The Measure(105)

Nina reached out her hand, where the loose folds of skin had only recently begun to betray her as a woman in her mid-forties, and ran her fingers along the smooth silver plaque, which Amie had gifted to Ben on their tenth anniversary, after spending the previous nine years secretly saving up for it.

Dear B,

No matter what happens, I still feel the same.

—A



Nina lowered herself down onto the bench, while Willie and Midge sprinted to the playground nearby.

Watching the children run, smiling, from the swings to the monkey bars and back, Nina marveled at their resilience. Amie and Ben would be so proud of them—the sweet, inquisitive, playful little humans they created.

In moments like this, Nina was glad that Amie had never opened her box, never felt the anger and anguish that plagued Maura, and never had to look at the soft, round faces of her babies with the searing knowledge that she wouldn’t see them grow old.

Nina even wondered, sometimes, whether Willie and Midge would have ever been born, if Amie had looked at her string. It was difficult enough for Amie to plan on raising a family without Ben. What if she had known that she, too, wouldn’t be there? Perhaps Amie’s decision to never look, to never know, had given both sisters the gift of these two precious souls.

Of course, Nina strove to be the mother that Amie had always been, so attentive and affectionate, but she also wondered about the kind of mom that Maura might have become, and it was Maura’s sense of fun and fearlessness and spontaneity that Nina wished to instill in these kids. An eagerness for life that both her sister and her wife had shared. Nina thought about how often she saw the phrase “Live Like Your String Is Short” emblazoned on T-shirts and tote bags and posters. The popular refrain was heard a lot nowadays, much more often than back at the beginning, when short-stringers were overwhelmingly cast as dangerous and depressed, rather than purposeful, open to life.

Nina watched as Willie and Midge quickly made friends with two other children on the playground, the four of them taking turns on the plastic yellow slide, shrieking with delight as they slid down. It always amazed Nina how children could forge such instant, honest connections, only to thrive on division as adults.

Nina’s fingers crept toward her neck and touched Maura’s pin, the two gold strings, that she had slipped onto one of her mother’s chains after Maura died. She had a habit of rubbing her thumb against the pendant like a talisman whenever she was deep in thought. Few people wore that pin every day, as Nina did. It was mostly reserved for special occasions or political events, like the pink ribbons that appeared each October, now that the overwhelming shock of the early years had largely petered out, aided by the fact that there were never any mass waves of violence perpetrated by short-stringers, as some had cautioned. Former president Rollins, once the loudest voice of warning, only rarely reappeared in the news, to promote his memoir or give a speech.

Despite the ongoing efforts of the Johnson Foundation and Strung Together, allegations of illegal string discrimination still persisted, of course, and the more intimate, personal prejudices against short-stringers were perhaps too slippery, too invisible, to ever truly stamp out. Protests still erupted sporadically, in response to particularly egregious cases, and Maura would be pleased, Nina thought, to know that they hadn’t been silenced.

But when Nina watched the four children play together, friendships formed in a matter of minutes, she wondered if, this time, they might hold on to their childhood gift of easy, unbridled empathy, even after they grew up. It’s certainly what Amie and Ben and Maura would have wanted for them, and how Nina would do her best to raise them.

An older woman took a seat next to Nina on the bench, pulled a magazine from her purse, and started to read. Nina recognized the past issue for having featured a profile of Jack Hunter, the famous nephew of an infamous president, whom Nina would always remember as having turned to Maura in his time of need. After confessing, with Maura’s help, to swapping strings with a friend in the army, Jack had enjoyed a few years as a minor celebrity. The article recounted his rapid fall, stripped of his military title, followed by his eventual rise, finally unencumbered, as it seemed. At the time of the interview, he was working at a nonprofit supporting veterans with PTSD, his wife expecting their second child.

The picture of Jack Hunter’s pregnant wife, in a corner of the magazine cover, vaguely reminded Nina of Maura’s old friend Lea, who had nearly given birth in Times Square, after the first of many Strung Together events. Willie and Midge still had playdates in the backyard with Lea’s twins, who were just a few years older than they were, while Nina and Lea’s brother kept watch from the terrace, both tending their sisters’ legacies.

Someday, Nina thought, these children would all have children of their own, born into a world with little memory of the time before the boxes, when Nina and the other long-stringers of her generation would retreat to the stillness of old age, reminiscing about the arrival of the chests like her own grandparents once spoke of the Second World War, a seismic shift that everyone else merely learned about in textbooks and novels. Something so unfathomable for the two young sisters reading in a bookshop, for the shy boy drawing buildings on a sketchpad, for the carefree woman singing karaoke at a bar, would someday be just another part of growing up.

But would people still look inside?

Nina’s colleagues had all been talking about the recent Gallup poll, the latest national survey about the strings. For the first time, the number of people deciding not to view their strings had risen significantly. More and more boxes were remaining closed, especially among the newest recipients. It might just be a trend, people theorized, they might all change their minds. But Nina wondered if it might be a sign. If, after fifteen years of chaos and fear, the world had seen enough strings—short and long and every measure in between—to know that any length was possible, and so, perhaps, the length didn’t matter. That the beginning and the end may have been chosen for us, the string already spun, but the middle had always been left undetermined, to be woven and shaped by us.