What He's Poised to Do

My mother didn’t take the bait. She never did where people she loved were concerned. “Bye, Sweetie,” she said. “I can’t see what you see in him, but I trust that if you see something, it’s there. I believe in your judgment, because I feel that you are capable of great things. I hope you agree, or that you’ll come to agree.”

“Leaving,” Jill said. “Leaving leaving leaving.”

9.

But Jill didn’t leave. I left. I worked hard in high school, happier in class than at home, and spent afternoons out by the fence, thinking things through. When it came time to apply to college, my mother pressured me to attend Lunar City University, which was a fine institution, staffed by some of the best minds in America, many of whom had jumped at the opportunity to teach on the moon, others of whom had been reluctant initially but found the large salaries persuasive. “What do you like, business?” my mother said. “You can study business there. They say on TV that lunar franchises are a big deal now. Lunar franchises: Will you get a load of that?”

“I don’t like business,” I said. “Not at all.”

“What, then?” she said. “The law?” Her lip curled when she said it. But she loved me, and if I had said yes, she would have been right on it, weaving an elaborate defense of the law as a legitimate career.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just want to go back to Earth.” And so I did, to a nondescript four-year university in a nondescript state in the broad middle of the nation, only fifty miles or so from where my father had settled with Catherine and Rebecca. At first, my mother and I spoke on the phone every week, but the conversations grew strained. There was something in the extreme long distance of the call that diluted the tone of our voices and made each of us less liable to believe the other. For example, she suspected that I was secretly spending time with my father and Catherine there on Earth, though I told her plainly that I wasn’t. And I suspected that she was angry at me, though that seemed impossible. One day, near the end of the first semester, she was worrying about what she should cook when I came back for vacation. I told her that I wasn’t sure I was coming, that I was thinking of spending the holiday in Maine with a roommate. “It might be easier if you and Jill just ordered something,” I said. I didn’t mean anything by it, though I realized as I said it that it meant everything. My mother didn’t speak for a few seconds. I imagined that her mouth was wide open. Then she told me that I was acting just like my father, which I took as a sign not to call her for a while.

10.

My relationship with Jill was better. We didn’t talk on the telephone or send each other electronic messages. Instead, we exchanged letters, and in those letters she was able to give a fuller account of how she was feeling. In fact, they seemed to encourage her to try to understand her own motives and the motives of those around her, and to analyze before she judged; they were like a portable version of the Shrink Fence. At the start of my sophomore year in college, she visited me. By then, she was a swan of a young woman, tall and beautiful and capable of cool irony along with the silliness and surliness that were her trademarks. At least two of my friends fell in love with her during the week she was on campus, and one of them went so far as to spend his winter break working on the moon, calling her daily and offering to take her to expensive restaurants. He returned to college in the spring, defeated because Jill had spurned his advances. In the next letter she sent me, she explained. “It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with Anton,” she said. “But I met a guy here and I think I’m in love. He’s a pizza delivery boy. Ha ha. I am just joking. But you know the irony of it? He owns the pizza store. His name is Jack Holland, and he moved up here from Earth just last year. He is a quite a bit older than me and divorced. He is also the tallest man in town, I think. He’s six-eight if he’s an inch. On our first date I told him about Moonesota and he laughed so hard he fell out of his chair. This is not an exaggeration or colorful language. He fell out of his chair. Sitting there on the ground, he was almost as tall as I was.”

11.