The Explanation for Everything

by Lauren Grodstein

  The whistle outside of a bird swooping down for her prey.

  Andy turned back to the manuscript.

  My grandfather died when I was a small boy. He died the way that people used to die, at home, in bed, surrounded by family. (Far preferable, by the way, than our current system of hospitals and machines and expensive and useless procedures, and even if we lived a few years less back then, oh the majesty of that old-fashioned deathbed!) I remember a little about my grandfather: his heavy Yiddish accent, the way he sucked on an eternal supply of butterscotch candies, the nickels he slipped me when my mother wasn’t looking. And I remember too, he had these startling blue eyes, like the Swedish flag. My father’s eyes were the same exact color (it was these eyes, my mother said, that drew her to him at that 1929 meeting of the City College Communists, those eyes that got my own ball rolling) and so were my younger brother Teddy’s. A startling blue, a bottomless blue. (My own eyes are the muddy coffee of my mother’s, for which she apologized.)

  Anyway, I remember sitting in that clammy bedroom on the ground floor of my grandparents’ little house in the Bronx, some kids playing stickball outside, my grandmother crying, my littlest sister playing with toys on the floor. My baby cousin wailing in the hallway. The endless wait for what we all knew was coming, and the boredom and excitement of waiting for it. My grandfather’s labored breath. A nurse stationed outside in the living room, and a doctor who came, then left and said he’d come back in a little while. Nobody knew exactly what my grandfather was dying of, some kind of heart condition, I suppose—but he was seventy years old and it had been a good life, and now it was time to say good-bye. That was the way of things back then. I don’t think I’m romanticizing this. My father held the old man’s cramped hand. I had loved my grandfather and felt sad that he was dying but also understood that it wouldn’t do to cry. Only my grandmother could cry, and the baby in the hallway.

  Still, it felt sad and unfair that he wouldn’t be with us forever. I would miss his nickels, his butterscotch candies, the gentle way he spoke to me, the way he folded newspapers into caps.

  And then, a few seconds before he finally died, my grandfather opened his eyes—he hadn’t opened them for many hours—and although he didn’t say anything, I can remember that moment like it was seared into me. Those Swedish flag eyes. Bottomless blue. My father’s eyes, the very same color. And my brother’s. And because those three were all crammed next to each other in that crowded room, I saw the three of them in the same screen, as it were—the blue of my grandfather’s and father’s and brother’s eyes, the blue that transcends generations. And in that searing moment I understood that my grandfather would die today, yes, but also he would live for as long as my brother did, because my brother carried a part of my grandfather. The color of his eyes. And it seemed to me a fair enough bargain. We cannot live forever ourselves, but a small piece of us can, and will, as long as we keep having children.

  It was during that moment I became a Darwinian.

  I know that this is not enough for some people, and I am sorry about that. Some people need to believe that it is not just the color of our eyes, not just the texture of our skin, not just the predilection for foreign languages or the long piano fingers that will survive, but that they themselves will somehow live into eternity. Perhaps with their loved ones, and a few favored mementos and pets.

  This feeling is especially strong, I believe, among those who have lost their children. As it should be, I suppose. This is why I do not begrudge the Lims their thirteen-million-dollar settlement. They do not want my money. They want their daughter back. The money is a poor substitute, but it is all I can give them.

  So now what?

  I’m on eighteen pills a day and I take some in the morning and some at night, except for those mornings when I just can’t face it or those nights when I’m too damn tired. The pills are keeping me alive unless they’re not—unless what’s keeping me alive is just me being feisty, which I’ve been told I am. Feisty. This is a word people use for pets and old people, and that’s fine. Although I’ve never been anybody’s pet.

  Listen, Anita. I was so panicky at the thought of losing you that I never told you the things I should have. What should I have said? That love is important, of course. That if you have found this man who you think is a good guy, and who makes you happy, and will love you and take care of you and father your children, yadda yadda (and even now, here I am making fun, yadda yadda, I can’t help myself). No, really, Anita—if this man loves you, and you love him, then you are a lucky woman, and congratulations to you both.

  You should have children. Many children.

  And also! Listen, Anita—listen to me. Right now you may think that you have discovered the truth, and that the truth isn’t in a laboratory like you always thought, but the truth is in a chapel somewhere, or a holy book. Okay, fine. You’re wrong, but fine. Believe in that chapel or that holy book or the words of your husband but just keep a little part of your brain (your heart, your intestines, take your metaphor) and leave it open to doubt. Or to wonder. To curiosity. Ask yourself, one day (the kids are grown, the husband is in his study, those awful parents of yours are memories in a photo album), how did this God of mine put life on earth? Through what mechanism? Was it really as simple as his Word, or was perhaps the Word a more complicated story?

  I am sorry for what I did to you. I am sorry for the world, of course, and sorry for myself, but mostly I am sorry that I caused you such despair. That was never, ever my intention.

  I know there is no heaven but now that I am older I have become able to conjure one up. This, they say, is one of the hazards of growing older, but I don’t care. I don’t care that my mind is failing, and there are long periods these days that I spend quite happily back in my childhood, eating my mother’s cooking, going to yeshiva, playing stickball with my friends. I liked yeshiva. People say I didn’t, that my life’s work was in the main a rejection of a religious childhood, but this is quite untrue. I liked my schooling, I liked the rabbis, I liked some of the fairy tales they told us. I didn’t like our angry God very much but Adam and Eve, them I found appealing. Abraham and Isaac. Poor old Moses. Those stories were good stories.

  And I loved my mother and father, my brother and sisters, my grandparents, our apartment in the Bronx, the foyer I slept in, the elevator with the gate and the porthole window, the cousins in every neighboring building, the pretty girls, the overactive radiator in the winter and the nonexistent air-conditioning in the summer. I loved them all; I miss them all.

  Ah—I’ll stop! Although I was just there this morning.

  So yes, time travel is one of the small graces of growing older, and within that time travel is, perhaps, a little bit of clairvoyance, the ability to see what’s on the other side, or to imagine it with a certain amount of anticipation. I imagine you on the other side, Anita. You look exactly as you did when I knew you. You are small and serious. You are always at a computer. When you realize something enormously important, when you make a crucial connection, when you win two hundred thousand dollars because the world catches on to you—you let escape the smallest smile. Such a small, rare smile! I loved seeing it. Anita, if I’d only had daughters of my own, perhaps you would have been spared.

  I kept up with Charles and your family for as long as I could bear. The parents are back in Korea. The brother and the wife are in Texas with many children. Charles is married. After the settlement, the parents decided—please do smile at this—to give the bulk of my money to his church.

  And now the end of the day is getting closer and I have my pills to take, or not to take, as I decide. The man who owns this house has been worried for me and has started to send in a nurse, a nosy black lady I very much like except when she nags me too much about the meds. She cooks me Haitian food, fried pork, which in these sentimental days of mine reads a bit like trayf, so I eat it with gusto. It is spicy and soft and agrees with me. She is very pretty, this nurse of mine, but I can never reme
mber her name. It is Agnes or Angela or something with a French accent. I never can remember, but no matter.

  She does not mind if I call her Anita.

  This was the last of the numbered manuscript pages. Stapled underneath, Andy found this note:

  I expect it will not surprise you, Andy, that I am dead now.

  He had to read the line three times and still it read like a joke. A terrible sort of practical joke.

  How do I know that I am dead? Because poor Watson (a young lawyer and a former student of mine—and incidentally what does it say about the academic job market that biology students now turn to law school?)—poor Watson was under instructions not to send this mawkish piece of bullshit to you until I was good and gone. And since you’re reading this, ergo sum, etcetera. I have been cremated, my ashes sprinkled spitefully by my poor dear Watson (I presume) about and around the Princeton biology department. Fuck ’em.

  He read this again too. Dead? He wasn’t dead. He was so viscerally alive! Everything Rosenblum had said, had taught him—his words—he was alive!

  Dead! I promise you it’s the truth.

  Should he even keep reading this? He didn’t need to keep reading this. Tomorrow would be another spring day. The world spinning. The lilacs blooming. The hawks circling. Hank Rosenblum, alive in Montauk.

  As for the particulars—well, I died sometime after you applied for tenure, Andy, and I’m guessing sometime before the end of this summer. It’s now July of 2011 and I’m feeling like shit, I don’t mind saying. The end can’t possibly be near enough. Congestive heart failure has me wheezing like a goddamn accordion, along with some obstructive lung problems that I knew were coming at me, but fuck it, my pipe was a comfort that sullen old age was never gonna be. So here I am, dying. Or here I’m not, since now I’m dead. I’m a ghost, Andy! But don’t be scared.

  Don’t be scared. Andy took a walk around the room. Went to the sink in the bathroom and splashed water on his face.

  So fine, you might be wondering why I’m sending you all this right now, why of all my former students and dear ones, you (and you alone, Andy—no sibling rivalries for you, my friend!) received this missive, and what I expect you to do about it now that it’s in your care. Well, to answer the second and easier question first: nothing. You don’t have to do anything with this little book of mine. These pages are the smoke and emissions from a dying car, an unquiet mind.

  As for why you: well, of course I was always very fond of you, Andy. And though you might argue that I was very fond of all my students (untrue, but it makes me seem like a better professor if you say so) I also never quite got over the idea that I did poorly by you. I knew about your wife dying, Andy, and that you were alone with those two tiny daughters, and I never did anything about it. I could have used some of the few contacts I had left, maybe arranged a postdoc somewhere. Something, anyway, to have kept you somewhat whole and sane. The sort of thing that a friendly and interested mentor would have and should have done. But I was still grieving for Anita then, in the worst part of the grief, and I wasn’t able to think about anybody but myself. I assume you know the feeling, Andy, but that doesn’t make it excusable. As long as we’re on this earth we should do right by other people. Especially those who have been good to us. You were a nice kid, a loveable kid, and you had a bright future ahead of you. And now you’ve ended up in that shithole of a college. Well. At least you’re not a lawyer.

  Anyway, Andy, I hope you can forgive me my absence. I would have reached out to you before I died, but as you can probably tell, I’ve been a bit feverish. And I was afraid, perhaps, that you would judge me unkindly.

  My hope for you is that you have come to a happy place in your life. (How old are you now, anyway, kid? Could you be forty?) And of course you have an awful lot left of it. Enjoy it all, my friend, and know that I always thought of you with much affection.

  And that was all.

  Andy put down the pages. There was nothing to do about the cold pained surprise throbbing in him—no, he had not known that Rosenblum was dead, and had enjoyed (perhaps too much) the elaborate imaginings of surprising the old man at home, reconnecting, drawing him out of his solitude.

  But the man was dead. He probably should have figured it out, but he was never quite the student Rosenblum wanted him to be. He splashed more water on his face, so that if he was crying he could not really tell. Then he took a cigar—his first one in a while—and went outside in the drizzly cold to light it, sheltering his Zippo with his hand. He tried to enjoy the lashing of the cold air as he stood on his porch and looked toward where the sun would soon rise. Across the street sat a prefab house with aluminum siding turning greenish, neighbors he rarely saw. But they were alive. Weren’t they alive? And would it matter to him if they weren’t? Did it matter that Rosenblum was gone if he refused to believe he was gone? Could he still be alive in Andy’s mind?

  Louisa’s ghost just behind him. No, dummy, that’s not how death works.

  Andy walked down the street, the cigar smoke trailing behind him like a dog, ignoring as best he could the drizzle and Louisa’s ghost, trying to conjure up Rosenblum’s ghost instead, so he could yell at him. It wasn’t fair of him to make Andy feel, once again, like an ignorant rube. He drew in on his cigar. Rosenblum was the one who taught him to smoke cigars, in the rose garden behind the math building, where smoking was politely ignored. Rosenblum cutting and lighting the cigar for skinny Andy, Ohio’s prodigal son. Rosenblum was undeniably fat, his large head rimmed by a halo of wiry hair, brown eyes that didn’t twinkle so much as glitter, a sharp nose, lascivious lips. Porcine Hardy to Andy’s nervous Laurel. “Jesus, Andy, try to look like you’re enjoying it.”

  Andy coughed, felt like a fool, tried to look like he was enjoying it. After a while, he did enjoy it, and he and Rosenblum would meet frequently behind the math building whenever the weather was nice, and Rosenblum would expound, and Andy would smoke happily.

  Now, Andy walked down Stanwick Street with his cheap cigar between his thumb and his forefinger, even though the walk couldn’t possibly warm him up. He surveyed the neighbors’ houses, Roberta Hayes who still had Saint Patrick’s Day leprechauns on her chicken coops. Sheila’s Ford in her driveway. Which was odd, because whenever it was rainy Sheila parked in her garage.

  The Ford’s windows were fogged. Why would the windows fog? He crossed the lawn toward her driveway, in a hurry. He wiped a clear space on her car window with the sleeve of his sweatshirt.

  She was in the driver’s seat, eyes closed, mouth halfway open and apparently mumbling something in her sleep. “Sheila,” he said out loud; her lips kept moving but her eyes stayed closed.

  “Sheila!” He banged on her window, and she stopped moving her lips. Her head was tilted back and a thin line of drool leaked from the corner of her mouth. She rubbed her nose, turned her head the other way. She wasn’t wearing a coat. Where had she been at four in the morning with no coat? Why was she sleeping in the car? Should he wake her up? He almost certainly should wake her up. Was Jeremy okay?

  Andy took a step backward. It was Sunday morning. Jeremy was at his dad’s. And if it was odd that she should be sleeping in her car—well, it was odd too to be strolling in nothing but a worn-out sweatshirt in the frigid dawn. Smoking a cigar. Who was he to judge Sheila?

  Still—she looked vulnerable there. She was certainly vulnerable there. But if he knocked on the window again, woke her up, she might have to tell him things she didn’t want him to know. He’d leave her be. He stepped backward, away from her car, then hurried home, dropping his cigar in a frosty puddle as he ran.

  SIXTEEN

  The next day he took the girls—quiescent, agreeable—to school and then headed to the office. The semester was in full strut now, after spring break, and he had his midterm grades to take care of, and a meeting of the student advisory committee, and the accreditation committee, and although the NSF grant wasn’t due until next week he still had to figure out how to make his number
s work. He still wanted a NanoDrop spectrophotometer and perhaps a new ultracentrifuge, although the truth was if he had this new equipment he would have to keep performing experiments, and for some reason the thought of this, of dosing more mice and then dissecting them in order to prove his ever more unprovable theory that alcoholics were resistant to behavioral changes—in order to prove that Oliver McGee should stay in jail—it suddenly seemed more than just pointless. It seemed cruel.

  Should he have knocked on Sheila’s window? Should he have left her there? Yesterday afternoon, on the pretext of checking in about the third-grade science fair, he had knocked on her door. Her hair was damp, and she looked tired but clean. Her house smelled like chicken nuggets. She told him he looked tired, and he agreed that he was. He left then, in a hurry.

  That evening Rachel had made them lunches—tuna salad with curry powder packed into Tupperware in the fridge. Andy took his now to the picnic table by the faculty parking lot even though it wasn’t quite warm enough to start eating outside. The wind tousled his hair as he walked across the old weedy campus, and he wondered what he would do with himself if he didn’t teach here anymore, if he didn’t get tenure. He was still, after all, in the first half of his life. He was still in possession of a thick head of hair. His tie blew eastward. Andy sat down at the picnic table and considered what, exactly, he loved about what he did. Mostly at this point it was the steadiness of it.

  If he left here he could take his daughters to Ohio, his own mother and the Mother of Presidents. Or he could convince his mother to move with him somewhere else, Hawaii, California. He could have that beach house in California. He could find a job doing anything else. He didn’t have to stay here, under the gray windy skies of the New Jersey Pine Barrens. He didn’t have to keep dissecting mice. He wasn’t sure anymore what he wanted to prove.