Early Warning

Jared rented a truck. Seven of their friends turned out to help with the move. Everyone was a little excited: Janet and Jared were buying a house, a first in their group. It cost $55,000; the sellers were holding the mortgage and letting them pay 12 percent. The house was a brown house on Brown Street, with screened-in porches front and back, three bedrooms upstairs, and a spacious if not modern kitchen. Janet and Jared had, painfully, come up with $10,000, and their mortgage payment would be $450 per month, which seemed huge, especially compared with their $160 rent in Solon. But the price of gas was $1.30 and didn’t look like it was going down. Jared thought they could save $120 a month on his commute, not even counting the few occasions where they came into town to go to a movie or to the Mill to listen to music.

Salt crunched under their feet, and Janet kept having to sweep it off the entry floor just inside the front door. Everything was out of the rental in an hour and fifteen minutes. The guys drove off in the truck, and Janet, Leslie, and Gina cleaned. When the girls and Emily got to Brown Street, though, the former owners were sitting glumly on their own boxes. The driver of their moving van, which had the name of a religious organization painted along the side, had gotten lost in Illinois and then again in Iowa City — he and the two movers were too tired from their long trip to do anything. Jared and Janet and the seven friends moved all of the previous owners’ furniture and boxes into the van while the movers looked on, and then Janet gave the movers five sandwiches she had made. She knew the look of their faces — the obedient look of people being “given a new life.” She wanted them to go away. When the owner thanked her and gave her a hug, Janet said, “Be careful; good luck, and I hope you get there.”

She put him out of her mind by focusing intently on everything she was doing, whether it was reading a book, listening to one of her professors, playing Legos with Emily, or chatting with Jared. She could feel herself getting louder, brighter, weirder, the way she always got when she was converting herself. As a result, she could sense Emily withdrawing, Jared looking at her sideways, her Realism and Naturalism professor watching for some other student’s raised hand. Finally, one day when Jared was home with Emily, and she was supposed to be going to class, she went to Student Health Services and talked to a Dr. Constance. She talked so fast that Dr. Constance stopped writing things down, had no opportunity to ask questions, just stared at her. She talked for exactly forty-five minutes, thereby giving Dr. Constance five minutes to tell her what to do. The silence was total. Janet waited. Clearly, Dr. Constance had no idea, either. The silence continued. There were three minutes left. Janet shifted her gaze from the woman’s gray curls to the window and the brick wall outside, and remembered how her own mother disappeared so often, heading out to see Dr. Somebody. “Dr. Dix,” her father had called him. Dr. Constance said, “I think maybe you should consider your marriage and your feelings for your husband.”

“I consider my family all the time.”

“No, I mean ponder them, not take them into consideration. Whenever we are feeling something strongly, it is related to what is going on in the present.”

Janet said, “I guess now you are going to tell me to live in the moment and take things one day at a time.”

“That isn’t bad advice.”

Janet looked at her watch. She really, really didn’t want to be rude, so she smiled and said, “Well, anyway, thanks for listening to me, and I think that’s a good idea.” Then she ran.