A Student of Living Things

by Susan Richards Shreve

  “Fight,” was Julia’s motto for my brother. “Stand up to this teacher or that principal or the fifth-grade bully,” she’d say, always pushing Steven to an outrage already deep in his nature.

  He had grown up quarreling with anyone in authority, willing to say what other students didn’t dare, preparing for revolution.

  My mother loved that spirit in Steven, loved what was absent in my father’s otherworldly, abstract, gentle way. Steven had qualities she must have felt sleeping in her own character, taking risks that she might have taken if she’d been in such a position, if she’d been younger or American born or a man.

  “There’s nothing worth worrying about.” My father brushed away the rising conversation. “What’s done is done.”

  Julia slipped one of her bright Mexican blouses over her head. “That’s not what you said to me the other night in bed, David.” She took a yellow cotton skirt out of the closet, pulling the waistband tight, struggling to button it. “What you said then was that you wished Steven would be more circumspect and compromising.” She tossed a towel in the clothes hamper. “Your words, not mine.”

  “Whatever I said in our bedroom was private.”

  “Private!” my mother said. “I don’t know the meaning of that word.”

  My father’s temper seldom flared, but it did now, and he gathered up his papers, buckled his briefcase and headed out of the bedroom. “If you want to come with me, Claire, I’m leaving now.”

  “I’ll wait for Steven,” I said.

  Julia was sitting at her dressing table, putting on mascara, looking back from the mirror at me sitting on her bed.

  “So it’ll just be you and Steven going to school together today, right?”

  “And Lisha.”

  “But you’ll drop her off at work?”

  “Yes.”

  “When you’re alone with Steven, just the two of you in the car, ask him what he’s up to outside of school.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I’ve been wondering whether he’s involved with something we don’t know about.”

  “Like what?”

  “Some political group. I know he’s involved with the democrats at school, and I know he takes a left-wing position on issues, but I have this feeling there’s something else going on.”

  “He doesn’t have time for a political group as long as he’s in law school,” I said.

  I used to be quick to deny any possibility of trouble, “a cockeyed optimist” my father said of me. But he knew better, certainly than I did, that the defenses of our particular mix of genes were fragile and that my kind of optimism was a thin shield and not to be counted on.

  Julia shrugged. “Steven has time for what he has time for, Claire,” she said. “I know him very well.”

  I didn’t argue. I seldom did.

  4

  I sat in the backseat of the old green Ford, watching Steven’s hands on the steering wheel. An urgency to everything he did, even his grip on the top of the wheel, his knuckles protruding bone white, like the knuckles of an old man, his jaw set, his foot tapping nervously on the floorboards. In the rearview mirror, I could see his black eyes and narrowed my own so he couldn’t tell I was watching him.

  He was talking to Lisha about this and that, whether she’d be finished work in time for a drink at Demi’s Bar, whether they’d go to the Blue Ridge Mountains for the weekend, how much work he had to do, especially in criminal law. He was catching a cold.

  Lisha stared out the window at the line of tract houses, their colors articulated in the gray day.

  Viewed from my window in the backseat, our neighborhood had an eerie, soundless menace—the string of rectangular houses so low to the ground they seemed in the threatening weather to sink beneath its surface, the lamps lit in the matching living rooms casting a garish yellow circle on the tiny lawns, the upstairs shades drawn as if there’d been a death. No one was on the street. We had moved to this suburban outpost when I was eight, no longer an outpost since I left elementary school, new neighborhoods surfacing like weeds along the strip north of the city. When we were young, Julia tried to make a family of the neighbors, who were mostly visiting foreign doctors at NIH whose tenure at the government medical-research laboratories was temporary. But on Sunday nights Julia would give big suppers and push back the furniture in the living room for dancing, while the children of the neighborhood played in the kitchen a form of hide-and-seek we called “Scare Me to Dead.”

  And then the daughters of a local radio disc jockey shopping with their parents at Montgomery Mall disappeared, and every day on the 8:00 A.M. show, the father of the girls was on the radio pleading with his listeners for information, any information that might lead to his girls. My mother was a listener, the radio always on at seven when we came into the kitchen for breakfast. But the girls were never found, and the dinner dances in our house ended.

  “Why no more parties?” I asked my mother.

  “Nobody stays in Washington for very long,” she said. “No point in getting to know anyone.”

  The air inside the hot, sticky room of the car was thick with silent argument, and though I must have sensed, behind Steven’s talk of incidentals, the conversation that wasn’t taking place, I was more or less in the dark about the subtle hostilities of relationships. I needed to learn cunning, and even last year I must have known that its absence was my protection against the truth.

  When I think of myself then, at twenty-two still a virgin with a sense of my own soul’s purity, the picture I have is one my mother keeps beside her bed. In it I am seven, already lanky and tall, wearing a white ruffled pinafore, which is too tight and too short, above my knees. My hair is braided with ribbons, an expression on my face, with its too-large nose and full lips and coal-black eyes, that I can only describe as otherworldly.

  “Claire’s looking at heaven,” my mother would say, not without irritation, giving weight to the word “heaven” clicking her tongue in the back of her throat. “She’s too good for this world.”

  Steven stopped the car at St. Vincent’s Day Care Center, where Lisha worked, watching while she got out, put up her umbrella against the light rain still falling and walked away without saying good-bye, down the long cement path, up the steps to the front door of the main building, a square-columned black stone building with the bleak suggestion of an asylum about it.

  “Get in the front and talk to me,” he said after Lisha had disappeared inside the building.

  I climbed over and pushed the seat back to accommodate my long legs.

  Steven had a way of clenching his fists so his nails made little slices on his palms, which bled. It was clear by the thin sweep of blood at the top of the steering wheel that he had just done that.

  “Are they very angry?” he asked when I had settled beside him and fastened my seat belt.

  “Dad is,” I said. “He left the house in a temper.”

  “I didn’t think about Faith when I was writing the op-ed. I know it’s hard to believe, but I didn’t.” He was tapping the steering wheel in time to his own voice.

  “I don’t ever think about Faith working at the Justice Department, only sitting in the kitchen in bare feet with her hair down, drinking tea with Julia,” I said. “She’s not a working kind of woman. She just goes to work.”

  “That’s probably why I didn’t think about her job when I did the piece,” Steven was saying. “I was doing research on the implications of the Freedom for Democracy Act and ran across these stories about what happened to people when the law enforcers found them, and the stories were so terrible that I wrote in a heat and thought about nothing but these poor people. It was stupid of me.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen,” I said, but I must have been wary that morning. Any sign of change in my small world had the effect of a stun gun. My mind went white. “Faith never stays angry,” I said.

  Steven shook his head. “Unlike Dad.”

  “He doesn’t stay angry
either. He just bolts when he’s upset,” I said. “He did this morning.”

  “He almost ran over Mr. Denver picking up his morning paper in his hurry to get to the office.”

  In trouble, my father would leave, maybe only as far as the airplane hangar, but a quick exit was his solution to every problem.

  My father’s research at the National Institutes of Health was in the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Strokes, and his special interest was in ALS, called Lou Gerhig’s disease. When I was about ten, before the disc jockey’s daughters disappeared at Montgomery Mall, a young single woman with ALS on whom my father was trying an experimental drug died. She had been at NIH for months, and in the course of that time her only child, a boy about twelve, had become attached to my father.

  It was early June, the windows open, a damp breeze blowing through the room, and we were having dinner at the kitchen table when my mother brought up the boy. He never had a name that I remember, referred to by my father as “the boy,” as “the orphan boy” by my mother.

  “I would like to tell the orphan boy we will adopt him, David. I want to say yes.”

  It was the first Steven and I had heard of the boy, and in retrospect Julia’s choice for bringing up the conversation must have been to involve us in the private argument. We fell quiet, listening carefully, pretending to eat.

  Julia was reasonable, quieter than usual in her defense. “There are only five of us with Milo, and the boy could be happy with us.”

  “The answer is no,” my father said, already out of his chair, taking his half-finished meal to the sink.

  “But think of it, David,” my mother was saying as my father headed for the front door. “We have such a small family.”

  By the following week, my father had resigned his post at NIH to be a professor of medicine at George Washington University.

  “Because of the boy?” Steven had asked our mother.

  “Ask him,” Julia said.

  But Steven wouldn’t dare.

  We drove across town taking the back streets. Steven turned the radio up, and we listened to the WTOP report on the weather:

  “Some reports suggest that an underwater explosion could have caused the Potomac to rise above the banks, but that’s conjecture,” the weather-man said. “Nothing confirmed.”

  Steven turned the dial to all-music.

  “Lisha worries too much,” he was saying. “And that makes her angry, and then we fight, usually about something there’s no reason to worry about.”

  “About the flag?”

  “The flag, the op-ed pieces, the professors, the arguments I write in the Law Review. Everything upsets her.” He fiddled with the dial, looking for WPFW 89.3 FM Blues.

  “Don’t you love her?”

  “I don’t know if I love her,” he said. “I have too much in my head.”

  I used to have a soft-petaled view of romance, as if love were inspiration, arriving in a rush and by surprise, and I believed that such a feeling would eventually come to me as a kind of visitation.

  I tucked my feet under and opened the window a crack so the light rain misted my face. “I can imagine that sometime I’ll fall in love and marry and probably have a baby and teach in a university biology department somewhere. Maybe New York.”

  Ever since we were small and first moved to Bethesda, we had talked about New York. We begged our mother to promise we’d move back after the school year, after the next school year or the next, telling our classmates that each year would be our last at Bethesda Elementary and then we’d be moving home. For Steven it was the elevators in New York—punch “1” and you’re on the ground floor, out the door, on the street, the street crowded with people, the shops open, the coffeehouses with doughnuts and cookies in glass cases.

  For me New York was Steven, who was allowed to take me out alone, around the block, stopping at the deli for juice, pressing our noses against the window of the toy store, passing the children in strollers with their parents, harnessed in while I walked free as summer along Columbus Avenue with my brother.

  “I love New York,” I said, hoping for a promise out of our childhoods, some permanent commitment from Steven.

  I wiped the dampness off my face with the sleeve of my jacket and closed the window. We had talked about moving back many times, even recently, certainly in the last year. Steven would go back after law school and take the bar and become a public defender. I would follow when I got my doctorate, and our parents would retire to a small apartment on the Upper West Side. My father could find a part-time teaching job someplace or practice medicine, and Julia would be a freelance designer, and we’d all be back where we started, going to the Jersey shore for summer vacations.

  “I thought we talked about New York just this year,” I said. “You were going to go to finish law school and then take a job there.”

  “I need to be in Washington,” he said. “Too much is happening.”

  It was the conspiratorial moment my mother had hoped I would have with Steven, just the two of us driving together, secrets pouring into the void between us. But I was consumed by my own yearning for something irretrievable—some feeling of home agitating like floaters in the eye or the taste of salt.

  I sank back in my seat, turning my face away, suddenly weepy.

  Just last summer we’d talked about New York, how he might live in the city and I’d get a job at a small college in the East, how our children would play together in the summers.

  “So here is home?” I asked.

  “Here is home.”

  We were stopped at a light then, and he looked over at me with a kind of sadness.

  “You’re too smart to want what’s over, Claire,” he said quietly, as if he didn’t intend for me to hear him.

  It made me angry. It makes me angry now, because he doesn’t know that I’ve become a different person than I was that morning as we skirted the flooded streets of downtown Washington.

  I wrapped my arms around my knees, my knees under my chin, my head resting at the bend. My body felt like the crispy cloak the seven-year locust leaves behind when he dies, as if my insides had evaporated in the air and I had disappeared.

  “We’re different people,” he said.

  He was probably wondering how he could explain to me that the world as I found it was only in my head, that I couldn’t live forever in a sanctuary with animal corpses as holy objects.

  “I’m a biologist,” I said coolly, as if guessing at his thoughts. “I know about death, if that’s what you’re saying.”

  The windows were open just enough for moving air to blow the hair on the top of our heads, blues on the all-music station, Steven tapping his fingers in rhythm on my arm. Something casual and confident about his gesture that moved me, and I wanted this moment to last, just the two of us trapped in the cocoon of the car, an argument aborted, circling the streets for a clear path to our destination.

  Steven pulled in to the parking lot, turned off the car, got out, and we slung our book bags over our shoulders, heading for the cement steps to the campus, a spread of buildings in the middle of the city.

  “Coffee?” he asked.

  I checked my watch. “I’ll be late for class.” I said. I could barely keep pace with him, although I had longer legs.

  “Then we’ll meet in the library at five as usual.” He lit a cigarette.

  We headed down Twenty-first Street toward the river, cutting across the traffic to the other side. A group of people walking in our direction knew Steven by name, and he waved, and a law professor stopped to ask him about the op-ed piece in the Washington Post, saying he liked the piece, thought it was smart and daring.

  We were stopped at a light crossing G Street, and he leaned against me with his weight as if he’d lost his balance.

  “Smart and daring! Not bad.” Steven rested his head on my shoulder.

  “Are you worried about trouble?” I asked, surprised at the sudden softness of his gesture.

&
nbsp; “I’m not a fool.”

  The light had turned green, and we crossed the street to Lisner Hall, where my biology classes were held.

  “It’s not the flag, if that’s what you’re thinking. That was a gift, and I’m glad to have it,” he said, shrugging off the conversation, and I didn’t know at the time whether he meant it or not, but I expect now that he did not. He reached over and gave me a puff of his cigarette. I took it, although I don’t smoke, something conspiratorial in the gesture and intimate.

  “So I’ll see you in the main library at five?”

  “You know, Steven,” I said with a flush of emotion, “I’m completely happy when you’re around.”

  He gave my chin a gentle box and smiled. “If you’re not in the library at five, I’ll meet you in New York,” he said, and I turned to hurry up the steps to biology.

  5

  My mailbox in the biology office was full of junk mail—announcements of lectures and picnics, special makeup sessions, a message from the registrar about freshman grades, a note from one of my students about missing class and a message from Faith saying she would meet me for lunch at one o’clock in the school cafeteria.

  I wasn’t surprised. We often met for lunch in the cafeteria for “sex talks,” as Faith called them, and she would tell me about her affair with the married photographer, and I would listen.

  Probably this afternoon she’d want to talk about Steven’s op-ed piece and how angry she was at him for having written it. I knew that my parents were upset, knew it had been foolish of Steven to attack the department where Faith worked, but I was an expert at denial. This would “blow over,” as my father often said.

  I called Faith’s office at the Justice Department, left a message on her voice mail that I’d meet her at one and told her I was full of despair and needed one of our sex talks about her love affair.