Chemistry Lessons

by Meredith Goldstein

  The dogs haven’t seen each other in almost eight years, but they occasionally bark at nothing, haunted by each other’s scents.

  “Where are Cindy and Ralph?” I yelled to Pam. My dad was already making his way inside, his telescope case hanging off his back.

  “Inside, marinating steaks for later,” Pam said as Johnny climbed my calves. “We’re going to fix that broken heart with food, sweetie.” I flashed her a look of panic as I caught my breath.

  “Your dad called last night,” she explained. “We know about the breakup, honey.”

  “Okay,” I said, staring at the lawn, feeling almost relieved, like I’d been given permission to be lifeless for the rest of the trip.

  Pam shot me a sympathetic smile and motioned for me to join her inside. She cracked the front door before we entered and yelled, “Johnny coming in!” Ralph began to squeal as Cindy hurried him downstairs.

  * * *

  “I’m not surprised by any of this. He’s what, nineteen, babe?”

  Cindy called everyone babe. Pam, the dogs, my dad, me—​we were all “babe.” It became a very long “baaaabe” whenever she was drinking.

  I’d made it through the steak dinner, staying silent as my dad updated Cindy and Pam on all his latest outdoor activities—​the hiking, the rock climbing, and all the recreational athletic clubs that would keep him busy during summer vacation from teaching middle school science.

  The three of them let me be, allowing me to remain a passive, morose dinner guest, until my dad excused himself from dessert to stargaze. That’s when Cindy poured me a full glass of sweet wine and urged me onto the patio.

  While I sipped, the alcohol hitting my brain faster than I thought it would, Cindy polished off the last of a bottle of her favorite, Maker’s Mark. My mom never drank much, but Aunt Cindy believed in indulgences. Her backyard was evidence of that. Every time we visited the aunts in Plymouth, we noticed a new addition to their back deck. The setup now included a jacuzzi, a space for grilling, and a multilevel garden behind it that was labeled so carefully you’d think my neuroscientist aunt was a botanist.

  I leaned back on the wicker chaise lounge by their new fire pit, enthralled by the stars. Cambridge had so much light pollution that I often forgot that the sky could be this bright on its own. No wonder my dad sometimes drove down here to escape with his telescope.

  I tried to block out Cindy’s voice while I enjoyed the view. The minute we were outside, she had started pontificating about the breakup, as if I’d asked her to explain it to me. I didn’t want to hear her thoughts about how Whit was only nineteen and how we were going to break up someday anyway.

  What she said made sense—​logically, at least—​but the point was that we were supposed to be in love now.

  “Honestly, where could it go?” she asked. “You’re teenagers. It had to end at some point. But the timing and the reasons—​he just pulled that rug right out from under you, babe. It’s how he did it—that’s what’s heartbreaking. You don’t do that to your first love. You wouldn’t be this upset if you’d seen it coming.”

  “I guess.”

  I leaned over to grab from the bowl of wasabi peas on the table in front of us.

  “I just wish there was a way I could remind him of how he used to feel,” I said. “I remember how it was when we met. He would wait for me after class. He used to watch me do homework. I understand that crushes on other people happen when you’re in a long relationship. I’m sure you’ve had feelings for other women while you’ve been with Pam, right? But you wouldn’t end your relationship because of some temporary crush.”

  “I’ve had crushes on women and men while I’ve been with Pam,” Cindy said, letting out a sharp laugh. “But I dated a lot of people before Pam, babe. I met her when I was in my thirties—​when I was very much ready to have a partner. It was much easier to ignore the crushes.

  “Whit should have told you how he was feeling. Men do this. They don’t talk. They process internally, on their own, and then it’s too late to work through it. He had probably broken up with you in his mind months ago.”

  I winced. “Cindy, we were really serious a month ago. We were planning a big night for when he moved into his apartment. We were supposed to . . .” I trailed off.

  “Oh, babe,” Cindy said as my eyes got cloudy with tears, “I didn’t mean to suggest that he didn’t love you then, okay? I just meant that he might have known it wasn’t forever. He might have been realizing that you were too young to make big promises.”

  I fought the urge to scream at her and decided in that moment that maybe people who have been dumped should be quarantined for several weeks before they’re allowed to see friends and relatives—​because everything Cindy said to make me feel better was making me feel worse, and I knew it wasn’t her fault.

  I shifted to my side so I could get a better look at my aunt, who looked royal in the center of her peach papasan. Her eyes were now on the backyard, focused on the shadow of my dad, who had set up his telescope about a half acre out on a small hill in their massive backyard.

  “I wish your mother were here right now,” Cindy said, giving a sad smile to the small dark blob on the grass that was my father. “Obviously, I always wish your mother were here. But you should have a mother around for your first breakup. Especially your mother, of all mothers. She’d break this all down for you. She’d make this her work.”

  “Yeah,” I said, pleased to have another reason to wallow. Not only had I been dumped; my mother was dead.

  “Although I’m not sure Mom would have really understood what I’m going through,” I told Cindy. “According to her, Dad was her first love. As soon as they met, they were basically married. She never had a first big breakup. She just had one perfect relationship, so I doubt she’d really get what this is like.”

  Cindy sat up and leaned forward on the papasan, forcing it to tip in my direction.

  “But let’s be honest: this is what your mom was doing before she died, right? Trying to make love last? Sometimes I just want to steal all of her research from you and continue it myself. Or turn it over to a pharmaceutical company. But I fear it’d wind up in the wrong hands.”

  I sat up straight and leaned forward, mirroring Cindy’s pose. “What research? What are you talking about?”

  My mom’s specialty had been epigenetics, which is basically the study of modified gene expression. She and Dr. Araghi researched how people can pass down a disease or a trait even if it’s not part of their DNA sequence. Like when someone gets cancer from smoking and passes that cancer down to their kids.

  “When Mom died, she was starting something with epigenetics and diabetes, right? What did any of her work have to do with ‘making love last’?” I asked with air quotes.

  “I’m not talking about her primary work, Maya. I’m talking about the research she was doing . . . ‘independently,’” Cindy said, putting her own air quotes around the word independently. “You know . . . her experiments . . . on relationships. The work she was doing with pheromones​—and attraction.”

  She whispered the word pheromones like she was saying something dirty. A wasabi pea that missed my mouth fell from my lap onto the ground. I reached for it, not wanting to spoil her perfect patio.

  “No,” Cindy said. “Let Johnny or Ralph get it tomorrow. It’ll scare the hell out of them, teach them not to eat everything we drop.”

  “Cindy,” I said, confused, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Mom never studied pheromones—”

  “I’m talking about her private research,” Cindy said, cutting me off. “The work she left to you. I assume she talked to you about that project, or that you read it on your own by now. She willed it to you, after all.”

  I lowered my head and put my hands in my sweatshirt pockets as I felt the night breeze roll over the patio. My mother’s will had been specific; I was to be the guardian of all her unpublished research, which was basically a bunch of notebooks, files, and
memory sticks now stored in boxes in the attic. Dr. Araghi was to keep everything she worked on in the lab, but her ideas and plans for future research were supposed to stay with me.

  The will had caused some awkwardness in the lab after she died. Dr. Araghi didn’t object to my taking possession of my mom’s unpublished work, but one of my mom’s PhD students, Ann Markley, had asked for copies of everything. Ann had become my mom’s unofficial protégé during her years at MIT and claimed she was entitled to all my mom’s recent notes and ideas because she helped develop them.

  My dad and I were conflicted and considered lending Ann the boxes so she could scan what she wanted, but her aggressive insistence on having them—​and my mom’s specific instructions that all the work be kept under my “guard”—​made us reconsider.

  It also wasn’t as though the will predated Ann. My mom had rewritten it when she got her cancer diagnosis, just in case.

  My dad was the one who made the decision.

  “I know that Ann and your mother were close—​I believe that. But I don’t know what Ann would do with the research on her own,” he’d said. “I don’t know that your mom would want Ann pursuing any of those ideas without her.”

  Dad, who’s usually so passive and polite, was stern with Ann and told her that if my mom had wanted her to have the notes, she would have given them to her.

  The decision severed whatever superficial relationship we might have had with Ann without my mother. After years of Ann visiting our house, if only to spend time with my mom in her office, she was now out of our lives. She and I ignored each other when we crossed paths during my internship hours in Building 68b. We behaved like strangers.

  As for the boxes of research, I hadn’t seen them since we’d lugged them up to the attic after the funeral.

  “I haven’t read Mom’s research yet,” I admitted to Cindy. “I meant to at some point,” I continued, floundering, “but things got so busy after she died. We only got around to donating her old clothes last month. I feel like we can only do one sad thing at a time, you know?”

  Cindy narrowed her eyes at me, her expression telling me that a good grieving daughter would have already pored over her late mother’s journals.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” I said, defending myself. “I want to give her work the attention it deserves. Shouldn’t I wait to go through it until I have a better understanding of the science? I know more about epigenetics than your average incoming MIT freshman, but it’s not like I can really decode her theories just yet. I have the rest of my life to read her research.”

  “Maya,” Cindy said, sounding too sober, “your mother wrote a will that explicitly stated that only you can have her research, and you don’t even look at it? Weren’t you desperate to know what was in those books?”

  I shrugged. The truth was that as much as I was fascinated with my mother’s work while she was alive, I was afraid to look at it now that she was gone. She wasn’t there to talk to me about her ideas, and the idea of decoding her notes on my own seemed sad and most likely impossible—​at this stage in my education, at least.

  “Babe,” Cindy said with a sagging smile, “when you get home, make those notebooks your first priority, okay? You should know what your mother was dreaming up after-hours in that lab. Those notebooks were her passion. Her legacy. I know how much you miss her, Maya. I can’t imagine how you get through it all without her. I’m pretty sure that spending time with her research—​maybe it’s a way to keep her around.”

  I felt a tug in my gut, a mix of alcohol and shame. People said this kind of thing a lot—​proclamations like “You must be heartbroken about your mother” or “I know you must think about her all the time.”

  I did think about her a lot right after she died, and it had been difficult to get through the day without falling into a spiral of deep grief. My mom and I had a unique relationship in that we really liked each other as friends. While all the other girls at my school started lying to their parents about their weekend plans and secret social media accounts, my mom and I were taking road trips and watching the same television shows.

  A month before she died, when she was exhausted from the chemo, we stayed indoors for an entire weekend and binge-watched the first two seasons of Game of Thrones. Bryan came over for the marathon, and we just sat there for two days, eating takeout and sleeping in front of the television while my dad graded tests.

  “I should not be letting you watch this,” my mom had said during a particularly violent episode, her eyes fixed on the decapitation happening in front of us on the massive high-def screen my dad had picked up to entertain her during treatment.

  “Whatever. This happens at school all the time,” Bryan had said. “You can run all the anti-bullying campaigns you want, but come prom season, there’s always a beheading or two.”

  After she died, I was in a fog, home every night with Bryan. We watched more seasons of Game of Thrones with my dad in a state of intense grief, eating meals that we had put together from the strange things they put in condolence baskets. Stale lemon squares and bruised apples. Port wine cheese and not-yet-ripe bananas. I couldn’t really get my head around what had happened, because it was too big.

  Then, days later, when I returned to school, I felt an unfamiliar calmness, like I was floating. Everyone was nice to me. Teachers had always been okay with me because they knew I was a good student, but this was different. They treated me like I was one of them, like I should have access to their lounge and special bathroom. My English teacher, Mrs. Mikowicz, whose default mood was furious, took me aside and told me about her late mother and rambled on, in tears, about how other countries are more generous with bereavement time. It was as if this woman, who seemed to despise everyone in school, was suddenly on my side.

  I was no longer intimidated by the lacrosse girls, who seemed to be multiplying, taking up more and more of the hallways with their short kilts. I told Bryan at the time that the worst thing that could happen to me had already happened. It was an unanticipated side effect of loss; I felt untouchable.

  Then I met Whit. That floating feeling was probably why I connected with him in the first place.

  Four months after my mom died, Bryan took me to one of his cast parties. He’d starred in Guys and Dolls, the spring musical, and Whit, a senior, was the show’s student director.

  He wore glasses with thick dark frames and had symmetrical patches of light freckles on either side of his nose. He held a Coke, which showed some confidence, because most of the kids were drinking beer procured by someone’s older brother just to prove that they could. I’d never spoken to Whit, but he was someone I stared at in the hallways and whenever I tagged along with Bryan’s theater friends.

  In that bulletproof state of mind, not caring about the fact that we didn’t know each other and that I was a junior and he was a senior, I walked straight up to him and introduced myself.

  “Do you know how that happened to you?” I asked, tipsy from one beer.

  “How what happened to me?” he answered, grinning.

  He indulged me, listening with amusement as I explained all the ways his hair could be so orange while his eyes were so blue. He was riveted, and, for once, I felt as magnetic as Bryan.

  From then on, I lived a different life. In place of late-night talks in the kitchen with my mom, I had freedom and a boyfriend. It wasn’t that I didn’t think of my mom or miss her—​I did all the time—​it just felt like she didn’t have a place in this new world. I couldn’t explain this to Cindy without it sounding awful, so I didn’t try.

  “Babe,” Cindy said, her eyes almost closed, “look at that research. I think it’ll be of interest to you, especially now. It was all about relationships—​why people drift apart, and how science might be able to keep them together. It was almost like she’d come up with the cure for the common breakup. She was onto something big.”

  “Cure for the common breakup?” I asked, stunned by the description, but Cin
dy was already on her feet, clearing our glasses from the table and staggering into the kitchen.

  Why people drift apart. How science might be able to keep them together. I repeated Cindy’s words in my head as I forced myself up to get ready for bed.

  For the first time, I was desperate to see my mother’s research. I decided that as soon as I had a few hours alone in the house—​without my dad around to question my motives—​I’d go to the attic.

  Because if anyone could fix a breakup with science, it was my mother.

  4

  I hear that women are still underrepresented in science, but sometimes I find that hard to believe when I think about where I come from. Every woman on my mom’s side of the family is some kind of scientist, and they’re almost all a big deal in their fields. My mother went to Johns Hopkins and then MIT, where she became a world-renowned geneticist. Aunt Cindy studied neuroscience at Stanford and wrote two books about memory. My cousin Sheila was chosen for some special research fellowship with the Environmental Protection Agency. Technically, my grandmother didn’t work, but she was supposedly a gifted chef, and my mom always said that there was science in that, too.

  My mom made the personnel decisions in her lab, so it had always been a kingdom of women when I was growing up. Women clicking their flats down linoleum hallways as I spun around in the chair next to Mom’s desk. Women’s hair ties kept in a jar at the reception desk for anyone who needed one in a pinch.

  Most of the researchers came from faraway cities and countries. I remember tagging along with my mom when I was small, fascinated by the tall women in lab coats who spoke with German, Korean, Indian, and South African accents.