Just let them stay out for pizza. Please.
“I’m not sure I believe it, but it’s true,” she said, and went back to her sandwich.
Donna wasn’t eating anymore but was pulling crumbs from her nice, firm peasant bread and sort of rolling them in her cheese. Now the cheese dropped and she got mad and began banging the bread and the remaining piece of cheese on her high-chair tray. Finally she said she wanted to go down.
I whispered. “We’ll have to watch her if she gets near the stairs.”
Olivia nodded.
I wiped the baby’s face and hands, set her down on the floor, suggested she look at one of her books.
“Except for that one time . . . There’s nobody in any of my classes who has a better memory than I do,” Olivia said.
“I believe it.”
The baby brought over a book. She wanted to climb up on my lap and be read to. I told her she should look at the book for a while, and when I was finished with lunch, I’d read to her.
Olivia said, “The stuff I’m reading is for Physics for Poets.”
I nodded, smiled. She’d talked to us about this class more than any other. Actually called “Physics in Historical Perspective,” it fulfilled a science requirement for a lot of liberal arts students who took as little science as possible. The teacher was the only one Livvy had had so far who she thought might be as smart as Doctor Weinberger, or at least have as broad a range.
“Do you know who Nils Bohr was?” she asked me now.
“I just know he’s a scientist.”
“Was,” she corrected. “He died in, I think, 1962.”
“Was,” I repeated.
“He was someone who really changed the way people looked at the world. The physical world.”
“How did he do that?” I asked obligingly.
“Well, his first big discovery, when he made his sharp break with classical physics, was when he said that various elements emitted light in discreet wavelengths. Don’t get confused when I say elements, I mean chemical elements, like chlorine, not the basic elements.” My daughter was oblivious to the fact that she was speaking to someone who’d forgotten the distinction the day she left high school. “Anyway, what Bohr said that a lot of people refused to believe for a long time—it was against all the ideas of classic physics—was that various elements emit light in discreet wavelengths, and you don’t get emissions of light unless they’re excited in some way.”
Her voice had grown louder. Nineteen years earlier I had given birth to someone who was excited by the fact that various elements emitted light in discreet wavelengths.
She began to say that she was thinking of taking more physics classes, but then she stood up so hastily that she frightened me, and ran over to the stairs, where Donna had taken advantage of our absorption to climb by her sideways route onto that reachable second step, and had already managed to reach the fifth or sixth one. She began to teeter dangerously at the narrow side of the wedge-shaped step, looked around for the grown-up who was always in back of her, and began to fall just as Livvy reached the steps and extended her arms to catch the baby, buckling under her weight.
Safe in Livvy’s arms, Donna began to cry, “Mama, Mama.”
Olivia brought her back to the table and seemed about to hand her over to me, but then changed her mind and instead sat down, holding Donna on her lap as she discussed the matter of when and how she would make up her mind about what her major would be.
Also by Judith Rossner
Any Minute I Can Split
Attachments
August
Emmeline
His Little Women
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
Nine Months in the Life of an Old Maid
Perfidia
To the Precipice
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1994 by Judith Rossner
Previously published in 1994 by Crown Publishers, Inc.
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First Simon & Schuster ebook edition July 2014
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ISBN 978-1-4767-7482-4 (eBook)
Olivia Page 42