Everything I Never Told You(41)

Every day, as Marilyn unboxed a frozen pie or defrosted a Salisbury steak—for she still refused to cook, and the family quietly accepted this as the price of her presence—she made plans: Books she would buy Lydia. Science fair projects. Summer classes. “Only if you’re interested,” she told Lydia, every time. “Only if you want to.” She meant it, every time, but she did not realize she was holding her breath. Lydia did. Yes, she said, every time. Yes. Yes. And her mother would breathe again. In the newspaper—which, between loads of washing, Marilyn read front to back, metering out the day, section by section—she saw glimmers of hope. Yale admitted women, then Harvard. The nation learned new words: affirmative action; Equal Rights Amendment; Ms. In her mind, Marilyn spun out Lydia’s future in one long golden thread, the future she was positive her daughter wanted, too: Lydia in high heels and a white coat, a stethoscope round her neck; Lydia bent over an operating table, a ring of men awed at her deft handiwork. Every day, it seemed more possible.

Every day, at the dinner table, Nath sat quietly while his father quizzed Lydia about her friends, while his mother nudged Lydia about her classes. When they turned, dutifully, to him, he was tongue-tied, because his father—still seared by the memory of a smashed television and his son’s slapped face, did not ever want to hear about space. And that was all Nath read or thought about. In his spare moments, he worked his way through every book in the school card catalog. Spaceflight. Astrodynamics. See also: combustion; propulsion; satellites. After a few stuttering replies, the spotlight would swivel back to Lydia, and Nath would retreat to his room and his aeronautics magazines, which he stashed under his bed like pornography. He did not mind this permanent state of eclipse: every evening, Lydia rapped at his door, silent and miserable. He understood everything she did not say, which at its core was: Don’t let go. When Lydia left—to struggle over her homework or a science fair project—he turned his telescope outward, looking for faraway stars, far-off places where he might one day venture alone.

And Lydia herself—the reluctant center of their universe—every day, she held the world together. She absorbed her parents’ dreams, quieting the reluctance that bubbled up within. Years passed. Johnson and Nixon and Ford came and went. She grew willowy; Nath grew tall. Creases formed around their mother’s eyes; their father’s hair silvered at the temples. Lydia knew what they wanted so desperately, even when they didn’t ask. Every time, it seemed such a small thing to trade for their happiness. So she studied algebra in the summertime. She put on a dress and went to the freshman dance. She enrolled in biology at the college, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, all summer long. Yes. Yes. Yes.

(What about Hannah? They set up her nursery in the bedroom in the attic, where things that were not wanted were kept, and even when she got older, now and then each of them would forget, fleetingly, that she existed—as when Marilyn, laying four plates for dinner one night, did not realize her omission until Hannah reached the table. Hannah, as if she understood her place in the cosmos, grew from quiet infant to watchful child: a child fond of nooks and corners, who curled up in closets, behind sofas, under dangling tablecloths, staying out of sight as well as out of mind, to ensure the terrain of the family did not change.)

A decade after that terrible year, everything had turned upside down. For the rest of the world, 1976 was a topsy-turvy time, too, culminating in an unusually cold winter and strange headlines: Snow Falls on Miami. Lydia was fifteen and a half, and winter break had just begun. In five months she would be dead. That December, alone in her room, she opened her bookbag and pulled out a physics test with a red fifty-five at the top.

The biology course had been hard enough, but by memorizing kingdom, phylum, and class she’d passed the first few tests. Then, as the course got tougher, she had gotten lucky: the boy who sat to her right studied hard, wrote large, and never covered up his answers. “My daughter,” Marilyn had said that fall to Mrs. Wolff—Doctor Wolff—“is a genius. An A in a college class, and the only girl, too.” So Lydia had never told her mother that she didn’t understand the Krebs cycle, that she couldn’t explain mitosis. When her mother framed the grade report from the college, she hung it on her wall and pretended to smile.

After biology, Marilyn had other suggestions. “We’ll skip you ahead in science this fall,” she’d said. “After college biology, I’m sure high school physics will be a snap.” Lydia, knowing this was her mother’s pet subject, had agreed. “You’ll meet some of the older students,” her father had told her, “and make some new friends.” He’d winked, remembering how at Lloyd, older had meant better. But the juniors all talked to each other, comparing French translations due next period or memorizing Shakespeare for the quiz that afternoon; to Lydia they were merely polite, with the distant graciousness of natives in a place where she was a foreigner. And the problems about car crashes, shooting cannons, skidding trucks on frictionless ice—she couldn’t make the answers turn out. Race cars on banked tracks, roller coasters with loops, pendulums and weights: around and around, back and forth she went. The more she thought about it, the less sense it made. Why didn’t the race cars tip over? Why didn’t the roller coaster fall from its track? When she tried to figure out why, gravity reached up and pulled down the cars like a trailing ribbon. Each night when she sat down with her book, the equations—studded with k and M and theta—seemed pointed and dense as brambles. Above her desk, on the postcard her mother had given her, Einstein stuck out his tongue.