by Celeste Ng
“Of course not,” James says. Lydia had refused, refused, to take swim classes at the Y. He’d been a swimmer as a teenager himself; he’d taught Nath to swim at age three. With Lydia he’d started too late, and she was already five when he took her to the pool for the first time and waded into the shallow end, water barely to his waist, and waited. Lydia would not even come near the water. She’d laid down in her swimsuit by the side of the pool and cried, and James finally hoisted himself out, swim trunks dripping but top half dry, and promised he would not make her jump. Even now, though the lake is so close, Lydia goes in just ankle-deep in summer, to wash the dirt from her feet.
“Of course not,” James says again. “Lydia doesn’t know how to swim.” It’s not until he says these words into the telephone that he understands why the police are asking. As he speaks, the entire family catches a chill, as if they know exactly what the police will find.
It’s not until early Thursday morning, just after dawn, that the police drag the lake and find her.
two
How had it begun? Like everything: with mothers and fathers. Because of Lydia’s mother and father, because of her mother’s and father’s mothers and fathers. Because long ago, her mother had gone missing, and her father had brought her home. Because more than anything, her mother had wanted to stand out; because more than anything, her father had wanted to blend in. Because those things had been impossible.
In her first year at Radcliffe, 1955, Marilyn had enrolled in introductory physics, and her advisor glanced at her course schedule and paused. He was a plump man with a tweed suit and a crimson bowtie, a dark gray hat brim-down on the table beside him. “Why do you want to take physics?” he asked, and she explained shyly that she was hoping to become a doctor. “Not a nurse?” he’d said, with a chuckle. From a folder he pulled her high-school transcript and studied it. “Well,” he said. “I see you received very good grades in your high-school physics course.” She’d had the highest grade in her class, had set the curve on every test; she had loved physics. But he couldn’t know that. On the transcript, it said only “A.” She held her breath, waiting, afraid he would tell her that science was too hard, that she’d better try something like English or history instead. In her mind she prepared her retort. Instead he said, “All right, then, why don’t you try chemistry—if you think you can handle it,” and signed her course slip and handed it over, just like that.
When she arrived at the laboratory, though, she found herself the only girl in a room of fifteen men. The instructor tut-tutted and said, “Miss Walker, you’d better tie up those golden locks.” “Can I light the burner for you?” someone else would say. “Let me open that jar for you.” When she broke a beaker, the second day of class, three men rushed to her side. “Careful,” they said. “Better let us help.” Everything, she soon realized, started with better: “Better let me pour that acid for you.” “Better stand back—this will make a pop.” By the third day of class, she decided to show them. She said no, thank you, when people offered to make her pipettes, then hid a grin as they watched her melt glass tubes over the Bunsen burner and stretch them, like taffy, into perfectly tapered droppers. While her classmates sometimes splashed their lab coats, burning holes all the way down through their suits, she measured acids with steady hands. Her solutions never bubbled onto the counter like baking-soda volcanoes. Her results were the most accurate; her lab reports the most complete. By midterm, she set the curve for every exam, and the instructor had stopped smirking.
She had always liked surprising people that way. In high school, she had approached her principal with a request: to take shop instead of home ec. It was 1952, and in Boston, researchers were just beginning to develop a pill that would change women’s lives forever—but girls still wore skirts to school, and in Virginia, her request had been radical. Home economics was required for every sophomore girl, and Marilyn’s mother, Doris Walker, was the only home ec teacher at Patrick Henry Senior High. Marilyn had asked to switch into shop with the sophomore boys. It was the same class period, she pointed out. Her schedule wouldn’t be disrupted. Mr. Tolliver, the principal, knew her well; she had been at the top of her class—girls and boys—since the sixth grade, and her mother had taught at the school for years. So he nodded and smiled as she made her case. Then he shook his head.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “We can’t make an exception for anyone, or everyone will expect it.” At the look on Marilyn’s face, he reached across the desk and patted her hand. “Some of the equipment in the shop would be difficult for you to use,” he told her. “And to be honest, Miss Walker, having a girl like you in the classroom would be very distracting to the boys in the class.” He meant it as a compliment, she knew. But she also knew that it wasn’t. She smiled and thanked him for his time. It wasn’t a true smile, and her dimples didn’t show.
So she had slouched in the back row of the home ec classroom, waiting out the first-day welcome speech her mother had given for a dozen years, drumming her fingers as her mother promised to teach them everything a young lady needed to keep a house. As if, Marilyn thought, it might run away when you weren’t looking. She studied the other girls in her class, noting who bit her nails, whose sweater was pilled, who smelled faintly of a cigarette snuck over lunch. Across the hall, she could see Mr. Landis, the shop teacher, demonstrating the correct way to hold a hammer.
Keeping house, she had thought. Each day she watched her classmates, clumsy in thimbled fingers, sucking the ends of thread, squinting for the needle’s eye. She thought of her mother’s insistence on changing clothes before dinner, though there was no longer a husband to impress with her fresh face and crisp housedress. It was after her father left that her mother had begun to teach. Marilyn had been three. Her clearest memory of her father was a feel and a smell: the bristle of his cheek against hers as he lifted her up, and the tingle of Old Spice in her nostrils. She didn’t remember his leaving but knew it had happened. Everyone did. And now, everyone had more or less forgotten it. Newcomers to the school district assumed Mrs. Walker was a widow. Her mother herself never mentioned it. She still powdered her nose after cooking and before eating; she still put on lipstick before coming downstairs to make breakfast. So they called it keeping house for a reason, Marilyn thought. Sometimes it did run away. And in English class, on a test, she wrote, Irony: a contradictory outcome of events as if in mockery of the promise and fitness of things, and received an A.
She began tangling the thread on her sewing machine. She snipped patterns without unfolding them, making paper-cut lace of the layers beneath. Her zippers ripped out of their dresses. She stirred eggshell fragments into the pancake batter; she switched salt and sugar in the sponge cake. One day she left her iron facedown on the board, causing not only a blackened burn in the cover but enough smoke to set off the fire sprinklers. That evening, at dinner, her mother finished her last bite of potato and set her knife and fork down, crossed neatly, on the plate.
“I know what you’re trying to prove,” she said. “But believe me, I will fail you if you keep this up.” Then she gathered the dishes and carried them to the sink.
Marilyn did not move to help as she usually did. She watched her mother tie a ruffled apron around her waist, fingers knotting the strings in one quick motion. After the last dish was washed, her mother rinsed her hands and applied a dab of lotion from the bottle on the counter. Then she came to the table, brushed Marilyn’s hair from her face, and kissed her forehead. Her hands smelled like lemons. Her lips were dry and warm.
For the rest of her life, this would be what Marilyn thought of first when she thought of her mother. Her mother, who had never left her hometown eighty miles from Charlottesville, who always wore gloves outside the house, and who never, in all the years Marilyn could remember, sent her to school without a hot breakfast. Who never mentioned Marilyn’s father after he left, but raised her alone. Who, when Marilyn earned a scholarship to Radcliffe, hugged her for a long time and whispered, “H
ow proud I am of you. You have no idea.” And then, when she loosened her arms, looked into Marilyn’s face and tucked her hair behind her ears and said, “You know, you’ll meet a lot of wonderful Harvard men.”
It would bother Marilyn, for the rest of her life, that her mother had been right. She worked her way through chemistry, majored in physics, ticked the requirements for medical school off her list. Late at night, bent over her textbooks while her roommate wound curlers into her hair and patted cold cream onto her cheeks and went to bed, Marilyn sipped double-strength tea and kept awake by picturing herself in a white doctor’s coat, laying a cool hand against a feverish forehead, touching a stethoscope to a patient’s chest. It was the furthest thing she could imagine from her mother’s life, where sewing a neat hem was a laudable accomplishment and removing beet stains from a blouse was cause for celebration. Instead she would blunt pain and stanch bleeding and set bones. She would save lives. Yet in the end it happened just as her mother predicted: she met a man.
It was September 1957, her junior year, at the back of a crowded lecture hall. Cambridge was still sweltering and sticky, and everyone was waiting for the crisp cool of fall to sweep the city clean. The course was new that year—“The Cowboy in American Culture”—and everyone wanted to take it: rumor had it that their homework would be watching The Lone Ranger and Gunsmoke on television. Marilyn took a piece of loose-leaf from her folder and, while her head was bent, quiet fell over the room like snow. She glanced up at the professor approaching the podium, and then she understood why everyone had gone silent.
The course catalog had listed the instructor as James P. Lee. He was a fourth-year graduate student and no one knew anything about him. To Marilyn, who had spent all her years in Virginia, Lee conjured a certain kind of man: a Richard Henry, a Robert E. Now she realized that she—that everyone—had expected someone in a sand-colored blazer, someone with a slight drawl and a Southern pedigree. The man setting his papers on the lectern was youngish and thin, but that was as close as he came to what they all had pictured. An Oriental, she thought. She had never seen one in person before. He was dressed like an undertaker: black suit, black tie knotted tight, shirt so white it glowed. His hair was slicked back and parted in a perfect pale line, but one wisp stood straight up in back, like an Indian chief’s feather. As he started to speak, he reached up with one hand to smooth down the cowlick, and someone snickered.
If Professor Lee heard, he didn’t show it. “Good afternoon,” he said. Marilyn found herself holding her breath as he wrote his name on the board. She could see him through her classmates’ eyes, and she knew what they were thinking. This was their professor? This little man, five foot nine at most and not even American, was going to teach them about cowboys? But when she studied him again, she noticed how slender his neck was, how smooth his cheeks. He looked like a little boy playing dress-up, and she closed her eyes and prayed for the class to go well. The silence stretched, taut as the surface of a bubble, ready to be popped. Someone shoved a sheaf of mimeographed syllabi over her shoulder, and she jumped.
By the time she had taken the top copy and passed the rest on, Professor Lee had begun to speak again.
“The image of the cowboy,” he said, “has existed longer than we might imagine.” There was no trace of an accent in his voice, and she slowly let out her breath. Where had he come from, she wondered. He sounded nothing like what she’d been told Chinamen sounded like: so solly, no washee. Had he grown up in America? Ten minutes in, the room began to rustle and murmur. Marilyn glanced at the notes she’d jotted down: phrases like “undergone multiple evolutions in each era of American history” and “apparent dichotomy between social rebel and embodiment of quintessential American values.” She scanned the syllabus. Ten required books, a midterm exam, three essays. This wasn’t what her classmates had had in mind. A girl at the side of the room tucked her book beneath her arm and slipped out the door. Two girls from the next row followed. After that it was a slow but steady trickle. Every minute or two another few students left. One boy from the first row stood up and cut right in front of the podium on his way out. The last to leave were three boys from the back. They whispered and sniggered as they edged past just-emptied seats, their thighs bumping each armrest with a soft thump, thump, thump. As the door closed behind them, Marilyn heard one shout “Yippee-ki-yay-ay!” so loud that he drowned out the lecture. Only nine other students still remained, all studiously bent over notebooks, but they were all reddening in the cheeks and at the edges of their ears. Her own face was hot and she didn’t dare look at Professor Lee. Instead she turned her face to her notes and put her hand to her forehead, as if shielding her eyes from the sun.
When she finally peeked up at the podium again, Professor Lee gazed out over the room as if nothing were amiss. He didn’t seem to notice that his voice now echoed in the nearly empty hall. He finished his lecture with five minutes remaining in the period and said, “I’ll hold office hours until three o’clock.” For just a few seconds, he stared straight ahead, toward a distant horizon, and she squirmed in her seat as if he were staring directly at her.
It was that last moment, the tingle at the back of her neck as he stacked his notes and left the room, that brought her to his office after the lecture. The history department had the peaceful quiet of a library, the air still and cool and slightly dusty. She found him at his desk, head propped against the wall, reading that morning’s Crimson. The part in his hair had blurred, and the cowlick stuck up again.
“Professor Lee? I’m Marilyn Walker. I was in your lecture just now?” Though she hadn’t meant it to, the end of her voice swerved up into a question, and she thought, I must sound like a teenage girl, a stupid, silly, shallow teenage girl.
“Yes?” He did not look up, and Marilyn fiddled with the top button of her sweater.
“I just wanted to check,” she said, “if you thought I’d be able to keep up with the work.”
He still didn’t look up. “Are you a history major?”
“No. Physics.”
“A senior?”
“No. A junior. I’m going to medical school. So history—it’s not my field.”
“Well,” he said, “to be honest, I don’t think you’ll have any problems. If you choose to stay in the course, that is.” He half-folded the newspaper, revealing a mug of coffee, took a sip, then fanned out the paper again. Marilyn pursed her lips. She understood that her audience was now over, that she was expected to turn around and walk back into the hallway and leave him alone. Still, she’d come here for something, though she wasn’t sure what, and she jutted out her jaw and pulled a chair up to his desk.
“Was history your favorite subject in school?”
“Miss Walker,” he said, looking up at last, “why are you here?” When she saw his face up close, just a table-width away, she saw again how young he was. Maybe only a few years older than she was, not even thirty, she thought. His hands were broad, the fingers long. No rings.
“I just wanted to apologize for those boys,” she said suddenly, and realized this was really why she’d come. He paused, eyebrows slightly raised, and she heard what he’d just heard: “boys,” a trivializing word. Boys will be boys.
“Friends of yours?”
“No,” Marilyn said, stung. “No. Just idiots.”
At that he laughed, and she did, too. She watched tiny crinkles form around the corners of his eyes, and when they unfolded, his face was different, softer, a real person’s face now. From here, she saw that his eyes were brown, not black, as they’d seemed in the lecture hall. How skinny he was, she thought, how wide his shoulders were, like a swimmer’s, his skin the color of tea, of fall leaves toasted by the sun. She had never seen anyone like him.
“I guess that sort of thing must happen all the time,” she said softly.
“I wouldn’t know. That was my first lecture. The department let me take this class as a trial.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s all
right,” he said. “You stayed until the end.” They both looked down—he at his now-empty mug, she at the typewriter and neat sheaf of carbon paper perched at the end of his desk.
“Paleontology,” he said after a moment.
“What?”
“Paleontology,” he repeated. “My favorite subject. It was paleontology. I wanted to dig up fossils.”
“That’s a kind of history, though,” she said.
“I guess it is.” He grinned into his coffee cup, and Marilyn leaned across the desk and kissed him.
On Thursday, at the next lecture, Marilyn sat off to the side. When Professor Lee came into the room, she didn’t look up. Instead she wrote the date carefully in the corner of her notes, looping a demure S in September, crossing the t in a perfectly horizontal line. As he began to speak, her cheeks went hot, as if she’d stepped into summer sun. She was positive she was bright red, blazing like a lighthouse, but when she finally looked around, out of the corners of her eyes, everyone was focused on the lecture. There were a handful of other students in the room, but they were scribbling in their notebooks or facing the podium up front. No one noticed her at all.
When she’d kissed him, she had surprised herself. It had been such an impulse—the way she sometimes reached out to catch a stray leaf on the wind, or jumped a puddle on a rainy day—something done without thinking or resisting, something pointless and harmless. She had never done anything like that before and never would again, and looking back on it, she would forever be surprised at herself, and a little shocked. But at that moment she had known, with a certainty she would never feel about anything else in her life, that it was right, that she wanted this man in her life. Something inside her said, He understands. What it’s like to be different.
