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Reverend Carl says. His hands are down now, and he’s no longer looking at me, but at the steel cuff Thomas has been holding for the past twenty minutes. “It’s your choice. You can set up a new lab, recommence your research, and move forward. Or—”
“Or?” I say. My eyes find Patrick’s.
“Or everything can go back to normal. I’m sure your family would like that.” He doesn’t look at me while he’s talking, but at Patrick, as if he’s studying my husband’s reaction.
As if anything about our lives in the past year has been normal. Then I get it—Carl Corbin actually believes what he preaches. At first, I’d thought he’d spun the Pure Movement, that his motives for resurrecting the Victorian cult of domesticity and keeping women out of the public sphere were purely misogynistic. In a way, I wish that were true; it’s less creepy than the alternative.
Steven was the first to explain it to me, on a Sunday morning two years ago.
“It’s sort of traditional, Mom. Like in olden times.”
“Olden times? Like what? Greece? Sumer? Babylonia?”
He poured himself a second bowl of cereal, mixed in two bananas, and topped it with half-and-half. By the time Sam and Leo reached fifteen, I’d have to buy futures in Cheerios. “Well, yeah. It was there with the Greeks, the idea of public spheres and private spheres, but it goes back further. Think hunter-gatherer communities. Biologically, we’re suited to different things.”
“We?” I said.
“Men and women, Mom.” He stopped crunching and flexed his right arm. “See this? You could go to the gym every day for a year and you still won’t have muscle like I do.” He must have seen the look of pure disbelief on my face, because he reversed course. “I don’t mean you’re weak. Just different.”
Christ.
I pointed to my temple. “See this, kiddo? Ten more years of school and you might have one like it. Or you might not. And it has absolutely shit to do with gender.” My voice was rising.
“Calm down, Mom.”
“Don’t tell me to calm down.”
“You’re getting kind of hysterical. I’m only saying that it makes biological sense to have women do some stuff and men do other stuff. Like, for instance, you’re a really great teacher, but you probably wouldn’t last more than an hour if you—I dunno—had a job digging ditches.”
That was it. “I’m a scientist, Steven, not a kindergarten teacher. And I’m not hysterical.”
Well, I sort of was.
I poured my second cup of coffee with shaking hands.
Steven didn’t let up. He opened his textbook from that goddamned AP class—Religious Nuttership 101 or whatever they called it—and started reading. “‘Woman has no call to the ballot-box, but she has a sphere of her own, of amazing responsibility and importance. She is the divinely appointed guardian of the home. . . . She should more fully realize that her position as wife and mother, and angel of the home, is the holiest, most responsible, and queenlike assigned to mortals; and dismiss all ambition for anything higher, as there is nothing else here so high for mortals.’ That’s Reverend John Milton Williams. See? You’re queenlike.”
“Terrific.” I needed the coffee but didn’t want Steven to see how on edge I was, so I left it on the counter. “I think you should drop this course.”
“No way. I’m kinda into it. I mean, there’s a crap ton to think about. Even a few of the girls say so.”
“I find that hard to believe,” I said, not bothering to take the snideness out of my voice.
“Julia King, for instance.”
“Julia King isn’t exactly representative of the entire female population.” Poor kid, I thought, wondering what my next-door neighbors had done to brainwash their daughter. “Really, Steven. Drop the course.”
“No.”
Fifteen years old. The age of defiance. I knew it well, having been there.
Patrick came into the kitchen, emptied the coffeepot into a mug, and stirred in the last of the half-and-half. “What’s going on?” he said, tousling Steven’s hair and then pecking me on the cheek. “Kinda early for a domestic argument.”
“Mom wants me to drop my AP Religion class.”
“Why?” Patrick said.
“I dunno. Ask her. I think she doesn’t like the textbook.”
“The textbook is shit,” I said.
Patrick picked it up and flipped the pages like they were an old cartoon. “Doesn’t look so bad to me.”
“Maybe if you tried reading it, hon.”
“Come on, babe. Let him take what he wants. It can’t hurt anything.”
I think it might have been that moment when I started hating my husband.
Now I’m back in my living room, hating the seven men seated or standing around me, waiting for me to join their ranks. “I need some details,” I say. Maybe they won’t notice I’m stalling.
Maybe you think I’m crazy for not leaping at the chance to go back to work. I can understand that.
We could use the extra income. There is that. And I’ve missed my research, my books, the collaboration with Lin and my graduate assistants. I’ve missed talking.
Most of all, I’ve missed the hope.
We were so fucking close.
It was Lin’s idea to abandon our fledgling work on Broca’s aphasia and move on to Wernicke’s. I could see her rationale: the Broca’s patients stammered and stuttered with a palpable frustration, but they got their words out. For the most part, their language was intact; only the ability to transfer it into speech had been hamstrung by a stroke, a fall down the stairs, a head injury sustained while they waded through some desert country in the uniforms of the free world. They could still comprehend, still hear their wives and daughters and fathers encouraging them on. It was the other victims—the ones with damage farther back in their brains, much like Bobby Myers—who suffered the more sinister loss. Language, for them, had become an inescapable labyrinth of non-meaning. I imagine it must feel like being lost at sea.
So, yes, I want to go back. I want to forge ahead with the serum and—when I’m ready—inject that potion into Mrs. Ray’s old veins. I want to hear her tell me about Quercus virginiana and Magnolia stellata and Syringa vulgaris in the way she did when she first came to my home, identifying the live oaks and the giant, starry trees and the lilacs with a scent that no perfumer has been able to match. She considered them God’s gifts, and I tolerated that. Whatever might be up there, he or she or it did a crackerjack job with trees and flowers.
But I don’t give a shit about the president or his baby brother or, really, any man.
“Well, Dr. McClellan?” Reverend Carl says.
I want to tell him no.
Christ, it’s hot in here. There must be a leak in the air-conditioning compressor again. Wouldn’t that be just our luck?
I get up, jeans sticking to the backs of my legs, and go to the kitchen to refill my glass with water. “Patrick, can you give me a hand for a sec?” I call. He makes the rounds in the living room, collecting empty glasses, and joins me.
While I’m pressing one glass after another into the ice dispenser, he takes hold of my left wrist. “You don’t want that back on, do you?”
I shake my head, out of habit.