from Other People We Married by Emma Straub
“Just because something was impossible didn’t mean it couldn’t happen.”
Which sort of says it all about my relationship with this book. Clearly I’ve missed the boat, or at least color me ignorant for not reading this earlier, back when Five Chapters originally published it.
Amy, Martin and Jeff work together at a college, which for me, well, that’s been done before, in bunches. Admittedly I’m jealous of Straub’s ability to make this story and these people easy, to see and read. Amy deals three-card Monte, revealing the little details of a funky knitting circle, each teacher swarms around their students, pollinating, sometimes hovering, waiting for anything to happen, good or bad. There is fiction to be taught, egos to be delicately prepared for baking, you know, bring that craftsman out of the woods.
Amy is smitten with Paul, a student who, in her words, has seen enough of the Ohio sun to make his hair the color of straw, and his eyes the color of cold water, from a pond. What does cold water look like? It is a great question, but a little bit quaint. This little observation reveals Amy isn’t quite as grown-up as she wants to be, maybe even a rookie poet, sleeved in hearts. There is mischief in the details as she pursues Paul, around and around she goes, in her mind she wants this Paul, but brings herself to a bar instead of breaking down and falling into his arms. She wants to go somewhere, a place where she would meet someone who she might want to sleep with, as it seems that bell has not been rung in some time. Off she goes to a local bar with the only defense mechanism she can find, Jeff, who happens to be a homosexual. It was at this point of the story, just at the end, where I laughed out loud, and wanted more. Just because things were suddenly adult, and Amy seemed to realize that her story was not hers alone, but just a struggle to escape loneliness.
