Hold Me

  But the demographics of university professorship are skewed against anything more than a mild acquaintance. Aging baby boomers occupy most of the tenured slots, and open faculty lines have a half-life close to Fermium-252. I’m the youngest professor by far in an aging department, and I feel it.

  We’re an odd social mix. Half of my colleagues are old enough that the concept of a faculty wife was a part of the reality they grew up with. The generation that follows is mostly married to each other or other scientists who work up the hill. Their worst nightmare is what they call the nearly-insoluble two-body problem—the difficulty of finding two academic jobs in the same geographic location.

  Then there’s my generation. Half my friends have cobbled together postdoc after postdoc, or collected adjunct positions into some shambling sense of security. Never mind finding two jobs in the same place; I know people, good people, smart people, people with PhDs from Harvard, who would kill for one job with health insurance.

  I’m the lucky one, the one that gets held up as the shiny example of you, too, could achieve this. Except we all know that we can’t. The jobs just don’t exist.

  You, too, can win the right to slowly lose touch with your friends. To gradually watch your life undergo an order-to-disorder transition while you scramble to keep on top of a shifting pile of sand.

  Sometimes I think about my friend Lillian who went to work for industry. She leaves her job at Merck at five every night. Lucky bastard.

  Not that working outside academia is any guarantee of a reasonable schedule. I have only to look at my own mother to see how industry work can turn out.

  I am the lucky one. I know that. I’m lucky, and I’ll stay lucky as long as I don’t stop moving.

  I shake my head. I don’t have time for maudlin thoughts or self-comparisons.

  My phone dings, and I turn it over.

  Quick question, Em says. Do you know anything about carcinogens, or should I ping someone else?

  I know almost nothing about carcinogens. Still, I find myself replying. Chemical, radiation, or something else?

  I’m looking for a chemical the government can put in the water, she says. Maybe a carcinogen. Maybe a mutagen. It feels kinda fake to just make up something like 1,3-trans-dimethyl-cyclohexane. If I do, someone will grab the MSDS and make me look like an idiot.

  Yeah. Once we get into materials safety data sheets, we’re over my head. Not my thing, I tell her. You need a chemist.

  But I’m reluctant to jump back into work. Maybe because I’m thinking of her. Maybe because the encounter with Eric left me feeling unmoored from my work. I know, quite literally, a hundred people who have the capability to be here, and some days, I’m still not sure why it’s me instead.

  So I add this: Did you pull 1,3-trans-dimethyl-cyclohexane out of a hat, or does it have some special meaning?

  Inside joke, she shoots back. I have a tattoo of 1,3-trans-dimethyl-cyclohexane. It started because—oh shit, sorry, can’t talk. I have a presentation to give in an hour. Dammit.

  Em and I rarely talk about our day jobs. I suspect she’s somewhere in industry. She has to have figured that I’m in academia.

  You ready?

  No, she responds a few moments later. I can’t find my fuck-off shoes.

  I blink at my phone.

  You got me, I write, I know what fuck-me shoes are. What are fuck-off shoes?

  My mind is already coming up with options: combat boots, maybe. Or thick-soled steel-toed trainers.

  What she writes is this: Er, so. I make shoes.

  I wasn’t expecting that.

  Or, I mean, I decorate them. I buy old designer shoes at thrift stores and bling them up. Then I classify them by mood. Fuck-off shoes are the same concept as fuck-me shoes, but with one subtle distinction. Fuck-off shoes are kind of a combination “you wish you could get with this” + “look what I am, I’m not backing down” + “I’m killing it and you can’t stop me.”

  Not steel-toed trainers, then.

  There’s this guy I’ve known for a couple of years, she continues, and he hates me. Thinks I’m a freak and I do not belong. And we keep crossing paths. So I’m wearing the shoes to my presentation just for him.

  Lucky guy.

  I don’t want to examine that thought as it drifts through my head, and so I don’t.

  Found them! Wanna see?

  Sure, I say before I think better of it.

  A minute later, she sends me a picture. My idle curiosity… Holy shit. Everything goes up in flames. I’m not an expert in women’s shoes. I wouldn’t know one designer from another.

  Oh look, those are shoes, is the extent of my usual commentary. Right now, all I can think is this: Holy Shit. Those are shoes.

  Her shoes are arranged on a light hardwood floor. The cherry-red leather gleams in some warm overhead light. I can almost imagine her reflection in the surface. Maybe that dark blob is her phone.

  Nothing says “fuck off” quite like red, strappy stilettos with three-inch heels. Twin stylized gold butterflies are wired to each buckle, and Swarovski crystals are affixed to the straps. It’s not enough bling to make them gaudy. Instead, it’s enough to glitter, to draw attention to their obvious femininity.

  These are her take-no-prisoners shoes? No kidding. I would surrender. Gladly.

  My mental image of Em always placed her firmly on the shy spectrum. I’ve imagined her with long, untamable hair that was the bane of her existence.

  I know enough about the issues of women in STEM to be able to imagine exactly why some asshole man would think she was a freak who didn’t belong. I doubt she gets enough credit for her intelligence where she works. Vithika told me that she started talking to me because I didn’t interrupt her, and if there’s a shittier indictment of our profession, I don’t know it.

  I can imagine Em taking off her usual sneakers and replacing them with those heels. They would be her quiet way of saying, I’m a woman, and you can’t ignore me. Fuck you; I do so belong.

  I swallow hard. I can’t take my eyes off her shoes.

  I know exactly why I like Em—and I’m all too aware how tame the word like is for how I feel. She’s funny, clever, and smart.

  I’ve lived in Berkeley for three years. No matter how hard I work, no matter how good a job I do at staying in touch with distant friends, deep down I’m hungry for human contact. I should have held the line here. Drawn firmer boundaries. Not let this slip.

  Because right now? I want to know more. I want to see Em in those shoes.

  Fuck me.

  She’s written more. In some way, my fuck-off shoes are about everything everyone ever told me. I wear them to remind myself that everyone who said that people like me couldn’t wear shoes like this was wrong. I am feminine. I am pretty. I can wear heels, and I don’t care if it makes me 6’2”. It’s a fuck off to the voices I heard all my childhood, telling me that I couldn’t.

  I’ve never had so clear a picture of Em as a child. My mental image rearranges slightly. She’s no longer short; she’s tall, gawky, and ungainly. Teased by everyone around her. She had to dig deep inside herself for a validation that nobody gave her, and she found it anyway. She trots it out daily, because she never gets enough credit from the people around her.

  Yep, I write slowly. Those sure are shoes.

  I make myself face the truth. I like Em. I like her way too much. I haven’t met her. I don’t know her name. I’ve never seen her picture.

  And I’m the lucky one, the one with the one-in-a-million opportunity that my best friends would kill to have. I’m the one with something to prove, and dammit, I am going to prove it.

  Even if it means not asking more about the shoes.

  Definitely shoes, I say again. And because I can’t help myself, I add this: Good luck on your presentation.

  I go back to my work, but those shoes linger in my mind for far too long.

  5

  JAY

  October

  The moment I see who
’s calling, my heart sinks. I know why she’s calling. I know what she wants. And I realize that I’ve fucked up. Again.

  I pick up. “Hi, Mom.”

  “Jay, you told me to call you in early October. Here we are.”

  Crap.

  It sounds terrible to say that I forget about my parents. I never really forget about my parents. Every time I think about them, I feel a tinge of guilt.

  Which is why I tend to put my parents out of my mind as long as I can. They live an hour away when the traffic’s good, which means it’s more like three hours most of the time.

  It’s October, and we haven’t seen each other since February.

  “So,” my mother says, “we were saving this weekend for you to visit. How are things looking for you?”

  To the uninitiated, my mother’s accent is hard to place. She was born in Thailand, moved to Hong Kong when she was nine, got her undergraduate degree from Oxford, a master’s from Stanford, and has worked at Cyclone Technologies ever since, a job that has taken her around the globe.

  She sounds like a linear combination of British and American, with a liberal dose of swearing that is all her own.

  Looking at my calendar is a total pretense. She can’t see me do it, and I already know what it will show.

  “So. Um. About this weekend. It’s not great. What about next?”

  “Mmm.” She doesn’t sound terribly disappointed. “Next weekend, I’m traveling. We’re having one of our Cyclone software summits, and I promised our localization support in London I’d be with them this time around.”

  In most families, landing a tenure-track position at a research one university would be considered a signal success. For me? Not so much. My mom’s the baby of her family. She’s also the vice president of software engineering at Cyclone. My aunts and uncles—a swarm of nine, all related, but not really aunts or uncles the way Americans would mean those words—range from executives in Singapore to cutting-edge doctors in France. There’s Lung Wat, who does large-scale art installations where he covers skyscrapers in fabric.

  In that company, I don’t even make the average mark. My cousins and I—all nineteen of us—used to complain in our private Facebook group about the impossible bar our parents had set. Back when we had time.

  “The week after that?” she asks hopefully.

  “Uh.” I do have to look at my calendar now. “Also…not great.”

  There’s a long pause before she speaks again. “After that, things get a little hairy on our end. My fault; I was going to remind you before now, but I never see you on c-chat anymore.”

  C-chat is the messaging system built into all Cyclone computers. I look at the computer in front of me and feel another pang of guilt. “That’s because I don’t have Cyclone machines at work.”

  Once, Mom wouldn’t have accepted so transparent an excuse. Aren’t you in charge of purchasing for your lab? she’d grumble. Or, once she figured out the problem: What do you mean, your laser doesn’t have a driver for Cyclone systems? Your cousin Philippe wrote his own device driver for his PCR machine, and he doesn’t have half your experience.

  Instead she’s quiet for a moment. “Ah. I should have realized. I wasn’t calling to play Cyclone salesperson anyway. Let’s go back to this weekend. What about a few hours? Your father and I could come up.”

  I exhale slowly. “Mom, I picked up two graduate students this year, and I already have a theory of quantum computation session set up for Saturday. I’m taking them out after.”

  Once she would have said something about that. You’re taking out your graduate students instead of seeing your own parents?

  Now…

  She clicks her tongue. “Brunch Sunday? Early Sunday, if you can.”

  “I’ve got a call with Vithika.”

  She doesn’t say anything, but I still feel the need to explain why a call with my collaborator takes precedence over brunch with my parents.

  “She lives in Australia. It really is the only time our schedules overlap for three weeks—her husband is at a conference, and so she has the kids in the evening—and we have to go over the final revisions on our paper.”

  “It’s okay,” she says.

  These days, it’s always okay.

  “It’s just, your father’s book comes out after that, and he’ll be on tour. You know how it is.”

  I do.

  My father writes literary fiction. Every few years, he produces a book to moderate critical acclaim.

  I haven’t read his last book. Or the book before it. Or… Or any book of his at all, not since I was nineteen. I’m too chicken to admit that I’m afraid of what I’ll find.

  I look upward. “I’m sorry. We’ll work something out when Dad gets back, okay? When we all have some time.”

  My mother is tiny and filled with energy. She’s always fidgeting, except when she’s upset. I can imagine her now, momentarily still.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. And I am.

  She brushes me off. “Not your fault. My schedule was hell until we got the beta out, and you can’t help that your summer is all conferences. Now it’s your dad’s turn. Don’t worry; we’ll figure it out.”

  It is my fault. When we touched base frantically in June—me preparing a poster for a conference in Spain, Mom going over her schedule for the Cyclone Developer’s Conference—we’d agreed to get together in October.

  It is entirely my fault, and it doesn’t matter that she doesn’t blame me. The thing about being a perfectionist workaholic is that you bring your own guilt with you.

  “Fine,” she says again. “Maybe later this month, then. But since I have you now, set aside December fifth, okay? Don’t forget that Saints and Dinosaurs is that weekend.”

  Saints and Dinosaurs is a party my mom throws for the Cyclone employees who work under her. It has also become my parents’ excuse to have something to occupy themselves during that time of year.

  I shut my eyes. “Of course. I’ll come down. It might not be right at the start of the shindig, but I’ll spend the night. We can talk in the morning.”

  “Good. Now talk to your dad. Here.”

  I hear the rustle of them handing off the phone.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “Jay.” My dad’s voice is deep and entirely unlike my mother’s—more California surfer than anything else.

  I fumble for a topic of conversation—any topic. “How’s the new book going? Are you going to finish it before your tour?”

  He makes a little sound in his throat—a weird, growling noise. “Never ask that question. I think I killed the wrong person. The book is terrible. Everything is terrible.”

  I almost smile. My father writes serious books that he does not take seriously.

  “Maybe you could kill two people,” I suggest mildly. “Salvage what you have.”

  “That would mess with my authorial signature. One person dying is a tragedy. Two? That’s bordering on thriller territory. It would be off-brand.”

  “Ha.” I smile despite myself.

  “Did you finish your grant proposal for DARPA?”

  “Last night. Seven whole hours early.”

  “My punctual son,” he says drily. “Wherever did you get that skill?”

  “Try being on time. Once. You might like it.”

  “No good. My editor would die of shock, and we have an excellent working relationship. It would be inconvenient to have to find someone else at this juncture.”

  “I bet.” I stare at my desk. The pause lingers as I shuffle papers around.

  I can imagine him running his hand through his hair—still mostly dark, with a few white threads—and looking upward, trying to think of something to say. Small talk can only carry a conversation so far.

  My father is an author. My mother is the VP of one of the world’s biggest corporations. I come by my workaholic tendencies honestly.

  My parents used to expect a lot of me. Now? Now it’s all awkward pauses and excuses.

  I never w
orry that I’ll disappoint them these days. You can’t disappoint people who have no expectations.

  “So,” my dad finally says. “Saints and Dinosaurs is on the schedule. First Saturday in December. Think you can make it?”

  That’s what I get these days. Think you can make it? It used to be: Attendance is mandatory; do not think of escaping.

  I blow out a breath. “Mom already told me. Is she going to draft me to help?”

  I wish she would. Saints and Dinosaurs is a party, but it’s also a competition. Ostensibly, it started as type-A bluster. Twelve years ago, in the midst of some epic shit-talking battle between Mom and her boss, Mom claimed she was a better cook.

  Did it matter that nobody in the upper echelons of Cyclone ever cooked beyond microwaving Hot Pockets? No. A challenge had been made; it had to be answered.

  Thirty minutes later, their outrageous claims had morphed into a dessert-off between the two of them. Five hundred and some Cyclone employees were enlisted as the judges, and an excuse for a party at the end of the year was born.

  “You are safe,” Dad says. “I am her sole sous chef in this matter.”

  I fix my gaze on a point across the room. Of course. They don’t even expect me to help any longer.

  “Come in the evening, when you have time. Spend the night after we get rid of the hoi polloi. We’ll have breakfast in the morning. If you can, that is?”

  “You know, Dad.” I swallow, pitching my voice to sarcastic so he won’t know how serious I am. “You are allowed to expect me to show up for family events.”

  “We don’t want to be a bother. We know you’re busy.”

  That’s the way it always goes. We don’t expect anything of you, Jay. I rub my forehead.

  “It’s okay,” Dad says again. “We get it. You have a lot to do. I’ll let you go. I’ve a book to write.”

  “Same,” I say. “Except it’s a paper.”

  Yeah. There’s more than one reason why I might disappoint them.