The Atlas of Love: A Novel - Hardcover

One
WHEN I WAS six years old, I found a baby in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria. Wound in a sheet and nestled among the roots of a veritable island of overgrown potted jungle in the corner, it was exactly where no one but a six-year-old would look. You wouldn’t go back there unless you were obsessed with Where the Wild Things Are and knew a forest hung with vines when you saw one and your grandmother was taking forever to check in and wasn’t paying any attention to you anyway. Or unless you were a twenty-year-old front desk clerk, secretly pregnant and scared to death, who had just given birth on your lunch break in a third-floor suite which you knew wouldn’t be occupied all week because its carpet was being replaced. Then that potted jungle might look pretty good to you.
I had slipped stealthily away from my grandmother and wandered bravely into that forest in search of wild things. There, I found mostly dust, one heads-up penny I pocketed for good luck, two Rolos stuck to the floor which I ignored because even at six, I wasn’t eating Rolos off the floor, and, underneath a caladium, a tiny squirming thing I took at first to be Max in his wolf suit.
I could not, of course, have understood, but on the other hand, I must have understood because I hunkered down with the baby in my lap and leaned against the wall of the potted jungle and, to quiet her, stared into the eyes of my new friend without blinking once, ignoring the frantic cries of my grandmother and the wild rumpus of a lobby full of strangers pitching in to call my name, to peek under bathroom stalls and into the gift shop and out onto the sidewalk and a dozen other places a six-year-old might wander accidentally. It took another kid to rat me out, to poke his grubby face into my forest and cry, “I found her. I found her. I did,” as if his were the heroic act.
I watched my grandmother’s face pass from relief to anger to confusion all in a moment as she tried to work out how her six-year-old granddaughter had managed to slip away from her and give birth in under five minutes. She opened and closed her mouth a couple times before she finally settled on, “Janey, honey, tell me you did not steal somebody’s baby.”
Later, upstairs in our perfect room with its huge white beds and huge soft towels and huge windows full of a million glowing lights, after we’d escaped the media frenzy that had taken over the lobby when an ashen front desk clerk figured it was time to come clean, my grandmother held me in her arms after I’d changed into pj’s and told me she was very proud of me.
“You’re not mad?”
“I’m a little mad,” she admitted, “so don’t ever, ever run and hide from me like that again. But I am also very impressed.”
“Why?”
“Because I see the big girl you’re going to be when you grow up. And she’s lovely.”
“Why?”
“Because it was scary but you were brave. You didn’t know what would happen if everyone found you, so you stayed put and quiet and didn’t leave that baby. Even though you knew I might be mad. Even though you never took care of a baby before. Smart thinking and sweet and gutsy. You have a very full heart,” my grandmother told me.
I considered this. “We should take her home to live with us.”
“No, my love. That baby belongs to someone else.”
“But if she didn’t want her . . . ?”
“Not your baby, baby. But tomorrow, we’ll go to the toy store and pick out one of your very own.”
And later still, much later actually, my grandmother argued that this was where it all began. Traditionally, people like to trace this sort of thing back to eggs and sperms, but it almost always begins well before that. Jill thought it started when Dan saved the student government. Katie thought it started with the cream puffs. But my grandmother argued it was twenty years earlier in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria. It’s always hard to nail these things down, but I think that’s probably a little premature. Myself, I put the no-going-back point with Jill in the cracker aisle. Everything else followed from there. Family may not be blood, but it is destiny. It’s not like you get to choose.
Two
I MET JILL among the crackers at the grocery store the night before the start of classes, the night before we started graduate school, the night before we started teaching. I thought some Triskets or something would be nice to snack on while I panicked until dawn. Jill was loading a cart with boxes of saltines.
“Hey, you’re that foreign girl,” she began when she recognized me from orientation.
“I’m from Vancouver,” I said.
“Canada’s a foreign country,” said Jill reasonably. True enough I suppose. I was feeling perfectly at home though. Seattle is practically Canada.
“That’s a lot of saltines,” I observed. This wasn’t going well so far.
She shrugged. “They’re cheap. And I don’t like the grocery store.”
“So you’re punishing it by buying all its saltines?”
“I’m buying as many as I can now so I don’t have to come back.”
“They’ll go stale.”
“Saltines already taste stale, so it doesn’t matter,” said Jill.
“What about vitamins?” I said. She looked at me blankly. “Vitamins? Nutrients? You know, healthy food?”
“What do you know about healthy food?” said Jill, looking in my basket. Pasta, boil-in-bag rice, Triskets. “I don’t think that pack of gum is going to help you power through either,” she said. Also true I guess.
“I’m going to the farmers’ market tomorrow,” I said, even though it hadn’t been true until just that second. “I’m only here for staples.”
“I don’t eat vegetables, but you can pick me up after classes,” said Jill as if I’d invited her. “Maybe I can absorb some vitamins by walking near yours.”
“I’m Janey,” I offered, kind of blown away by her forwardness but glad to have a maybe-friend.
“I remember,” said Jill. “Janey from Canada.”
It didn’t take immediately though. We sat together in class usually, but that was about it. Then walking out of seminar one afternoon, I asked, “You don’t go home and eat saltines for dinner?”
“Sometimes.”
“Just saltines?”
“Or a sandwich.”
“A saltine sandwich?”
“Sometimes. What do you eat for dinner?”
“Pasta. Or rice. But with vegetables.”
“You cook them?”
“I microwave them. But still. You should come over for dinner.”
“I can take care of myself,” said Jill.
“Evidently not,” I said. It’s that statement that was truly true enough. I didn’t know that yet. She came for dinner. I microwaved frozen broccoli in cheese sauce and frozen peas in butter sauce and dumped both pouches over pasta. Penne in cheesy butter sauce with broccoli and peas. It contained some vitamins probably, but it was kind of gross.
“This is kind of gross,” said Jill.
“It’s better than saltines for dinner.”
“I’m not sure it is.”
I wasn’t sure it was either, so I decided we better learn to cook. Faced with the evidence, Jill agreed this was a good idea. How hard could it be? Cookbooks were books, and books were our specialty. I got several, read them, and we ventured back to Pike Place Market that Sunday afternoon. Jill proposed eating...