Field Notes on Love(16)

“You know what I’m saying. Just promise me you’ll be open to the possibilities.”

Without quite meaning to, Mae finds herself thinking of the video she sent to Hugo W., and how easy it had been to answer his questions. She takes a deep breath and nods. “I promise.”

Priyanka seems satisfied by this. She reaches for the door handle and gets out of the car, and Mae does the same. They hurry around the front to give each other a hug.

“I love you like a pizza,” Priyanka whispers in her ear, and Mae laughs.

“Safe travels.”

Priyanka steps back and gives her a long look. “You too,” she says finally.

Up until that moment, Mae wasn’t completely sure. But right then, she realizes they both know exactly what she’s going to do.

    Afterward, she walks around the side of the house and finds Nana out on the porch, her favorite spot to nap these days. Her eyes flicker open as Mae jogs up the old wooden steps.

“And then there were two,” Nana says with a melodramatic sigh. “I can’t believe Priyanka busted out of here before us.”

Mae laughs. “Won’t be long now.”

“Five days,” she says. “But who’s counting?”

They tried to persuade Nana to stay permanently, arguing that the country would be more relaxing for her. But she made it clear she has no interest in relaxing, and now that she’s got a clean bill of health, she insists on moving back to her own apartment in the city.

“You know what I will miss about living here?”

“Giving my dads a hard time?”

Nana laughs. “No.”

“The burnt coffee?”

“No.”

“What, then?”

“You,” she says, and Mae smiles.

Out on the street, a red car that looks just like Garrett’s comes spinning around the corner, and for a second, Mae thinks maybe it’s him. But of course he’s already gone.

As if she can see right into Mae’s head, Nana says, “You doing okay with everything?”

This strikes Mae as funny, coming from someone who recently went through four straight weeks of induction chemotherapy for acute myeloid leukemia. But she doesn’t say so. “Yeah,” she says instead. “I’m doing fine.”

“You know, the only way to get over a broken heart is to find someone new.”

    “This isn’t a broken heart, Nana. Honestly, I’m not even sure it’s bruised.” She thinks about what Priyanka said, imagining her heart packed carefully away, a tiny fence around it. Then she glances sideways at her grandmother. “Have you ever been on a train trip? Not the train to the city, but something longer.”

Nana is quiet, but her eyes have a faraway look. “I was only a little older than you,” she says with a wisp of a smile. “Maybe nineteen or twenty. A friend and I took a train to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. She had some family down there, so we went on a lark. That first morning, I met a boy in uniform, and he bought me a cup of tea. My friend barely saw me for the rest of the trip.”

Mae sits forward. “So what happened?”

“What do you mean what happened? We talked. We flirted. We kissed.”

“You did?”

“Of course we did,” Nana says impatiently. “We were in love.”

“People don’t fall in love that quickly,” Mae says, thinking this sounds suspiciously like one of the old romantic movies her grandmother loves so much.

But Nana is adamant. “They can. And we did. We spent the whole weekend together, dancing and eating and listening to jazz. We were practically giddy. Couldn’t keep our hands off each other and couldn’t stop—”

Mae hurries her along, eager to move past this description. “And then what?”

“Then we said goodbye.”

“But if you were in love…?”

“He was on leave from an army base in Texas. I had a life in New York City. It wasn’t meant to be.” She shrugs. “Love isn’t magic. It doesn’t transcend time and space. It doesn’t fix anything. It’s just love.”

    “But—”

“I was in love many times before I met your grandfather,” she says. “Some of them lasted a long time; some of them didn’t. The trick is not to worry about it. If you spend too much time thinking about when it will disappear, you’ll miss the whole thing.”

“So what happened to him?” Mae asks, suddenly impatient.

“He was killed in Vietnam. But we kept writing postcards until the day he died.”

Mae is quiet, trying to decide if this is memory or imagination. It sounds like it could be true, but so do most of the stories her grandmother has told them over the years. Nana, too, is silent for a while, thinking about her soldier, perhaps, or lost in the movies that take place in her head. After a moment, she sets her mug on the table between them and turns to Mae. “So,” she says, “tell me more about this train ride.”

“What train ride?”

“The one you’re deciding whether or not to take.”

Mae looks at Nana in surprise. And then the story comes spilling out: the twinge she felt when she saw that post, and the video she sent zipping across the ocean; the way she felt when she watched her film again, like she was stuck, like she couldn’t figure out how to peer around the edges of her own life, and how it smarted when Garrett said the word impersonal; the message from Hugo W. and the questions he asked, which are still sliding around in her head like pinballs, even days later. When she’s done, Nana simply nods.