The Year of the Gadfly

by Jennifer Miller

  There’s plenty of wealth in our general vicinity—we’re not far from the glimmer of the Berkshires—and that wealth does seep through the cracks. But most affluent families who send their children to Mariana Academy reside in the less isolated towns to the southeast. People in Nye proper have either been here for a very long time or are transplants (like my family) who couldn’t afford to live in Stockbridge and Lenox. The small college where my parents taught is even more remote than Nye, so many of the faculty settle here, moving into one of the ramshackle Victorians on Church Street as the current inhabitants die off one by one.

  When I returned last summer, I spotted several efforts to lure in visitors by increasing the town’s quaintness quotient. For example, a new sign had appeared outside the bookstore: a black iron arm, exploding with curlicues, from which hung the silhouette cutout of a large book. Matching curlicues spelled the name, NyeTime Bookshop. The Sidecar Café displayed a similar emblem from its doorway, this one a jaunty sidecar and a man sporting a newsboy cap. The Sidecar had claustrophobic low-slung ceilings and lighting so dim you felt like a blind geezer trying to read the menu. The café served wine but no other alcohol. Not even sidecars.

  I immediately spotted Hazel at the bar, leaning flirtatiously toward the bartender. The sight of her coiled updo and beautiful freckled neck ratcheted up my nerves. Maybe this was a date after all. Her laughter rose, resonant and deep. She hadn’t seen me yet and I hung back a moment, taking in the scene. The bartender was tall with scraggly facial hair and a fitted shirt that advertised his pectoral muscles. Approaching the bar, I spotted a dark tattoo on each of his forearms. They might have been of skulls, or the logo of some indie band, or a fashionably obscure Nietzsche quote like “Idealism is mendaciousness in the face of necessity.” A rhinestone belt glinted around the Nietzsche wannabe’s skinny hipster waist. For all these reasons, and because I was wearing only corduroys and a button-down from the Gap, I hated this man. If Hazel was into this guy, I didn’t have half a chance.

  He noticed me with a cool nod. “What can I get you?”

  Hazel turned her head but did not get up. She looked like she was stuck there, like she had no intention of moving away, ever. “Hi, Jonah,” she said, and gave a tug at a loose strand of hair. Like magic it all came tumbling down over her shoulders, unfurling like coiled lengths of silk. (I was pretty certain that women played with their hair when they were seeking male attention—but which man was this display for?)

  Nietzsche Man refilled Hazel’s glass. “On the house,” he said, smiling a row of crooked bottom teeth.

  “Thanks, Marcus.” She returned the smile.

  “Hey,” I said, responding to a greeting that already seemed long gone.

  “So can I get ya something?”

  I looked at Hazel. Maybe this wasn’t a date at all. Maybe she, Friedrich N, and I were going to stand around all night shooting the shit.

  “Mar, we’re going to sit down. Thanks for the wine.”

  He nodded and proffered a pair of menus. “Lentil’s really good tonight,” he said. “Just the way you like it.” He refilled the two sips she’d taken.

  I would have preferred something much stronger, but Mar produced a wineglass from under the counter. I reached for my wallet.

  “That’s on me.” Hazel grabbed my wrist. I tried to protest, but I was too preoccupied with the sensation of her hand squeezing my pulse point. “Shall we?” she said after she’d paid. I could still feel the pressure of her fingers as she led me to the back of the café. The ceiling was so low that I could reach up and touch it with my hand. I looked out the window but saw only streaks of rain. I took a big gulp of wine.

  We chatted about the Academic League until our soup came. “So tell me, Jonah,” Hazel began, as though this was a business meeting, “why on earth are you teaching at Mariana? I had high hopes for you, sonny.”

  I ran through the litany: the UMass entomology team, Pasternak’s generous offer, my plan to be a better teacher than the ones we’d had. “I’m saving student lives,” I joked, and then remembered the speech I’d given my class about being ill equipped to do just that.

  Hazel nodded, but she knew as well as I did that a microbiologist didn’t just wake up one morning and decide to switch fields. I didn’t feel like elaborating, however, so I changed the conversation to my parents. Hazel’s home life was more than a little erratic, and my parents had treated her like a surrogate daughter. I told her about my mom’s NSF grant to study a rare beetle in the Cook Islands and how my dad had gone along to kick off his retirement. Hazel asked if I was living at home, and I told her about my apartment in Forest Acres. The whole time, I was fixated on her tongue, soft and pink, testing the lentils.

  “Let me guess. Your apartment features track lighting and beige carpets?”

  I nodded and took a bite of soup. It scalded my tongue. I pushed the lentils around to cool them, but it was no use. When I swallowed, they burned my throat. I took a gulp of water. Hazel watched, amused, clearly unconcerned with my scalded papillae.

  “It’s total wilderness outside the bedroom window,” I mumbled through the pain.

  “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

  “Depends on the season,” I said, and Hazel chuckled. “The woods felt more homey when we were kids.”

  “We can still play, Jonahlah.” She met my eye for a quick second before plunging her spoon back in the bowl.

  “Is that so?”

  But she didn’t return the flirtatious volley. “Why aren’t you living at your folks’ place?”

  “And wake up every day in my Transformers bedsheets?”

  Hazel put her freckled palms on the table, her face thoughtful. “I’m an adult now, too,” she said without a hint of irony or innuendo. I started to hope that she’d wiped away her old animosity and forgiven me for our falling-out. I knew I should appreciate this moment—that I shouldn’t worry too much about the past—but I still had so many questions about what had transpired between us. “It’s really good to see you, Hazel,” I said.

  Hazel blinked, her eyes tired. “Jonahlah, you have no idea.”

  The more we drank, the more information Hazel offered up about the last decade. In high school she’d been the most confident, self-assured person I knew. Even her teachers were a little intimidated. (Me, they just wanted to kick in the ass.) She’d been the epitome of success, walking out of Mariana with a perfect GPA, a feat practically unheard of. But I had no idea how difficult a time she’d had after high school. She’d attended Bates, and she now explained that she had few friends there, none of them close. She focused doggedly on her work, and lost herself in a bramble of Latin and Greek literature. Immediately after college, she left for the Mediterranean.

  “I couldn’t stand to be anywhere near this town,” she said. “Not even California was far enough.” Hazel eyed me. I started to respond, but she cut me off. “When your brother died, it wasn’t just the following months and years that changed, Jonah. Everything that came before was suddenly different. But maybe that wasn’t the case for you.”

  I regarded her, not sure what to say. This was the first time since I’d been back in Nye that anyone had mentioned Justin’s death outright. Of course, hardly anyone at school, aside from Pasternak and a few other teachers, knew about it.

  “Hazel, I—” But at that moment, Marcus arrived with our dinners. Hazel didn’t even look at him as he placed her mussels and French fries on the table. Ten points for the underdog, I thought cynically. Because Hazel’s eyes, though fixed on my face, were not happy.

  “Anyway, I became a different person in Greece,” she said, as Marcus left.

  I nudged my salmon. I wasn’t hungry. Hazel raised her eyes at me. Freckles dotted the creases of her eyelids.

  “I was so starved for contact,” she continued. “And every night I’d go out to some bar and drink cheap Greek wine and wait.”

  I imagined Hazel sitting on a rickety barstool, her long hair gleaming
in the candlelight, her cotton dress rustling in the breeze. And all around her a sea of men, captivated and entranced. I imagined myself—pasty and pale—among those burly, dark-haired Greek suitors. At least in Nye the pickings were slim.

  “Sometimes I’d get into a fling for a week or two,” she continued. “But I didn’t really care about any of them. I’m not sure they cared much about me.”

  I knew how Hazel felt. Justin had died in a car crash the spring of my sophomore year, and the accident site was uncomfortably close to both my parents’ home and the school. After graduation, I’d wanted to purge myself from Nye in order to purge it from me. Everything in the East felt brittle, like I was walking on a tremulous crust.

  I told Hazel now how I’d wanted to be in a place where the sidewalk was hard beneath my feet, a place where nothing ever froze: California. “Not that I spent much time in the sun,” I added. “The lab microscope was practically fused to my eyeball.”

  “You always had a talent for blocking out what you didn’t want to see, Jonahlah.”

  “So why did you come back?” I asked, trying to ignore the jab.

  Hazel picked a French fry from the paper cone. “I was running out of money, and I started to feel aimless.” She put the fry, uneaten, on her plate. She told me about the Historical Society, her tutoring, and the Community Council scandal with her former tutee. She claimed not to regret relinquishing her dream of becoming a classics superstar. I didn’t buy this for a second; Hazel took what she wanted, by force if necessary.

  “Now tell me,” she said, her eyes flashing mischievously as she leaned over her still-untouched mussels, “why are you really here?”

  “You mean in the metaphysical sense?”

  “You hated Mariana, Jonah, and they hated you.”

  All true. I refused to conform and therefore was considered dangerous. In entomology terms, I was an endoparasite: an exploitative entity sapping the life force from its host. But to Helen and Jeffrey Kaplan, the only adjective that belonged in front of the word “education” was “good,” so forget public school. Their Jewish social conscience did not extend that far.

  “And by the way,” Hazel added, “you can’t change that place.”

  “Have a little optimism, why don’t you?”

  Hazel shook her head. “Think about it, Mr. Science. The school may be giving you free rein over a couple dozen students, but the organic building blocks of its composition are exactly the same.”

  “I agree. And finding Prisom’s Party is the first step in changing that composition.”

  “Prisom’s Party?” She looked like I’d mentioned some ex-fiancée. Indeed, it was crazy how the myth had persisted into the new millennium.

  I explained my discussion with Pasternak in the Trench. “Those kids need help, Hazel. They’re caught in the system, just like I was, and look where the system got me.”

  Hazel sat back, indignant. “It got you Stanford and UCLA! Only now you’re getting all worked up over saving student lives.” The way her mouth tightened gave me a glimpse of my friend as a future mother. She’d clearly be the family enforcer.

  “Who says I’m worked up?”

  She shrugged. “This Prisom’s Party thing—it’s made you all emotional.”

  This felt like an accusation, so I threw one back at her. “You hated Mariana as much as I did. I’m surprised you agreed to work there in the first place, let alone come back now after what happened to your tutee.”

  Hazel twisted a spiral of hair around her finger with a coyness I found excruciating. I finished off my wine and refilled the glass. Hazel raised her hand and Marcus came running. “We need another bottle. Any chance you have something stronger?”

  Marcus flashed a wicked grin. “My dear, you know we only serve wine at the Sidecar.” He disappeared and returned a moment later with bourbon-filled shot glasses. “What are we toasting?”

  “Old friends,” Hazel said. I blinked. Had she just winked at me? We clinked glasses and tilted our heads. The bourbon shot hot and fierce down my throat. Marcus put another bottle of wine on the table, collected the shot glasses, and left.

  “How do you know him?” I asked, pouring myself a glass and drinking it too fast.

  “He’s an artist,” she said as though this answered the question. I poured us both more wine. “Don’t worry about Marcus.”

  Hazel held my gaze longer than was comfortable. Millions of unspoken possibilities flashed between us. I wanted to touch her and solidify the connection. But it was too soon. It had taken supereons for the biological potential encapsulated within single-cell organisms to blossom into complex life. There was hope for Hazel and me, in our Precambrian phase, if only I was patient.

  By this point Hazel’s freckles were buzzing all around, and when I excused myself to the bathroom I had to focus on my balance. Was I too emotional? I stood over the leaky sink, inspecting my grim expression.

  My ex-girlfriend at UCLA had dumped me three weeks before graduation precisely because I wasn’t emotional enough. “Unavailable” was the term she’d used. I scoffed at this rebuke. I was career-oriented, I argued. No different from her or any of our colleagues. We’d been accepted into this highly prestigious doctoral program because we were dedicated and directed. If the prospect of the next publication, the upcoming grant, did not pull her from bed in the morning, then what did?

  “Relationships, Jonah!” she exclaimed. “Life!” And then, knowing I required clarification, she added, “Human life!”

  She slammed the door and was gone. I turned over and went back to sleep. I’d been at the lab until 3 a.m. the previous night, and my headache, the perennial throb of recent months, felt like a bulldozer overturning the gray matter in my brain.

  Not long after this, graduation weekend arrived, and with it, my parents. Somehow I’d forgotten to set my alarm, and they woke me up with a persistent banging.

  “Jonah, are you sick?” My mother gasped at the sight of me and pushed into the darkened studio. My father peered into the kitchen nook. Without a word he began bundling up garbage, throwing bags of chips and empty soda cans and candy wrappers into a plastic bag. As I watched him stomp around, it occurred to me that I’d been subsisting on a diet of MSG and high-fructose corn syrup. My mother yanked the window cord and the blinds shot up with a brisk thwap. Searing light cut into my face. It was, apparently, a beautiful morning.

  “We have news,” my mother said. “We’re moving to the Cook Islands!” Her eyes shone. “I’ve won an NSF grant.”

  “You’ve quit your jobs?” My parents had taught at the college for as long as I could remember. They were natural inhabitants to Nye. They couldn’t just up and change environments.

  “Your father’s going to retire in style. Drink cocktails on the beach. It’s the opportunity of a lifetime, Jonah.”

  I felt off balance, as though the whole apartment—the whole state of California—was tipping over. My father sat down beside me. “It’s our turn to start over, Jonah,” he said. “And I know you can’t appreciate this . . .” He stared at his Birkenstocks. “But we went from having two sons to one. And then, when you came out here, from one to none.”

  He meant that I’d run away, and he was right. But I needed distance from my brother’s death and the constant panic it produced in my gut, even if it took three thousand miles and ten years of intense, focused study to do so.

  “Jonah, what are you doing?” My father surveyed the studio, and for the first time I saw what he must be seeing: how the place was full of clutter and yet utterly empty. When he met my eyes again, I knew he saw the exact same contrast in me.

  “I know you’ve got a postdoc, but is that really the best thing for you?” My mother edged closer to me. I was now sandwiched between my parents, their warm bodies radiating concern. “And by the way,” my mother said, “I bumped into Hazel at the supermarket. Apparently she’s home again—or has been home for a while? She wasn’t very talkative. Have you spoken to her recently? She
didn’t look terrific.”

  “She’s back in Nye?” I could feel the blood rushing to my face, my fingers tingling. My parents knew that Hazel and I had grown apart after Justin’s death, but they didn’t know the extent of our estrangement.

  “You look strangely energized,” my father said. “Remarkably healthy, all of a sudden. Why might that be?”

  “I’m getting over a breakup, Dad. Remember?”

  “Exactly,” my father said.

  My father was correct: The pure excitement I felt upon hearing Hazel’s name was anathema to the deadness I’d been feeling for months. And once I realized how numb I’d been—once I saw my middle-aged parents upending their lives—I couldn’t go on as before, hunched vulture-like over the microscope. As my ex-girlfriend had said, I needed to live. But how? I considered applying for teaching jobs abroad or offering my knowledge of radiation-resistant microorganisms to some clandestine DOD lab. Meanwhile, Hazel lingered in the back of my mind, pulling me homeward like a tractor beam. Why not find work close to Nye, conduct science of the natural world in nature, and reboot my outdated operating system? Why not make things right with my former best friend? I had a moment of doubt—how would I feel being home after all this time? But I’d secured enough distance from the past. My advisors thought I was ruining my career, but I didn’t have a choice—either leave the lab or be buried in it. Not long after signing on with the UMass entomology project, Pasternak came calling.

  I’d navigated around explaining all this to Hazel; things were going well between us, and I didn’t want to make myself seem vulnerable. I wasn’t, really, but I knew that the story of my return suggested otherwise. I was drunk now, however, and everything was rotating. I splashed water on my face and returned to the table.

  As I approached, something odd happened. Hazel was on her cell, and she didn’t see me until I was practically standing over her. When she did notice my presence, she abruptly ended the call. Just snapped the phone shut on whoever she was speaking to.