The Raising

by Laura Kasischke

  Of course.

  Walking away from the library that day—its stiff neoclassical columns pretending to hold it up—Mira had felt silly, at best. Slightly insane, at worst. So, less insanely, she consulted medical books and websites, but when she asked their pediatrician if the twins might be experiencing some kind of language development delay, he’d laughed and said, “You professors all think your kids should be delivering lectures a few months out of the womb. Look, if they’re still babbling in a foreign language this time next year, we’ll explore the possibilities. But I’m telling you, they won’t be.”

  Clark was becoming more and more frustrated these days by the twins’ refusal to speak his language, and Mira knew it was because he was the one at home day after day while she was doing research, going to meetings, teaching. He was exhausted most of the time, wired up with manic energy the rest. There were dark circles the size of half-dollars under his eyes, and in the last three years he’d gone from the horniest man she’d every met—hard inside her again before he’d even pulled out—to the kind of guy women called radio talk shows about: I wonder if my husband’s having an affair; he hasn’t wanted to have sex for the last three months.

  An affair might have occurred to Mira, too, if she didn’t know exactly how Clark spent his days, and how impossible fitting anything extra into them would have been. The twins woke at 5:00 a.m., and did not stop having needs or making demands in their foreign language until 9:00 p.m. If she didn’t have class, Mira would get up with them in the morning and let Clark sleep. But when she did have class, which was most days, he’d be the one stumbling and swearing out of the bedroom and into the hallway. Mira would roll over and pretend to be asleep—even on the occasions when Clark seemed to take forever to wake up and roll out of bed—although her whole body would be screaming as she listened to the twins cry out. Their cries, always the same (Braclaig! Braclaig!), made it impossible to know whose attention they were demanding, but Mira felt certain they were calling for her. It made her feel as if an alarm clock were rattling inside her chest, sending vibrations through every nerve and into every nerve ending of her body.

  There were so many nerve endings.

  The year before, in the fall, she and Clark had gotten a babysitter and gone to the Body Worlds exhibit at the Natural History Museum in the city.

  Dead bodies.

  Her specialty.

  It was why Clark had thought to buy the tickets. A birthday present. “Right up your alley,” he’d said, holding them up.

  Except that these weren’t historical dead bodies. Folkloric dead bodies. These weren’t the kinds of primitive embalmings Mira studied. Instead, these were plastinated, dissected corpses, standing right in front of the viewer, filleted and splayed. A dead guy was set up on horseback, holding his own brain in one hand and his horse’s brain in the other. Another was lobbing a basketball into the air, all his muscles on display, stringy and red. There was a corpse reclining in front of a dark television set, and one kneeling in prayer, literally holding his heart in his hands. The worst, the one that haunted Mira for weeks afterward, was the pregnant woman lying on her side like a centerfold—nothing left but tissue and bone and a net of blood vessels, but still with her baby floating eerily in her womb.

  Maybe it was because Mira was a cultural anthropologist and had never had the vaguest interest in biology or physiology, but standing in the moving line of gawkers at the Natural History Museum that day, all of them together shuffling past that woman and her child (both of whom looked unborn and undead at the same time), Mira had urgently wanted to know how that woman had died. The brochure they’d been handed when they turned in their tickets insisted that the people who’d donated their bodies for the exhibit had requested anonymity, had donated in the interest of science, and that to reveal the mundane details—age, race, nationality, dates, and circumstances of their deaths—was to muddy the waters, lessen the message of the exhibit, which was to show the human body in all of its glorious detail.

  Bullshit, Mira thought. The only important thing here was who that woman was and what she had been doing on the day of her death. Had she known she would die? Had she lingered for weeks, or had she simply failed to look both ways as she crossed the street? Had she had her throat cut by a husband who suspected the baby she was carrying wasn’t his? Had she been stoned to death in some dark corner of the world for some supposed crime—maybe she’d flirted with a man of another religion, or sold some book to his wife that women weren’t allowed to read?

  “They were executed,” Clark whispered into her ear as they stood in line waiting to view the dead Madonna, as if he’d gotten the news firsthand from someone who’d threatened to kill him, too, if he passed it on. “The men at least. You can tell. They’re all Asian. They’re shorter than Americans. Chinese prisoners.”

  Clark hadn’t liked the exhibit either, but he said it was because he’d found it dull. It reminded him of high school health class, Mrs. Liebler. “I shouldn’t have wasted the money,” he’d said, but there was an edge of bitterness in it as if he’d expected Mira to love it even if he hadn’t. Instead, Mira had agreed—not that it was dull, but that they shouldn’t have wasted the money. God knows they did not, at the moment, have money to waste. And they so rarely hired a babysitter that Mira felt they should have used the free time to do something more important, like bathe, or sleep.

  Still, she had learned something from looking at those corpses. She had learned that nerves were not the invisible, semi-imaginary forces inside the body she’d always thought they were.

  No.

  Nerves hung off the body in dangling cords, draping like willow switches. They looked damp and heavy. Humans were tangled in them like ropes and pulleys.

  No wonder she felt as if every inch of her had been electrified as she lay there listening to the twins cry in the mornings, Clark taking his time shuffling out of the bedroom to meet their demands. She was, Mira realized, wrapped in a curtain of nerves! She was wearing a web of them. She was strung with them, like a Christmas tree in lights.

  So, why didn’t she get up?

  Because that was his job.

  His only job.

  She had an actual job.

  Mira wasn’t, she thought, a feminist. Not exactly. If she had been, she wouldn’t have married a man like Clark—not with his lascivious admiration of women’s legs, and his belief in the supremacy of men in all things requiring logic or mechanical inclinations.

  But she also felt it would be a terrible precedent to take over these tasks for him on the days she was teaching. It would take away the last thing he seemed to be contributing to the running of the household—attending to the children when she had to work.

  Work in the world. For pay. An activity Clark, it seemed, had no plans to engage in again anytime soon.

  And then she felt terrible for thinking this.

  If Clark were a woman, a housewife, and Mira had heard some man say that the work of caring for two children wasn’t real, Mira would have been the first to stand up, waving a banner, shouting the chauvinist down. Of course it was a full-time job. A job she should have been grateful he was doing so that she could do hers.

  So why, now, did she wish she were the one staying home with the screaming twins? Why, now, did she resent Clark for not having to get up in the morning, find his notes, pack his briefcase? She’d known exactly what his plans were when she’d married him, and bread-winning hadn’t been one of them. Mira had been the one who’d bristled when her father had asked if Clark planned, maybe someday, to go to law school, and proudly explained to her father that they both valued their “freedom to pursue intellectual endeavors” too much for either to take on such a mundane endeavor as law school.

  Still, Mira had finished her doctorate, and Clark had dropped out of his master’s program in comparative philosophy, finding it to be another “mundane endeavor.” Now they were in their thirties, with two children, living in an apartment complex full of undergra
duates, many of whom drove much nicer cars than the clunker she and Clark shared. Sometimes, Clark let his beard grow for days before shaving, and Mira occasionally wondered, from the smell of his breath, if he was taking sufficient care of his teeth. She knew he was bathing, because he would spend a long hour every night in the claw-foot tub with the door latched while she put the twins to bed. Once, she’d mentioned to him that their electric bill, $125, might be so high because of the hot water heater, and he’d turned to her with wide, desperate-looking eyes and said, “The fucking tub is the only thing I have to look forward to all day.”

  “What about the gym?” she’d asked.

  They’d joined the nicest one in town because Clark insisted he needed a place with Nautilus machines and childcare. Mira rarely got to this gym herself, but on the occasions she did, she couldn’t help noticing that the parking lot was full of BMWs. You cannot afford this membership, the BMWs said to her.

  “And what about Espresso Royale—?” where Clark met a gaggle of stay-at-home mothers many afternoons, and where, as far as Mira could tell, they just let their children climb around on the upholstered cubes in the Kid Corner while they drank coffee and complained.

  Clark looked at her blankly. “I need the bath,” he’d said.

  “Professor Polson?”

  This time Mira turned around, recognizing, finally, even in her sleep-deprivation and distraction, her own last name.

  How long had he been running after her? The boy was sweating. He had the clean-shaven, buzzed-head look of an ROTC student, or maybe a member of College Students for Christ. But these kids could fool you. Sometimes the conservative look was an ironic statement, right down to the pressed khaki shorts. He could be the lead guitarist in some bad college band. She’d seen flyers around Godwin Hall for an upcoming performance by the Motherfuckers.

  “Professor Polson,” he said. “I saw you, and I wanted to ask—” He gasped for breath. “I wanted to ask if I could get into your seminar.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s full,” she said, and started to turn from him as quickly and unsympathetically as she could. She always felt bad, sending students away, but these late registers would keep demanding entrance into the class for weeks into the semester if she didn’t stand firm. This was a first-year honors seminar, and Mira couldn’t teach it well with more than fifteen students in it because of the amount of writing and discussion she required. The seminar was called Death, Dying, and the Undead. A lot of students wanted in. It was the most popular seminar in the college. This was, Mira supposed, because they were only eighteen, so the death and dying part didn’t faze them—what eighteen-year-old believes in death?—and because they wrongly imagined that the “Undead” part would mean vampires, when that was only the thinnest (and, in Mira’s opinion, the least interesting) thread in the vast tapestry of Undead material.

  “But—”

  “I have a waiting list,” Mira said. “Twenty-seven students are on it before you, and there’s not a chance that any one of them will get in, but I’ll add your name to the bottom if you insist.”

  “Can I just tell you one thing?”

  Mira inhaled, but stopped walking. She looked at a spot over the boy’s shoulder so she wouldn’t seem to be encouraging a long explanation of his scheduling problems or credit deficits or financial aid requirements. They were the only two people in the hallway, and the stone floors beyond him were gleaming in the September sunlight as it shone through the windows. Godwin Hall was the oldest building on campus, and where it showed its age most was in its windows, which were an intricate crisscross of glass diamonds and molten lead. The panes were multicolored, warped, and one or two had been cracked and not yet replaced—but these cracked ones added to the prismatic blues and golds when the sun hit them and made dazzling patterns of light and shadow on the walls and floors.

  “I’m a sophomore,” the boy said.

  “Well,” Mira said, no longer as reluctant to reveal her impatience. “In that case, you’re not eligible for a first-year seminar anyway.”

  “But I don’t want to take the class for credit. I just need to sit in. For personal reasons.”

  This time Mira looked at him, directly into his eyes, which were dark brown and long-lashed. His hair was so short it was impossible to know what color it was, but she imagined it must also be dark, although his skin was fair. His cheeks were still flushed from him running after her.

  “Why?” she asked, but then she stopped herself—why bother to encourage his explanation or excuse?—and held up a hand. “Just so you know, I’m against auditors. I find they’re an intrusion in the closed circle of a seminar, and often they have very little stake in the class. And, the class is full.”

  Still, she tilted her head, to show him she was listening. It was rare, but there were the occasional students who took Death, Dying, and the Undead because of a trauma in their backgrounds. A car crash involving high school pals. An older sibling who had committed suicide. Twice, she’d had students who’d had childhood leukemia and been cured, but the experience of it had left a strange gray haze over the landscape of their lives. The year before, there’d been a girl in the class who’d revealed, only a few weeks before the end of the semester, that her mother had been murdered by her father:

  That, in itself, was enough of a story, but this girl had been in utero when the murder took place, and had been delivered two months prematurely at the Emergency Room in the same hour her mother had died. The girl had been raised by wealthy grandparents who’d told her that her parents had been killed in a tragic car accident when she was a baby—of course, is there ever any other explanation for such things?—but the student discovered the truth on the Internet, her grandparents being of a generation that hadn’t anticipated that one day, thanks to Google, no family secret would be safe.

  The boy was still breathing heavily. He said, “I would participate fully, Professor. I’m a straight-A student. I’ve—” He stopped. A cool, rose-colored diamond passed over his eyes through the broken windowpane—a cloud traveling across the sun—and he blinked it away. “I’ve never gotten a grade lower than an A.”

  “That’s impressive,” Mira said. “But it’s a first-year seminar, and if you audit you won’t get a grade anyway, so your special interest in the subject is . . . ?” She waved her hand through the air to indicate that he needed to continue, and then shivered. She was wearing a silk dress—catalog stuff, deeply discounted—and it had short cap sleeves. She knew it looked good on her because Jeff Blackhawk, the poet-in-residence in the Honors College, had nearly spilled his coffee when he saw her walk into the faculty lounge. He was the kind of man who was completely undone by a woman in a sexy dress, or a low-cut blouse, or a nicely tailored pair of black slacks, and Mira was glad, almost relieved, that she’d caught his attention. Still, the dress was too light without a sweater, a cool-weather one, and autumn had come on before she’d expected it—only the first week of September, and that morning the sky had been full of the kind of fat blue clouds Mira associated with snow.

  The student inhaled, and wiped a hand across his brow. He said, “I was good friends with Nicole. Nicole Werner. I grew up with her. And Craig Clements-Rabbitt was—is—my roommate.”

  Nicole Werner.

  And that horrible rich boy who’d killed her.

  Mira had known neither of them personally, but of course she knew the story. Everyone did. It was last year’s Tragic Incident. Most years, there was at least one, and this year the victim had been perfect for the leading role: Virgin. Girl Scout. Sorority pledge. A devout Christian from a small town. Two married, devoted parents. The youngest child. The baby. A straight-A student, but full of goodwill and vivacity, too. In her spare time she tutored illiterate children. She’d been beloved by her professors and her classmates alike. Until the end of the spring semester, the whole of Godwin Hall had been draped in black.

  Mira hadn’t, herself, attended the memorial service in the auditorium, but another professo
r at the college told her that the girl’s mother had wept so piteously throughout the service that no one could help but join her in sympathy until the four hundred and fifty people gathered around the high school senior portrait of the dead Nicole Werner were sobbing.

  And then they’d let her murderer back into the university. Despite the public protests, the outrage, the letters to the editor of the student and local papers, the university lawyers had concluded that since no criminal charges had been filed against him, they had no grounds for keeping him out. Only the Honors College had the balls to ban him, and everyone knew that was only because the dean, who was old pals from Dartmouth with the boy’s father, had bent all the rules to admit him in the first place, and didn’t want that getting any more press than it already had.

  There were goose bumps on her arms now. Wrapping her arms around herself, Mira realized that not only had she shivered, but now she was trembling. She worried that her teeth might begin to chatter. It was truly autumn. The sun had clearly slipped a few notches down on the horizon, and the light on the leaves was amber now, not white, not even golden, as it had been the week before, and a breeze seemed to be pouring through the centuries-old windows of Godwin Honors Hall despite the fact that they were all closed. That cold breeze seemed to pour in a steady stream down the hallway, bathing her.

  “I know you’re an expert on death,” the boy said to her, “and dying, and the undead. All I know about is Nicole and Craig. But there are . . . circumstances. I could tell you, but you might think I was nuts. Basically, I just need to know more, and I thought your seminar might help me with that.”

  5

  Perry had—on purpose, most likely—picked out an apartment for them that was as far from Godwin Honors Hall as you could get within the boundaries of the same circumscribed college town. And since Craig no longer had any classes at the Hall, he had no reason to go there. Still, he found himself standing outside of it within an hour of the dismissal of his first class of the semester, staring up at the window of the room he was certain had been hers—fourth from the end, facing East University Avenue.