Short Story - In the Time of Love

A short story about life’s most complex arrangement – loving another human being.

by Christina Carson

In the Time of Love

The dog days of summer, steeped in heat and humidity, sank Jill deeper into glumness as she lay sulky and brooding, stretched out on the sofa on her grandmother’s back porch. Two ponderous maple trees sheltered that end of the house from direct sun and encouraged a seeming cool breath of air to wash over her, but it couldn’t soothe her foul mood. She was working on the second of ten books she needed to read before her junior year in Literature began in September, but she was distracted. The heat had stuck her T-shirt to her like a second skin and her naturally curly hair now looked like Orphan Annie’s, but today she hardly noticed. She doodled on her legal pad where she had been taking notes on Joyce’s Ulysses. She drew a big “M” thickening the lines with each pass and thinning out to curlicues on the ends. She murmured, “What has happened with him?” The him referred to was her boyfriend of two years. Matt and she had seemed such a great fit she’d thought. They had the same sense of humor, enjoyed similar films and music and seemed so compatible. Then he got a grant to work on a science project across the summer and rather than encourage her to stay and seek work in the adjacent town, he suggested they take the summer off. Their last conversation still banged around in her mind pinball-like.

…..

“Off from what,” she’d asked him, confused.

“You know.”

“No, I don’t know.” She could feel her stomach knotting up.

“Sometimes it’s good for two people to have a break from each other.”

“Explain to me why. I’m not seeking a break from you. So that seems to leave you who needs a break, I guess, from me. What’s going on?”

“I’m just feeling corralled.”

“Hah, I thought we were enjoying each other; that we both liked being together. How did I get that wrong?”

“I just need some space that’s all.” Frustration accented each of his words.

She revisited the memory of his face twisting in annoyance as he shoved himself away from the table with a force that pushed the table toward her. With no apology, he walked away.

That night, Jill packed up her belongings. The following day she loaded them in her friend’s car who was giving her a lift home for the summer holiday. She asked her friend to drop her off in another small college town where her grandmother lived. Jill, a child of divorce, found living with her grandmother the best of her options. Late that same evening, she unloaded her belongings into her attic bedroom at her Granny Bette’s place and prepared to live there for the summer, alone.

…..

Jill got up from the sofa, picked up James Joyce’s heavy tome and walked back into the house to find Granny Bette in the kitchen. Jill stood in the doorway staring at her grandmother. She hadn’t noticed before just how young-looking she was, this 62-year-old English Lit professor, but she had noticed how inscrutable. Usually old people walked about embarrassingly unmasked for her, like they didn’t care anymore what you noticed about them. But Granny Bette, she displayed an air of dignity that made Jill comfortable in her presence.

Bette turned from the stove where she was making curry and stared back at Jill. “Is it Ulysses that’s proving intolerable or just life in general? Jill smiled, the kindness in her granny’s eyes softening her frustration.”

“Life is beginning to make Ulysses look like child’s play.”

“Ooooh. Sounds like heart disease to me.”

Jill chuckled this time, then asked, “Granny Bette, what do you know about men?”

“The worst and the best, my darling child, yes, the worst and the best.” Her gaze drifted off for a second as if she was recalling it all.

Jill didn’t know where to start with that reply so she stuck to her present problem. “Matt says he needs space. I don’t understand that statement. Why would someone need space?”

Without a pause, Granny Bette started reeling off the reasons. “Possibility one, the most obvious, he’s flirting with another relationship. Possibility two, he’s getting nervous about the seriousness of his relationship with you. Perhaps responsibility scares him. Possibility three, he’s a cad and a liar. Let’s hope that isn’t the case. Possibility four, he’s a dolt who can’t separate uncut gems from beach pebbles.”

“How many possibilities are there, for god's sake?”

“You don’t really want an answer to that question, do you?” 

Jill stopped for a moment as if considering that comment. She shook her head like someone who just got a whiff of a bad odor.

“What scares me most is that I never saw any of this coming. Am I that obtuse that I thought we were in love with each other, only one of us wasn’t? What are the rules here? What about fair play?”

Bette considered her granddaughter, studying the face of this sensitive, blue-eyed young woman. Jill reminded Bette of herself at that age, a believer in goodness rewarded, but she knew Jill’s understanding of men and women in love, however, was a fool’s tale at best.

“Dear girl, there is no greater treachery than the affairs of love. Any time humans are attempting to complete the cosmic equation of one plus one equals one, stresses and strains abide. It’s then that each participant’s true character is revealed, often as surprising to themselves as to the other. Which way do they lean under pressure – toward kindness or intolerance, flexibility or control, blame or accountability, or do they just jump ship? It’s the ultimate gamble.”

“Is it worth it? I mean what’s the point if it’s so difficult and the odds seem against you from the start? You’re single and your life looks full and satisfying.”

 “Does it?” Bette’s intonation suggested irony.

Jill stopped dead in response to Bette. She suddenly realized she didn’t know the first thing about Granny Bette’s life other than the obvious.

“So, you chose to be single?”

“I would say neither yes nor no. It’s not so straight forward as you would imagine. He was my childhood sweetheart. People had those back in the day. The ten-minute shag, the jumping into bed with a stranger was the exception, not the rule like the world you live in. We had time to determine who this person was to us. We had time to get in touch with the part of us that knows the truth about such things as love. Those revelations didn’t frighten us then, just amazed us. Anymore, no one wants to take the time it takes.”

Jill was leaning against the kitchen wall listening, but now her frustration came out as a challenge, “You don’t think two years is enough time to know someone?”

“Let me ask you this. Do you know him?”

“I thought I did, but what’s happening now seems to have come out of nowhere.”

“How has he indicated to you that he loves you?”

“We get along. He’s pleasant to me.” Jill was struggling to get a list past two items.

“Getting along is hardly the height of relationship. It’s merely a starting point.”

“Well, how would you answer that with this guy of your childhood?” Jill flung the words at her grandmother, childishly, as if they were stones.

Granny Bette turned off the stove and leaned against it, her arms folded. Her face grew reflective and she spoke quietly, as if to herself. “I knew him first as tender.” Then she spoke directly to Jill. “Have you known tenderness from a man? Has a man ever touched your face as if it were as delicate as thin-walled china? From that sensibility, their awe is palpable, their vulnerability unguarded. There is something extraordinary about a man’s fierceness and strength when focused through the lens of tenderness. I knew him tender.

“I also knew him as completing. We women were on the edge of making a damnable mistake back then. We set out to prove our worth to a male dominated world. One can prove a mathematical equation or prove the necessity of eating well and exercising, but one cannot prove the worth of a fellow human being or gender. It immediately begs the question, who’s in doubt? We fought so hard to stand alone, singular and independent that we almost annihilated our chances to understand that the law of the cosmos is that we depend on each other without being dependent on each other. When he and I were together it was like a ten-thousand-piece puzzle that fell naturally into its assembled panorama. We had nothing to do with that except to be willing to bring all of ourselves fully to the experience.

“And finally, I knew him as someone who respected and valued me. I was someone he would have died for, not out of some machismo reflex, but because he knew he had found in me a treasure.”

Somewhere in Bette’s discourse, Jill had slid down the wall like a creature pinned to it and was now sitting on the floor barely breathing. One part of her wanted to scream this is sentimental tripe, but it just couldn’t get past the part of her that so longed to experience what Bette was talking about. Those two forces held her immobile.

The kitchen grew still. Bette appeared to have traveled back in time, her face softening with memories running deep and dear. Jill’s expression was more analytical, as if she were evaluating, perhaps for the first time, what she knew of this man and what he meant to her.

The first of the evensong of robins began to drift through the open windows. The sun was long and low, releasing the world from the intensity of the afternoon heat. A bit of cooling breeze picked up and drifted lightly through the room where these two women talked much like women have done throughout time when caught up in the mysteries and marvels of men.

Jill spoke first. She had to clear her throat to get the words to come out. She didn’t like how it made her feel, but as the thoughts merged into words and the words into sounds, she sighed deeply. “I don’t think I know the first damned thing about love, most especially with men. My relationship feels akin to a shopping list – what he’s got that I think I want and what he doesn’t that I think I need. Where’s love in that? And the sex is already waning because it’s no longer a language expressing joy, or appreciation or awe. It’s just a physical act that sometimes results in a momentarily pleasurable sensation.” Only then did she raise her eyes to seek Bette’s; Jill presenting as a scared and wounded child. “How do I ever find love, Granny, how do I do that?”

“Stop hunting it down, child. You are presently a student. Focus your attention in literature allowing the thoughts and reasoning of its great voices to possess you for a while, ripening your mind, enlarging your capacity to touch life beyond your own limited experiences. Let yourself come to know what it means to have “a room of your own.” Then one day, the man who doesn’t shy from a woman who stands strong and accomplished will thrill to the moment of your meeting.

Jill felt strangely released from the burden her self-imposed blindness had saddled her with. Afraid her world would come apart if Matt didn’t want her anymore, she realized she’d settled for remodeling a room, when she should have been looking for the right house. Jill sat peaceably as one does when clarity has replaced muddle. Yet, there was a remaining question nagging at her. “Granny, did you choose to stay single?”

Her face softening as the question evoked memories, Bette replied. “Yes and no.”

Jill began to roll her eyes, but stopped when she realized the question had taken her grandmother deep within herself. “He was my world,” she began. “I thrilled to the sight of him, and I can say without doubt that would still be the case if he were here today.” She then pulled herself back to the moment and shifted her attention to her granddaughter. “We were luckier than your generation. We lived in the time of love, when people took things slower and let the love that was there blossom and ripen. But we also lived in the time of war. He went to Vietnam and all that remains of him now is his name on that granite slice of a wall. Maybe some people get two great loves in a lifetime, but I wasn’t one of those.”

The twilight was upon them. Shadows darkened the kitchen as Jill rose from the floor, walked over to her granny and hugged her; this woman she was just now beginning to know. Her earlier question, as to whether love was worth it, had been answered as well. It was clear her granny still lived in the time of love, and Jill took great comfort from that.

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