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were a plant, her instructions would have read: “Needs ample sunlight; thrives in solitude.” Some winter evenings she would turn off her phone, start a fire, open a book—and swear there was no home happier than hers. Her friends called her commitment-phobic to her face, but why label as fear what was simply a choice? When she told them she dreamed of being an old spinster one day, of course no one believed her. But she knew her recent restlessness had little to do with love.
    Ginny had no illusions about marriage. To her it looked like boatloads of work and a lifetime of compromise. She realized she was in the minority in her disaffection for the institution; the world was peopled with the betrothed. Still, occasionally her friends confideddetails that supported her aversion: Jessica’s husband, Ted, taped
The X-Files
over their wedding video; Katrina could never cook with her favorite spice, dill, because Leo didn’t care for it. And parenthood—parenthood looked like slavery. Ginny found herself newly in awe of her own parents now that her peers had begun to procreate, and she could see up close what was involved. To consider all they had given up—the time, the freedom. “Maybe I’m just too selfish to have children,” she confessed to Jessica over the phone.
    â€œLet’s not forget, a lot of people
have
children for selfish reasons,” Jessica said. “In order to have someone to play with, or to take care of them when they’re old. Or because they’re bored and don’t have anything better to do.” Jessica herself was pregnant with baby number four, and Ginny knew her motives were of the more magnanimous variety: She wanted to adore her children in a way she had never been adored.
    Truth be told, Ginny already had children—five classes full of them. Despite frustrations, her favorites were the seniors. Twenty seventeen-year-olds were hers for AP English every day, fifth period, right after lunch, when all the blood in their bodies that wasn’t already servicing endocrine glands was busy digesting pizza and Gatorade. Nonetheless, she made it her duty to try to love them. And she attempted to impart a few morsels of wisdom; she tried very hard, but more and more she felt that something was being lost on them. She did everything she’d always done: She took them on the field trip to Walden Pond; she read from writers’ obituaries; she told them who were the alcoholics, who slept with whom,who were the geniuses and who were the hacks, which one subsisted on a diet of only white wine, oysters, and grapes for so long she had to be hospitalized for anemia. Still, they looked at her with what could only be called accusation. As if she were withholding something. As if there were something that she, Ginny, was supposed to be doing for them, or giving them, but she was simply too selfish or too lazy to do it.
    She’d heard of the great teachers who said they learned more from their students than they taught them, so she examined her teenagers’ faces with fresh scrutiny and pored over their essays with renewed vigor, wondering what she was supposed to glean. Her kids were so disaffected, so sophisticated, so urbane. A couple of times she could have sworn Marc Campbell had winked at her in the hallway. She had them read
Suite Française
, a World War II novel whose author had perished at Auschwitz while the manuscript was rescued by her daughters. Ginny asked if there were any questions.
    â€œDo you think the sum of the good things mankind has done outweighs the sum of the horrible things?” It was Julia, her star student. Ginny panicked for a second, genuinely stumped, then made up an answer about how it’s not always useful to quantify things.
    If they wanted difficult questions, she’d give them the difficult questions. “Love is an attempt to penetrate another being, but it can only be realized if the surrender is