An Uncommon Education (42 page)

“Yes,” I said.

“Did you know you couldn’t even count past ten until you were almost five?” I laughed, shaking my head. “It’s true! You got to ten usually, but you could never quite make it to twenty. I swear to god you were inventing teens. We thought there was something wrong with you.”

“Maybe there was,” I said, still laughing.

T
iney was awarded the Marshall scholarship, to much fanfare, and planned to do her graduate work at the London School of Economics. At the opening of our senior year, just before her application was due, she offered up the piece of stage left that was buried in the roof, the relic that Jun had shown me more than two years earlier, to the administration.

A man came with a ladder and knocked at the door, asking for the president, a position I had been elected to two weeks earlier. After Jun left, there was such a void for me at Wellesley that I needed something huge to fill it, something that might come close to honoring what she had sacrificed. He asked me if I knew anything about an object in the roof. I told him I didn’t, then stood outside on the lawn, watching him scuttle clumsily over the shingles. He was in a yellow coverall, and he stood out like a flag as he became more confident and began to walk upright. There were two huge pockets on either side of the uniform and two more on the back, a misfit shell he had to negotiate as he walked. I wondered how well it protected him. A crowd was gathering outside. A.J. was at my side.

“Did you know about it?” she asked me. I told her I had.

“It was Amanda.” She answered the question I hadn’t asked.

I took my eyes off the roof and looked at her. “She told them where it was? Just because?” I wasn’t as surprised as I sounded, not for long. I could see only the round of his back; he was prying a shingle loose in the wrong area. I wanted to call to him but didn’t. It was easier to watch him hit and miss, lend some time to it, approximating ceremony or some other kind of care.

“You’re surprised?” A.J. was saying. “Is it less surprising than giving up Jun?”

Jun had left as quietly as she had wanted to: It was rumored, effectively, that she had started working at her father’s company prematurely, that this was her reason for finishing at Tokyo University.

“Elena told you,” I realized out loud.

“She got drunk after graduation last spring,” A.J. said. We were both still watching the work on the roof.

“Who else did she tell?” I asked.

“Ruth,” A.J. said.

“She already knew.”

A.J. nodded. “Think of it this way,” she added conversationally as the man began to pry around the right area. “It’s been there less than seventy years. That’s really no time at all. Wellesley itself has only been around for about a hundred. Will himself was born only about four hundred years ago. Pocket change as far as years are concerned.” A.J. had switched to a geology major, her fingers now frequently stained with mineral dust. “It was barely there at all.”

The man had now displaced several shingles, and small pieces of debris were skidding down the roof, getting caught in its grooves. “I thought all this was important to Tiney, too.”

“I think she just found herself here, like she was following some kind of homing device.” A.J. shoved her hands under her arms, drawing herself inward. “The allure, you know, of Shakespeare.” The sun on the man above us made the yellow of his suit nearly glow. He stepped away from it, on to the other side of the roof. “Sometimes I think he was just another man, though, you know? Not so different from everyone else. But people like Tiney would never see it that way. Her appetites are too big to be constrained by reality. Though, you’re right, I’ve never seen her happier than she’s been here. She did love it. Does love it. She probably loved Jun, too.”

The man stood up, straightening to his full height, even though he was on a slant. The roof was more comfortable to him now. He held the relic in his hand and made his way over to the sunny part of the roof and held it up there, to be sure he’d found what he was looking for. He shook his head, as though disagreeing with someone, then fished a plastic bag from his pocket and dropped it in. He collected his tools and found his ladder again, and a few moments later he was on the ground.

“Found it,” he told me in a friendly way. He pulled out some papers from one of the two enormous back pockets on his uniform. “I’ll need you to sign.” He’d unfolded and handed them to me. I did as I was told.

W
e received a very nice letter from the president and the library’s head archivist, written in a tone that suggested we were all good friends who’d had the same goal in mind all along, and the relic was stored in the special collections area of the library. I went to see it shortly thereafter. I needed a pass to get on the separate elevator at the back of the building. It was a tiny, rickety thing that shook as it lifted me.

Special Collections was on the third floor, designed like a museum with a wide-open space in the middle of the main room and lines of smooth cases around the edges. The relic was on display beside an original folio edition of
Coriolanus
, which I hadn’t known was there, and it looked even plainer than usual in comparison. Without the description etched into plastic beside it, it would have looked comical; a warped rag of wood under thick, tempered glass. I laughed, and the heavy walls and thick carpet absorbed the sound.

A few hours later, I came back to my room to find a message from my father.

T
he acoustic neuroma that had been found on the left side of my mother’s brain two years earlier was thought to have been typically finite, though there were always exceptions. This is what Dr. Stern explained to us, using a silver pointer to direct our attention to what looked like a small black beetle resting in the MRI image of the right half of my mother’s brain, then a pin-sized black spot on the left side, as though the film had skipped or been punctured and another picture might reveal something different. He drew our attention to the benefits of a standard, annual follow-up examination, and he gave us a new word to chew on: “neurofibromatosis,” or, in my mother’s case, NF2, followed by the requisite statistics.

I wanted to know if appropriate questions about my mother’s genetic history were asked when the first tumor appeared. I waited until he was done talking to bring that up. He stared at me, his glare equal parts outrage and discomfort. I told him I thought it was terribly important for him not to be mistaken, that he should have patience and an open mind. He bristled, and my father elbowed me in the side. I knew how obnoxious I was being, but I didn’t care. He asked me if I’d like to examine her case file, to see if I would have proceeded differently. I knew it would only conceal the essential fragments, that even if asked, my mother would have provided little information on her family’s genetic predispositions, most probably because she did not have that information herself, or held it incompletely. My father began to sweat, his hairline growing damp. I declined the doctor’s offer. He straightened his shoulders and stood taller when I did. The truth is, he had little reason to doubt himself. I wondered after his own mother, picturing only a diminutive version of Dr. Stern himself. I finally asked the question I’d been working up the courage to ask.

“Do you think there’s a connection between NF2 and depression? She’s been depressed her whole life.” I didn’t look at my father. “Wouldn’t a growth in the brain affect the mind?”

“The mind?” he scoffed at my misplaced question. “No one knows,” he added, dismissing me.

“How could you not know that?” I asked, surprised.

He looked back at me, equally surprised. “Who could know such a thing?” he asked.

Sometimes my stomach turns when I remember that I forgot, again, that my mother was sitting there during that particular moment; I can’t understand why, on more than one occasion, I have remembered only my father and the doctor and me speaking, only the picture of the two hemispheres on the light box in front of us. And this realization is worse because I would have had to work to blot her from the scene. Of course she was there. It was her diagnosis, her appointment. We were there only to learn, to become better informed, because it was thought that a family that was better informed would lead to greater support for the patient, which could lead to an optimal outcome: a robust life, for several years or more.

I
kept my room at Wellesley but went home on the weekends. My parents did not disallow this arrangement, though they went through the motions of dismay. I completed my coursework dutifully and missed the MCAT deadlines that would have placed me in the most competitive pool because I was needed at home. At first the tumors were small enough that my parents decided to take the course of “watchful waiting,” a term they plucked from a brochure. Later, after my mother lost her hearing entirely, we reverted to the initial medical obfuscation: neurofibromatosis. It kept questions, most notably our own, at bay.

The tumor on the right began to grow first, pressing on her aural-cranial nerve. As she began to lose the hearing in her right ear as well as her balance, being around her was like being on land, admiring the mysterious grace of someone walking through water: every move slow and careful. She needed to watch my lips to understand what I said to her. Oftentimes, as she did, she would move her mouth, too, as mothers will open their own mouths when they feed their children. I returned her bracelet, fastening it to her wrist to remind her that there were some things she had once believed in.

Once her hearing was completely gone, I began to talk freely to her. At first I would only do this when she was reading or watching television, when her eyes weren’t on me, but by the time she got to the point of sleeping most of the day, I would speak as the thoughts occurred to me. I told her first every detail I could recall or imagine about what happened with Jun and Tiney, how I’d been involved. Then I began to read to her, pulling out my favorite books, the very ones I’d memorized, just so I could have the comfort of turning those pages once again. I read to her from Psalms, lingering on the thirty-fourth. I recited the prayer for daughters while she slept. I read to her from Einstein when she was awake, returning to Teddy’s favorite passage about gravitations and love. In the middle of this I got the idea that I should read the plays to her, and so I pulled
The Riverside Shakespeare
from within the pile of books I’d brought back from Wellesley.

First I read the ones we’d done, lingering on
The Tempest
and
Richard III
, the senior year productions I hadn’t taken a role for, then the ones I’d wished we’d done but hadn’t, and finally them all, casting my friends in their old roles and new ones, hearing their peculiar voices as I read. I felt I was reciting something that drew them nearer: Ann was a lion-haired Caliban; A.J. a brilliant Iago; I used Phyllis to change Bianca’s petulance to sultriness; Tiney as Ophelia; Jun as the Duke of Kent. Then I told my mother about Ruth and Julie and Mr. Oko, about Weingarten and Keigo, and about the adult Teddy. Then I began to tell her everything I could think of that was real and foreign to me about the Wellesley outside of the house, how that realness and foreignness together kept me there, forever trying to solve them both. And then I told her about everything before then, about being her child, how I sometimes thought I’d already spent my life missing her, how I’d marveled at her beauty and poise and wondered how it could be mine, how I finally understood why she hadn’t wanted me to be a part of her sickness, a part of the uglier parts of her life. And, finally, I told her how I’d tried to save Teddy, then Jun, and had always been trying to save her, and that by not allowing herself to be saved she had probably saved me.

And when I ran out of things to tell her about myself, I began to tell her the story of her own life, imagining for both of us the parts I didn’t know, until I had spun a great and colorful thing for us to consider together. But this came much later, almost two years after I had graduated, after my mother was too ill to make sense of me, after an easier thing was between us and I began to notice the onset of a curious peacefulness.

F
or the first two years following Jun’s departure we wrote to each other regularly. Her letters arrived on tissue-fine paper in hasty, tall handwriting, so that she frequently filled more than a dozen of the narrow, transparent rectangles. I learned that she had done well at Tokyo University and had begun the young-executive program at Oko Industries almost immediately after graduating. She played practical jokes on her coworkers there until they no longer regarded her with reverence, and she rose quickly in the ranks from that point on. I wrote to her of nothing, and then of my mother’s illness, and at times, as I read her responses, I remembered how she had crouched down on the track with me, watching me to understand.

The same fall that my mother received her diagnosis, an article had appeared in the
New York Times
entitled “How to Succeed? Go to Wellesley.” It detailed the accomplishments of our alumnae in duly impressed prose for all of its erudite readers to absorb. It was framed discreetly behind the main desk in the Career Center of the college, to the left of an enormous hand-drawn map of the college, and to the far left of an enlarged print of the college seal.

To be fair, the counselor assigned me in the months before graduation was new, though not to the world. I guessed her to be in her late fifties, though she behaved as if she were much older. She began by telling me things I already knew about my chances at medical school, how at best I might be admitted to a respectable institution, but that an elite school was most likely beyond my reach.

“It looks like you’ve spent quite a bit of time at the Shakespeare house.” She shot a strained grin at me. “Perhaps another hospital would have been better?” She folded her hands over the file she had been studying, leaning forward in a friendly way. “You know, you could still do something with this English major of yours. Politicians don’t care as much about grades. Have you any activist tendencies?” she asked solemnly.