I sat down hard on the porch steps. I watched and heard the ugly young woman shift out of neutral into first and roar off in her VW. A number of other cars passed. Then I got up and went back inside. Ollie was drawing the string. She’d carefully separated all the symmetric shapes from the asymmetric; they were divided by a long half-erased wobbly line. Now she was making a drawing of the unraveled string. As she worked, she sucked on the orange half; it was attached like a suction cup to her mouth. Juice dribbled down her chin.
She looked up at me and laughed. The orange half dropped. I hugged her, smelling her sweet orange smell, and I lifted my finger, drew an imaginary line from the top of her head down the center of her body, bisecting her. Then she did the same to me. I wiggled my ears again, but she looked at me solemnly.
“Mom, I am seeing ears. They are jumping with line bees.”
The sun rose higher in the sky and we still sat there on the braided rug, out of time, talking about our shapes. Ollie and Esme, Esme and Ollie; for just this moment no one could touch us: safe on the other side of the mirror.
Chapter 21
I OPENED THE front door on Mrs. Kraft (my talkative elderly neighbor and occasional baby-sitter). I held a finger to my lips. Ollie was taking a late-morning nap and she was a light sleeper.
“Why isn’t the little stinker in school?” Mrs. K. asked in a loud stage whisper, her little birdlike head bobbing on her neck, her bright inquisitive eyes taking in the room. She winked at me. I used to wink back at her every single time until I finally realized she had a facial tic.
“She’s been exhausted lately.” I smiled, and covered my lips with my finger again. “Let her sleep, OK? I’ll probably be home before she wakes up.”
After Mrs. K. had settled herself, winking, in front of her soap operas with a diet Pepsi, I went into my study, shut the door, and played back the accumulated voices of concern and judgment. The tape ran around its track, the Greek chorus intoned.
Students’ voices: superficially solicitous, then annoyed. “Professor, my grade.” “Professor, my paper.” Two colleagues from the biochemistry department, inquiring politely as to my whereabouts and presumably, my state of mind. Faber’s secretary (several times, her tone getting sharper and sharper); then Faber himself (“Since you are not returning my calls, I have no choice but to leave this message on your recording machine. I’ve been in consultation with the dean and it is my sad task to inform you that as of Wednesday your contract with this university is suspended until further notice. I regret very much having had to take this step,” blah, blah); Susan Dubs, a friend and fellow mother at Sixth Street School; Ollie’s kindergarten teacher, sounding confused—Was Olive well? she asked after a long hesitation; beep, Jay—who paused dramatically, then called out “Esme? Esme?” as if I was deliberately refusing to acknowledge him, then left a terse sentence about the divorce papers. Rocky next, leaving a cool memorandum: She’d clear her stuff out of the lab, she’d leave the key on the hook by the door, she’d see me around sometime. Three hangups; a message from Jay’s dentist: His teeth were due to be cleaned. Before the tape ran out, cutting off his message, I heard a smoky, weighted voice, East Coast accent.
“Esme. Jesse. I was just thinking—” followed by a series of loud beeps. The tape was full.
Well, I thought, not bad. In one elliptical turn I’d lost my job, my husband, and the best lab assistant I’d ever had, and had my steamy fantasy life offhandedly amputated.
I sat down at my messy desk and put my head in my hands. Then I jumped up, talking to myself, grabbed my bag, and hit the door.
I stood on the porch, staring blindly in front of me. Then: Take them all away, God, I prayed. Except her.
I turned into the Paramount lot and stopped at the guard booth, where, as I’d expected, Sherman was on duty. We stared each other down, combat veterans; then he rolled his eyes, and with a quick brutal gesture waved me through.
I parked and found my way to Jay’s building. A red bulb burned over the entrance to the soundstage, indicating that a taping was in progress. There was a director’s trailer next to the soundstage and I walked up the steps and opened the door.
No one looked up as I came in. The director, a nervous man in glasses and a plaid shirt, huddled with Jay and the A.D., while crew members milled around them.
I glanced at the wall of monitors. On the screens was a montage of shots, all focusing on a cluster of very small people—dwarfs or midgets. I stared at the nearest monitor. Several of the dwarfs looked up at the dangling boom as one of their group pointed at it. They were dressed in strange costumes, vaguely Elizabethan—doublets and jerkins and hose. The costumes exaggerated their physical oddness, which was a matter not just of diminutive size but of queer altered symmetry: great hands, barrel torsos, overdeveloped biceps and legs—as if they’d all tried to grow laterally. One of their number stood to the side; he had a long pale face and a high Mayan forehead. He looked tragic and refined, like one of Picasso’s saltimbanques. One held a bouquet of shaggy mums, another an enormous lollipop. There was a wave of laughter from the studio audience, then another, sounding unintentionally cruel.
I wondered what show they were taping and, as if she’d read my thoughts, one of the production assistants moved in front of the monitors, sipping coffee and murmuring, “I mean, I could never guess which one is directly descended from an original Munchkin, could you, Tina? Are they gonna stump those deadheads on the panel, or what?”
A crew member came up behind her and put his arms around her.
“Who’d you rather fuck? Me or a Munchkin?”
She pulled away, making a face.
“In case you haven’t heard, Kellogg, size has nothing to do with it.”
I walked up to Jay and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned slowly, still talking to the director, and then he froze.
“Hey, Jay. I got your papers. I’d like to talk to you.”
He shook his head. “Not now, Esme.”
“This will only take a minute.”
The director looked at me over his glasses, then turned to Jay.
“Jay, take a little break, it’s fine. We’re just going to go over that last shot—stay close where we can find you.”
He turned away and Jay glared at me. Without a word, he spun on his heel, stalked over to the trailer doorway. I followed.
We stood on the steps and faced each other. Then he looked away. The sound of studio laughter filled the room behind us.
“Yes?”
“I just wanted to ask you face to face: Why are you asking for full custody of Ollie?”
Audience laughter.
“I told you—I want to p-put her in a special school, I want her to have a ch-chance to be a normal child.”
“So you’re going to put her in an institution.”
Laughter.
“Not an institution, a s-school, can you grasp the difference? She’s not going to be put in a straitjacket, she’s going to be working with p-professionals who will help her. And I s-suggest, Esme”—he looked into my eyes for the first time since I’d arrived—“that you get some p-professional help too. I mean it.”
“Jay, I don’t want a penny of alimony, I’ll give you the house, Jay, anything—OK? Just stop trying to hurt me like this.”
He laughed. There was another swell of audience mirth, backing him up.
“Wake up, Esme! I c-called UGC to talk to you and I was told by the department secretary that you’ve been s-suspended from your job. Apparently you’ve been fucking up there too. How are you going to support Ollie? And k-keep the house? Have you thought about th-that?”
I tried to catch his eye.
“Jay. The TOE came together. As a model, it works. Lorraine Atwater and I—”
“God damn your T-TOE!” he yelled, and a production assistant coming up the steps glanced, shocked, at my sandals.
“Listen to me! If this thing is what we think, I’ll be able to teach anywhere I choose. Jay, it’s som
ething I had to do. And Ollie ...” He was looking out at the lot and I moved around and down a step so that I was looking up into his face.
“Jay, Ollie is fine. She sees the world in a very sophisticated spatial fashion. I went over mirror-symmetrical and asymmetrical shapes with her and she picked them right out. Then she organized them all—”
“Jesus, Esme! When are you going to st-stop this shit! Trying to make your own kid your ... experiment. S-so what if she understands the theory of relativity? She can’t t-talk to her parents, she can’t t-talk to other kids. She’s in a world of her own, Esme.”
More laughter.
“She talks to me, Jay. All the time.”
The director’s assistant stood in the doorway.
“Jay. Time.”
He started to turn and I grabbed his arm.
“Jay. Don’t put her through this.”
“D-don’t contact me again. Except through the lawyer. His n-name’s on the papers.”
He pushed inside, into the swelling laughter, then turned around. We looked at each other for a long minute. Then he closed his eyes, very slowly opened them, whirled around and was gone.
I stepped down and walked toward the parking lot. I nearly ran head-on into Paloma, who was hurrying toward the trailer carrying a number of grease-spotted white bags filled with what smelled unmistakably like Chinese food.
We stared at each other. Then she started to move around me. I stopped her.
“How are you doin’, Paloma? What’s new?”
“Hello ... Esme.”
“Got some egg rolls there, Paloma? You bringing those to my husband?”
“If you’ll excuse me, Esme—”
“You wanna take my kid, right? Bring her up? My kid—who you think is cuckoo, right?”
“Esme, listen to me, OK? I can’t help it your daughter is not normal. The sooner she gets into a ... you know, special environment, the better. Then she might have a chance to be ... like other normal, you know, happy kids.”
“That’s true. Maybe she could grow up to be like you, Paloma! You’ve met Ollie—what? Once? Right?”
“Esme, I don’t want to talk to you. Let me—”
“You stay away from Ollie. Do you hear me? Don’t you touch Ollie, don’t you even think about her!”
Paloma backed away from me and stumbled, dropping one of the bags. White-lidded foil cartons spilled onto the grass. She opened her mouth wide.
“Jay!”
It was amazing. He was there in an instant. I don’t ever remember him moving that fast the whole time I’d known him. He must have been watching from the door.
“P-Paloma?”
She took his arm. She began to cry.
“J-Jesus fucking C-Christ, Esme!”
He couldn’t look at me.
“Well,” I said. “Here’s my best wishes to you both.”
A plastic bag of fortune cookies lay next to my foot. I stomped on it and ground it in with my heel.
I smiled at them.
“Now,” I said, “you’ve got what you deserve—no future! Or about the same future you have as a stand-up, Jay.”
I kicked one of the foil containers toward them as I turned to go. They jumped back, staring at it.
“Too bad, Jay,” I said. “A depressing aspect of all this is you used to at least try to be funny.”
I waved to Sherman from my car on my way out, and he froze a second, then actually smiled and waved back to me.
When I got home there was a message on my machine from Lorraine Revent Atwater. She’d decided to go away for a while, the message said. She needed some more time to “refine her thinking.” She left no forwarding number, but she said she’d call me soon from the East Coast.
I played her message back twice, listening closely for some hint of emotional content—was she upset, tired, pissed off with me (like everyone else), or just preoccupied? But her tone was steady and uncompromising in its banality: Hello, Esme. It’s been swell. Goodbye, Esme.
I waited till Ollie was tucked in that night and then paced the floor of my study. At one point I tried L.R.’s number at home, but her recorded response was equally opaque. She was out of town. She’d be returning soon. Please leave a message after the beep.
The magnitude of what we’d come up with seemed undercut suddenly by feelings of doubt: What if L.R. had found something shockingly wrong with my calculations, so wrong she was embarrassed to tell me—no. What if ... I stopped myself. I sat down in my desk chair, but I could not relax.
I’d taken enormous risks. I’d sacrificed my status quo for this work. I’d actually thought I was doing what no woman scientist had ever done: writing my own life. I’d waited for L.R. to take the lead, given her age and experience, in determining where to submit our results for publication, deciding who should be notified and in what order. Now, in her wake, I wasn’t sure how to proceed: On my own? Solo but noting both our names? How?
For the first time in all the previous dark twisting weeks, I let myself weep for myself, my life. What had I done, where was this going to end? I’d been unstable, unrepentant, heartless, single-minded about my goal. But somehow I’d had faith; the world of theory is touched by God, it had provided me a halo tunnel—I’d felt blessed, invincible. Now the walls were starting to fall and there was no longer that sense of invincibility, the giddiness of privileged vision.
Earlier, through a friend at UGC Law School, I’d located a lawyer who agreed to represent me. I was terrified that Jay was going to sue for temporary custody of Ollie while the divorce was in progress.
On the phone the lawyer had asked me several questions, about my marriage and Ollie, and though I sensed her sympathy and willingness to understand, I felt she’d had trouble grasping the heart of the conflict between Jay and me—our polar views of Ollie. I arranged a time the next day to meet with her and I set myself the goal of appearing strong and collected by the time the meeting took place.
The next morning Ollie chattered away at breakfast, then climbed down from her chair, picked up her crayons, and settled on the floor to draw while I did the dishes.
“Mom,” she called after a while, propping herself up on her elbows. Then she beckoned with one hand, urgently.
“These are the same ones turned.”
I wiped my hands on the dish towel, then knelt beside her. She had been drawing the shapes I’d shown her: first the symmetric, then the asymmetric. Her renderings were careful and exact, lined up on the page—but then she had flipped them. That is to say, she’d shown how two enantiomorphic (one left, one right) polygons could be superimposed. That was easy. But since the other day’s science lesson, she’d been obsessed with two enantiomorphic corkscrews, one left-handed, one right-handed. To imagine superimposing these two guys you’d have to be able to visualize four dimensions—that is, to see them not in a Euclidean, 3-D manner, but topologically. One of them would have to be cranked around, rotated, flipped over in a fourth dimension (disappearing!) and then it would reappear as the “other side.” If you had 4-D eyes you could view the corkscrew as a left helix from one spot and as a right helix from another. Ollie had drawn a loop from “behind” the left-handed corkscrew, knotted it “overhand,” then brought it up behind the right-hander.
“I believe you can see this,” I said to her bent head. “I believe you see hyperspace.”
She looked up at me and nodded. “Ollie is a very turning eye,” she said proudly. She got to her feet and began spinning slowly, gradually faster and faster. Then she stopped abruptly, shaking herself like a puppy. She steadied herself, then turned toward me.
“I am Ollie,” she said, and smiled. It was extraordinary—the first time I had ever known her to refer to herself in the first person.
“Yes. You’re Ollie.” I laughed and hugged her and kissed her. She wrinkled up her face and smiled.
“You are most definitely Ollie. The only such Ollie on earth.”
An hour or so later, the doorbell rang agai
n. In a zombielike calm, I opened the door. This time the messenger was a young black kid; he had a dreamy look on his face and he wore a lime-green satin baseball jacket. He kept checking his watch, annoyed. It was a fake too-gold Rolex—I wondered if he’d been conned into buying it and now it was running badly.
He’d looked up smiling when the door opened and he handed me the envelope in a very delicate, hesitant fashion. As if he knew—or did that slightly cringing behavior come with the territory?
“Have a good one, if you can, man!” he called over his shoulder, loping away in his hightops.
I took the papers out to the kitchen, so Ollie couldn’t see my face. I sat down and read the words slowly: “... temporary custody of Olivia Tallich, during divorce proceedings.”
I restacked the papers neatly. I looked up at the clock and went to the phone.
Chapter 22
THE GLASS DOOR is right in front of me, reading TUO: Walk out, tuo klaw, I think, into the fourth dimension. Did I think Ollie was a genius? No. But I think she saw the world differently from everyone. Was she an autistic savant, one of those strange children with little or no language ability who can paint like Leonardo or add up and multiply columns of figures in their heads? No.
But I thought she really did see things differently—therefore her powers of description were different—therefore language was a tightrope for her, from here to there—and sometimes she rose up off the tightrope and walked a glittering trail on air. Around, all the way around shape. I wrote her phrases, her word-collages down and I recorded the consistencies—she was always making her own kind of “sense.” Whenever we went out—I mean left somewhere, said goodbye, exited—she spoke in more orderly sentences, as if she recognized doorways in experience through which she came and went.
Jean Piaget believed all kids see the world topologically, four-dimensionally, first, as infants, before they are taught to see things in three-dimensional Euclidean geometric space. Squares, rectangles, triangles, you see, don’t come to us naturally—we have to internalize the cookie-cutter. But fluid, unending, curving hyperspace—it’s our first visual home. That’s why a palette, a circle with dots of paint in colors moving clockwise around it, and a reverse palette, with the colors going counter, will be looked on as the same by those little minds that can “flip” the spheres with no effort. A triangle and a circle look the same—it’s the closed curve that likens them in a child’s mind. “Handedness” exists only for those minds trapped in space-time.
Saving St. Germ Page 20
