Maybe it was dirt that had started her down the road to losing her faith.
But what a silly way to put it. She released her handful like a magician revealing a dove. The soil looked like an extension of the dark tattoo on her forearm, like the ink was sliding off the skin.
Because by shedding the hyper-restrictive construct of religious thinking—what some people call “losing your faith”—Stacey had gained the Universe.
Before leaving Ann Arbor that afternoon, she’d gotten coffee with Janet, and her primary advisor said something disturbingly insightful.
“You view writing like those scenes of Bruce Wayne putting on the Batsuit.” Her eyes bulged in her peculiar, excitable way. Janet’s hands and eyes were always in motion, crumpling a used sugar packet, tapping the wooden stirrer against the side of her mug, peering over the rim of her matronly glasses at passersby, Stacey, and back to people watch. “Like those scenes with Christian Bale or Michael Keaton putting on each piece of the suit in this onerous process.”
“Don’t forget Clooney and Val Kilmer.”
“Body armor, click on; gloves, click on; cowl, click on.” She made the motion for each piece. “You need to learn to just sit down and write without putting this pressure on yourself.”
Janet had become an English professor mostly to indulge the huge pop culture nerd hiding beneath her work on Faulkner. Stacey had yet to witness her in a conversation she couldn’t somehow turn to The Walking Dead.
“It’s just getting past that feeling,” said Stacey, “of everyone being totally fucking brilliant and then the paralysis when I realize I’m not.”
Janet rolled her eyes, a motion that took her entire head in a loop.
“Chill out, Stacey,” she ordered. “You’re a first-year student, for Christ’s sake. Take a week off when you go see your parents. Write something nonacademic. Just write something for yourself.” It felt like Janet had pulled it out of her head: because she’d spent an awful long time writing something for herself the night before. It was now sealed in an envelope on the passenger seat of her car. “Give transnational modernism and ecocriticism a rest.”
When she’d been casting about for a grad program, she’d chosen Michigan because it was by far the best school she got into, and now it freaked her out to think that had she chosen differently, she might never have met their horror- and sci-fi-obsessed Faulknerian, who had become not only a mentor but a woman with whom she was engaged in an absolutely shit-stomping case of hero worship.
“Saw that Maddy dropped you off.”
Stacey responded with a furious heat in her cheeks.
“Hey,” Janet reassured her. “Literature and sex are the primary methods we use for demarcating intervals of our lives. You’re reading this person and fucking this person during any given period and they tend to change over with weirdly similar timing.”
Stacey had no defense for sleeping with her ex, who was about to go chase adjunct positions in the wide blue world. Maddy had somehow dragged her back into her fold. When they first started hooking up, Stacey found her butch midwestern frankness appealing, not to mention those squat legs of a power lifter. Maddy had an awesome androgynous punk coif, and courted her by cutting Stacey’s hair into a sort of Mia Farrow pixie cut she was still in love with. When she began describing her embryonic notion of an idea for her dissertation—ecology and world literature—Maddy kind of scoffed at her first-year naiveté and asked if she’d ever read Goethe, who supposedly invented the genre. “The world at large, no matter how vast it may be, is only an expanded homeland,” she quoted. Later, Stacey decided she had to date outside the handful of women in her program, preferably a half-straight girl who never quoted anything.
“Forget Maddy,” she told Janet. “I’ve got enough making me crazy right now. This trip home… It’s just like this total sense of doom. Like having to think ecologically all the time, it creates this impulse to barricade yourself in a house, town, region, country, planet—hell, that’s doom.” Stacey laughed nervously at her babbling. “Wait, maybe we should go back to who I’m fucking.”
Janet smiled, her mouth two rows of gravestone teeth. Her professor could quell from her mind all eloquence, leave Stacey stammering, staggering around mentally like Gregor Mendel in his library during an earthquake, books beaming her on the head.
“Anyway.”
“Stacey, you’re wound tighter than the girdle on a Baptist minister’s wife.” Janet’s eyebrows danced. “This is your ex’s mom?”
She’d already told Janet the story, editing out the more disturbing aspects. The parts she’d never told anybody.
“Listen, Stace, the past only has power over us if we allow it that power.”
“That’s easier said.”
“And come on, girl, it’s not the mom that’s bugging you. It’s her, doy!”
The night before when she hadn’t been able to sleep, while entertaining visions of ancient narratives racing across the coalescing and dissolution of stars, drowning in Deep Time, she finally realized her preoccupation with ecology and literature had a trail of breadcrumbs leading back to Lisa Han’s bedroom library. Stacey’s love of reading began with Lisa, who pulled books from her foldable shelves and pushed them on her like a drug dealer, the pile of unread tomes growing so vast that Stacey only finished all of them years later while traveling in Europe. Stacey doled out to herself this strategic reserve of Lisa’s favorite texts in careful drips, never reading two in a row. They were Stacey’s reward to herself, her way of connecting back to this person without admitting that that’s what she wanted. Almost all of them had Lisa’s dog-ears and margin notes. Jaunty, clever quips, occasionally filthy, always charming: A huge smiley face at a perverted scene in Lolita. A sarcastic “Thumbs-up, bro!” at a bit of misogyny from Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. A “Jesus I’m wet” next to a scene in Wuthering Heights. It had been during these pusher days that Lisa had handed her James Lovelock’s eco-classic Gaia, warning of its density but also its mind-blowing capability. “After you read it, you’ll be a totally new person,” Lisa told her. “You won’t look at flowers or lichen or dung beetles the same ever again.”
Flipping Gaia’s pages in Lisa’s bedroom, a photo had fallen out. It was of Bethany, Lisa’s mother, swollen with pregnancy, holding her stomach and looking at the camera. “You in your mom’s belly!” she’d exclaimed. “She’s so pretty in this.”
“Seventeen years and one kid ago,” Lisa snorted.
Stacey flipped the photo over and squinted at the date. “Lis,” she laughed. “This is from the day before you were born.”
Lisa took the photo from Stacey, gazed at it a moment, searching for an unspecified clue to no particular mystery. Then she shrugged and stuck it back in the book. Or she must have, because Stacey would find that photograph nearly five years later in Croatia when she finally got around to reading Gaia.