An Elegant Theory Read online

  “I was at the lab. I was working on my dissertation. I turned my phone off so I wouldn’t be disturbed. I forgot about—”

  “I panicked and tried to get out of the tub, but I slipped and fell back into the water.” She pulled up her hair and leaned forward so I could see her back. A bruise covered her neck where she had hit the porcelain tub.

  “I’m not trying to use my dissertation as an excuse. I’m not. What I did last night was inexcusable. But you have to understand. I’m under a lot of pressure right now.”

  “I’ve been alone since we’ve been here. The last three and a half years, alone. I’m turning into one of those sad, desolate women who stay home and have babies and cook and clean and have no voice. I am turning into something I hate, Coulter. Don’t you see that?”

  “If I don’t get this done, I won’t graduate. I’ll have wasted ten years of my life.”

  “I feel worthless right now. I feel subhuman.”

  “This isn’t permanent. I will figure this out. I will graduate. We will move. I will find a job closer to home.”

  “I want to go back to work.”

  “I will defend in March, and the semester will end in May. Then we can move. We just have to hold on until then.”

  “I can’t wait that long.”

  I paused, wondering if I heard her correctly.

  “I’m going to start finding work now.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’re pregnant.”

  “So? It’s illegal to discriminate against pregnant women.”

  “You have severely high blood pressure. Preeclampsia. Hypertension. Starting a new job is stressful. Searching for a job is stressful. We have to do what is best for the baby.”

  “What’s best for me is best for the baby.”

  “That’s unfair.”

  “He’s a part of me. He’s growing inside of me. My health, both physically and mentally, indeed does affect him, Coulter. You can’t deny that.”

  Sara pushed the food tray away from her. It was connected to the bed and swiveled outward and to the side. With more room to move, she cinched up to an upright position, using only her arms to pull herself up, like she was paralyzed from the waist down.

  “I can’t allow you to do this,” I said.

  “Allow?”

  “That’s the wrong word.”

  “Allow?”

  “That’s not what I meant. I just mean that you need to relax right now. After the birth, then you can look for work again.”

  “I don’t need your permission, Coulter. I’m a person, too.”

  “You’re focusing on the wrong thing here, Sara.”

  “I don’t think I am.”

  Preeclampsia coupled with hypertension could cause cerebral hemorrhaging, killing her and the baby both. I’d read more about it when Dr. Remington first told us about the possibility of Sara developing it, and since then I’d been dreaming that I could see Sara’s brain, the little electrical synapses fluttering from the cerebral cortex down the nervous system, keeping her bodily functions working, keeping the baby alive, and then an artery would erupt, like a volcano might, a stream of blood that would flow down the rippled curvature of her brain’s tissue, flooding the nerves until all the little electrical currents flickered out. I would awake in a panic, and I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep until I checked her breathing, making sure she was still alive.

  Not that I hadn’t thought about what life would be like if Sara weren’t around, if I wasn’t about to be a father, if they both abruptly died. I supposed these little fantasies are normal to some degree—each of us dreams about the proverbial greener grass. What if I could devote my life full-time to my research? What if I mapped out the shape of the universe? What would I be capable of then?

  “You think this is what is best then?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

  A knock sounded on the door, and Dr. Remington walked in, smiling. She appeared as tired as always. Her sneakers squeaked as she walked toward us, her soles sliding against the linoleum as if she was too exhausted to even pick up her feet. Glasses drooped down onto her nose, and her eyelid twitched like she was running on an inordinate amount of caffeine. She took in deep breaths, her nostrils flaring out each time she inhaled. I’d read somewhere that deep breaths curtail yawning, as yawns are caused by lack of oxygen to the brain. Perhaps, I thought, that could be useful for me, too.

  “How’re you feeling?” Dr. Remington asked. She sat on a swivel stool and rolled it over to the side of Sara’s bed, using her legs as propellers.

  “Better,” Sara said. “Calmer.”

  “That’s good. You gave your little one quite a shock last night.”

  “Is he okay?” I asked.

  “The baby?” Dr. Remington asked.

  I nodded.

  “Yes,” she said. “He’ll be fine. His heart rate was way above normal. Oxygen flow was disrupted.” She took out her stethoscope and placed it against Sara’s chest. “But he’ll be just fine.”

  “Good,” I said. “That’s good.”

  “You’ll need to rest for a while,” Dr. Remington said to Sara. “I want you to keep all physical activity to a minimum.”

  “Are you putting me on bed rest?”

  “No. Not bed rest per se, but you should limit your activities. No heavy lifting, plenty of fluids, walk slowly, eat healthy, and, most importantly, ample sleep. You should be sleeping ten to twelve hours a night at this point. No walking up and down stairs. No extraneous exercise. No standing for prolonged periods of time. No deep cleaning. No activities making you bend over repeatedly. No long walks—”

  “No shellfish. No jumping on trampolines. Microwaves. Standing too long. Heat. Cold. Breathing. Salt. Nothing is good for the baby. I can’t do anything.”

  “Sara, I’m being serious. I’m worried about you. You’ll need to take it easy for the remainder of your pregnancy. No stressful activities. Nothing strenuous. Physically or mentally.”

  “Does that mean she shouldn’t work?” I asked.

  “You’re working?” Dr. Remington asked Sara.

  “No,” Sara said. “It was just something I was considering.” Sara glared at me, her cheeks sucked in and her lips puckered. “Nothing is set in stone.”

  “I highly recommend that you do not begin a new job at this time.”

  “It was only a thought,” Sara said.

  “Promise me you won’t,” Dr. Remington said. “I’m serious, Sara. In your condition, any more stress-induced behavior could severely distress the baby. Alongside the preeclampsia, he could come prematurely. There could be brain traumas. Lack of oxygen. Severe birth defects. You have to take it easy.”

  “I will. I promise. It was just a stupid idea anyway.” Sara pulled the blanket up to her chin like a child afraid of a monster underneath her bed. “Could you turn the heater up, please? It’s freezing in here.”

  “I’ll talk to the staff.” Dr. Remington handed me a clipboard. “Here are her discharge papers. You take good care of her. Okay, Coulter?”

  “I will,” I said. “I promise.”

  SARA REFUSED TO OBEY THE DOCTOR. A DAY after being released from the hospital, she was cleaning the apartment, shopping for new clothes for job interviews, revamping her resume, combing the classifieds for any openings in commercial banking. Before the subprime mortgage crisis, she’d worked as a risk analyst for a small community bank, and when the FDIC shuttered its doors, Sara was out of a job. At first, it hadn’t seemed to bother her to be unemployed. She was still the same crass Sara, declaring this time in her life to be an opportunity, not an obstacle. She took painting and literature courses. She volunteered at the food bank. She took up gardening. But then I got accepted into MIT, and we moved to Boston. Here, she lost her enthusiasm, not having the energy to finish a painting or a book, and with no place to continue her garden, she stayed inside mostly, calling banks around the city for any openings. Mired
in the worst economy since the Great Depression, though, she wasn’t able to find work, and weeks turned to months turned to years, and she eventually gave up. When we’d gotten pregnant, I hoped she would throw herself into the pregnancy, excited to become a mother, but she withdrew even more, I later realized from a fear she’d turn into her mother, a stay-at-home mom whose opinions always came second behind her husband’s.

  It was after a trip to Staples to buy Sara a day planner that we found my dad sitting on the steps of our apartment, a large box sitting at his feet. This was unlike him, to show up without warning. Usually we planned a visit weeks in advance. We would schedule itineraries, buy tickets for Red Sox games, tour the Boston massacre site, the Boston Tea Party site, go on a gastropub scavenger hunt in search of the best corned beef and cabbage, a tour of the Sam Adams Brewery, or just sit at home and watch marathons of weather disasters on the National Geographic channel. Something, I knew, had to be wrong.

  I worried how long he’d sat there. Dot inhabitants didn’t enjoy the presence of strangers, especially loitering strangers, ones with cowboy boots and darting eyes and who smell like they don’t belong. It’s not that the Dot has a trouble with outsiders, really. It’s more of a trust issue. If they hadn’t known you since you were in diapers, then you were to be avoided. Dorchester wasn’t a bad spot. Like any urban neighborhood, there were abandoned houses, windows boarded up and tagged with graffiti. Empty lots rough with grated gravel and concrete pockmarked the area. But the houses that were still occupied had been taken care of. Patio rails were freshly painted. American flags waved in the breeze. Gardens were well manicured, vines of potato plants wrapping around slatted fences. Those who remained took pride in that fact. And I couldn’t blame them for that. Sometimes just standing can be an achievement.

  Dad looked good, though, un-harassed at least. He had a dark tan, a consequence of spending most his summer days in the field, chasing thunderstorms across the plains like an old hunter stalking bison. His hair receded to the shape of a horseshoe, but it hadn’t grayed; instead, it appeared to have been tinted blond, the sun having destroyed any remaining melanin. Despite spending most of his time behind the wheel of his ’86 Bronco, he kept in good shape. His forearms had always struck me as something Herculean, chiseled to that of a Greco-Roman style wrestler. I’d look at my own, thin and pale and with wrists a child could wrap her fingers around, and wonder why I hadn’t inherited his physical features. Why did I have to look so much like my mother?

  He smiled and waved a large paw as we arrived in front of our building.

  “What’re you doing here?” I asked.

  “What? No hello? No, ‘hey, Dad, how’s it going?’”

  “It’s just odd. Is there something wrong?”

  “Not at all!” he said. “It’s just been too long, that’s all. I wanted to surprise you. Thought it would be good to see each other.”

  We hugged. He smelled like the inside of public transportation, the stale air of an airplane cabin, the gas station air fresheners that hung from the rearview mirror in every Boston cab.

  “It is,” I said. “It’s good to see you.”

  He turned toward Sara. “And you, my dear, how are you?” he asked, beaming and approaching for a hug. “Come here.” He pulled away and held her hands. “How is my grandbaby doing?”

  “Good,” Sara said.

  “Well, we did have a little scare the other day,” I said.

  “What?” Dad asked. “What happened? Is everything okay?” He held his hands out like a spotter.

  “Nothing,” Sara said, shooting me a look. “I’m fine.”

  “And the baby?”

  “The baby’s okay, Dad,” I said. “It’s Sara.”

  “What happened? Are you okay?”

  I told him about her preeclampsia and hypertension. “And now she’s looking for work.”

  “For work?” He looked at her, dumbfounded. “Seriously?”

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” Sara said. “I have everything under control.”

  Dad didn’t interrogate her further, though I could tell he was concerned, frightened even. He’d wanted grandchildren ever since Sara and I had started getting serious, bringing up the topic anytime we got together. He’d ask what names we were considering, whether or not we’d stay close so he could spoil them, and we’d have to remind him that we’d only been dating for six months, that it was a bit awkward that he was bringing it up. “I’m just excited,” he would say. “I can’t wait to be a grandpa.” Later, after we moved in together, he’d slip the question in between innocuous things. “How’re the studies going? You pregnant? Plan on going to grad school?” Once we got engaged, we made a deal with him, every time he mentioned children we would add another year he had to wait. Before we’d gotten pregnant, it had reached 187 years.

  “I got you something,” he said. He pointed to the box at his side. It was a crib. “I hope you like it. It was a bitch hauling this thing around in a cab.”

  Sara ran her finger down the picture on the box. It was a plain crib, white wood, cylindrical rails, no ornamentation of any kind. Even on the picture it looked flimsy. “It’s great,” Sara said.

  I borrowed a dolly from the building’s super, and Dad and I lugged the crib up the stairs and unloaded it into the nursery. The instructions to assemble consisted of twenty-eight single-spaced pages filled with tiny diagrams. I’d seen software code that made more sense to me. The box consisted of fourteen wood rods, four pieces of railing, thirty-eight small screws, fourteen large screws, fifty-six washers, a Phillips head, a flat head, and an offset screwdriver, nineteen nails, seventeen plastic rods, and dozens of more pieces I had no discernible idea what they were. Dad and I struggled to make sense of the mess, and we didn’t make any progress.

  The nursery was the only bedroom that had a window. It didn’t have any curtains yet—another item we needed or Sara would make—and across the alleyway we could see a large Irishman washing his face at his kitchen sink. We’d lived here for years and so had he and we still didn’t know each other’s names. We’d acknowledge each other every once in a while if I happened to see him on his stoop with a slight nod of the head and eyes that we dared not let linger for too long. But that was it. He’d been here all his life and we hadn’t and that’s all we needed to know about each other.

  Next door we could hear the hushed, stern voices of a man and woman fighting. The walls were paper-thin here, and despite their best intentions to keep their kids from hearing their argument, they failed—she wanted him to get help, see somebody, anybody, his drinking needed to stop. He didn’t see why—he took care of them, didn’t he?

  “I think we need to start with number three,” Dad said. “It just doesn’t make any sense to start putting these rails together without first putting in the rods.”

  “We should probably just stick with the directions, Dad.”

  Sara supervised our work from a rocking chair in the corner. A sly smile spread across her lips like she knew how this would turn out.

  “But how are we going to latch the rods in place once the rails are already attached?” Dad asked. “The rods are longer than the opening.”

  I’d heard horror stories about in-laws from colleagues in the physics department. A few of my fellow candidates were married, and they spoke of their in-laws like they plotted to dissolve their marriages. Their mother-in-laws practiced spiteful things to say at dinner, “You still haven’t graduated from school? For such a smart man, you’d think you would’ve devoted your life to something that did the world some good for Christ’s sake. Medicine or law or hell even dentistry. At the very least brought home some money.” Their father-in-laws bought them hammers and electrical drills for Christmas, knowing fully well they’d only serve as a constant reminder their daughter did not marry a man’s man. I felt blessed in this regard. Sara got along with my dad quite well, and her parents had accepted me, and at times even pretended to be interested in my research. />
  Dad jammed each rod into the top railing one by one, twisting until they fit. Although I should’ve been thankful for the help, I couldn’t help but feel slighted. This was, after all, my home, my son’s crib, my job as husband and father. But it had always been this way—my father doing the work as I stepped aside. Changing the oil in my first car, putting together microscopes given to me at Christmas, anything at all, my father would do the heavy lifting, and I’d stand idly by, disparaging the fact that his actions made me seem like an entitled, spoiled brat.

  “Why are you here, Dad?” I asked again.

  Dad was having problems with the corner rod. The grooves weren’t catching, and each time he swiveled, the rod inserted crookedly. I could tell he was getting frustrated with it, a tirade boiling underneath his calm façade, and that familiar childish anxiety I’d felt growing up returned right behind that soft spot in the neck—he’d get angry, and it was all my fault.

  The couple next door continued their fight: “What do you think bought all them shoes in your closet, huh? Monopoly money?”

  “I just figured I should tell you this in person rather than over the phone,” Dad said. He put down the rod and rail, the former sticking out of the latter at an odd angle, like a piece of hay stuck in a maple tree after a tornado. “I heard from your mother. She’d like to see you.”

  At first I thought I’d heard him wrong. There was just no way that those words could’ve come out of my father’s mouth. I hadn’t seen my mother, or heard from her, in fifteen years. My last memory of her I couldn’t even conclude authoritatively had even happened. The memory begins with me in my room. I’m getting dressed for school. I’m anxious as I get dressed, but I’m not entirely sure what about. Maybe I had an exam that day, in English perhaps. That had always been my worst subject. I’m interrupted by a knock at the door. It’s Mom. She’s nursing a mug of coffee and is fully dressed. This is unusual. Usually a late sleeper, she would be clad in only a robe when she kissed me goodbye as I headed down the street for the bus.