If You’ve Got Her, Flaunt It

As far as girlfriends go, I like to think of myself as a pretty damn cool one. Now, I know pretty much every girl on the planet thinks this about herself and that her boyfriend is forced to agree upon pain of death, but considering that I spent the majority of my life eating my school lunches all by my lonesome in some suspicious smelling corner of the school library and have never once declared myself a cool anything, I think you can trust me on this. I will make you and your boys two huge batches of my famous three-layer nachos on Super Bowl Sunday; I will share pint after pint of beer with you as we belt, and probably bastardize, all the lyrics to Rush’s “Tom Sawyer”; I will watch Spinal Tap and Anchorman with you for the hundredth time and love every second of it – because I was probably the one who suggested watching them to begin with; I smile like a saint and curse like a sailor, often at the same time; I will tell you exactly what I expect from you instead of passively-aggressively suggesting it; the only shopping spree I will ever drag you on is one to Victoria’s Secret; and I’m pretty much always ready to – well, yeah, anyway.

But, see, here’s the thing: for all my coolness, you’ve got to make some kind of effort when Valentine’s Day rolls around. I’m not a huge romantic or particularly keen on the holiday or anything (though there is something I can appreciate about a day dedicated to growing a pair and declaring, out loud, that you love someone, no matter how much of a consumerist ploy the actual holiday might be) – it’s just, no one wants to be the girlfriend who logs unsuspectingly onto Facebook and gets bombarded by gushy, grammatically incorrect status updates from other girlfriends bragging about their guy’s chick flick-stolen grand gesture, and then feel, despite all the cringing at the ridiculousness of it all, a sudden pang of envy and hurt at having been left out. And when you’re as cool a girlfriend as me, not even getting a card while those other girlfriends – the vacant, vapid ones who kind of just hold up the walls at sketchy bars looking like oversexed cartoon characters waiting to copulate with whichever intellectually deficient male has peacocked his way to the top of the mating food chain that night – get flowers, candy hearts, candle-lit dinners, and freakin’ concert tickets to see Social Distortion? Well, that’s worse than unfair and worse than a slap in the face – that’s like being sent back to the corner of the school library – this time the one in my soul. (See what I just did there?)

It’s just one little gesture. A book will do! (Bet you didn’t see that coming. Harhar.) And the best  book for the occasion? Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love. If it already sounds like a motherload of malarkey, that’s probably a good sign you’ll enjoy it, because one of the novel’s two protagonists, a writer named Leo Gursky, would probably think it sounded lame, too. That is, if he hadn’t written it. Leo’s The History of Love was written when he was twenty years old, for Alma, the love of his life who, sadly, he will spend the next several decades of his life never seeing again. At eighty years old, Leo is beginning to fear death and the question of what to do with the rest of existence is thus inexplicably, yet naturally linked to the question of Alma. In a parallel, simultaneous narrative, we meet a young girl named Alma Singer, named after the Alma in The History of Love, her parents’ favorite book. Her mother has been asked to translate the book by a mysterious man, and soon afterwards a search for the real Alma transpires. Leo and Alma Singer’s worlds collide, on both a literal and figurative level, and through the unraveling patchwork of stories and secrets and deeply rooted hopes and dreams, love – as we’re so often told it can – manages to conquer all, in its own unique way. The book is sad, hopeful, hilarious, magical, and real all at once, held together tightly by moments, images, and words that are all beautifully wrought and tinted expertly with wisdom and experience. Nicole Krauss takes what could easily be an overbearing and over-done story-line and turns it on its head completely, turns it into something new that even the most cynical part of my brain can’t help but reach for.

I am the girlfriend who kills spiders by herself, who can only do house chores while listening to Alice in Chains on full blast, who has a marathon of World War II movies every year, who causes no fuss and plenty of laughs, who burps and scratches at her belly (wait – what?) – who, in short, is satisfied and doesn’t want for much. But fundamentally, all anyone needs is to be loved, man. Greeting card holiday or not, celebrated with heart-shaped chocolates or pricey, glittering gifts, cool girlfriend or extremely needy girlfriend, self-aware boyfriend or slightly maladjusted boyfriend, whether or not it’s even Valentine’s Day at all – the point is to honor and share that need, to acknowledge that you’ve fulfilled it, after all that time, after all that seemingly pointless floundering. Because, tell you what, anyone who’s found it is damn lucky to have done so. Just look at anyone who hasn’t.

Jayne Wilson writes fiction about the likes of decapitated gnomes, compulsive hoarders, and sardonic old men. She laughs pathetically at her own jokes and is generally an impish mess. She graduated from the University of California, Davis in 2010 with a degree in English-Creative Writing.

Jayne Wilson