Friday night, and the B is sleeping, a late-evening nap that might turn into an extremely early bedtime. He fell asleep one Law & Order, one Bones, and one-half Pretty Woman ago. I've been in the kitchen. Potato salad with herb mayonnaise and hard-boiled eggs. Chocolate chip cookies. A long grocery list for the morning, when we'll go to the store. Earlier, online, I bought a pair of Adidas and a digital kitchen scale.
It's not the most exciting kickoff to the weekend, but it works.
I am stockpiling. I am soothed by our full refrigerator. I am thinking about the spring. I am grateful that even though the temperature is back in the twenties and thirties, there is no snow.
I am humbled and happy that I came home today to a pudding care package, sent from Wayzata. Inside an old Converse All-Stars box was nail polish, my favorite kind, and mix CDs labeled "March ♥s Xtina," and two kinds of pudding, and a green wind-up dinosaur that immediately terrified the dog. In the video, there is something that looks like blood but might be just barbecue sauce on the kitchen tile.
It's a good day. A good evening.
*
I received a rejection letter today from a job I applied to in September. This is probably the most inane and nonsensical part of the academic job search--the official notification that you get after after months of silence, after the search committee has done phone interviews and campus interviews and offered a candidate the position and received a signed contract from that candidate. I knew I didn't get this job back in December, when one of my colleagues was invited down for a campus interview. But still, I got a letter.
The letter was signed by the man who used to be my former TA director. Four years after we both left Minnesota, our names have intersected one more time. Because I was in a good mood, because the sun was out, I laughed before I tossed it into the recycling bin.
For the next three or four months, I'll get one of these letters a week. I remember that from Minnesota, from Wisconsin.
*
We have been talking. The future that lies ahead of us is familiar in its unfamiliarity. Like we did in summer 2007, we have no specific prospects or offers ahead of us.
The Plan B, the one we'd known might be coming, is starting to take its shape.
We are making a list. New York is out. Seattle is tempting, but means a full-on commitment to cross-country flights. We are at the ages when we have to think about the marriages and deaths and births we'd miss.
Boston is, after some reflection, out. The idea of Los Angeles makes me want to stab myself in the face. We are thinking Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond, Atlanta.
We won't go to Minneapolis, though of course we'll always know people there. I need something different. I want to get out of the Midwest. I should try something that isn't pulling back the curtains and groaning at the sky.
Three weeks ago, before I had heard the nos from Texas and Oregon and Louisiana, before those doors closed, the idea of Plan B made me tired all over. Bone tired. I wanted the basic decision made for me--We'd like to offer you this position. We could go from there, I knew, could line up apartments and work for the B.
But something changed in me last week. Now I'm glad for the Plan B. Something about all the nos makes me feel, oddly, in control. For the last two years, I've been sending out letters and CVs and hoping that someone would pay attention to me. Now it's our turn to look at the map and think not Could I live there? but Where do we want to live?
In this uncertainty, there is great freedom.
*
On Wednesday, Liz was here. The B and I, along with two other visitors, were reading on campus. Our contracts are up in four weeks, and we are leaving, so we read our poems and our nonfiction and our fiction. Afterward, a bunch of us went to the bar around the corner, and we ate burgers and drank beer and laughed.
Liz followed me to the bar from campus, and as we parked our cars down the block and walked, she mentioned looking for jobs in Atlanta.
Atlanta? I said. We hadn't talked in a few weeks; we'd been busy.
I have to get out of Michigan, she said. Maybe Atlanta. Maybe Chica--
The wind--cold, bitter--took the go out of her mouth for her.
Fuck Chicago, I said. I mean, it seems like a great city, but fuck this weather. We went into the bar, where the fake fireplace roared in the corner.
Later, we sat in the living room and listened to Joe Purdy, ate blondies and talked. We talked about the dues we still might pay. We talked about adjunct pay and piecing together full-time work and what it's like to be in our thirties and not have insurance. We talked about the current national rhetoric regarding teachers. We talked about the future, and the cities we could see ourselves living in, respectively, and the conversation felt just like the ones we used to hold in the red living room of the house in Minnesota, and it felt good.
*
We have been thinking of Atlanta. There is the weather, the proximity to family, the number of two-year colleges, the IKEA, the four-hour drive to Savannah and Tybee and the beaches, the dogwoods, the aquariums, the population, the opportunities. There is the fact that our proxy--my brother--could help us find an apartment, and, in a pinch, be sent to check it out. There is the knowledge that no matter what the year ends up throwing at us, we could invite over at least one person for dinner on a Wednesday night .
Nothing is settled yet, and nothing can be--before the great apartment search and job search can begin, we need to finish the semester, and go to Vermont, and go to Wisconsin for our respective residencies, and begin to pack up this place. We need to say goodbye to Michigan. And there is always the slim chance that the school I applied to this week, or last, might call.
In the meantime, I make potato salad with the parsley from the window box. I make cookies for freezing. I make a grocery list. I think of Atlanta, and I feel good.
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