“The way to defeat a Boggart is to fight him with a partner,” Simmi said. “It has to turn into its enemy’s greatest fear, right? But if there are two people, it can’t decide which fear it’s going to become. It gets confused—sometimes it goes back and forth.”
“I think J. K. Rowling might have gotten that from another writer, named George Orwell.”
“Probably he got it from her,” Simmi suggested. “She’s really famous.”
Jack turned to me. “Got what?” There was something heartbreaking in his expression, revealing his urgent desire to keep up with the conversation.
“The idea,” I told him. “In one of Orwell’s books there’s a room where you find your greatest fear—whatever it is.” I felt stupid the moment I’d said it. Room 101 was likely to be an interesting concept only if your greatest fear hadn’t yet materialized in your life. But if Simmi made that connection, she didn’t show it.
“It’s just like that! Mine is spiders.”
“Spiders eat mosquitoes, though,” Jack said. “Mine is being locked in and not being able to get out.”
“Jack once locked himself in a bathroom at his cousins’ house,” I explained.
“Hey!” Jack said, embarrassed, but Simmi wasn’t paying attention.
“What’s yours?” she asked me.
“What?”
But I was stalling. As I child it had seemed to me that most children (including my sister) worried about their parents dying, and I remember feeling guilty about my lack of concern in that department. It was my own death—not the dying itself but what came afterward, the complete and permanent cessation of my own consciousness—that terrified me.
Now that dread is magnified because of Jack, and eclipsed by an even greater one, of losing him.
“Clowns,” I said.
Both Jack and Simmi giggled. “Clowns?”
“Don’t make fun of me!”
“That can’t be your biggest fear,” said Jack, who knows me better than I sometimes like to admit.
“It is,” I said. “I hate their makeup.”
Jack picked up his plate from the table. “Can we go set up our sleeping bags?”
“You don’t need a sleeping bag,” I told him. “You have your bed.”
“I want to sleep on the floor.”
I hadn’t been sure whether Simmi would want to sleep in Jack’s room, or on the sofa bed in the living room. I offered her both options, while Jack watched her anxiously, clearly not having considered the possibility that Simmi might want her own space.
“I’ll sleep in Jack’s room.”
Jack looked relieved.
“But if you’re not going to use your bed, maybe I’ll sleep in it?”
“Okay!”
I was annoyed again, although I tried not to show it. Had Simmi just manipulated my son out of his own bed, or was it natural that she should be dominant in their friendship? She was, after all, a year older than he was, and a girl, and it was nice that they got along so well. They went off to set up the sleeping bag while I half cleaned up the kitchen, and then got distracted by email.
At about eight, I suggested that they start getting themselves ready for bed. Simmi said that she needed a shower, and so I offered that she could use my bathroom while Jack took his shower downstairs. In the bathroom she asked if she could borrow a shower cap, moisturizer, and some cleanser for her face. I didn’t know whether Charlie had introduced beauty products early, or if all eight-year-olds now required a separate facial cleanser, but I was able to locate all of these items. I handed them to her along with her towel.
“Do you need something for your ears, too?”
“Yes, please,” Simmi said, and so I went downstairs again, to Jack’s small bathroom, where I keep most of the medicine. I found him already on his bed in his pajamas, trying to read Harry Potter to himself, although we normally read it together. I thought he might have wanted Simmi to come upon him doing this; he gave me a wary look, as if he expected me to expose his ruse.
“Simmi needs some medicine for her ears,” I told him. I couldn’t find the antibiotic ointment, and so I googled “ear piercing care.” The first blog that came up suggested witch hazel, something I had left over from when Jack had stitches on his eyebrow in kindergarten. I took this and some cotton rounds for Simmi. Jack followed me upstairs.
“Simmi,” I said from outside the door. “I have something for your ears. Jack’s here, too, but he can go downstairs if you want.”
She opened the door. She was wearing shorts and a T-shirt instead of pajamas, and I hoped Jack wasn’t going to be embarrassed about his, which were a little too small for him, patterned with sporting equipment.
“He can come in.”
“My dad used to use this when we scraped our knees.” Simmi sat on the toilet seat, and pushed back her braids so that I could examine the piercings. The skin was red and maybe a little inflamed, but there was no pus or scabbing; it wasn’t as bad as I expected.
“Witch hazel,” Simmi read off the package.
“That sounds like Harry Potter,” Jack said.
Simmi laughed.
“I am Witch Hazel,” Jack declared, hamming it up.
“You can’t be a witch. You have to be a wizard.” Simmi gasped suddenly. “Ow—that stings!”
“Wizard Hazel zaps you with his Phoenix Wand!”
Simmi covered her ear with her hand. “That really hurt.”
“I’m sorry.”
Jack was overexcited, hopping up and down. “You need Hermione to mix you a potion!”
I touched his arm. “Go ahead,” I told him. “You can wait for Simmi in your room.”
* * *
—
When they were in bed, I got a beer from the fridge, thought about working on the electroweak paper, and instead watched the trailer for a French detective show that everyone in our department was suddenly crazy about. Then I watched a few more trailers, which I find is a good way of keeping up, without actually wasting time watching television shows. I was still doing it when Terrence texted to ask if Simmi wanted to talk. I said that we were having a great time, but that the kids were asleep and I was doing some work.
Great! Terrence texted back, will call in AM, and I thought I could hear his relief. Almost as soon as I’d sent it, Simmi appeared.
“Hi,” I said. “Do you need anything?”
“Can I have some more of the witch hazel? My ears are hurting again.”
“It didn’t sting too much?”
“It stopped after a second.”
I got her the solution and the cotton pads, and she disappeared into the bathroom. She came out a few minutes later, but instead of going back to the bedroom, she stood in the doorway, playing with the plastic package I’d given her.
“These are cool.”
“The cotton rounds?”
“Can you use them for makeup?”
“You don’t wear makeup, do you?”
Simmi looked sideways. “Sometimes my dad lets me play with it. At home.”
In college Charlie had kept her cosmetics in a plastic case with separate compartments, like a makeup artist. I wondered if she had continued using it. Was that the makeup Simmi meant?
“Is Jack asleep?” I asked her.
She nodded. “For a while.”
“He sometimes falls asleep before I’m out of the room.”
Simmi gave me a knowing look, as if she were familiar with this quality in little boys. “I sometimes have trouble sleeping.”
“Me, too.”
“Women don’t sleep as well as men.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“My mom said it’s because we’re supposed to wake up when babies cry.”
“You have a while before you have to worry about
that.”
“She said my dad used to be the one to get up and give me a bottle.”
“You have a great dad.”
Simmi looked at me from under long lashes: “But you had to do it yourself.”
“Your mom told you that?”
Simmi shook her head. “No. But didn’t you?”
“My mom stayed with us for two weeks after Jack was born. But yes, after that.”
“Is that weird?”
“Getting up at night?”
“Not having a husband.”
I looked at Simmi, and she looked innocently back.
“I’ve never had a husband, so it wasn’t weird for me.”
“What’s Jack’s dad’s name?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know his name?”
“Nope.”
“What if you just, like, ran into him? Like in Starbucks or something?”
“I don’t think I’d recognize him. He certainly wouldn’t recognize me.”
Simmi shook her head. “Super weird.”
I took the kind of deep, slow breath a therapist once recommended for challenging interpersonal situations. It had no immediate effect.
“Are you ready for me to take you back to bed?”
“I can go myself,” she said. But she didn’t. Instead she came farther into the room, leaned against the arm of the couch.
“Do you love him more?”
“I don’t know him, so I can’t love him,” I said.
Simmi straightened her arms, pushing off the couch and lifting her feet in the air. Then she dropped back down.
“Not him. I mean Jack.”
“Do I love Jack more than what?”
“Than if you had a husband,” Simmi said.
“I love Jack more than anything.”
“Why do parents always say that?”
“Because it’s true,” I told her. “Kids can’t imagine how much we love them.”
Simmi frowned. Then she sat down, not on the couch but on the armrest. Her back wasn’t toward me, but she was sitting sideways, so I was looking more at her shoulder than her face.
“Parents have their own parents. And they have husbands and wives”—she glanced at me quickly—“sometimes. And their jobs and stuff. Kids just have parents.”
“They have grandparents and other relatives. And school.”
“That’s not the same.”
“You’re right.”
“Parents forget everything.”
“We forget a lot.”
Simmi lifted her knee so that her foot was lined up on the arm of the couch, like a balance beam. She picked at the last remains of some light blue polish on her big toenail. It was hard to hear her, because her chin was resting on her knee.
“They forget how much they used to love their own parents,” she said, “when they were kids.”
* * *
—
When Simmi had gone back to bed, I opened the electroweak paper to see if Vincenzo had added comments. He had, as usual, but I couldn’t focus. I tried my sister; it was three hours earlier there, and she was making dinner. She said she could talk anyway and put the phone on speaker. I could hear her clattering around the kitchen.
I told Amy about my conversation with Simmi.
“Maybe she was trying to connect with you,” Amy said.
“By interrogating me?”
“That must be a defense mechanism on her part,” Amy said.
“Yeah, it’s fine. It’s just—what if she says something to Jack?”
“Like what?”
“About not having a father.”
“Well, then he could ask her about her mother.”
“Right—it would be a total disaster.”
“Or exactly what they both need.”
Amy said something to one of her daughters in a firm, maternal voice. I thought of how much better my sister would be at dealing with Simmi than I was. She seemed able to keep her feelings on an even keel, whereas I was always fluctuating between these poles of emotion, frustration and passionate attachment. Was that because I was the only parent, or because I was who I was? Had Charlie been more like Amy, or more like me?
“I haven’t gotten one of those messages from Charlie’s phone in a while.”
“How long is a while?”
Like Jack, Amy requires precise answers, at least where numbers are concerned. “Almost a month.”
“She’s ghosting you.”
“Ha ha.”
“Sorry.”
“I had to help Simmi with her ears. She said Charlie wouldn’t let her pierce them, and then she did it with her dad. Now they’re a little infected. She said her dad got another tattoo at the same time.”
“I guess everyone has them now. Where is this additional tattoo?”
“I have no idea.”
“I’m just getting the sense you might want to find out.”
“He’s my dead friend’s husband.”
“Yeah,” Amy said, clanging metal on metal. “There’s that.”
* * *
—
I went in later that night to look at them. Jack was completely inside the sleeping bag, only a bit of his hair sticking out the top. As an infant, he’d liked being tightly swaddled, and even in his own bed, he would often sleep with the covers over his head. Simmi, on the other hand, had pushed off the quilt and the sheet, and was lying on her back, one arm draped over the side of the bed. I thought of rearranging it, but I was afraid of waking her. The expression on her face was an extreme version of the way she looked during the day, which I had taken for aloofness, even conceit. But it had been transformed by sleep. What I suddenly thought of, standing in the dark room, were the plaster casts from Pompeii: the lidded, alarmed eyes, mouth slightly open, chin tilted up, as if her face had been fixed in a moment of suffering. Suffering, but in four dimensions—what you might call yearning.
11.
It always took me a couple of weeks to catch up after a trip, and this one was no exception. From Pöllau, I’d gone on to see some of our colleagues at CERN in Geneva; those conversations had been useful, but I still had my own work to do on the electroweak paper, which I’d avoided in Pöllau because I’d wanted to think about the kilonova book. Vincenzo was furious about the delay on my end, with some justification; two of my grad students had completed theses over the holiday, and my postdoc Bence needed an extensive job recommendation. Jack’s resentment about the trip also seemed of longer duration than usual. Whether this was because I hadn’t let him come along, because he’d decided it was more fun downstairs with Terrence, or because it was the nature of seven-year-olds to be angry at their mothers, I had no idea.
It felt like the only person who wasn’t fed up with me was Neel, who’d taken to coming to my office in the afternoons and attempting to drag me to the coffee shop on the other side of campus. One change in him since we’d last spent time together was his tolerance for luxuries like Italian coffee in the middle of the afternoon.
“They don’t have coffee in Building 22?” I teased him, but I was always happy for the excuse to get out of the office, where the atmosphere that January had become less than congenial even before my trip. Most recently, Vincenzo and I had begun arguing about the temperature on our floor. I thought the office was overheated, whereas Vincenzo walked around with a martyred look, in scarves knitted for him by his most recent girlfriend. Before I went to Europe, my postdocs and graduate students had taken my side, while Vincenzo’s had allied themselves with him, but on my return I found that both Srikanth and Bence had abandoned me. I’d initially been pleased that our preferences didn’t line up with gender norms—wasn’t it women in corporate offices who were always complaining about the air-conditioning?—but the problem got so
bad that the plastic toggle on the thermostat actually snapped off, due to constant and vitriolic adjustment.
One night after Jack was asleep, I was catching up on email when I got a message from a graduate student in Vincenzo’s group, a joke in the form of a graph. It was a spoof on our recent paper on luminosity correlations of gamma ray bursts: the most powerful electromagnetic explosions in the universe. The part of this “appendage” that was supposed to be especially clever was the addition of a temperature function to the graph, and the text underneath identifying it as a “Clapp correlation.” The high-energy bursts as corresponded to temperature, of course, were supposed to be coming from me.
The email had been sent to my team of three postdocs and six graduate students, as well as to all of Vincenzo’s. Of those nineteen people, three were female, including me, and the more I thought of the message’s effect on my painfully shy grad student Chendong, or Vincenzo’s outspoken (but primarily Italian-speaking) grad student Giulia, the angrier I got. I contemplated firing something back to the entire group, but resisted that very strong impulse. I waited until Vincenzo arrived in his office the next morning, his neck passive-aggressively wrapped in a multicolored balaclava.
“That was a bit disrespectful last night, no?” I tried to modulate my tone, so as not to be accused of creating “high-energy bursts.”
Vincenzo glanced at his screen, as if to remind himself, but it was clear he’d been expecting my visit. He didn’t get up. “Email,” he said mournfully. “It has totally eroded the traditional relationship between teacher and student. When I was an undergraduate, at Sapienza, even the idea that we would’ve used a professor’s Christian name—”
“But it needs to stop right now.”
“Agreed.”
“So, we leave the thermostat at sixty-eight—several degrees above what is necessary for human beings indoors. And your student comes to apologize.”
Vincenzo waved his hand. “Done. That one’s an idiot, anyway—I’m going to unload him on Nagy next year.” He smiled at me. “My girlfriend tells me I’m more sensitive to temperature fluctuations in the early universe than I am to those naturally occurring in the women around me.”
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