Graduates in Wonderland (30 page)

This didn't seem like enough, so I asked, “But how do you know which one to choose?”

She thought about it and said, “You know when you can imagine being as happy with someone else, but you can't imagine anyone making you happier.”

And then she turned into the side road that leads to the ranch and the barn, where I put on a pair of cowboy boots and gave my rehearsal dinner speech in front of one hundred people and thirty-­five mounted deer heads. (I've repressed the entire memory of this because I hate public speaking so much. It helped to focus on the deer heads.)

I caught the bouquet this morning. I leapt into the air above the nine other single bridesmaids. There's a photo in which I can actually see my calves flexing as I leap into the air. If you can't tell, I'm so proud of myself.

I wonder what Sam's reaction will be when I tell him.

As the afternoon faded, Paige and her new husband got into a car and drove away toward their honeymoon. I got into a car with my parents. As my dad drove us home on the familiar roads, I felt very young again, until I looked down at my lap and the bridal bouquet. We drove past the local bookstore where I imagined my alternate homebody self working the cash register—­my dad told me that it was now closed. Also, my favorite field is now a used-­car lot. Life back home has not stood still without me as I had hoped.

I don't know what to do with myself at this moment. Wish you were here right now. I miss you so much. I'm flying back to Australia tomorrow, which isn't any closer to Paris at all. The world feels too big tonight.

Love,

Jess

APRIL 20

Rachel to Jess

Today, after I got back from my film class, Josh came to my apartment. He's borrowing my air mattress for when his parents visit Paris next week. Sylvia does not know this, though. We are still not supposed to be alone together per her instructions, but Josh initiated it, and I've missed him. Missed our conversations about Hemingway and grand adventures.

We sat down to talk for a moment, and I offered him some wine that was on the table. He refused but reached past me with one arm to pick up the bottle and examine it. For a second, seeing his face coming toward me, I thought he was going to kiss me. The blood rushed out of my face and I lost all feeling in my hands. Then he said something about the wine and I laughed super hard. I don't even know if he made a joke.

After that, he stayed just long enough to get the mattress and browse my books.

His eyes immediately fell on my copy of
Fiesta
, the Cuban edition of
The Sun Also Rises
I bought on a class trip to Havana ten years ago.

I told him its story: I spent one hot morning at the book markets, where I found this volume and zeroed in on it. I opened the cover and saw that it was published in 1964. First Cuban edition. And it had a name scrawled in the front.

My heart racing, I asked in Spanish, “Hemingway write here? HEMINGWAY WRITE HERE?” pointing to the signature on the front page.

“Si, si.”

So I bought it for what seemed like an amazingly cheap twenty-­five dollars. When I got home, I showed it to my father, who immediately pointed out that Hemingway died in 1961...three years before this book was published.

Side note: Also during this trip, a prostitute asked me if my breasts were real. And I got food poisoning and had to have an antinausea shot in my butt in front of a bunch of Cubans. It was also the first time I ever drank rum. I take this book on all of my travels, because it was my first real adventure. I almost never open the book anymore, but I carry it around with me when I travel. I guess that I also had dreams of being epic.

Josh listened to my experiences in Cuba, laughing a lot in his big-­hearted way. The story of the book seemed to touch some chord in him. Then he stood up and left my apartment in order to make it home to Sylvia on time.

I sat on my bed thinking for a long time after he left. I would still have bought that book today, full of the illicit pleasure of being in Cuba, but I no longer believe that people actually live the way they do in its story—­all pithy words and dramatic adventures.

In a way, that's what London would be for me: embracing a feasible life even though it may not be as grand as I had imagined when I was fifteen. I find myself hoping to get the good news from England that my PhD will be funded. But the idea of living in a larger-­than-­life Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, Janis Joplin kind of way is hard to let go.

All my love,

Hemingway Write Here

APRIL 24

Jess to Rachel

I like that story. You've never told me any of those things about Cuba. Sort of makes me want to go. I'm kind of up for anywhere right now because it's getting harder and harder to settle here.

Since I've been back from Texas, Sam and I have been talking about our future together. We might want to stay in Melbourne—­Australia is our shaky middle ground. He can't work in America; I can't work in the United Kingdom. I can stay here for a few months after my program ends, looking for someone to sponsor my work visa. We've been talking about this a lot lately and there's been a very sudden, bizarre development. As a UK citizen, he can stay here too, under one very big condition.

The only way to extend Sam's current visa is if he spends the next three months doing manual labor or agricultural work in the country. There's a shortage of willing agricultural workers in Australia and so the government's solution is to put sad Englishmen who want to stay in the country for their girlfriends to work on farms, cattle stations, and vineyards. Apparently, most farms have a few Irish or English guys doing anything from picking fruit to working with livestock for minimum wage, just so they can stay in Australia for another year.

Doesn't this sound so old-­timey? Ye shall sow, ye shall reap, and ye shall be rewarded with...another year in Surfers Paradise!

We'd both been trying to avoid this option, but time has run out. If Sam wants to stay in Australia with me, he'll have to leave next week for the countryside. Every online description of the dull, physically taxing jobs, like fruit picking, is tempered by the phrase, “but if you are working with fun people, it'll be a laugh!” The photos are all of guys picking oranges or shoveling manure, doubled over with laughter.

It's winter in Australia, and Sam has figured out that the least taxing work would be to go to Australia's wine country and work trimming the branches or stems of the grapevines on a vineyard (known as pruning). He must head to the bush (the countryside) or the outback, because the final condition of his visa is that he can't work near a city.

He made a few phone calls to some wineries and is headed to a town in New South Wales called Canowindra.

Canowindra, population 1,500.

Sam spoke with the owner of the organic vineyard, which is on the outskirts of the town, and mail only gets delivered once or twice a week. To get food other than basics, they have to drive to a town three hours away. The closest big city is Sydney, which is two hundred miles away.

And so this is our only option if we want to remain in Australia together. Sam seems very stoic and resigned to the manual labor that I just know will ruin his good hands.

Three months feels like an eternity to me, especially because we'll be apart for most of it. After he gets settled there, I'm going to visit him in Canowindra for a week.

Unfortunately, everything I know about the country comes from
Little House on the Prairie
: the dog dies, Mary goes blind, and I need to hoard all of my food.

Love,

The Pruner's Girlfriend

APRIL 26

Rachel to Jess

What? Pruning to stay in the country? That is the strangest rule I've ever heard of. Are you sure it's real? Did your Irish housemate tell you that?

I'm from Wisconsin, where
Little House on the Prairie
is from, and I read the entire series, so here's some advice: If rural Australia's anything like those books, you can look forward to spending your nights listening to fiddle music and sitting around in sewing circles.

It feels like just yesterday that you two were secretly in love with each other from afar, and now he's willing to sacrifice three months of his life for the good of your relationship. It's kind of amazing, actually—­three months of manual labor is like nine years doing anything else.

It's impossible to think that far in the future for me. In three months, I might be gone from Paris if my funding comes through.

Oh—­and so will Josh.

Yesterday Josh and I went to sit on the steps of the stock exchange. This is, of course, forbidden, but we have the same lunch break and he wanted to talk to me. But instead of laughing at the tourists or gossiping about the teachers at work, he got weird—­quiet and excited at the same time—­and told me that he is engaged.

He asked Sylvia to marry him last week. It wasn't that it was out of nowhere, but it still took me aback. I had to suppress a gasp and then compensated by acting a little too happy for him.

“Eeek, Josh, how exciting, omigod, I can't believe it! That's amazing! When is the wedding?!?!”

It was me on fifteen cups of coffee.

His fiancée's dream is to move to New York, and they've been planning their life there for several months. And now their departure is only a few weeks away.

I can't believe that he's leaving.

And also—­Josh! I always said Paris was worth a million New Yorks!

He's going to work for a competing education company, and he already gave his notice at American Prep. I had no idea. Was he afraid to confide in me at all, having been forbidden by Sylvia?

I do kind of hate Sylvia for that. I know that if I were her, I would act the same way, but Josh and I were good friends and I feel like she kept something really important from growing between the two of us. At the same time, though, I know that whatever he and I could have had would only have infringed upon what they have together, so I guess I understand why she had to stop it. Even if I don't like it.

It's hard to say good-­bye to someone when you haven't realized the full friendship potential. When we left college, we knew all of our close friends so well. The kind of closeness that grows from spending day after day in six-­hour-­long conversations. The friendships were intense. And now I've met—­and am losing—­somebody who had the potential to be this kind of friend, but who will now never be one to me.

Anyway, the wedding is next summer, in Bordeaux.

I think if you can make plans that far in advance, you are officially in the adult club. My current life has the same expiration date as my student visa.

Love,

Rach

P.S. A student of mine from an English class for adults asked me out. I finished teaching the class this week. Ethical/unethical to go out with him? Please write your answer in fifty words or less.

APRIL 27

Jess to Rachel

Rachel, I'm the girl who pursued, dated, slept with, and then followed her intern to Australia (but let's make sure this doesn't go in my obituary). Do you really have to ask me what I think about dating one of your students?

I've started interning at an evening news show at a national TV station here. I shadow reporters all day and after filming interviews during the morning and afternoon, I sit with them as we edit and put together the video packages. So much of putting together TV reports involves going through the archive, looking for stock footage to fill up airtime while making it somehow relevant to your story. We once resorted to using footage of a man eating a donut for a report on a drought that wiped out the sugarcane crop. Today, I spent all morning with a reporter trying to figure out how to show postpartum depression on the screen.

“Would a shot of a woman furrowing her eyebrows at her child be over-­the-­top? Should we stick to a generic woman sitting on a park bench, looking out into the distance?”

But I like the actual reporting aspect—­finding stories and interviewing people. I wonder if I could actually get a job as a TV reporter in Sydney or Melbourne. I worked with a reporter our age and she said it took her three years of grunt work at the station to even get an interview to be a reporter.

But I'm already twenty-­five! The second-­oldest person in my journalism program! Oh God, I spent my requisite entry-­level time in China editing at a magazine and now it feels like I have to start over again climbing the ladder in the Western world.

It's also strange to be an unpaid intern again who doesn't want to get in anyone's way. I miss being the one who told the interns what to do. As in, “Write this. File that. Date me.”

I'm also creating and editing my own TV news stories for school. I sit in a dark editing suite rewinding and fast-­forwarding the footage over and over to cut it just right. I'm slowly losing my mind watching myself on-­screen. After my radio course, I'm finally capable of listening to my own voice—­but this is like watching a news anchor that I really want to make fun of.

The worst part, though, is filming in public. Whenever I try to look into the camera to say something really serious, a crowd of people gathers around to watch me. It is total hell.

Maybe I should stick to radio or print. I'm still scrambling to find my next step because my program and my internship finish up in a few weeks. What next?

I'm trying to book my journey to Canowindra to visit Sam, but I can't go for some time—­school is still in session. Every night, he calls from the vineyard's landline and logs our conversations so that he can pay back the vineyard owner for the long-­distance calls. Apparently it is 1900 there.

I wonder if I'll show up and he'll open the door wearing overalls with a wheat stalk hanging from the corner of his mouth and have a twangy Australian accent. I kind of think he'd look dapper in overalls....

Love,