What We Have Read Free Page A

nice,” she said slowly, head to one side, as if deliberating.
    I grabbed her arm. “Come on! What do you think?”
    She burst out laughing. “I think he’s great,” she said.
    She liked his twinkly eyes. And his sense of humor.
    “That’s important,” she reminded me. “You have to have a sense of humor to survive Mom and Dad.”
    I nodded, afraid to agree. I didn’t want to jinx this.
    Julie, on the other hand, was in fast-forward mode. “You guys have to move here,” she said. “You have to teach at Georgetown!” She’d been living in DC since law school, and she was sure we’d love it. It was a great city! Completely livable! Everything she said seemed to end in an exclamation point. They’d help us get settled! We could live with them while we were looking for a house!
    Julie has always been ahead of me, planning-wise. If I’m type A minus (my mother’s term), she’s type A plus. “You guys can get married and get a place near us and we can raise our kids together!” she added under her breath, halfway back to the table.
    To be honest, the thought had crossed my mind. But I was trying to put the brakes on. I was only here for a callback, I reminded myself. Jacques and I had only been seeing each other since October. Things couldn’t happen that fast. Could they?
    Sometimes, life goes your way. Miracle of miracles, I got two job offers. And one was from Georgetown. I was euphoric.
    Back in Cambridge, one of my thesis advisors told me I had to turn Georgetown down. She closed her office door, paced back and forth, and explained that the other offer—not Lubbock, not Tempe, but a research university in the Northwest—was more prestigious. It had PhD students! She explained to me how it worked: You trained your PhD students and they went off and made a name for themselves, which reflected well on you. That was what I was supposed to be doing now—reflecting well on her after all her years of training me. It should have been clear to me that the bigger university was the better option. She seemed irritated with me, like I’d failed an important test. But I still had time to take the right offer and make up for it.
    Up until this point, I’d always done whatever my professors told me. But I didn’t want to move out West. I didn’t want the big university with the lecture classes. It seemed like another planet to me: cold and distant, rimmed with phosphorescent highways.
    I didn’t just want a job—I wanted a whole life.
    I took the Georgetown job. My first advisor stopped talking to me, but I still had my other advisor, who—her own office door closed—told me to take the job that I thought would make me happy.
    Bit by bit, Jacques and I started making plans. Moving speeded everything up.
    By March he was talking about coming with me, and by summer he’d sold his house (pear tree and all) and we were on our way.
    We crammed a lot into a short period of time: flying to Michigan so he could meet my parents; renting a sweet, mildewy cottage on Buzzards Bay so we could practice living together; flying to South Africa and spending a week on his parents’ farm north of Johannesburg, trying not to step on scorpions and watching baboons run in the hills behind their rondavel.
    In August we drove down to DC, everything we owned squashed in the rented U-Haul behind us, Dave Brubeck booming on the stereo. I had a real estate agent lined up waiting to show us houses. We were in our honeymoon phase, though technically we weren’t married yet, and Jacques still found my efficiency endearing. He didn’t realize I was just in warm-up mode. I was only thirty—we still had lots of time.
     
    FOR THOSE FIRST MONTHS, WASHINGTON felt charmed to us. It was a place of lucky, unasked-for coincidences—we could get good seats to shows last minute, it was easy to find parking, the people who dropped by turned into friends. The luck had to be coming from Jacques, since my family has never been lucky. But who could