“Don’t worry,” he said, oblivious to her sarcasm. “I’ll take care of it.”
“Thank you.” She batted her eyes, waiting for him to get a clue. He offered her the hero’s nod and carried her bags through the quad to the registrar’s office.
The problem was resolved quickly, well before it could become a scandal or a blight on the university’s reputation. Once Bobby was settled into another dorm with three girls who slept with rollers in their hair, she forgot all about the pseudo heroic boy with whom she’d shared a dorm room for an hour. He’d vanished from her mind, replaced by thoughts of cell structures and DNA and whether her roommates might burn down their housing by leaving those electric rollers plugged in all day.
A few weeks later, when Bobby was tucked into an oversized chair in the library reading about mitochondria, she heard a throat clear and looked up to see a lanky man fidgeting.
“I’m sorry,” he said, plopping into the empty chair angled toward hers. A girl seated nearby shushed them, so he whispered, “I’ve been hoping to see you so I could say that. I’m sorry I made such a big deal about the whole roommate assignment thing.”
Bobby studied the young man, trying to place him. He crossed his legs, bobbing a foot encased in a dirty white tennis shoe. The shoe she remembered. It took a few moments longer to recall its owner, Paul Meadows.
“Most men are excited at the prospect of sharing a room with me.” Bobby returned her attention to her textbook, but not before she saw the horrified look on his face. “I’m joking. Really, what sort of woman do you take me for?”
“I didn’t... I mean I wasn’t thinking... It’s just it was a rather unusual—” Bobby smirked, enjoying him squirm.
“Again, joking.” She closed her textbook and stood. “Come on. We need to teach you how to lighten up.”
From there, Bobby couldn’t recall a lesson they hadn’t learned together. Whether it was planning a route across Europe for a summer of backpacking after they graduated college or figuring out how to install a car seat in anticipation of Alice’s arrival, they tackled everything as a team. Once they were a team, Bobby could not remember a time when they hadn’t been united. Paul permeated all her memories, even those from before she knew him and those from after he was gone. At least that was how Bobby explained their love to her daughter. Alice wasn’t sure how her father would have described their love because she never had a chance to ask him.
Still, Alice had always known that Bobby’s life was configured around her love for her husband. After college, Bobby wanted nothing more than to be in love. For her, that meant abandoning her old, self-centered dreams in favor of new ones they could build together. They moved to Carpinteria because where else would you want to be in love but a quaint beach town on the Pacific and because Paul had grown up in the area and always dreamed of raising a family in a tile-roofed house with an ocean view. She found a part-time job in administration at a hospital, which she told herself was the next best thing to being a doctor. Every morning, Bobby would attempt breakfast for Paul before he made the short commute to UC Santa Barbara, where he worked as an admissions officer. Bobby was a terrible homemaker, even before she had the distraction of a colicky, sleep-averse infant. Eggs were forgotten on the stove so often that Paul left a fire extinguisher on the counter. And she never could figure out how to get coffee stains out of Paul’s dress shirts, much less how to make a palatable cup of joe.
How ironic, it might seem, that Paul chose a profession so integrally connected to how he and Bobby first met. He imagined that when he granted students access to the university, he was setting them on a path toward love. As he read application files, he liked to predict which applicants might end up together, and surprisingly often he was right. With every student he admitted, he fell a little more in love with his wife, their life together.
They were so happy in that life that it took Paul longer than it should have to see how unhappy Bobby truly was. In fact, it took him thirteen years of marriage to realize that Bobby was living a lie she told to herself. At night, Bobby nestled into Paul, her fingers tracing his figure as she rattled off the names of more bones than he knew he had. In those moments, he understood she wanted more, even when she insisted she didn’t. They had each other. And Alice. She didn’t need anything else. She was happy. Paul finally recognized that you could be both at once, happy and wanting. In love and needing more.
One night, over petrified TV dinners—Bobby couldn’t even effectively work the microwave—Paul plopped a pile of brochures on the kitchen table.
“What’s this?” Bobby picked one up. It showed a group of students sitting cross-legged on a sunny quad.
“Applications for medical school.”
“For you?” Bobby asked, genuinely confused. Paul had a lot of talents; the sciences weren’t among them.
“For you.”
“What?” Bobby laughed, spitting bits of fossilized mashed potatoes on the table. “I’m not qualified for medical school.”
“Sure you are.” Paul stared into the expansive face of the woman he loved. “You’re the smartest person I know.”
She stopped laughing. “It’s been years. I wouldn’t know where I’d begin.”
“Where we’d begin,” he corrected.
“Can we afford it?”
“Let me work that out.”
“What about Alice?” They both looked at their three-year-old, who had outgrown her colic but not her antipathy to sleep. “Who will take care of her?”
“I will.”
“Paul, it’s sweet of you, really, but I love things the way they are. I like being here when you get home at the end of the day. I like taking Alice to the park. I like taking care of both of you. I don’t need more.”
“Yes, you do. I believe in you.” That was all Bobby needed to believe in herself.
UCSB didn’t have a medical school, so Bobby drove to LA for classes, a sojourn that took anywhere from ninety minutes to two hours. She’d drop Alice off at school on her way to the 101, returning home after Alice was already in bed. Those were Alice’s childhood memories of her mother: banana nut muffins in the car on the way to school, soft lips on her forehead at night while she was half asleep.
Her childhood memories of her father were weeknights when he donned an apron and cooked one dinner more impressive than the last. Weekends when he would take Alice to the beach so Bobby could have a quiet house to study in. He’d let Alice bury him in sand, then toss her into the waves when he broke through and raced her into the ocean. It wasn’t just Bobby who was born again when she pursued her dreams, it was Paul too. He discovered a passion for cooking, a dexterity with the vacuum, a penchant for starched sheets, a knack for taking care of the women in his life in ways no one had expected of him, not even himself.
