The Explanation for Everything: A Novel

by Lauren Grodstein

  She met Rosenblum for the first time at a conference at MIT’s Whitehead Institute, where she was presenting a paper she’d coauthored with one of her lesser professors. He introduced himself after her presentation, told her he’d heard a lot about her, looked forward to working with her in the fall. She should look for an official acceptance letter in the mail in the next few weeks. “That’s it?” Anita asked him. She was startled by Rosenblum’s enthusiasm; she had taken him for a cheerfully drunk old man when he’d first approached her. He was tall, with a large belly and ears full of protruding white hairs; the pictures she’d seen of him had clearly been taken twenty years earlier.

  “That’s it,” Rosenblum said. “You’ll be working closely with me. I look forward to it.”

  “So do I,” Anita said, startled and a bit underwhelmed.

  “Princeton!” Mrs. Lim’s mother was dead in Pusan at this point but she could feel her spirit smiling down at her, whispering praise.

  “I barely even had to apply,” Anita said. Even she sounded impressed with herself.

  “And you’ll be close again! New Jersey!”

  “Yes,” Anita said, and suddenly that distracted sound was back in her voice. “I guess I will.”

  Eddie, at this point, was at seminary in upstate New York, studying to be a pastor, and was dating a nice girl and collecting some nice friends, including a roommate, Charles, whom he spoke of fondly and frequently. Charles was from Los Angeles, his family originally from Seoul, and everything he did seemed to be haloed with luck and success. Charles was the smartest in the class, Charles spoke three languages fluently, Charles delivered sermons with such grace that he could make their weathered old teachers weep with newfound devotion. The Lims met Charles on their trips to visit Eddie upstate and were impressed by him, if a little put off by his fierce-eyed determined belief in not just the Lord, but himself. He offered to pay for dinner for everyone when they went out, as though the Lims wouldn’t be happy to pay, or as if they couldn’t.

  As for Anita, she lived in a tiny apartment in Princeton, across from a record store, one room with a hot plate and a bathroom that even a tiny girl like her could barely squeeze into. No closet. One window. The Lims offered to help her with something better but Anita declined, said she was happy there, and anyway she spent so much time in Rosenblum’s lab she was rarely home anyway. Her research was incomprehensible to her parents, although this new, satisfied Anita—as satisfied as they’d ever seen her, although still distracted, and more focused than ever on academic success—this new PhD-candidate daughter did try to explain to them what she was doing. Her research worried them because it seemed to be less about language at this point and more about evolution, strict Darwinian evolution, which contradicted everything they knew from church and everything they believed in their hearts. But they knew that they had let Anita go her own way all those years ago when they allowed her to play cello instead of go to church, study chemistry instead of read the Bible, so whose fault was it, really, that she was now studying Darwinian evolution? Could they blame anyone but themselves?

  And surely devout Eddie was making up for whatever lapses they’d allowed in Anita.

  They met this Rosenblum several times in Princeton, and he seemed to be a nice enough man (“But so foul-mouthed!”) who praised Anita constantly and without moderation. “She’s doing brilliant work, Mrs. Lim. I’ve honestly never met a student like her in my life. Her theory on the viral origins of life—has she explained it to you? In our field this is groundbreaking stuff. And for someone like her, doesn’t even have her PhD yet—for someone like her to be publishing these kinds of papers, it’s really unbelievable. You must be very proud.”

  On their drive back to Brooklyn, Mrs. Lim noticed how worried her husband looked. “That professor,” he said, “what do you think he wants with her?”

  “No, no,” Mrs. Lim said, glad that her husband had articulated what they were both worried about so that she could reassure him, and thus herself. “He really just thinks she’s very smart, that’s all. He doesn’t want anything else.”

  “But why is he always around? Every time we visit, there he is.”

  “She works in his lab,” Mrs. Lim said. “They have a very close professional relationship.”

  “What if he takes advantage of her?” he said. “She’s still so innocent.”

  This was something Mrs. Lim wondered about too, although she knew better than to bring it up with her daughter (and here too she imagined those American mothers and their daughters, eating their lunches, talking about boyfriends)—why exactly was this Rosenblum so high on their Anita? Why that possessed look in his eye when he told them how brilliant she was?

  “No, Mom, you don’t understand. We’re doing research together. If anything it’s an intellectual affair, not a sexual one. I mean, if it helps you to think of it like that.”

  This didn’t help Mrs. Lim at all, not that it mattered much. Anita was a grown woman now, and her life was her own. She could study Darwinian evolution, have an intellectual affair with her professor, live in a room like the room she herself had once shared with three friends in Pusan, before she met her husband, before she followed him to America, before she worked calluses on her fingers to give her children something more.

  In April Anita won another award, something big and important with money attached. Evidently this was the first time a person without a PhD had won this particular award, and she and Rosenblum traveled together to London to receive it. Mrs. Lim wanted to meet them at the airport on their return—ever since she had moved to this country, bewildered, exhausted, and was met by representatives of the Bethany church, Mrs. Lim had been a firm believer in meeting people at airports. But Anita, of course, said no. A car service would be provided for them. They would be ferried right back to Princeton. Why would she even want to go to the airport on the middle of a Tuesday? Didn’t she have to work? And there it was, the sneer in Anita’s voice, and Mrs. Lim, when she hung up the phone, didn’t wish for another daughter this time nor lament the daughter she had. Instead, she took down the Harvard bumper sticker, and then she went back to work.

  In May Anita passed her orals.

  In June Eddie was married.

  The wedding was held at the home of the bride, who was not, of course, planning to be a pastor herself (in the Korean Presbyterian church, women were not ordained), but who wanted to teach youth Bible, perhaps in New York, perhaps back home in Dallas. She was a second-generation American, and when Mrs. Lim met her parents, she was surprised at their heavy Texas accents—she had never met Koreans with Texas accents before—and from the way that they regarded her son, she knew he was not exactly what they had imagined for their daughter.

  Still, a wedding was a joyful thing, a hot Texas wedding in June, and Anita agreed to take a break from Princeton and her work with Hank Rosenblum (Eddie had wanted to bet someone she’d just bring him along to the wedding so as not to interrupt her studies) and put on a peach-colored organza dress and be one of Diana’s eleven bridesmaids. At the rehearsal dinner, a big Texas barbecue, Korean food on the side, Anita was seated next to Eddie’s seminary friend Charles.

  That night, in the corridor of the Holiday Inn, outside their adjoining rooms: had anyone seen Anita?

  The next morning Anita was neither sleepy nor hungover but instead was as happy as Mrs. Lim had ever seen her. Gushing. Glowing! She didn’t need any makeup whatsoever but still she happily submitted to the makeup artist, who drew long lines around her eyes, lines around her lips, filled in the lines with sparkly colors. She floated into her peach dress. She walked down that aisle carrying her flowers like one of the heroines in the British novels she and Mrs. Lim both used to read. From the front pew where Mrs. Lim sat, regarding the processional, she thought: Oh, for heaven’s sake. Anita’s in love.

  How she changed! Immediately she changed. She was happy. She was polite! She allowed them to tease her, kindly, about the size and squalor of her Princeton living
conditions. She allowed them to bring her another glass of champagne. When it was time for her to say something to the bride and her brother, she raised her glass and spoke with more loving kindness toward Eddie than Mrs. Lim had ever heard her express. And she danced with all of them, with her brother, with her father, but especially with Charles, who escorted her onto the dance floor with a gentlemanly hand on her back and whom she gazed up at with eyes wide and joyful, never mind the sparkly makeup sliding off them in a welter of Texas heat.

  She didn’t go directly back to Princeton but instead came to her parents’ house in Brooklyn, borrowed their car, and drove up to Rochester, where Charles was now an apprentice pastor. “Don’t worry, Mom, I’ll stay with one of the ladies from his church, Charles is old-fashioned about these things,” and Mrs. Lim thought that she had just been in London with Rosenblum and hadn’t even told her the name of their hotel.

  Suddenly she was in Brooklyn all the time. Suddenly Charles was their guest for dinner, along with Eddie and Diana, and nobody could quite believe the girl Anita was or had become: demure, friendly, and most of all, smiling. Finally, finally, she helped Mrs. Lim prepare food in the kitchen. They ate together, like a family, in the dining room, the television turned off, the conversation friendly and engaged. Diana talked about her wish to start a big family, soon, and instead of rolling her eyes (Anita had always had strange ideas about children, thought the best thing to do was not have any in the first place) Anita just smiled.

  All she asked of them throughout these performances—and Mrs. Lim couldn’t help but think of them as performances, because how else to understand these radical changes? How else to understand the daughter who now asked her how her day was, who asked if she could help out any, who wanted—and here Mrs. Lim almost dropped the phone—who wanted to meet them at church on Sunday before taking the train back to Princeton? All Anita asked of them in return was that they not discuss in any particular detail her work at Princeton, in part because she wanted to explain it all to Charles herself, and in part because she was kind of rethinking, she said, the whole thing. She was rethinking everything she’d ever believed.

  ON A BUSY Friday morning at the store, October, Halloween season, Mrs. Lim received a strange phone call. The man on the other end was frantic, speaking so quickly that at first Mrs. Lim didn’t understand.

  “Anita!” he finally said. “Where is she?”

  Anita, at that moment, had just stepped out of the store to go for a jog in Prospect Park with Charles.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Mrs. Lim, she hasn’t returned my calls. She hasn’t come to the lab. I’ve seen her on campus and she’s told me to leave her alone. Is she sick? Is she depressed? What’s happened to her?”

  “How did you get this number?” Mrs. Lim said. That miserable unwashed professor at Princeton chasing her down like this—it was unprofessional. Maybe it was even criminal? Mrs. Lim thought briefly about calling the police.

  “Can you tell me where she is?”

  “I’m sorry,” Mrs. Lim said. “I don’t think I should.”

  “Mrs. Lim, no disrespect here, but do you know anything about the award Anita won this spring?”

  “Yes,” she said, and even here was she saying too much? “She went to London.”

  “Right, but do you understand what a big huge deal this award is? Her viral theory—Mrs. Lim, this is one of the biggest deals in evolutionary biology in a generation. Did she tell you, Mrs. Lim? Have you seen the newspaper articles? Do you understand? I need to find her, Mrs. Lim. I need to talk to her.”

  If there was anything she was sick of, it was people assuming she didn’t understand. “I’d like to end this conversation now, Mister.”

  “Did she tell you about the money, Mrs. Lim?”

  The money? “I must hang up the phone.”

  “Two hundred thousand dollars, more or less, depending on the exchange rate. That’s the money that comes with the Kent-Hughes. She didn’t tell you?”

  “Anita doesn’t talk about these kinds of things,” said Mrs. Lim, even though she felt her insides growing cold. What kind of daughter wouldn’t tell her about two hundred thousand dollars?

  “Mrs. Lim—I—” the voice on the other end sounded less frantic now, now just broken. “She didn’t tell you?”

  What was she supposed to say to this stranger? What she and her daughter talked about, didn’t talk about—the kind of daughter Anita was, or had been, was no business of his.

  “Mrs. Lim, your daughter is the sort of genius I’ve been waiting to meet all my life. In all my pursuits, in everything—I think, if she continues the track she’s on—Mrs. Lim, I think Anita might explain some of the very fundamentals of life itself. How it started. Where it comes from. The very origins, the lightning in a bottle. Do you understand, Mrs. Lim? We need to continue working together because—because if we don’t, Mrs. Lim, I just worry—I worry about all the people who will suffer. That’s what I think about. That’s what a big deal she is.”

  Oh, the grandiosity of these people. Mrs. Lim was glad she’d taken the Harvard sticker off the wall.

  “Do you understand, Mrs. Lim?”

  “I have to go now.”

  “Do you understand what’s at stake?”

  “Good day.”

  She did, of course, have every intention of asking Anita about the phone call and the money and the prize—two hundred thousand dollars never even mentioned—and maybe she would even ask about all the people who would suffer, but instead, an hour later, when Anita jogged into the store, sweaty and trailed by a beaming Charles, she ran straight behind the counter and into her mother’s arms. “Anita!” This hadn’t happened since she was a toddler. “What’s happening?” Between this and the phone call—Mrs. Lim wondered about her own nervous heart.

  Instead of answering, Anita stuck out her left hand, where a modest but not insignificant diamond was perched on the ring finger. And now Mrs. Lim couldn’t help it—she brought a hand to her chest to make sure what she was feeling was just a nervous flutter, not an attack.

  “I asked your husband for permission last night,” Charles said. “I hope this is okay with you as well, Uhmuhni.”

  The Korean word for mother. “Of course,” Mrs. Lim said. “Oh, I am so happy.”

  Forget the two hundred thousand dollars. It didn’t matter. Because now she really was so happy, planning the second family wedding of the year, and this time she had so much more to do with it, and this time—for the first time—she was included in the major affairs of Anita’s life. Although Anita still lived in Princeton, and Charles still lived in Rochester, the wedding was going to be held in Brooklyn, at the Bethany Presbyterian Church, and officiated by Eddie.

  Pregnant Diana told them to hurry up and get it done so she could still fit into her bridesmaid’s dress when she walked down the aisle. A January wedding, then. Followed by a Hawaiian honeymoon, and then the couple would move to Rochester, where Charles would finish his term as an assistant pastor before moving on to a church of his own, or perhaps even doing missionary work. Charles had long felt a desire to spread the Word of God in Africa.

  “And what about Princeton?” Mrs. Lim asked, cautiously, as she and Anita sat in the kitchen, addressing wedding invitations. “When will you finish your studies?”

  “I’m not sure,” Anita said. She put down her pen, rested her cheek on her hand. Everything about Anita looked different than it had a year ago. Her hair was longer, falling in shiny sheets down her back. She’d started wearing contacts, so her eyes seemed more expressive, less obscured by the heavy black frames she’d favored since her freshman year at Stuyvesant. Her clothing too—where once she wore only the kind of clothing that made a girl disappear (dark turtlenecks, dark cords), now she wore knee-length skirts and open-collared shirts with patterns on them. She wore lipstick and high-heeled shoes and earrings and her diamond engagement ring. She looked, more and more, not at all like a scientist and a lot like a pastor’s wi
fe.

  Mrs. Lim neatly stacked her invitations back into the cardboard box they’d arrived in and reached out her hands for her daughter’s. This was a gesture she wasn’t used to making but it felt natural. Her daughter’s hands were so small and soft. Mrs. Lim didn’t say anything, but enjoyed the feeling of her daughter’s hands in her own.

  “It’s, like, my entire life I was searching for something, you know? I kept searching and searching, thought I’d find it in school—thought I’d find out the reason that we were here, the reason that I’d been born in the first place. Because I wasn’t very happy, I don’t think. I couldn’t figure out the reason for my own life. But I thought if I could—maybe I wouldn’t be happy, but at least the world might make a little more sense.”

  Mrs. Lim remembered Anita as a baby. So watchful. Never cried. Slept still as a stone.

  “But no matter how much I studied, no matter how much I understood—no matter how many awards I won, even—I was never very happy. And it was only after I met Charles, after he opened up the way I saw the world—only then did everything start to make true sense to me. Only then did life fundamentally start to mean something to me.”

  Mrs. Lim held tight to her daughter’s hands. “I understand,” she said.

  “I know.”

  They were quiet for a while. The kitchen in which Mrs. Lim had done so much raising of her family hadn’t changed much in the thirty years she’d been using it—same linoleum tile, same gray chipped counters, same view, out the back window, of the small, fenced-in yards of her Brooklyn neighbors, and the tall poles in each yard, with clotheslines controlled by pulleys—but Mrs. Lim noticed that the kitchen seemed new to her in some small way. She wanted to stand to make tea but she didn’t want to risk this sense of newness.