I’ve thrown my new grad students in the deep end of the pool—preparation, of course, for throwing them in the ocean—and I have to make sure they aren’t drowning.
“Uh,” says Gary as I look over at them. “Hi, Jay. I—uh—we have, uh, a homework set due in stat mech and it’s pretty complex, so, uh—”
“So you have a half-hour to talk about how the experiment went,” I say, pulling up a chair. I straddle it backward.
“Um.” Soo Yin looks at Gary. Gary looks at Soo Yin. “So… Um, maybe if we talk tomorrow…?”
“Then you’ll be able to stay up all night to redo the experiment and pretend you did it right the first time?”
Soo Yin exhales and looks away.
“People.” I fold my arms. “Don’t lie to me. You’re really bad at it. This is like walking into a kitchen with a puppy and finding trash all over the floor. ‘Who, me?’ doesn’t work.”
“We’re…um, not exactly sure what we did wrong. But we’ll figure it out.” Gary is as earnest as my hypothetical puppy.
“Sure. Of course you will.” I gesture to the whiteboard. “Because we’re going to do a post mortem right now.”
Soo Yin winces.
“Step one: stop feeling self-conscious about things not working. You want a PhD? Well, guess what. You’re going to be issued a wall, with instructions to beat your head against it for a few years. If you’re lucky, the wall will crack, and you’ll write about the structural integrity of walls. If you’re unlucky, your head will break, and you’ll write about the structural integrity of heads. Either way, we have to talk about failure. If you can’t get over your ego and just talk about what you did and what happened, this will take four times as long. You failed. Get used to it. Some of the biggest scientific breakthroughs came about because someone failed and figured out why. Don’t worry about failing. Worry about failing wrongly.”
Soo Yin nods, and slowly, they start explaining how they set up the ion trap. I listen. I nod. I tell them to stop and check when they hesitate.
I need a post mortem for myself. I need to figure out precisely how I fucked up so badly with Em—and fuck up I did.
I get up at one point to circle something on the whiteboard. I knew I was wrong even before now. But how did I end up so wrong?
As I listen to Soo Yin and Gary, I start making a list of mental reasons. I was mistaken; that’s all. Everyone makes mistakes, right? And it’s not like she was nice to me in response. It’s not all my fault. It was a series of snide remarks and shitty blunders on both sides, and we fucked up in equal measure.
That characterization doesn’t sit well. I break it down over dinner—alone—later that night. I assumed Maria didn’t know math because she was hot and dressed well. Worse—I assumed she was a judgy bitch because of the same. Was she perfect? No. But I started it, I continued it, and I made only a half-hearted effort to apologize. This situation may not be all my fault, but I’m lying if I pretend it’s less than about ninety-five percent.
This realization takes a few days to sink in, for me to really understand it. I wasn’t just wrong or mistaken. I apparently have the notion, rooted deep in my subconscious, that women who look nice aren’t real.
I know I’m coming close to the truth because it makes me squirmy. Even after I realized Em had a point, I had to fight to remember it.
If she has time to spend on her clothes…
Of course she video chats…
If she didn’t want to be judged on her appearance…
I’m four scientific generations into quantum mechanics. Even Einstein found quantum physics too strange for his tastes. He couldn’t get his head around basic tenets of the discipline that he called “spooky action at a distance” or “God playing dice.” I’m two scientific generations removed from Eric Llewellyn, who thinks “groovy, dude” is what people my age say.
Even Einstein messed up. He knew how the world worked, and when it didn’t fit his view, he dug his heels in. He became the ninety-year-old who couldn’t figure out the remote on the VCR.
The lesson I drew from this when I was young was that even brilliant minds can stall out if they let their brain get stuck on the way they think the universe works instead of examining the actual evidence. “Bad data; reject” is how scientists miss the existence of quarks.
The actual evidence is that if I can’t wrap my mind around my own failure, I’m fucked as a scientist. If I can’t wrap my mind around this, I don’t know what I’ll say if Em—if Maria—ever decides she wants to talk to me again.
That thought, on day four after discovering that Em is Maria, is what jars me loose from my moorings.
All this time, I’ve been trying to figure out how to explain myself to Maria. How to come up with an explanation for my actions that won’t be too incriminating. I’ve been trying to figure out how to save myself. To avoid just a little bit of blame.
But come on.
She came home. There was trash everywhere. And I was the puppy sitting in front of her, panting eagerly. Em’s not fucking stupid. She knows what the explanation is.
The explanation is that she was right in front of me the whole time and I didn’t see her. “I don’t think women are stupid per se; I reserve that judgment only for the women that engage in overt displays of socially constructed femininity” is an inherently wrong belief. It wasn’t a one-time mistake or an accident that I applied it to her.
It was a fundamental flaw.
All this time, I’ve been wondering if she’ll be able to get over what I did.
Wrong question. What I need to know is this: Will I?
* * *
On my way home that night, I drop into a shop. Behind the cones of incense and the specialty cards, there’s a display of handmade paper—delicate pieces with texture and fibers you can feel, sold by the sheet for almost as much money as an entire ream would cost from an office superstore.
I pick out three sheets of light brown paper and a matching envelope.
I go home.
I don’t message. I don’t email. I don’t call. All of those feel invasive. They have read receipts and time stamps. None of them feel right at the moment.
No; there’s only one thing that seems to fit.
I write Em a letter.
* * *
MARIA
* * *
There are some times when soup is not enough. For those times, I have my grandmother. After nursing complicated, broken feelings for days on end, disappearing for the weekend seems like a better and better idea.
Just getting on the BART makes me feel better, like I’m going some place where the revelations of the last week can’t touch me. A train ride and a bus transfer later, and I’m walking up to her apartment.
When I tell people that Nana is a Catholic Latina, they tend to take a certain view of her. They imagine her speaking only Spanish, answering to abuela, wearing a cross around her neck and spending her weekends at mass praying her Rosary. They also imagine her as an infinite source of tamales.
The truth is…not like that. Yes to the cross. Yes to mass on the weekends, and yes to the Rosary. But my dad’s mother was always abuela instead, and as to everything else? My grandparents got a divorce when she was in her twenties, and that was long enough ago that it still had a whiff of scandal.
Nana had been a stay-at-home mother up until that moment. She finished an undergraduate degree after the divorce was final and went to law school. Now she works for the City Attorney of San Francisco, and when I say she works, she works.
Standing in the hallway outside, I get a whiff that brings me back to my high school years—a hint of the powdery stuff that she sprinkles on her carpets to make them smell rain forest fresh, or whatever manufactured scent this is.
I don’t knock. She doesn’t expect me to, and if she’s working, she won’t appreciate the interruption. I get out my keys, and the door opens to reveal a maze of white cardboard evidence boxes.
“Nana?”
&nb
sp; No answer, but her heels are right by the door, so she’s here. I follow the trail she’s left behind—nylon stockings, colorful silk scarf, pieces of mail—until I find her on the couch. She’s still wearing the business casual outfit she wore to the office. She has a legal pad and a voice recorder—she’s old enough that she hasn’t adapted to the ubiquity of computers—and a white cardboard box in front of her. I could chart my high-school years by the case names on the boxes.
She doesn’t notice me entering. She doesn’t see me sorting the mail, tossing the junk, setting aside the power bill that she won’t put on Autopay because she doesn’t trust bank computers. She’s skimming, making notes, and occasionally speaking into her recorder. The only way that she’s let technology change her is that she now uses a tiny MP3 recorder to take dictation. She only switched to that because she stopped being able to buy cassette tapes in the grocery store.
I know better than to interrupt her when she’s busy. Instead, I go to the fridge and open it.
Moldy cheese. A withered apple. A round plastic tub that proclaims that it can’t believe it’s not butter. A carton of eggs. I open the latter; a single brown egg sits forlornly inside. I peek in the plastic tub, because I, too, do not believe it’s butter. I am correct. It holds two pieces of gross, dry pizza.
In other words, Nana has a case that is going to trial, and she hasn’t paid attention to anything around her for weeks.
She taps her recorder again. “Affidavit of David Caftan, white. File thirty-seven, box six. Pertinent facts: Contacted Infinity Housing on May 11, 2015, regarding the apartment listed in the paper. Was told the apartment was available, and Infinity made an appointment to show him the place.” She will be at this forever.
I slip back out the door and head down the street. If this case goes like her cases usually do, she’s going to live on apples and cheese, eaten hastily only when she remembers to look up from her work. I’ve tried to get her to take breaks for meals, but she even forgets about microwavable dinners.
It’s been a little less than four years since I left for college, but in that short space of time, Nana’s neighborhood has changed. The painted, ever-changing mural that used to face her building has been torn down and replaced with a glass-walled organic ice cream shop. The bodega down the street has turned into an upscale market.
When I enter, the cashier’s eyes follow me carefully. Some blond scruffy guy wearing a hoodie advertising some app I’ve never heard of frowns at me as I consider the varied cheese selection, as if I’m the one out of place in the neighborhood where I went to high school.
The apples are all organic, and the bread bears the logo of some fancy bakery. I shake my head and get them anyway. I add a few things for dinner tonight, and we’re set.
I return to my grandmother’s apartment, put the groceries away, set the table, and, on further contemplation, start cleaning the bathroom.
When the light starts to fade, I turn on the light in the living room. She still doesn’t seem to notice that I’ve arrived.
Nana’s ability to concentrate is incredible. There’s a reason she’s one of the best trial attorneys in her office. She can shut out everything except her work for weeks on end. The sofa has a permanent indentation where she sits and works. She’s one of the leading experts on fair housing law. From what I’ve been reading in the papers, she’s about to bring one of the city’s largest landlords to trial.
She puts the folder she’s working on back in the box, reaches for the next, realizes she’s come to the end of the box, and finally looks up.
“Oh.” She stretches and blinks, as if the bright light of reality is blinding. “Maria. What time is it?”
“Seven thirty-six.”
“You’ve been here an hour already?”
More like an hour and a half at this point.
“One day,” I tell her, “someone is going to break into your apartment and steal everything. You’ll be home, but you won’t even notice they’re here.”
She smiles. “As long as they don’t take my notes, I really don’t care. And on the bright side, I won’t get shot confronting them.”
“I got dinner.”
She frowns and peers in the direction of the kitchen over the edge of her reading glasses. “That looks nice. Did I have chicken in the house?”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I didn’t trust anything in the fridge. It was sketchy as hell.”
“You didn’t have to do that.”
I don’t say anything to that. The truth is, she took me in when I most needed her. Being useful is the least I can do after that.
“You went shopping.” She stands up, her eyes narrowing. “Maria, you’re a college student. You shouldn’t be buying me groceries. That is exactly backward.”
“It’s nothing.”
It is, really. The truth is, at this point, the ads and affiliate payments from my blog generate a little over a thousand dollars every month. Add in the fact that Blake Reynolds owns the house where I live and refuses to accept rent. I don’t make enough to repay student loans or manage all the other adult bills I might otherwise have to deal with. But I still feel rich as hell.
She glares at me. “How much did you spend?”
“Thirty dollars.”
“I’ll pay you back.” She glances around the living room. I hadn’t gotten to the living room yet. It’s littered with paper, boxes of evidence, a suit jacket, three blouses still in plastic dry cleaning, a take-out bag from a local Chinese restaurant, used wooden chopsticks…
“I’ll pay you back,” she amends, “when I find my purse.”
“You mean you’ll pay me back when pigs fly.”
She sticks her tongue out at me, glances at the next box of evidence, and then stands.
“Oooh.” She sets her hand on her stomach.
“Are you okay?”
She winces. “Fine. I just think I was sitting too long.”
My grandmother is usually an excellent conversationalist. She’s one of those people who can talk intelligently about everything. She can ask insightful, interesting questions about anything anyone can throw at her. She’s bright, funny, and intelligent…except when she’s about to go to trial. Then, her brain gets so crammed with the record from whatever case she’s working on that there’s no space for anything else. She sits at the table, in front of the plate I’ve made for her, and stares blankly at the setting as if she’s forgotten what a fork is for.
“So. When does trial start?”
“Tuesday.” She’s still distracted. “I’m going to have nine days of witnesses.” Her hand goes again to her abdomen. I translate this into lay person terms. With interruptions and bar conferences, with presentations from the other side, opening and closing arguments, drafting instructions to the jury… I can expect Nana to be completely out of commission for almost a month.
“Expecting anything good to come out at trial?”
“I don’t expect. I know.” She taps her fork against her plate. “And yes, it will all come out about as I expect. There are always a few surprises, but it’s not television. I can’t tell you anything else about it.”
I understand that. She’s scrupulous about her ethical duties. She’ll tell me all about cases after they’ve happened and everything becomes public; before trial, though, she just stares straight ahead like she’s a zombie.
“You should eat,” I point out.
She jumps and blinks, and then carefully takes a bite of the chicken that I have so carefully obtained from the market.
“I was thinking,” she says slowly.
“Yes?”
“You’re graduating in…” Doing math overtaxes her current brain capacity.
“Four months,” I supply.
“Four months.” She nods. “I can arrange things, I think. Take a vacation. I have…a lot of vacation days saved up. We should do something to celebrate.”
I’m not sure if we’re celebrating my graduation or my impending desce
nt into the drudgery of full-time work.
“What do you want to do?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. Go somewhere?” She picks up a roll and rips a piece off. “Somewhere that has never heard of section 3604. You know. I’ll do a brain dump or something.”
“That’s most of the world outside a courtroom.”
“Then let’s not go to a courtroom,” she says. “You decide.”
I look over at her. She appears to be serious. “Antarctica.”
“Sure.”
“It’ll be winter there that time of year,” I point out.
“Mittens,” she says distractedly.
“Norway,” I counter. “Everyone there is white. They don’t have to worry about racial discrimination in housing rentals.”
She smiles hopefully at nothing across the room. “Perfect. Although at the rate things are going, San Francisco will turn into entirely on-demand short-term housing in three years anyway. Just in time for me to retire.”
I sigh and set a reminder on my phone to ask her whether she actually means this vacation talk when she’s finished with her trial. She’s probably serious about the vacation; she definitely would not want me to decide it all on my own. She is a woman of decided opinions. Or rather, she will have decided opinions. In a few weeks, when the trial is over.
I look over at her. She’s eaten half her roll, a few bites of chicken, and no salad. She’s already looking yearningly at the next box back in the room.
“I’ll go get your box if you finish what’s on your plate,” I tell her.
Nana blinks and looks over at me. “Oh.” She considers this. Her eyes slip back to the box, and then she shakes her head. “No, no. I’m being a bad grandmother. I should ask you what’s going on in your life. Have you decided on a job yet after graduation? Are you seeing anyone?” She frowns. “I don’t think I know the answer to any of these questions.”
I take her hand. “You could never be a bad grandmother,” I say. “Never, ever.”