The Many Daughters of Afong Moy(22)
On the inside, though, she worried.
That’s when on dark, rainy days—in moments between feeling low and not feeling anything at all—she worried about Annabel. Louis thought the idea of inherited trauma was a joke. A very expensive joke at best and a dangerous scam at worst, high-tech snake oil for desperate, gullible people. “Let me get this straight. They inject you with a virus that alters tissue in the brain,” he’d argued, throwing up his hands. “And no one—not even the geneticists involved—know what the long-term side effects could be. So they basically charge you for being their lab rat—charge us thousands of dollars for something that’s unproven, unsanctioned, and unsupported by the FDA because it’s too experimental.” Dorothy hated the way Louis put words in air quotes almost as much as when he talked about money, especially since she’d allowed him to use what was left of her mother’s estate to launch his business and lease their apartment.
Dorothy tried to explain how the entire field of epigenetics had blown up two decades earlier with an experiment at Emory University using actual lab rats. Researchers released a citrus spray while electrifying the floors of the animals’ cages, habituating the rats to react in fear whenever they smelled that particular scent. Years later, researchers noticed that the offspring of those lab animals, three and four generations later, had the same fear reaction to citrus.
Louis shook his head. He tried not to roll his eyes but failed. “And of course, no insurance company will touch something so completely unknown.”
“It’s not completely unknown. It’s just unknown to you,” Dorothy argued. “My therapist said I’m a perfect candidate for this kind of treatment.”
“Why am I not even remotely surprised?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because,” he groaned. “You’d have to be out of your mind to hand over our money for something so breathtakingly foolish.”
As the subway slowed for her stop in Ballard, Dorothy knew Louis would find fault in anything she tried, but especially this. The idea of treating trauma passed down from one generation to the next in humans was highly controversial, to say the least. Just the idea of historical trauma was argumentative, though the concept had been widely accepted in Native American communities for hundreds of years, or more recently, within groups descended from Holocaust survivors. Yet therapists and geneticists had been puzzled for decades, searching for evidence of what they called transgenerational epigenetic inheritance.
Dorothy didn’t know what to expect, but she did know that whatever the process was, it wasn’t even remotely approved by the American Medical Association.
Walking to her appointment, she found that the address she’d been given led to a small windowless building that appeared to have made it through the storm relatively unscathed. There was a simple sign on the door that read: Epigenesis. Dorothy felt nervous and remembered an old poem by Wendell Berry. Something about fearing for what a child’s life may become. Then she quoted the great Southern poet as she opened the door. “I come into the peace of wild things.”
7 Zoe
(1927)
Zoe Moy’s ears were filled with the happy squeals of a child’s laughter as a group of third graders chased a loping clumber spaniel around the base of an old English walnut tree. Above the fray, sitting on a thick branch in a green dress, her feet dangling, was Zoe’s favorite teacher, Mrs. Bidwell, playing “The Wreckers Overture” on her violin.
Zoe stood perilously at the edge of the diving platform of the new swimming pool at Summerhill, the boarding school where she’d lived for the last eight years. She waved to her teacher, who smiled and nodded. When the song reached its crescendo, Zoe looked up at the rare, clear blue August sky, drew a deep breath, pinched her nose, and jumped, plummeting six meters. As she plunged into the cool water, she puffed out her cheeks and slowly released bubbling air from her lungs, allowing her to sink to the bottom, where she sat, legs crossed in a lotus position like the Hindu swamis she’d read about in World History class. She opened her eyes, appreciating the rays of light that sliced through the water, illuminating the churning legs of the boys and girls above her in the middle of the pool. The teenage girls wore only bloomers, the teenage boys, like their younger cohorts, wore nothing. Zoe winced at the whiteness of their posteriors, though she thought their shriveled boy parts looked cherubic, like the dangling participles of the Roman statuary that haunted the school’s wild rose garden.
Zoe’s heart raced and her lungs began to burn, so she pushed off from the bottom of the pool. She kicked until she broke through the surface as a bell was ringing and most of her classmates were busying themselves by toweling off, putting their clothes back on, though a few ignored the clanging and continued playing, splashing in the pool.
Having spent half of her lifetime at Summerhill, Zoe knew that the bell meant afternoon classes would begin. The academic classrooms, the woodworking studio, the art room, the music parlor would all have faculty ready to teach those who felt like learning, exploring, indulging their whims of curiosity. Those who didn’t feel like attending class today could go back to their rooms, or read in the library, or play anywhere on school property. At Summerhill, play was encouraged and learning was allowed, the opposite of a traditional English boarding school.
Zoe squeezed water from her hair and toweled off. She put her shirt back on as she walked barefoot to where Mrs. Bidwell was packing her violin. “Did you see me?”