Appetite

by Sheila Grinell

  “That’s prejudice.”

  “Dad, we’ve been over this. It’s outside your area of expertise.”

  “Just think about what I said. It’s not too late.” He didn’t trust himself to say more. He’d give her space and reopen the subject that evening.

  Her voice softened. “I will. I always do.” She busied herself removing the lid from her cup and jiggling the tea bag.

  He pulled his briefcase onto his lap and extracted a printout, pretending to read. Despite the monumental frustration, he felt a touch of pride at the strength of her. His girl.

  Outside the windows, tall stone walls blocked the view of the Bronx as the train lurched ahead. Nothing to distract or disturb commuters—no derelict buildings, no garbage, no dark people—all the way into the gleaming heart of Manhattan. And Jenn couldn’t wait to immerse herself in the detritus of the human race. The filth, the disease, the stench of the downtrodden. He’d stop her, one way or another, that night.

  When he opened the office door, Sandi frowned at him. “Alicia is in a tizzy again.”

  “Stamford been here?” He primed for a fight.

  “She’s running around collecting supplies. She says she needs to go off campus for the next few days. She looks awful, more wound up than I’ve ever seen. Talk to her.” Sandi pointed to the wet lab.

  He found Alicia bent over a notebook, two colors of highlighter clutched in her left hand, folders and reagents cluttering the countertop in front of her. Her unbuttoned lab coat flared at her sides. She looked up at him with a tightly drawn face.

  He feigned a casual tone. “What’s up?”

  “I have to go to Dr. Miller’s lab to set up the last two experiments. They want to see how we did them.” She had bent forward so far that her chest nearly touched the notebook.

  “No you don’t. You don’t work for Martin Miller. You work for me. Stay here and put that stuff away.”

  “I have to go. I got a letter from the hospital ethics board. They copied you.” She began to sob and reached into a pocket to extract a crumpled tissue.

  He could have burst with impatience. He stepped forward and wrapped arms around her shoulders—no matter if Sandi saw them through the open doorway—to comfort her. “Take it easy. I don’t think anyone can compel you to do anything outside your job.” He hoped to hell that was true.

  She leaned into him, sniffling, dabbing at her cheeks. “What if they find discrepancies? They’ll question my dissertation.”

  He could feel her trembling. He willed her calm.

  In a tiny voice Alicia said, “I’ll never get another job.”

  “You won’t need one. I’ll take care of everything. Now, either get to work or go home until you’ve calmed down. We’ve got big stuff to do.” She quieted. He released her. She stuck the tissue into the pocket of her lab coat and began to lift the folders from the countertop, tucking them into a tote. He watched, examining the reagents, understanding which experiments she had in mind. “I’ll put the bottles away. You carry on as planned, okay?” She nodded, stood up, slung the tote over her inward-curving shoulder, a defensive shoulder protecting an inadequate heart. He willed her courage. She walked out of the lab. He gathered the reagent bottles to return them to the refrigerator in the anteroom. After the new work was published, he’d have enough clout to get a bigger lab suite, big enough to house the refrigerators in a more convenient place, and two postdocs and state-of-the-art equipment. A new era for his team.

  The offending letter lay on top of the pile of paper on his desk. He supposed Sandi had read it when she had placed it there. Didn’t frighten her, a mature woman he could count on, salt of the earth. He fished readers out of the drawer and scanned the page. The board had asked Miller to replicate two crucial experiments that Alicia had performed under Paul’s direction. The board required her to cooperate, not to do the work. Alicia had misconstrued the letter; what else would she screw up in her current state? Thinking that Stamford could end the mess he’d started, he picked up the phone. Halfway through punching in Stamford’s extension, he clicked off and phoned Maggie instead. Stamford could ignore him, but Maggie had a way of getting Stamford’s attention. Whenever she invited him to something, he came running. She answered immediately.

  “How was the train ride?”

  “Normal.”

  “What did you say to Jenn?”

  He condensed the story: “I gave her an out. She’s gonna think about what I said. I’ll check in with her tonight.”

  “You’re running out of time.”

  “I know, I know. Listen, I need you to do something. I need you to call your friend Robert Stamford and get him to withdraw a complaint he made to the ethics board about Alicia’s work. He scared her silly, and with the conference coming up, I can’t afford to have her distracted.”

  There was a long pause. “What’s the matter?”

  “Martin Miller got a hold of some of our papers and made comments to Stamford that your buddy blew up into a case for the ethics board. Alicia is first author and she’s freaking out. She’s ready to dump her career over a bunch of nits.”

  “If it’s a question of nits, you don’t have a problem.”

  He hated that superior tone, as if only an idiot would contradict her. “Can’t you just do what I ask?”

  She said something muffled to someone else and then spoke quietly to him. “Has Alicia tampered with the evidence?”

  “Goddammit, I’m making history!” He wanted to throw the phone at the wall.

  She said something to someone else, and then back to him: “I’ve got to go. We’ll discuss this tonight. After your talk with Jenn.”

  He cut off the call before she could, infuriated at the delay. Did she not get it, or was she holding him hostage to her priorities? She could be such a bitch.

  What else could he do to buy a couple of weeks? After his presentation at the conference, no one would bother picking nits. No scientist’s work was unassailable. In fact, you were supposed to assail every idea to separate the dumb-ass from the genius. Ideas mattered, big ideas that changed the course of progress for everyone, not dotted i’s and crossed t’s, the province of the second rate. Ever since graduate school, he’d disdained the plodders, especially after reading how Barbara McClintock had stood genetics on its ear. By examining generations of corn plants in an idiosyncratic way, she was able to assert, against prevailing opinion, that parts of genes could move around in the chromosomal complement, and that the instructions for that movement came from the living cell itself and perhaps from its environment. Her work was hard to understand and her colleagues ignored her for decades, until they couldn’t anymore. She won the Nobel Prize at age eighty-two.

  Back then, McClintock’s story confirmed everything he believed about the importance of the big picture and sticking with your intuition. He’d prided himself on doing “McClintock science” all these years. Yeah, he wanted colleagues to adopt his ideas and apply them to different kinds of tumors, and to medicine—he couldn’t possibly do all that work himself—but first he had to shake them out of their received knowledge, impress upon them the value of his voice. So when the data Alicia produced hadn’t yelled loud enough to galvanize attention, he’d turned up the volume a bit. Alicia was too timid to do McClintock science; she needed to be led, and she’d accepted his guidance without a murmur. But now Stamford had her in his sights. And she was weak, dangerously weak. He shuddered at the thought of Stamford pushing her to reveal the minor adjustments they’d made. Stamford would jump to the wrong conclusions, and she wouldn’t be able to defend them. His heart began to pound.

  He strode into the next office where Sandi sat at her desk. “I need you to take care of Alicia. Now. Go find her and take her home. No, take her to your house. She’s hysterical and she needs to be watched.”

  Sandi bent slowly to open the bottom drawer, where she stored her purse. “She looks okay now. Whatever you said seems to have helped.” She rooted in the drawer, put purse
in lap. “Are you sure you want me to leave the office?” She didn’t rise.

  “Go find her and take her away.”

  “And after she calms down, then what? Should I bring her back?” She didn’t move.

  “No. Stay with her until I call you.” Dammit, he shouldn’t have to explain. “You could put her up for the night.”

  “I could.” She kept sitting. “Is it necessary?” She folded hands over her purse and looked up at him, no urgency in her face. He calmed a notch.

  “Not necessary. Desirable. Will you please take her to your place for a few hours? I’ll phone when I figure out the rest.” She rose slowly. She bent over her desk to fuss with her computer. “Here’s today’s calendar.” She straightened and searched in her purse, removing keys. “We’ll be back after lunch. You’re buying.”

  “Wait for my call. I’m counting on you.”

  She smiled. “What else is new?” At the door, transferring purse and keys from one hand to the other, she took off the perpetual blue smock and hung it on the plastic hook she’d installed. “Give me a hint about what’s on Alicia’s mind, so I can be a good influence.”

  He hesitated. Sandi needed to know. “She’s worried about mistakes in the two papers Stamford wants checked. She thinks her thesis is in danger. She’s blown it out of proportion. You know she doesn’t understand office politics. We’ve gotta stop her from doing anything foolish.”

  “What foolish thing could she do?”

  “Just take care of her.”

  Sandi’s brow furrowed. “Okay, I’ll talk to her.” She ambled into the wet lab.

  He shut himself in his office. The only solution was to keep Alicia away from Stamford until Maggie could get to him. Maggie was his secret weapon. He would call her again and get her to come to the hospital if necessary. How could she refuse when so much was at stake? His last chance to grab the brass ring, and he wasn’t going to miss it. He booted his computer to reread the two papers and put on his armor. He forced himself to focus, forcing each sentence to permeate his brain. His knowledge of cancer biology was so well structured and so profound that, he believed, an unassailable explanation of the adjustments they’d made would emerge from its amassed depths.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Maggie put the phone down, exasperated. Paul had been hounding her to call Robert for two days. It made no sense. Robert had every right to talk to Paul’s staff. She had called, as requested, but had not reached him. Just now she’d heard an unusual note of panic in Paul’s voice. She’d deal with his insistence later; the wedding was scheduled for Sunday morning, the bride and groom would fly off to another continent Monday, and she had a lot to do today, Friday, including picking her parents up at LaGuardia, for which she’d be late if she didn’t hustle.

  Jenn, upstairs, writing place cards and folding origami table decorations, had seemed relaxed at lunch. Arun, now pacing overhead and mumbling, presumably rehearsing his vows, had seemed nervous, speaking in little bursts, with a look of terror on his face that was oddly endearing. Downstairs, all systems were go: the paperwork was ready, and two simple matching rings lay waiting on the mantelpiece. The retired judge who would officiate, a good friend of Jenn’s boss and a casual acquaintance of Maggie’s, would come to rehearse on Saturday after the canopy tent went up and Maggie had the catering in hand. She sighed, resigned, prepared to host the modest, symbol-filled affair Jenn wanted. No one had been able to dissuade Jenn—not Sarah, not Paul, not she herself. She did not understand Arun as a man apart from her daughter, but she wanted to make the most of the union, for Jenn’s sake, and for peace of mind. She wrote herself a Post-it for tomorrow: buy flowers at the farmer’s market, charge the camera. She called upstairs that she was leaving the house.

  In the car, sticking the note to the dashboard, backing down the driveway, she mentally reviewed the RSVPs: a few high school friends of Jenn’s who still lived nearby; a few close family friends who had watched Jenn grow up; and relatives: Arun’s cousin from New Jersey and her husband, who would stand in for his parents, and Paul’s brother, now divorced for the second time. She’d sent him an invitation pro forma and had been surprised at the instant reply. He must need something from Paul, she thought, and he’s coming to plead in person instead of long distance. For reasons she never fathomed, Paul jumped to attention for his older brother. Given Paul’s current frantic preoccupation with work though, Lenny might go home empty-handed, which might not be a bad thing.

  Paul, Paul, Paul. Got hung up at work and stopped talking to Jenn just when he could have done the most good. When he’d confessed to Maggie that the promised ultimate conversation had slipped his mind, she’d gotten furious. It might not have made a difference, but it should have happened. Her fury faded into deep disappointment, a disappointment, she felt, from which she would not recover. She could and did overlook so many of his little negligent actions. But not now, when their life was on the cusp of change and Jenn’s well-being was at stake. She shook her head to clear her mind.

  On the Whitestone Bridge driving onto Long Island, she saw gray cumulous clouds massed in the distant sky. If her parents’ plane experienced turbulence coming into LaGuardia, Claudia would worry about the weather, out loud, all weekend. Maggie braced herself to absorb that worry, and last night’s dream appeared in her mind’s eye. In the first segment, she’s trying to phone Jenn, and she sees that she has Jenn’s phone in her own purse, along with a bunch of other electronic stuff. The message is urgent, so she runs to find her. Jenn is unperturbed, having handled the emergency her own way. In the second segment, she’s back in Michigan and her old boss, Mr. Greenberg, is rearranging the furniture in the office, but it’s a bedroom. Greenberg pushes the cots together so eight people can sleep in a space for six. He’s proud of his cleverness, and so is she. The third segment, and she always dreamed in three segments, is fuzzy, further back in time, before Greenberg, before Paul . . . maybe Girl Scout camp, where she first learned about sex. She isn’t in the dream, she’s watching from afar. The scouting unit doesn’t need her. On waking she had thought the dream peculiar but inconsequential. Now she wondered if, and how, it connected to her parents’ arrival. As if there would be time this weekend to revisit the past. The future demanded all her energy, short and long term, Jenn’s and her own.

  Overhead, green-and-white highway signs pointed toward airport arrivals. She followed a circuitous route to the parking lot and looked for an accessible slot. No handicapped emblem on her car, so she’d have to chance a ticket. Most likely, the car wouldn’t be towed. She locked up and hastened inside to wait at a security barrier for the third time in three weeks.

  Her parents’ last visit to Pelham, for Jenn’s high school graduation, had been pleasant enough. They’d talked about college and the importance of being well rounded, by which Claudia meant “traditional.” Her parents had skipped the party Maggie threw for Jenn’s college graduation because Roger had been unwell. Maggie visited them afterward, bringing photos and news. Of course Claudia objected to Jenn’s living in Brooklyn. Later she objected to her leaving Brooklyn to travel. Claudia would have so much to object to on this visit. Maggie could only hope her mother’s desire to act the proper grandmother would keep her civil.

  In the stream of people passing out of the secure zone, she spotted her parents slowly advancing. A gate attendant pushed her father in a wheelchair, and Claudia walked next to him. She looked shorter, grayer than remembered, and she lumbered, as if burdened by more than the jacket and shopping bag she carried. Maggie embraced her parents and asked if she needed to hire a wheelchair for the visit. Claudia said no; Roger could walk but he was too slow. She handed Maggie a luggage receipt, saying they’d wait at the baggage claim doors while Maggie collected their suitcase, the flowered one, and Roger could walk to the car. Maggie did as bidden.

  They settled into the Prius, Roger up front. He had lost some hearing, which made it hard to talk over the sounds of traffic. Maggie previewed the weekend schedule
without detail. Roger nodded and smiled in a way that indicated he wasn’t following. They said little all the way to New Rochelle. After they had checked into the hotel and the handicapped suite had passed muster, Roger excused himself for a nap. Claudia wanted the particulars about the wedding weekend. The two women seated themselves in the suite living room, and Maggie began to describe Saturday’s rehearsal dinner. Claudia interrupted.

  “When is the young man going to pay us a visit? He owes us that courtesy.”

  Of course you want him to come to you, Maggie thought, and you’re quite right. “When would you like to see him? I can drive him over here this evening, if you’re not too tired. Tomorrow morning is also open. We need the afternoon to set up.”

  “Yes, this evening. We eat early, but it’s an hour later here. So bring him at eight. Tell me, what do you think of him?”

  How could she answer and preserve the peace? “He’s hard to get to know. Very polite. He and Jenn are nice to each other.”

  “Nice doesn’t make a marriage.” Claudia took a checkbook and pen from her purse.

  “She’s in love. He comes from a different culture; he says things that I interpret to mean he’s in love.” If Claudia would buy the cultural differences argument, the visit might succeed.

  “Humph.” Claudia placed the checkbook on the coffee table and closed her purse beside it. “I’m going to check on your father. See you at eight.”

  Maggie brushed her mother’s cheek with her lips. “I’ll phone if there’s a problem.” She let herself out of the suite.

  Driving back to Pelham, she twisted in her skin. To defuse her mother’s prejudice, she would manipulate the conversation, and she might find herself saying things she didn’t believe. Like attributing Arun’s reticence to his Indian heritage. She felt a twinge of defeat. Two hours with her mother had rendered her arch and artificial. What a pity she had to pay the price for a grandparent’s blessing.