susan asked.
“Pretty much whatever Bob asks me to teach,” Phoebe said. “Mostly the survey lit courses that all freshmen are required to take. Everything from the beginning of literature to the internet.”
