I was a teaching assistant in my first year of a Ph.D. program, and my particular interest was evolutionary biology. As a child I went with my family to Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen during the summer months when the dusk turns silver and lasts all night, and the glittering lights of Tivoli are painted across my memory like a Chagall, where the ordinary life of the village is happening in the sky. That was the kind of magic I had discovered in biology, as if the study of life was a kind of Tivlovian circus and I’d been invited to live inside the gates.
For a beginning student in evolutionary biology, the purpose of life is simple. The simplicity of it pleased me, although it reveals perhaps a childish intelligence to confess that I was comforted by a system in which the purpose includes only the objectives of survival and reproduction.
But I liked the implicit clarity, the ongoing narrative of natural selection, which like a soap opera resurfaces season after season, the end of each segment a hook for a new beginning.
To say it plainly, as I then believed it was and told my students: If we assume in the complexity of human life the simplicity of biology, each one of us has a particular set of genes. If we fail to survive or fail to reproduce, that original set of genes is kaput.
I had a casual way of speaking to my freshman class while I was teaching.
“Suppose DDT comes to Toledo,” I’d begin, “and in the process of zapping the mosquitoes, which is its job, it zaps as well a particular gene, and people with that gene wither on the spot or get cancer of the this or that, one kind of death or another. But the people lucky enough to survive have a gene that resists the DDT, a CIA secret-intelligence kind of gene that changes the genetic information to a different recipe. And those survivors reproduce. Ergo, over a long period of time, the population of Toledo shifts to one in which every citizen is resistant to DDT.”
No genetic variation, no evolution, I’d say to my students. And for genetic variation we need mutation and sex. Mutation comes from mistakes in the cell’s copy machine, creating an altogether new gene. Sex, just as important and much more entertaining, creates a new combination of old genes.
Get busy, I’d say to them. No evolution and we’re history.
Last year when all of this was happening, I used to sit in my room, cross-legged on my bed so I could see through the plants in the south-facing window across to the hangar, and imagine my life as a woman.
The hangar was where Steven went with Lisha when no one was at home, although Steven and I never spoke about it. We never spoke of sex at all, except once he did ask me had I ever been with a man, and I didn’t reply, wishing to say yes although the answer would have been no.
I was anxious about myself. I couldn’t understand why I was afraid of being with men. I was always thinking about them—someone from biochemistry, a man with curly hair and a cleft chin who I’d seen at the market, a boy in Steven’s law-school class, exactly my height with pale, pale blue eyes. Crushes I’d take into bed, sometimes waking in the middle of the night with a sense of presence beside me, surprised to find that the bed was empty, as if I believed my imagination of sufficient power to create a lover out of daydreams.
Eva had been with men since we were sophomores in high school—“indiscriminately,” she’d tell me. “A product of my Catholic girlhood,” she’d say.
And when we were in high school, I’d pretend to more adventure than I’d had.
By the time I went to college, there had been only deep kisses, a boy’s grip on my tailbone pressing me against his groin, his hands sliding along the sides of my breasts. And I’d pull away, breathless with a bewildering mix of terror and desire, half sick, as if, like the poor male praying mantis, I could die of sex.
After class I checked my messages in the office I shared with other teaching assistants. “Four unheard messages” were recorded, but it was almost one o’clock, so I replaced the receiver and didn’t listen to them.
I got to the cafeteria just before one and waited.
I was Faith’s confidante, I suppose. She had no daughter of her own, and my mother showed little interest in and occasional criticism of her affair with the married photographer, and, living a secret life as she was, Faith must have had a need for a sympathetic friend. Something I now understand. I was a likely friend. An excellent listener, too inexperienced to have an opinion and pleased to be let into the intimate life of so seductive a woman as I thought my aunt to be, although I had no way to measure seductiveness.
By one-thirty Faith still had not arrived. I made another call to her office, and no one answered except voice mail. I got a salad and a Diet Coke and sat at a table in the window directly across from the entrance to the cafeteria so she couldn’t miss me if she came.
At two I left for biology lab.
I’ve a capacity to put out of mind anything I don’t wish to think about, but I was alarmed that Faith had not come to lunch.
I had time before lab to check the messages in my office again, but I walked past the door without opening it, picked up some printouts in the biology office, and went to lab.
When I was young, I had a habit of hiding. Something would upset me, something minor. Sometimes I couldn’t even remember what it was. But when it happened, I’d disappear under the skirted table where the photographs of strangers were kept or into the broom closet or under a bed, usually my parents’ bed, but always close at hand. And tall as I am, I was able to make myself small enough that no one could ever find me. I never ran away from home, although Eva used to run away to her Aunt Vera’s and Steven ran away, taking me with him to the drugstore in his red wagon.
If trouble was brewing, I’d hide at home, and even then, as recently as last year, my instinct in conflict was short-distance flight. I wanted to be invisible but never too far from the source.
Which was how I felt that afternoon during biology lab, dissecting a fetal pig.
Three more messages had come since morning when I finally checked my office voice mail.
The first one was from Julia at 10:00 A.M. “Where are you?” The phone clicked off.
“Claire. I have to speak to you, pronto. Call as soon as you get this message.” It was Julia again.
The third call was from my father asking me to call my mother at work. In his second call, he asked me to stop by his office before I went to the library to meet Steven at five.
When I arrived at my father’s office, it was close to five and he was on rounds at the hospital across the street, and I suppose I was stopping by his office for reassurance and called my mother because he wasn’t there.
Julia was in a temper.
“This is the worst day of my life,” she said, not for the first time. “There was the op-ed piece, the flag, and now the computer has lost one of my designs.”
I had adopted silence as a matter of course when Julia was on a tear.
“So what did Steven say about his extracurricular life when you asked him this morning?”
“I haven’t mentioned it yet,” I said. “I’ll see him in the library.”
“Fourteen people at work—fourteen of them—made a remark about Steven’s piece this morning, and these are glass workers who don’t read the op-ed page. Your father and I are furious.”
“No one said anything to me,” I said.
“Well, plenty of people spoke to your father about it, and I’ve called Faith to check the temperature at her job—if she’s still got one. I must have called her ten times so far, and she hasn’t returned my call.”
I had thought I might tell Julia that Faith had missed our lunch, but I changed my mind.
“That’s why it’s important for you to find out what Steven is up to besides law school. I have extrasensory perception, and I see problems.”
“I’m actually calling about dinner, thinking I might go over to Eva’s.”
“Milo’s cooking, for what that’s worth,” Julia said. “I’ve got to finish this project and won’t be home until eight.” She stopped for a moment,
spoke to someone in her office, answered another telephone. I could hear her tell the caller that the order would be ready by Monday, and then she was back on the phone with me.
“You need to be at dinner tonight. The family needs to come together.”
I hesitated. This was exactly the conversation I didn’t want to have.
“Stormy weather,” she said, my father’s expression. He had a habit of humming the tune to “Stormy Weather” during arguments with Julia.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be there.”
“Leave your father a note and ask him to call me when he gets back to his office.”
I could tell she was trying to separate the sound of alarm from her voice, forcing herself to use the word “ask” instead of “tell.”
I said I would, then hung up and called Milo.
The part of Milo that wasn’t a crybaby and complainer was the part where he got to be a musician, the part I loved—generous and funny—and that was the Milo I got on the telephone.
This Milo was making lamb stew with garlic and rosemary and red wine, “roasted potatoes, very crisp on the outside, soft on the inside, like Welsh potatoes,” he said, “and slivers of carrot. Julia will love it.”
In this humor Milo was fond of my mother.
“If I die this afternoon,” Milo was saying with good cheer, “I want you to remember me as a musician and a cook, drink a toast to me at family dinners. ‘For Milo Frayn,’ you’ll say, ‘a musician first and then a master of lamb stew from his native Wales.’ ”
“Are you expecting to die this afternoon?” I asked, amused.
“I’m not expecting to die ever. But ‘the readiness is all,’ I think.”
I giggled and made a kissing sound in the receiver, since Milo’s life was short on kisses, and hung up.
It was almost five o’clock, the time when I planned to meet Steven in the library, so I wrote a note to my father, and just as I was about to head down the steps and down the street to the library, the telephone rang.
It was Faith.
“I thought David would be back from class by now,” she said.
“He’s on rounds with the interns,” I said. “I thought we were supposed to have lunch.”
There was a long silence, time for me to look outside my father’s window, where a little girl, not more than seven, with her umbrella up, her backpack on her shoulders, was tripping over a curb, and as she fell, the force of the wind picked up her umbrella, turned it inside out and blew it across the courtyard.
“Faith?”
“I’m still here.”
And very slowly, as if she had to imagine the words one by one before she could speak them, she said, “I was calling your father to tell him I’ve been terminated.” “Terminated?”
“Fired.”
Although I remember many of the details of what happened in April of last year, I cannot imagine myself in the scenes.
When we were young, Julia used to repeat, like a mantra of lost causes, “If only I’d known then what I know now,” as if knowing were sequential and fixed in time. I’d like to think that we’re born with the capacity to know as part of our genetic road map, but the willingness to see clearly is something else, a matter of character anticipating the future.
I believed intellectually in change and my ability to adapt to it, but emotionally I didn’t trust that I had the capacity.
6
When I arrived in the reading room at the table where Steven and I always sat, he wasn’t there. He’d left his books on the table but not his backpack, and there was a note on top of his constitutional-law text.
“Be back soon. A couple of things I need to do before we go home today. S”
I took off my jacket, unpacked my books, headed to the ladies’ room, and by the time I got back, a couple of people—but not Steven—had sat down at the table we usually had to ourselves. One of them had moved Steven’s stack of books closer to mine, and they’d fallen over, spilling his note cards, which he kept for exams, so I stacked them and put them back. I glanced at his calendar, which had been under the constitutional-law book, something I wouldn’t ordinarily do, but in the back of my mind, where I shoved everything I didn’t want to remember under a little fold of white matter, hoping it would get lost, I remembered Julia’s request.April 4:
11 am See Professor Raab.
11:30 Take Low Profile piece and leave with the dean’s sec’y.
12 Meet D—take Law Review.
1 Constitutional-law seminar.
4 Finish article for Law Review on justice vs. the law. Check mailbox for bad news.
5 Meet C in library. Lisha for drinks? Call early.
7 Home with C unless . . .
I made a mental note to ask him about D and what he meant by the “bad news” in his mailbox and why the word “unless”? Was he coming home for dinner or not?
I didn’t plan to tell him that Faith had been fired from her job. It was very bad news for our family, and I had no idea how Steven would react. I used to think I knew him perfectly, my brother, my beloved brother and dearest friend, but I was no longer sure of him or of myself.
When Steven came up behind me, I was imagining what would happen when we arrived at home for dinner, and Faith was there and poor bewildered Bernard and my parents, still angry. Would Faith tell Steven, and what would he say to her?
“Where were you?” I asked.
“Errands,” he said. “I needed a book at the bookstore and stopped by a bar to talk to a friend. And I called Faith to apologize for any trouble I might have caused her with the op-ed.”
“What did she say?”
“She was out,” he said.
Surely there’d be a fight in the kitchen tonight when we got home, and tears and recriminations. My father would go to the hangar to work, and I’d go to my room, and so would Faith, and Julia would stand by the sink, a dish towel over her shoulder, announcing the future to the remaining family as if it were in her absolute control.
Steven was restless, moving his books around, stacking and restacking them, fumbling with his papers, checking his watch.
“What time is it?” I asked, responding to his nerves.
“Six o’clock, later than I thought,” he said. “And my concentration’s shot, so I’m thinking of getting a beer.”
“I’ll get a beer with you if you want.”
I started to close my books, aware that he was scrutinizing me, his mouth tight, so the dimple at one corner of his lips deepened in a small depression.
“What’s the deal?” he asked. “You’re so jumpy.”
“You’re the one who’s jumpy.”
He had opened his calendar, crossing off the list.
“What did you mean by ‘home unless’?” I asked. “Unless Lisha?”
“Checking out my calendar, were you?” he asked.
“It fell open. I didn’t open it.”
“I always write ‘unless’ after ‘home for dinner.’ ”
We usually ate dinner together by candlelight at the long wooden table in the kitchen with music playing on the radio. It was a condition of living in the house, Julia had said, when Milo and Faith and Bernard moved in. She made a ceremony of it.
“So be here for dinner,” she’d say to Steven and me when we left in the morning for the university. “Who knows how many dinners are in our future?”
Steven was picking up one law book and then another, unable to settle, chewing on the eraser at the end of his pencil, cracking his knuckles. And I wonder now if he had a sixth sense of how the rest of the day would go, a feeling of cold air across his back, a coming darkness.
“Unless something better comes up, is what I meant,” he said, opening a notebook, his chin in his fist, and finally we both settled into our work. Or he did.
I must have dozed off, my face against the plastic surface of the entomology text, when Steven woke me up.
“I lost track, and it’s nearly seven,” he said, slinging his backpac
k over his shoulder.
I stood and stretched, gathering my books and papers, stuffing them into the backpack, following him out of the reading room.
“You’re always in such a hurry,” I said, my hand on his arm as he rushed down the stairs.
We stopped to check our books with security at the main entrance.
“Don’t I know you?” the guard asked, looking at Steven.
“I study here every night,” Steven said.
The guard was checking through his law books, looking in the bottom of his bag.
“Are you a soccer player?”
“A law student. You must have me mixed up with someone else.”
“You look like that guy Luis Lucero. You know him?”
“The goalie. I know who you mean.”
The guard handed him back his books, and Steven knelt down, stuffing them in the backpack, zipping the bag. I remember that particularly, because I noticed for the first time that he was getting a nest of gray hair around the crown of his head.
“So that’s who you look like, Luis Lucero,” the guard said. “If you get tired of law, maybe you should try soccer. You’ve got the right build for a goalie.”
This amused the guard, and he laughed hard.
The entrance to Gelman Library was located on H Street, just below ground level, approached several steps down from the sidewalk.
“So I was thinking of us at the Jersey shore,” I went on as we left the guard’s desk and headed to the exit. “We weren’t digging on the beach as I usually think of us doing, but we were headed into the ocean.”
I put the hood of my raincoat up.
“Did we ever swim in the Atlantic Ocean?” I asked.
“I swam with Dad.” Steven pushed open the heavy front door, and I followed him outside into the gathering weather. “I don’t think you ever went swimming.” He held the door for a group of students. “You hated the water.”
A Student of Living Things Page 6
