I started to keep a notebook called How to Survive in the Wild.
18. MY MOTHER NEVER FELL OUT OF LOVE WITH MY FATHER
She’s kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she’s turned life away. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air. Being the only known complex life-form to do this, she should have a species named after her. Once Uncle Julian told me how the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you’re limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.
My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father, and to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world.
19. THE WALL OF DICTIONARIES BETWEEN MY MOTHER AND THE WORLD GETS TALLER EVERY YEAR
Sometimes pages of the dictionaries come loose and gather at her feet, shallon, shallop, shallot, shallow, shalom, sham, shaman, shamble, like the petals of an immense flower. When I was little, I thought that the pages on the floor were words she would never be able to use again, and I tried to tape them back in where they belonged, out of fear that one day she would be left silent.
20. MY MOTHER HAS ONLY BEEN ON TWO DATES SINCE MY FATHER DIED
The first was five years ago, when I was ten, with a fat English editor at one of the houses that publishes her translations. On his left pinky he wore a ring with a family crest that may or may not have been his own. Whenever he was talking about himself, he waved that hand. A conversation occurred in which it was established that my mother and this man, Lyle, had been at Oxford at the same time. On the strength of this coincidence he’d asked her out. Plenty of men have asked my mother out and she always said No. For some reason, this time she agreed. On Saturday night she appeared in the living room with her hair swept up, wearing the red shawl my father bought for her in Peru. “How do I look?” she asked. She looked beautiful, but somehow it didn’t seem fair to wear it. There wasn’t time to say anything because right then Lyle arrived at the front door, panting. He made himself comfortable on the sofa. I asked him if he knew anything about wilderness survival, and he said, “Absolutely.” I asked him if he knew the difference between hemlock and wild carrots, and he gave me a blow-by-blow account of the final moments of an Oxford regatta during which his boat pulled forward to win during the last three seconds. “Holy cow,” I said, in a way that could have been interpreted as sarcastic. Lyle also recalled fond memories of punting on the Cherwell. My mother said she wouldn’t know since she never punted on the Cherwell. I thought, Well I’m not surprised.
After they left, I stayed up watching a TV program about the albatrosses of Antarctica: they can go years without touching the ground, sleep aloft in the sky, drink sea water, cry out the salt, and return year after year to raise babies with the same mate. I must have fallen asleep because when I heard my mother’s key in the lock it was almost one am. A few curls had fallen down around her neck and her mascara was smudged, but when I asked her how it went she said she knew orangutans with whom she could carry on more exciting conversations.
About a year later Bird fractured his wrist trying to leap off our neighbor’s balcony, and the tall, stooped doctor who treated him in the emergency room asked my mother on a date. Maybe it was because he made Bird smile even though his hand was turned at a terrible angle from his wrist, but for the second time since my father died my mother said Yes. The doctor’s name was Henry Lavender, which I thought boded well (Alma Lavender!). When the doorbell rang, Bird streaked down the stairs naked but for his cast, put “That’s Amore” on the record player, and streaked back up. My mother shot down the stairs not wearing her red shawl and pulled up the needle. The record gave out a screech. It spun noiselessly on the turntable while Henry Lavender came in and accepted a glass of cold white wine, and told us about his collection of seashells, many of which he’d dove for himself on trips to the Philippines. I imagined our future together in which he would take us on diving expeditions, the four of us smiling at each other through our masks under the sea. The next morning, I asked my mother how it had gone. She said he was a perfectly nice man. I saw this as a positive thing, but when Henry Lavender called that afternoon my mother was at the supermarket and didn’t call him back. Two days later he made another attempt. This time my mother was going for a walk in the park. I said, “You’re not going to call him back, are you?” and she said, “No.” When Henry Lavender called a third time, she was engrossed in a book of stories, repeatedly exclaiming that the author should be given a Posthumous Nobel. My mother is always giving out Posthumous Nobels. I slipped into the kitchen with the portable. “Dr. Lavender?” I said. And then I told him that I thought my mother actually liked him and even though a normal person would probably be very happy to talk to him and even go out again, I’d known my mother for eleven and a half years and she’d never done anything normal.
21. I THOUGHT IT WAS JUST THAT SHE HADN’T MET THE RIGHT PERSON
The fact that she stayed home all day in her pajamas translating books by mostly dead people didn’t seem to help matters much. Sometimes she would get stuck on a certain sentence for hours and go around like a dog with a bone until she’d shriek out, “I’VE GOT IT!” and scurry off to her desk to dig a hole and bury it. I decided to take things into my own hands. One day a veterinarian named Dr. Tucci came to speak to my sixth-grade class. He had a nice voice and a green parrot named Gordo who perched on his shoulder and stared moodily out the window. He also had an iguana, two ferrets, a box turtle, tree frogs, a duck with a broken wing, and a boa constrictor named Mahatma who’d recently shed his skin. He kept two llamas in his backyard. After class, while everyone else was handling Mahatma, I asked if he was married and when, with a puzzled expression, he said No, I asked for his business card. It had a picture of a monkey on it, and a few kids lost interest in the snake and started demanding business cards, too.
That night I found an attractive snapshot of my mother in a bathing suit to send to Dr. Frank Tucci, along with a typed list of her best qualities. These included HIGH IQ, BIG READER, ATTRACTIVE (SEE PHOTO), FUNNY. Bird looked over the list and after some thought suggested I add OPINIONATED, which was a word I’d taught him, and also STUBBORN. When I said I didn’t think those were her best or even good qualities, Bird said if they were on the list it might make it seem like they were good, and then if Dr. Tucci agreed to meet her he wouldn’t be put off. This seemed like a fair argument at the time so I added OPINIONATED and STUBBORN. At the bottom I wrote our telephone number. Then I mailed it.
A week passed and he didn’t call. Three days went by and I wondered if maybe I shouldn’t have written OPINIONATED and STUBBORN.
The next day the telephone rang and I heard my mother say, “Frank who?” There was a long silence. “Excuse me?” Another silence. Then she started laughing hysterically. She got off the phone and came to my room. “What was that all about?” I asked innocently. “What was what all about?” my mother asked even more innocently. “The person who just called,” I said. “Oh, that,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind, I arranged a double date, me and the snake charmer and you and Herman Cooper.”
Herman Cooper was an eighth-grade nightmare who lived on our block, called everyone Penis, and hooted at the huge balls on our neighbor’s dog.
“I’d rather lick the sidewalk,” I said.
22. THAT YEAR I WORE MY FATHER’S SWEATER FOR FORTY-TWO DAYS STRAIGHT
On the twelfth day I passed Sharon Newman and her friends in the hall. “WHAT’S UP WITH THAT DISGUSTING SWEATER?” she said. Go eat some hemlock, I thought, and decided to wear Dad’s sweater for the rest of my life. I made it almost to the end of the school year. It was alpaca wool, and by the middle of May it was unbearable. My mother thou
ght it was belated grieving. But I wasn’t trying to set any records. I just liked the way it felt.
23. MY MOTHER KEEPS A PHOTOGRAPH OF MY FATHER ON THE WALL NEXT TO HER DESK
Once or twice I passed her door and heard her talking aloud to it. My mother is lonely even when we’re around her, but sometimes my stomach hurts when I think about what will happen to her when I grow up and go away to start the rest of my life. Other times I imagine I’ll never be able to leave at all.
24. ALL THE FRIENDS I EVER HAD ARE GONE
On my fourteenth birthday, Bird woke me up by jumping on my bed and singing “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” He gave me a melted Hershey’s bar and a red woolen hat that he took from the Lost and Found. I picked a curly blond hair off it and wore it around the rest of the day. My mother gave me an anorak tested by Tenzing Norgay, the Sherpa who climbed Mt. Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary, and also an old leather pilot’s hat like the kind worn by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who is a hero of mine. My father read me The Little Prince when I was six, and told about how Saint-Ex was a great pilot who risked his life to open mail routes to remote places. In the end he was shot down by a German fighter, and he and his plane were lost forever in the Mediterranean Sea.
Along with the jacket and the pilot’s hat, my mother also gave me a book by someone named Daniel Eldridge who she said would deserve a Nobel if they gave them to paleontologists. “Is he dead?” I asked. “Why do you ask?” “No reason,” I said. Bird asked what a paleontologist was and Mom said that if he took a complete, illustrated guide to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shred it into a hundred pieces, cast them into the wind from the museum’s steps, let a few weeks pass, went back and scoured Fifth Avenue and Central Park for as many surviving scraps as he could find, then tried to reconstruct the history of painting, including schools, styles, genres, and names of painters from his scraps, that would be like being a paleontologist. The only difference is that paleontologists study fossils in order to figure out the origin and evolution of life. Every fourteen-year-old should know something about where she comes from, my mother said. It wouldn’t do to go around without the faintest clue of how it all began. Then, very quickly, as if it weren’t the point of everything, she said the book had belonged to Dad. Bird hurried over and touched the cover.
It was called Life as We Don’t Know It. On the back cover was a picture of Eldridge. He had dark eyes with thick lashes and a beard, and was holding up a fossil of a scary-looking fish. Underneath it said he was a professor at Columbia. That night I started to read it. I thought Dad might have written some notes in the margins, but he hadn’t. The only sign of him was his name on the inside cover. The book was about how Eldridge and some other scientists had gone down to the bottom of the ocean in a submersible and discovered hydrothermal vents at the places where tectonic plates met, which spewed mineral-rich gases reaching up to 700 degrees. Until that point, scientists thought the ocean floor was a wasteland with little or no life. But what Eldridge and his colleagues observed in the headlights of their submersible were hundreds of organisms never before seen by human eyes—a whole ecosystem that they realized was very, very old. They called it the dark biosphere. There were a lot of hydrothermal vents down there, and pretty soon they figured out that there were microorganisms living on the rock around the vents in temperatures hot enough to melt lead. When they brought some of the organisms to the surface, they smelled of rotten eggs. They realized that these strange organisms were subsisting on the hydrogen sulfide spewed from the vents, and breathing out sulfur the way plants on land produce oxygen. According to Dr. Eldridge’s book, what they had found was no less than a window onto the chemical pathways that billions of years ago led to the dawn of evolution.
The idea of evolution is so beautiful and sad. Since the earliest life on earth, there have been somewhere between five and fifty billion species, only five to fifty million of which are alive today. So, ninety-nine percent of all the species that have ever lived on earth are extinct.
25. MY BROTHER, THE MESSIAH
That night while I was reading, Bird came into my room and climbed into bed with me. At eleven and a half, he was small for his age. He pressed his little cold feet into my leg. “Tell me something about Dad,” he whispered. “You forgot to cut your toenails,” I said. He kneaded the balls of his feet into my calf. “Please?” he begged. I tried to think, and because I couldn’t remember anything I hadn’t already told him a hundred times, I made up something. “He liked to rock-climb,” I said. “He was a good climber. Once he climbed up a rock that was, like, two hundred feet tall. Somewhere in the Negev, I think.” Bird breathed his hot breath on my neck. “Masada?” he asked. “Could be,” I said. “He just liked it. It was a hobby,” I said. “Did he like to dance?” Bird asked. I had no idea if he liked to dance, but I said, “He loved it. He could even do the tango. He learned it in Buenos Aires. He and Mom danced all the time. He’d move the coffee table against the wall and use the whole room. He used to lift her and dip her and sing in her ear.” “Was I there?” “Sure you were,” I said. “He used to throw you up in the air and catch you.” “How’d he know he wouldn’t drop me?” “He just knew.” “What did he call me?” “Lots of things. Buddy, Little Guy, Punch.” I was making it up as I went. Bird looked unimpressed. “Judah the Maccabee,” I said. “Plain Maccabee. Mac.” “What’s the thing he called me the most?” “I guess it was Emmanuel.” I pretended to think. “No, wait. It was Manny. He used to call you Manny.” “Manny,” Bird said, testing it out. He cuddled closer. “I want to tell you a secret,” he whispered. “Because it’s your birthday.” “What?” “First you have to promise to believe me.” “OK.” “Say ‘I promise.’ ” “I promise.” He took a deep breath. “I think I might be a lamed vovnik.” “A what?” “One of the lamed vovniks,” he whispered. “The thirty-six holy people.” “What thirty-six holy people?” “The ones that the existence of the world depends on.” “Oh, those. Don’t be—” “You promised,” Bird said. I didn’t say anything. “There are always thirty-six at any time,” he whispered. “No one knows who they are. Only their prayers reach God’s ear. That’s what Mr. Goldstein says.” “And you think you might be one of them,” I said. “What else does Mr. Goldstein say?” “He says that when the Messiah comes, he’s going to be one of the lamed vovniks. In every generation there’s one person who has the potential to be the Messiah. Maybe he lives up to it, or maybe he doesn’t. Maybe the world is ready for him, or maybe it isn’t. That’s all.” I lay in the dark trying to think of the right thing to say. My stomach began to hurt.
26. THE SITUATION VERGED ON CRITICAL
The next Saturday I put Life as We Don’t Know It into my backpack and took the subway up to Columbia University. I wandered around the campus for forty-five minutes until I found Eldridge’s office in the Earth Sciences building. When I got there the secretary eating take-out said Dr. Eldridge wasn’t around. I said I would wait, and he said maybe I should come back another time since Dr. Eldridge wouldn’t be in for a few hours. I told him I didn’t mind. He went back to his food. While I waited, I read one issue of Fossil magazine. Then I asked the secretary, who was laughing out loud about something on his computer, if he thought Dr. Eldridge would be back soon. He stopped laughing and looked at me like I’d just ruined the most important moment of his life. I went back to my seat and read one issue of Paleontologist Today.
I got hungry, so I went down the hall and got a package of Devil Dogs from a vending machine. Then I fell asleep. When I woke up the secretary was gone. The door of Eldridge’s office was open, and the lights were on. Inside, a very old man with white hair was standing next to a filing cabinet under a poster that said: HENCE WITHOUT PARENTS, BY SPONTANEOUS BIRTH, RISE HE FIRST SPECKS OF ANIMATED EARTH—ERASMUS DARWIN.
“Well to be honest I hadn’t thought of that option,” the old man said into the phone. “I doubt he’d even want to apply. Anyway, I think we already have our man. I’ll have to talk to the dep
artment, but let’s just say things are looking good.” He saw me standing at the door and made a gesture that he’d be off in a moment. I was about to say it was OK, I was waiting for Dr. Eldridge, but he turned his back and gazed out the window. “Good, glad to hear it. I better run. Right, then. All the best. ’Bye now.” He turned to me. “Terribly sorry,” he said. “What can I help you with?” I scratched my arm and noticed the dirt under my fingernails. “You’re not Dr. Eldridge are you?” I asked. “I am,” he said. My heart sank. Thirty years must have passed since the photograph on the book was taken. I didn’t have to think for very long to know that he couldn’t help me with the thing I had come about, because even if he deserved a Nobel for being the greatest living paleontologist, he also deserved one for being the oldest.
I didn’t know what to say. “I read your book,” I managed, “and I’m thinking of becoming a paleontologist.” He said: “Well don’t sound so disappointed.”
27. ONE THING I AM NEVER GOING TO DO WHEN I GROW UP
Is fall in love, drop out of college, learn to subsist on water and air, have a species named after me, and ruin my life. When I was little my mother used to get a certain look in her eyes and say, “One day you’re going to fall in love.” I wanted to say, but never said: Not in a million years.
The only boy I’d ever kissed was Misha Shklovsky. His cousin taught him in Russia, where he lived before he moved to Brooklyn, and he taught me. “Not so much tongue,” was all he said.
28. A HUNDRED THINGS CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE; A LETTER IS ONE
Five months passed and I’d almost given up on finding someone to make my mother happy. Then it happened: in the middle of last February a letter arrived, typed on blue airmail paper and postmarked from Venice, forwarded to my mother from her publisher. Bird saw it first, and brought it to Mom to ask if he could have the stamps. We were all in the kitchen. She opened it and read it standing up. Then she read it a second time, sitting down. “This is amazing,” she said. “What?” I asked. “Someone wrote to me about The History of Love. The book Dad and I named you after.” She read the letter aloud to us.