“Biology 212, Introductory Genetics,” read the title of one such notebook. My mother had recorded the instructor’s lectures in obsessive detail, with meticulous illustrations in colored ink. These were the notes of someone who feared she might forget her own name if she didn’t write it down. And this was, in fact, the first information she had lost. “I don’t know,” she said, studying for the comprehensive exams for her Ph.D., exams she never took because she didn’t see the point, she had been diagnosed by then, “it’s as if everything I’ve learned is one of those lazy Susans down at King’s, and it’s spinning so fast I can’t grab the answers I want.” The rest of the box was filled with thick texts like Advanced Neuroanatomy and Mammalian Genetics. On page 467 of this latter text was the information that Valentine’s chorea was inherited in a dominant Mendelian fashion. The disease, the text said, had no known treatment or cure. The passage had been highlighted in yellow marker, so I knew that she must have read it.
I set aside Reproductive Biology, with its Technicolor photos of fetuses in various stages of development, the first such photos ever taken from inside a human womb. It occurred to me that my mother’s years as a parent hadn’t been the obstacle to her education I had always assumed they were, but the spur to go to college and study how a child unfolded from an egg and a sperm.
I had just repacked the books when my father came home. He looked around the kitchen to make sure I had done what he had asked. “Come on,” he said. “Help me get rid of all this food that Honey sent before it goes bad.”
I built us both sandwiches. My father washed down his meal with brandy, then bit off the tip of a cigar and began to smoke.
“So,” he said, “what’d you think of the store? I wouldn’t have minded retiring. But no one would have bought the chain in the shape those stores were in. I saved enough money for you and Laurel. But now there’s Honey to think about, and Ted.” His cigar made him cough. I had never heard him cough from smoking. “I’ll still be working less. Honey found some smart boychik with a Harvard MBA to oversee the day-to-day operations. I’d rather spend my time running the foundation. Besides, a woman like Honey doesn’t marry an old fart like me so she can sit around and twiddle her thumbs. She’s got a condo lined up for us in Palm Springs.” He peered at me to see if I would object. “You think all your old man’s good for is selling pots and pans?” He tapped the ashes from his cigar. The stench of tobacco made my stomach contract. “I’m not quitting the foundation. But Honey’s right, a man deserves a few good years before he kicks off.”
“Of course you do,” I said, although I couldn’t imagine my father sunning himself in Palm Springs. Like most daughters, I couldn’t imagine my father as anything other than what he had been when I was young. “Dad?” I said. “Did you and Mom ever think you shouldn’t have kids?”
“Ahh,” he said, “why bring all that up now.” He tossed back another shot of brandy. “People didn’t think that way back then. Who knew why children got sick? Whooping cough. Polio. If it wasn’t a bum heart, it was measles or scarlet fever. Maybe if you heard some girl’s mother had run off with the milkman, or her uncle liked little boys, you would have thought twice about marrying into a family like that. But your mother? She was like any woman. She wanted babies. She wanted a home. A woman didn’t decide not to have a kid just because her father and brothers had died of some crazy disease most people hadn’t heard of. And who knows, maybe she believed the cockamamie story your grandmother told her, that girls couldn’t get Valentine’s. As if I was the kind of skunk who would leave a girl high and dry because of something that ran in her genes.”
I supposed he was right. My mother had gotten pregnant with me, then with my sister, because she had hoped beyond hope that she had been spared the disease that killed her father and older brothers. Blessed with two daughters, she had chosen to believe her mother’s lie that girls didn’t get Valentine’s. After her children were all grown up, she had allowed herself to plan for a life that extended past her thirties. She defied her husband’s objections about going back to school, knowing these were only for show (he paid for her tuition, and bought her a car so she could travel back and forth to Albany).
Then her memory started failing. Crossing the stage to receive her diploma, she stumbled and nearly fell. Other symptoms surfaced. She began to study genetics from necessity more than from love. She tried before she left to pass the torch on to me.
My father pointed to the clock. “Think your sister’ll get here tonight? She’s coming with that dancer.” He tugged at his cheeks, which were slack and gray as putty. “She thinks if she comes in late enough, I won’t make a fuss about where they sleep. What do I care who she shacks up with. You know what I would give if this could be her wedding? Or yours?” He pulled me close. “That Willie is a mensch. I don’t expect you should live like a nun. But use your head, doll. This family doesn’t need any more tsuris. We’ve already got so much tsuris we could run a sale.”
After he went to bed, I sat up awhile. Then I put on my hat and coat and went out. I had missed this in Boston, where I rarely found the time—or felt safe enough—to take long walks at night. Clouds swam before the moon like amoebae swimming past the light beneath a microscope. I skated down the hill toward my high school. I circled the building, peering in at windows and straining to make out what was written on the boards. The windows in the gym were laced with wire mesh. Even the clock was protected, as if, should a ball crack its face, time itself might stop. Had I ever been so young as to tumble on those mats? Had I ever been the girl who so anxiously waited beside her science-fair project in this very same gym?
The day of the fair, when the judges had come to examine my display, I could tell they were tired—the exhibits had been arranged in alphabetical order by the students’ last names. I also guessed the judges—the vice-principal, Mr. Koots; Mr. Ryback, who taught sophomore chemistry; and Mrs. Scipione, who taught junior high math—thought they knew everything about chickens and eggs. Desperate, I came up with a strategy: I would try to explain what scientists didn’t understand about eggs and chicks, although I worried the judges might think I was lazy, like a student who writes a composition about not being able to decide what to write.
“Well then,” Mrs. Scipione said. “Perhaps in your studies of the chicken and the egg, you’ve come across the answer to a very vital question.” This seemed a setup for my father’s favorite joke. But Mrs. Scipione looked too serious for that. She twisted the yarn her glasses hung from. “I was hoping you could tell me at what moment life starts.”
I had always supposed that a person’s life started when she left for college. Then I saw that the question really meant: At what point does an egg become a chick? I was struck by the importance of this question. From the way Mrs. Scipione tapped her pen against her clipboard, I could tell that she knew the answer. What the men thought was harder to guess. Mr. Koots ground an invisible cigarette-butt into the shiny floor, while Mr. Ryback studied the two-headed fetus I had found in one egg. I was desperate to earn Mrs. Scipione’s approval. But the question seemed too hard. Eggs weren’t living things. An egg was dairy, not meat. It was a thing, like a cabbage. Then again, weren’t vegetables and fruits somehow “living”? At what point did an egg become a chick? When the heart started pumping? But didn’t a creature need to eat and reproduce? Maybe it became a chick when the brain started growing. But that would have meant that in peeling all those eggs and dissecting all those embryos, I had dissected living things.
I took such a long time thinking that Mrs. Scipione answered the question herself. “At conception,” she said.
“You mean, right from the start? With the rooster and the hen? But that’s crazy,” I said. So of course I didn’t win. After the award ceremony, I went out to the playground to figure out if I should care. Mrs. Scipione’s question wasn’t like other questions. No matter how long you studied when life began, you would never find the answer, because the answer was something you would n
eed to know before you started. Arguing with Mrs. Scipione would be like spinning on the merry-go-round: I think this; you think that. I considered asking my mother. But it was my father who picked me up. He didn’t seem surprised I hadn’t won.
“We could eat the eggs,” he joked.
As soon as we got home, I went out to my mother’s garden and buried the embryos in the dirt. I stuffed the posters in the trash, then lay in my bunk for hours, listening to Laurel practicing the cello. The music she played that night somehow expressed all the anger and disappointment I couldn’t put into words.
Now, on the eve of my father’s wedding, I walked back up the hill to our house to wait for her arrival. As a sort of consolation I settled in the easy chair and switched on the TV. The King and I was showing; it was Laurel’s favorite musical. I remembered one night when I lay reading on the sofa and this song began to play. Laurel pulled me to my feet and swung me around the living room, “One two three, one two three,” guiding me in a waltz as Anna guided the king. “Won’t you dance, won’t you dance, won’t you dance.”
I slept sitting in the chair. At dawn, I went outside. The wind had blown itself out, and the air had warmed slightly. Ice melted from the trees. I walked around the back. The new conservatory covered most of the land that had been my mother’s garden, a plot of ground so large our family couldn’t consume all the vegetables. Often, she would become so absorbed in her gardening she would forget Laurel and me. We played hide-and-seek among the cornstalks. Once, when Laurel hid, I couldn’t find her. I raced up and down the rows, then walked around the neighborhood calling her name. Did you think I’d been kidnapped again? she asked me, laughing. Were you worried I wouldn’t come back? I didn’t ask where she had been. I knew she had run off only because I always made such a point of keeping her in sight.
The rental company arrived, unfolding chairs in the conservatory and unrolling a bolt of white silk down the aisle. The florist brought bird-of-paradise. The ceremony was scheduled to begin at twelve thirty; it was nearly eleven when Cruz and Laurel pulled up. They arrived in a battered red MG. The door opened and out poured excuses. They had been up late the night before, rehearsing. The roads up north were very slick. Still, I couldn’t help but think they might have arrived earlier if Laurel hadn’t been reluctant to spend the night with me.
She went in to take a shower. Cruz loitered on the lawn as if he wanted to ask me something. But he must have sensed that he, too, ought to hurry in and change. I went up to my room and put on the suit Maureen had picked out. Laurel reappeared, her newly washed hair clinging to her back. Her skin radiated life in a way that made the robe superfluous. I struggled to pull on my panty hose, then smoothed my hair in place and put on the feathered cap Maureen had made me buy, then decided against it and took it off.
“Oh, you have to,” Laurel said. “It’s perfect.” She cocked the brim and stepped back, then threw her arms around me as if I were the one getting married. “Are you happy? You look as if, I don’t know, you’ve got a secret. You’re in love with Willie, aren’t you. I would be, too.” I tried to interrupt. “You’ve got a wonderful job. You’re on the verge of a breakthrough.” She spun like a child. “Oh, Jane, I’m on the verge of something, too. Not like you are. I’m not saving any lives. But you can’t imagine what Cruz has taught me. About dance. About myself. You’re coming, aren’t you, to the concert? There’ll be a big surprise. Something only you will appreciate.”
In the room next door, our father cursed. “Laurel! I need your help!”
She smiled at me and tied the robe tighter. “Just a minute,” she called back. The robe had been our mother’s. I had my memories of those afternoons driving with my mother back and forth to Albany, discussing evolution, and Laurel had this, the traded clothes, the tips about makeup and hair. How many siblings did this, I wondered, divided up their parents’ interests, as if my mother’s scientific curiosity and beauty were heirlooms that had to be apportioned, one trait to each child?
We finished getting dressed. Laurel leaned toward the mirror, dabbing on blush and mascara, then glazing her lips with gloss. The clock in the mirror moved backward half an hour. A car honked. I looked out and saw Willie in the back seat of a limousine. A slender young man sat beside him in the back, and Honey in the front. The doorbell rang, announcing the first of Honey’s guests from New York. Our neighbors arrived. My mother’s friends conveyed with a hug or a pat that they hadn’t forgotten my loss but were happy for my father.
“Where’s Charlene?” I asked Karl Prince, who was pulling off his overshoes.
He looked inside the empty black rubber skins. “Didn’t your father tell you? The doctors removed the other breast. But it didn’t matter by then. She passed on at the end of August.”
I put my hand to my mouth. I almost believed that if I hadn’t asked the question, Charlene Prince wouldn’t yet be dead.
“Maybe you could stop by and see Karen?” Karl asked. “She can’t seem to get over it.” As if grieving for a mother were an exam I could help another daughter pass.
“I’ll try,” I promised Karl, although I had planned to drive back to Boston with Willie that night. Charlene Prince had been the only woman in Mule’s Neck who had volunteered to look after my mother when I needed a break.
Karl honked his nose in his handkerchief. “We’re all proud of you, Jane. I used to tell Charlene, ‘I gave that girl her start.’ You knew more about chickens when you were twelve than I’ll ever know, and I been working with them every day of my life.” He kicked his rubbers beneath the bench. “Though you never did tell me that secret, how to grow chicks without the rooster.”
Why hadn’t I said it the first time? What a self-righteous prig I’d been. “You never paid me, Karl,” I said.
He laughed and stuffed his handkerchief in his pocket. “Guess the preacher’s getting ready. We better go sit down.”
The rabbi took his place at the little table they had set up by the arbor, and Willie’s cousin Irene started playing her flute. My father limped down the aisle, screwing up his face to signal that he wasn’t the reason the audience was there. Then came Willie and his mother. Honey wore an off-white lace dress that hugged her waist, with a slit down the front to show off those magnificent legs. Her crown of gold-white hair didn’t seem out of place at a wedding. The veil softened her features and made her appear half her age.
“What a lovely bride,” people murmured.
“Such tragedies for them both.”
“Thank goodness they met.”
I had never been the kind of girl to imagine my wedding, but it was hard not to see myself walking down this same aisle with my arm through my father’s. Willie would be standing by the chuppah in that charcoal tux with the black lapels. The reality that this would never happen wrenched a cry from my throat.
The rabbi blessed the wine. My father took a gulp then held the cup to Honey. He was sixty-six years old. His bride wasn’t much younger. Were their odds really so much different from Willie’s and my own?
My father lifted Honey’s veil. She leaned down to him and they kissed. I reached across Cruz and squeezed Laurel’s hand.
Willie’s son, Ted, let out a cheer. “Way to go, Grandma!” I turned and looked, straining to see if he resembled his father. But Irene had already started playing the recessional and everyone pivoted to watch the bride and groom walk back down the aisle.
Laurel and I made our way through the crowd to offer our good wishes to the newlyweds. Ted sashayed up behind us in the reception line, ducking his head like a cowpoke approaching the new schoolmarm. He wore pointy boots with lassoes etched on the sides, tight black jeans, and a starched white shirt. He slid the turquoise clasp on his string tie up and down, then toyed with the silver loop in one ear. He was rangy, almost frail, half a foot shorter than his father, with close-cropped red hair he must have gotten from his mother and a normal chin with no cleft.
“You’re Dad’s new girlfriend, aren’t you.” He winke
d, and it was a boy’s wink, so deliberate I could almost see his brain order his eyelid to shut. Whatever Willie had told him—something scrawled on a postcard the month before—by now was stale news. “That’s terrific. He’s still a young guy. It’s good for him to have a purpose in his life besides making money.” His own goal, Ted explained, was to compete in a famous rodeo that spring. Then he would write a book about his adventures. Then he would go to college and earn a degree in environmental law. Or maybe he would start his own recording studio, so he could produce authentic country music. Not the commercial shit the big companies in Nashville put out. He would do this, then he would do that, then he would try something else.
“I guess you two met.” Willie slapped his son on the back. “What’s this young varmint chewing your ear about?”
I had never seen him so self-conscious, like a bad actor attempting to play someone’s dad. In that too-folksy voice, he offered his son advice about never trusting horses enough to walk behind them and the tendency for harmless-looking scrapes to get infected. Like my own father, he kept asking Ted if he needed a few bucks to tide him over. He suggested Ted buy a pickup, so he wouldn’t have to hitch. It struck me that this young stranger, with his cowboy boots and earring, was my relative now. My step-nephew, wasn’t he? Although if I married Willie, he also would be my son. What if Ted had the gene for Valentine’s? What if he and his father both had it?
We reached the head of the receiving line, and Laurel took the opportunity to hand Honey her gift. She had bought them tickets to the Follies, and a certificate for dinner at Laurel’s favorite Left Bank bistro. I remembered walking Laurel downtown to buy gifts for our parents, Laurel contributing whatever money she had saved from her allowance, which never came to more than a fraction of the cost. This time, we hadn’t even considered going in on a gift. Just as well, I thought. We couldn’t have agreed on what to get.
A Perfect Life Page 19