“I’m taking you to dinner,” Dean said. “It’s already arranged. We can’t cancel it.”
And so she had gone with him to the expensive restaurant where he had reserved a big table at the back. He had invited their downstairs neighbors, his coworker and wife whom they’d had to dinner a few times, people from her lab (although only a few had come, and not, she thought, the ones whose work and opinions she admired). He had ordered wine, and everybody had asked how it went and he’d told them that it was brilliant and perfect and interesting, which it wasn’t, and they’d all raised glasses to her and the whole time she’d just been thinking of the critique Dr. Crawford had offered, and how spot on it was, how the hole he’d identified was a real one that might require her to rethink a larger portion of the dissertation than she had thought at first, wishing someone had brought it up sooner rather than simply cheering her on. The longer she waited to get it fixed, the later it would be when she moved on to the next project, and the fewer great projects there would ultimately be over the course of her finite lifetime.
But instead, she was here in this restaurant, with Dean and all these other people. It was kind of them to come and she didn’t want to hurt their feelings, but with every bite she thought of what she would do next, how far she might be able to get before she had to take the manuscript to the binder who would make a copy that would stay forever in the department, before she had to walk for her diploma and vacate the lab she’d occupied for the last five years.
There were twelve of them. They filled three tables pushed together, and Melanie was wedged in the middle with her back to the wall, stiff in the new blouse and skirt she’d worn, her hair pulled back in a painfully tight twist. They hadn’t ordered entrées; the table was instead strewn with dips and appetizers and salads, everything infused with garlic, half-empty wine bottles. The waitress had had to take away the flower arrangements and the candles to make room for all the glasses, the food.
Dean was to her left, and across from her, two men from her lab, Keith, who worked on chromatography, and Ollie, who had come from Germany and was obsessed with the idea of using microwaves for synthesis. Dean had always liked the two of them; they had invited him, once, to a poker night, where he’d lost a decent sum of money but come home laughing.
Ollie was telling a long story about something that had happened in Germany, but Melanie couldn’t process the words. All the chatter was beginning to sound like gibberish. She tried to focus on the walls of the restaurant. There were big paintings of isolated body parts. Near the door was an ear. Over by the bar, a nose, and an elbow, and a thumb. It felt as though the dinner had gone on for hours.
“Hamburgers,” someone was saying. “Definitely hamburgers.” The chatter around the table was becoming unbearable. She needed the cool, clean comfort of quiet numbers on a page, equations that could be solved, results predicted.
She slid her chair back and set her napkin on the table. “Thank you all,” she said, although only those closest to her could possibly have heard.
“Come on, Mel,” Dean said. “We agreed. Just take this one night off. Have some wine.”
“I can’t,” she said. Blood was roaring in her ears. She couldn’t focus her eyes. She wound her way through the restaurant, squeezing past chairs that seemed perfectly placed to impede her progress. When she reached the sidewalk she took a gulp of air.
Then Dean was beside her. “Hey,” he said. “You’re okay. Deep breath.” It was cool outside, and a little damp. The front windows of the restaurant were fogged up.
“I just want a few hours,” she said. “Just to start thinking this through.”
You can’t leave now,” he said. “Everyone came for you.”
“You don’t understand,” she said. “I’ve got to figure this out.”
“You can start revising first thing tomorrow. I’ll make you a pot of coffee.”
“It can’t wait. It’s fresh in my mind. I think he’s right, you know, Crawford.”
“The guy in the checked shirt?”
“Yes. It’s running over and over in my head and I can’t take any more chatter.”
The traffic light changed, and the cars on the street beside them began to move. Somewhere in the distance a police siren wailed.
“It will still be there tomorrow,” he said. “Hell, you can do it two hours from now. But you’ve got to come back in.”
“I can’t,” she said. Tears were forming, and her nose began to itch. “I’ve got to fix it. I’ve got nothing, Dean. All I’ve got is a theory with a big fat hole in it.” She sniffed and put a finger to the corner of her eye, trying to keep the tears in.
“Don’t do this, Mel,” he said. “Come back in. For me.”
“This is who I am,” she said. “You know that. You’ve always known that.”
“Look, I ordered a cake,” he said. “With your name on it and everything. I had to bring it over in the afternoon, before I came to the defense. Please, just come in while they bring it out, and have a piece, and then you can go.”
“I don’t know why you did that,” she said.
“You want me to go back in there and eat it with all of your friends without you? Keith and Ollie and everyone is in there, and I don’t think anybody would say they aren’t good chemists who are going to have good careers because they came to a party one night.”
“I’m not Keith and Ollie,” Melanie said. “Thank you for doing this, Dean. It was sweet of you. Good night.”
“Don’t,” he said.
She started walking.
“I mean it. I’ve put up with it every night for three years, but this is too much.”
“This isn’t about you,” she said. “It’s not like I’m going to be with some other man.”
“If you keep walking, that’s it.” His jaw was clenched, his hands thrust deep in his pockets.
She remembered feeling certain that, if there was a choice to be made, she knew what she was choosing, that it was absolutely correct, that the mere act of requiring her to make such a choice was betrayal enough to dictate the outcome.
And so she had gone. This much, she remembered. She’d gone back to their apartment, where she had changed into jeans and collected her bicycle. She remembered carrying her bicycle down the stairs, remembered that her right hip had felt stiff when she’d swung a leg over the bicycle’s frame, stiff from hours with her knees crossed during the defense. She remembered switching on the blinking headlight in the lingering dusk as she set off.
There was her dread: a dissertation needing to be pulled apart and stitched together. And Dean, suddenly objecting to the same priorities she had always had, wounded by them. His words stayed in her mind: That’s it. She longed to go back to the moments when she’d first awakened, with only the dull, opiated ache in her broken bones.
She shifted in the bed, taking stock. The leg was in a cast from mid-calf to mid-thigh, slightly bent. Her elbow was wrapped in a soft bandage. She tried to move the arm and a shot of pain ran through her shoulder. With her other arm she reached up to feel her head; it felt normal, no scrapes or bumps or bandages. Gingerly she felt along her torso. Each breath brought a dull stab of pain; she wondered which two ribs were broken. Her head was not clear. She looked up at the IV pole beside the bed, the tube snaking down into her right arm, but she couldn’t read its label without twisting to the right, and when she tried, the pain made her gasp involuntarily. Whatever it was, it was making her sleepy.
Someone was squeezing her arm gently, waking her. It wasn’t Dean. It was a woman, a doctor, wearing glasses with green plastic frames.
“Is it two already?” Melanie said. “The nurse said you wouldn’t be here until two.”
“It’s two-thirty,” the woman said. “I’m Dr. Kerrigan. How are you feeling?”
“Where’s Dean?” Melanie asked. “My fiancé.”
“I’ll ask them to check. Now, you took quite a spill.” The doctor set about examining her, explaining the injuries as
she went, asking her about pain, did this hurt, any pain here, but Melanie was focused on Dean. She knew there was a reason why she wasn’t sure he was coming, but she couldn’t remember. Then, she did remember, and her breath caught in her chest.
“Pain?” the doctor asked.
“No,” Melanie said. “Not really.”
“Well, it looks like you’re going to heal up just fine,” the doctor said. “I’d like you to stay one more night but if everything stays how it looks now, I see no reason why you couldn’t go home in the morning.”
“Is there a phone I can use?” Melanie asked.
They brought the phone in more quickly than she’d expected. She dialed the number of her lab, where she knew they would take her call. It rang six times before someone answered.
“It’s Melanie,” she said. “Who’s this?”
It was a second-year student, and not one she knew very well.
“Listen,” she said, “I was in an accident and I’m in the hospital and I’m okay, but I could really use something to read. Do you think there’s someone there who might run something over for me?”
“Of course,” the student said, as Melanie had known she would. They all regarded her as minor royalty, something more than a colleague, something different from Bob Franklin, the old professor who ran their lab, and she liked that. She knew it was earned. When they hung up she closed her eyes in relief. But the relief at the prospect of work only lasted a minute. The dread was still there. She closed her eyes, took a breath, and dialed Dean at his office.
“You’re awake,” he said. “How are you feeling? Are you in pain?”
“I can’t tell,” she said. “I think they’ve got me on enough drugs to eliminate any possibility of accurate perception.”
“I’ll come over,” he said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be there when you woke up. They told me you were going to be fine, you just needed to rest. I came to work.”
“It’s fine.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“Dean, are we—did we—” He exhaled. She could see in her mind the way he was surely holding the phone, pressed between Tshirted shoulder and ear, the way he would be pulling on the fingers of his left hand with his right.
“Let’s not talk about that now,” he said. “Get some rest. Try to heal. See you soon.” He hung up. She set the phone down and was overcome by nausea. She couldn’t move, and there was nowhere to turn. Before she knew what was happening, she was vomiting, right onto herself, onto the bed, and the freckled nurse was back.
“Poor thing,” the nurse said. “It’s a common reaction to morphine. Out of the frying pan, into the fire. Let’s get you cleaned up.”
She must have slept, because she awakened. A man stood in the doorway to her room, but it wasn’t Dean. It was John from her lab, Dean’s opposite, short, with glasses and a shaved head. If there was anyone at the lab she would have considered a friend, she supposed John was it. He was a year behind her, his office two doors over. She had trusted him to read papers for her before she sent them out and always listened to his comments in their lab meetings. He hadn’t been at the dinner; she supposed he had returned, sensibly, to the lab after the defense.
“Awake?” he said from the doorway. “Decent?”
“Both,” she said. “Come in.” She raised the back of the bed so she was sitting up.
He took a few steps toward her and stood, about even with her feet.
“So you drew the short straw?”
“I pulled rank,” he said.
She smiled a little, involuntarily, at this bit of unfamiliar sweetness.
“Christ. Are you—”
“I’m apparently going to be fine,” she said.
“Did it happen on the way home from the restaurant?” he asked. “When Ollie came in this morning he said you just kind of disappeared. I’m sorry I didn’t come, by the way. I had time for either the defense or the party, and I thought you’d approve.” She suddenly felt terribly exposed. Dean must have gone back in to that table full of people and served them her cake. She wondered if he’d made some excuse for her, pretended that he had acquiesced in her departure, a headache, an appointment he hadn’t known of when he’d arranged the surprise. Or perhaps he had enlisted whoever among them might take his side in casting her as heartless. He was, she thought, just cruel enough to aim a barb at her as she departed, in a tone of jest with a core of truth.
“I was on my bike, on my way back to the lab.”
“What a way to cap off the big day.”
“Oh, it’s probably fitting,” she said. “I didn’t see either one coming.”
John laughed. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know about the bike, but with the defense, we all thought you were the one who would just talk for half an hour and they’d all bow and send you on your way. I don’t think any of us saw it coming.”
“I should have,” she said. “I keep thinking I could have realized what was missing. I don’t know how I didn’t see it.”
“Nobody else saw it either. It’s like some secret genius dialogue between you and Crawford. I wish he’d talk to me like that. Where’s your fiancé?”
“I guess he went to work,” she said.
John raised an eyebrow. “How many bones did you break?”
“The nurse said he was here most of the night.”
“I guess that’s not my business,” John said. “But it seems…”
“It serves me right,” she said. “Punishment fits the crime. You don’t need to stay, John. Weren’t you trying to finish that asymmetric hydrogenation project this month? You’re running out of time.”
“Yes,” he said, “I’ll let you be. But first, I brought a few things.” He took the plastic chair beside her bed. He smelled like coffee. He set a canvas tote bag down at his feet. From it he drew a copy of her dissertation, a new, blank spiral-bound notebook, two recent journals, and a yellow legal pad filled with writing. “My notes from your defense,” he said. “I thought you, of all people, might be just masochistic enough to want them.”
“You angel.”
“I hope you’re not discouraged,” he said.
“No,” she said, “not discouraged. Maybe frustrated. But I’d so much rather he tell me now, before it’s really out there, while there’s still a chance to fix it.”
“Me, too,” John said. “I never understand why people take these things so personally.” John was a good chemist. He would do well. She thought she might still write to him, after she’d moved on to a post-doc, to wherever she would end up, and he, too, had found a place. She would still want to know what he thought.
“Dean doesn’t understand,” she said. “He thinks the point of this was, they’re giving me the degree. Wahoo.”
“He’ll come around, don’t you think? Wouldn’t he rather be married to the woman who won the Nobel Prize than the woman who always sat next to him at dinner?”
“I don’t know,” Melanie said. “I thought so. I hope so.” She regretted this last comment as soon as she’d said it. Three words too many. She was losing her composure.
“Maybe you’re either born with it or you’re not,” John said.
“I don’t know about that” Melanie said. “I came to it late. I had the most indulgent parents, growing up in New Mexico. It was like everything I did was a miracle to them. If I called them right now and told them I’d crashed my bicycle, they’d probably just go on about how I crashed it so brilliantly. All the injuries on one side of the body! Well done, daughter!”
“My parents were on the right side of that divide,” John said. “Very strict. I hated it as a kid.”
“Aren’t you glad now, though?”
“I am. Though I wish it had been focused on a direction I could use. I took piano lessons, right up through high school. An hour of practice minimum per day. Our piano was in this strange little room, I think it was supposed to be a bedroom, and it took up the whole room, and they’d shut me in there and I c
ouldn’t come out for an hour. I tried bringing my homework in there a few times but my mother would come and pound on the door and ask why she couldn’t hear any music.” She tried to imagine John seated in front of a keyboard. All these years she’d worked with him and never known.
“Did you ever think you wanted to play? That you’d pursue it?”
“No,” he said. “I wasn’t any good at it. Although I’m sure it taught me discipline. And in a way, I kind of enjoyed it.”
“Do you ever play now?”
“No,” he said. “I haven’t had access to a piano, really, since I left high school. But I wouldn’t have time anyway. Have you ever heard of a pianist/chemist who actually managed to be any good at either?”
“I can’t speak for music,” she said, “but I can’t imagine splitting the work we do with anything else that requires much in the way of time. I never had anything like that. My parents made me go to this awful camp where it was just, good job this, you’re amazing that. Blue ribbons all around. Once, I tried doing things badly on purpose for a few days just to see if anyone would say anything. No one did.”
“How old were you?”
“Nine or ten, I think. Then, I just started seeing it everywhere. Empty praise.” She shifted on the mattress. The pillow had slipped from behind her head down toward her left shoulder. She couldn’t use her injured right arm to reach it, nor could she twist to the side. She didn’t want to ask John to move it, so she went on.
“I remember the first time anybody actually demanded something of me,” Melanie said. “I was about to start sixth grade.” Her voice sounded strange as she spoke, as though she were listening to someone else do an impression of her.
It had been terribly hot outside, summer in the desert. She was bored out of her mind. She was standing in the front yard, staring at the garage, staring at the swingset, when she smelled something smoky, like fireworks. She thought she knew where it was coming from. It was funny to remember; she knew these people much better now.
She was afraid of that next-door family. Curtis, the son, was in her class at school, but his father had some kind of big, important job, and never recognized her when they ran into each other in town. One time she saw him in the grocery store, near the meat counter, and he stared at her for at least a minute before silently turning and walking away. Later she always found herself peering around the corner by the butcher’s to see if he was there.
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