A Student of Living Things Read online

  I thought about Steven as a name and couldn’t live with it. I’m superstitious by nature, and to give a baby my brother’s name seemed as if I were asking bad luck for Asa. Besides, and this perhaps is the more important: I loved Steven.

  I should clarify the irony of our situation. We aren’t Jewish or Muslim, and Christian only to the degree that until the 9/11 attack on the United States, when we began living with this whispering civil unrest, we were halfhearted Quakers, believing in what my father calls “peaceful coexistence.”

  My mother, born Jewish, has never been a natural believer of any kind, but my father is still a member of the Society of Friends.

  “In principle,” he says. “But in practice it’s foolish to stand in a war zone and turn the other cheek.”

  I am a biologist.

  When my mother used to introduce me to people at the glassblowing factory where she’s a designer, she’d say with real emotion in her voice, “My daughter, Claire, is a student of living things.”

  Since Steven’s death her voice assumes a flat and hollow tone.

  “My daughter, Claire, is a student of living things. Hah!”

  And the “Hah!” has the rattle of a final breath.

  “A true believer,” Steven used to say of me when we went to the university together. It amused him, my love for what he called the “creepy crawlies” and “fuzzy wuzzies” and “slippy slimies” that decorated my bedroom.

  But true belief is fairy dust, and I’m a scientist.

  It’s after eight, and I’ve finished marketing. Asa is fussing because he’s ready to nurse, and I’m looking for my friend Eva, who’s been my dearest friend since fourth grade. It’s Wednesday, and we’ve arranged as usual to meet at the market before she goes to work. If there weren’t this civil upheaval, Eva would be a dancer, but, as it is, she’s a technician at the hospital where Steven was taken when he was shot. So she was the one who called my parents to say there’d been a catastrophe.

  We used to do everything together, but after my brother was killed, her parents wouldn’t permit her to go to public places with me—not even a film or a restaurant, certainly not the busy market.

  I’m a marked woman. It’s difficult to be my friend.

  Nevertheless, every day or two we try to meet at the market to catch up. She doesn’t tell her parents, of course, and isn’t as concerned about being in my company as they are for her.

  “But I have to tell you, Claire. I do worry,” she has said on occasion.

  I look around, staying longer than I had planned, but Eva doesn’t seem to be here, and just her absence this particular day, perhaps because it’s Steven’s birthday, is a bad omen to me.

  “No meat for your lunch?” the vendor asks, holding up a chicken roasted on a spit and smothered in herbs.

  I shake my head.

  “Vegetarian?” she asks.

  “It’s too hot for meat,” I say.

  The vendor has come around the corner of her kiosk and is leaning over Asa, reaching under the umbrella I’ve attached to his stroller to protect him.

  “Fat,” she says, looking at him and shaking her head. “He’s eating you up.”

  Something about her interest alarms me, so I say, “Thank you” and “That will be all for today,” and I dip the umbrella so Asa is no longer visible to the assembled shoppers.

  As I lift my head from covering Asa, brush my hair off my forehead, my eyes readjusting to the brightness, I see someone familiar at the next kiosk, and my heart drops.

  He’s standing with his back to me, a rolled bandanna around his head, his hair longer than the last time I saw him, curling over the collar of his work shirt. He’s purchasing artichokes and black olives and olive oil. Surprising for someone who’s come here for a different purpose than marketing.

  I know this man, although I haven’t seen him since last August. And I know why he’s here this morning, pretending to shop, actually buying things he doesn’t need, reaching across another shopper for figs.

  He’s come here to watch me.

  Victor Duarte—the name he gave me when I met him a month after Steven’s death—is short and stocky, swarthy with tiny black bean eyes. I used to think he was handsome, with an earthy sexuality, a rough tenderness about him. But what did I know then?

  He’s watching me now. I feel his eyes as I hurry away from the market, not running but moving with dispatch, so I’ll seem purposeful but not afraid. I don’t turn around for some time, maybe two city blocks, and when I do, no one is behind me that I can see, except an old woman with her marketing in a cloth satchel struggling up the hill and an unpleasant-looking, short-haired brown dog who according to the laws of this city should be on a leash.

  My apartment is about a mile from the market on a steady upward incline, so I’m breathless pushing the stroller when I arrive. From my living room on the seventh floor, I can see the city. It looks like the black-and-white polka-dot dress Grandma Frayn used to wear to sing in the Welsh church choir. White splashed irregularly on a black background. When I stand in the large window facing north, what I see is an occasional streak of white spreading across the landscape where a random bomb has exploded, taking down a small building like National Bank and Trust on Wisconsin Avenue in the upper northwest, a gas station in the southeast along the Potomac, a grammar school in Capitol Hill, sufficient damage to leave a blank that from a distance in this sunny city is white.

  This has happened since Steven died a year ago last April.

  “He was the striking match,” Uncle Milo said at dinner one night last winter. “Since 9/11, people have been uneasy, and then a plane carrying a high-school baseball team on its way to spring practice in Florida falls for no known reason into the Potomac River, and fatal levels of mercury are discovered at Cardozo High School, and a law student is assassinated on the steps of a university library.”

  “Because he said what he believed,” Julia said, taking every conversation about my brother as an offensive attack.

  “Or for nothing,” Milo said. “Who knows?”

  “You’re insane, Milo,” my mother said.

  “Insane” has become her favorite word.

  I moved to Capitol Hill when I was six months pregnant because of Asa’s father, who had lived here growing up. Asa’s grandfather still lives in the same row house on Second Street NE, behind the Supreme Court, two blocks from the Capitol. I don’t know him, but I know about him, and sometimes I walk by his house, which is yellow with lacy vines running up the front, and I imagine him opening the front door just as I walk by, and I say, “Hello. I’m Claire Frayn, and this baby is your grandson, Asa.”

  But I’ve never seen him on my walks, which are in the daytime, so I probably never will.

  I live on Eleventh Street just after A, on the top floor of a small prewar apartment house. My mother thinks it’s dangerous with threats of terrorism to live so close to the Capitol, but I like that the streets are full of people, walking and shopping and eating, mothers like me with strollers, young men in ties who work for the government, children walking their dogs. Not that it feels safer than the suburbs where I grew up, just busier and less lonely.

  I don’t remember fear—not as a physiological condition, like the flu—until the night that Steven died. Now I have a kind of low-grade fever of anxiety all the time. I start at loud noises or high-pitched ones, at a screeching of brakes or a door slamming. I sleep well, well enough, my bed as far away from the window as possible, Asa in a basket in the corner beside me so nothing can fall on him.

  This civil war is what earthquakes must have seemed like centuries ago, before anything was understood about fault lines or tectonic plates. There’ll be a blast—like a firecracker, maybe a pipe bomb—in the distance, a crash and then a rumble, the hissing wind of an inferno. But the occasions are haphazard, almost careless in their planning. Days go by with nothing, and then a day of trouble will follow.

  By the time I reach the front door of my apartment,
I’m panting from the heat and the running and probably from fright. Certainly fear is what I’m feeling as I pick up Asa, drop my groceries in the stroller and push the 7 button on the elevator.

  I’ve come to a decision. It’s been on my mind for days, but after I saw Victor Duarte and tore off up the hill, Asa crying with hunger, a decision came without my even thinking about it.

  When the elevator opens on the seventh floor, I rush down the hall, open the door to my apartment and sink into the sofa, lifting my shirt for Asa.

  It’s as if, all along in these last months, I’ve been in the process of discovering that I have a choice.

  My father answers the phone at the first ring.

  “I thought you’d be in the hangar,” I say.

  “Too hot,” he replies.

  “Are you coming for lunch?” I ask.

  “You know the answer to that already, Claire,” he says.

  “But I’d like you to come,” I say quietly.

  I wait for his inevitable hesitation, knowing he can’t say no to me and won’t say yes, and when he starts to speak, I can almost hear him arranging his sentence in such a way that he can accomplish neither denying me nor coming to lunch.

  “Why?” he asks, to my surprise.

  “Because I want you to be here,” I say. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  I hang up the phone and lean against the stove, imagining the conversation I’ll have with my parents at lunch.

  For a year this month, my life has been at risk, and I’ve told no one—not Eva, not Lisha, not my family. This morning when I saw Victor Duarte looking for me at the market, I knew that the story I’ve kept a secret for a year is endangering all of us. When my family comes today, I will tell them the truth.

  I’ll begin on the morning of April 4, sixteen months ago, the day that Steven died.

  THE LIFEGUARD CHAIR

  My father gave me a lifeguard chair for my eighth birthday, which he had purchased at an auction in Lewes, Delaware. On weekends he and my mother scoured auctions and secondhand stores for treasures, and the chair he bought must have been used by lifeguards at one of the mid-Atlantic beaches—Rehoboth or Bethany or Dewey Beach. Why it was for sale, I don’t know. But I used to imagine that it had been used by a lifeguard who had died rescuing a drowning child. A young, sturdy, handsome lifeguard, and the child he had rescued was me.

  My father put the lifeguard chair in our garden next to the airplane hangar, and that’s when I began to keep my notebooks of observations. I have fifteen of them, spiral notebooks with unlined paper filled with notes, each one marking a year in my life.

  I would climb up to the seat of the chair, not quite as high as the roof of the hangar but high enough to see the lineup of backyards on either side of us and in daylight to see inside the kitchen windows of the look-alike houses on our block.

  The first entry was made on July 13, the day I turned eight.

  Side one

  Side two

  This is my eye. It’s brown with yellow spots and a black circle in the middle. One side of my eye, which is in the back, sees inside to my brain, and the other side, which is in the front, sees outside to the world.

  But in order to see the world clearly, I need to wear glasses.

  C.F., age 8

  II.

  APRIL 4: MINOR IMPERFECTIONS

  1

  April 4, a Tuesday, and a cold rain had been falling steadily for days. Streams of mud poured off the banks of the Potomac, flooding the river between the glassblowing factory in Alexandria and our house in the suburb of Bethesda. My mother had to spend the night at work.

  I got up before dawn, slipping into jeans and flip-flops and the yellow T-shirt I’d tossed on the floor the night before—the bedroom damp and dark, sheets of rain sliding down the south wall of glass that created a greenhouse for the mass of plants I kept. And in the microcosm of a zoo where I’d slept since I was a child, the living creatures were complaining of hunger. Field mice and a snow-white rat, a one-winged finch I rescued from the grounds of George Washington University, two thin-bodied milk snakes and a praying mantis. Not to mention the collection of dead creatures—the fetus of a kitten in formaldehyde, the skeleton of a spider monkey, a cobra head, the bones of birds, a pile of feathers in the shape of a fan. Every surface in my bedroom was a display for my personal museum of natural history. I fed the noisy animals quickly, checked my watch—not yet seven—and headed to the kitchen. I’d promised my mother I’d be at the factory early if I could get across the bridges.

  Milo was in the kitchen drinking a cup of coffee, licking the powdered sugar off a doughnut.

  “Blissfully quiet without Julia this morning.” He toasted me with his coffee cup.

  “A silent tomb, is how I see it,” I said defending my mother, who had after all opened our house to what remained of a small family—including Milo and her sister Faith and my cousin Bernard—who had moved in with their various complications and complaints, using as an excuse the fear of growing unrest in Washington, D.C.

  “At least we don’t have to blacken the morning with Julia’s report of the police blotter,” Milo went on, unable to help himself, a natural-born complainer.

  My mother was keeping a mental record of the incidents of violence that had occurred all over the city beginning with the evening three years ago at the 7-Eleven in Foggy Bottom when an explosion of a bomb handmade by an unemployed high-school dropout cost my cousin Bernard his right leg below the knee. The most recent incident was Sunday, the day before yesterday, when a young man in Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House, set himself on fire, injuring a policeman and burning, although not seriously, a cocker spaniel on a walk with his owner. Fourteen incidents within the ten square miles of this city since our family had become personally connected with what my father referred to as “the disintegration of order” in Washington, D.C. A civilized order was important to my father.

  “Oh, Milo, don’t be so difficult,” I said, taking a doughnut for myself.

  “Difficult, my foot! I’m a complicated artist with a fragile nervous system.” He grabbed my hand and kissed it, one of his Viennese kisses, fashioning himself a large talent in the wrong city and the wrong century.

  “So off you go, and think of me always on your journey.”

  Down the long, narrow hall of our meandering, one-story, carelessly constructed suburban tract house, where all the bedrooms were located except mine, and that because of the zoo smells that came from my room, my father was taking a shower. The rest of the house was silent.

  I poured coffee into a traveling mug, kissed Milo on the top of his head and started toward the front door.

  In the living room, my brother, Steven, was sleeping on the couch, sleeping under his raincoat, a pillow covering his face. So he must have had a fight with Lisha after I went to bed. When I’d left the kitchen the night before, late, after midnight, studying for a graduate entomology exam, Lisha—his girlfriend of the moment, marooned at our house for the night—was in Steven’s room with him, something that wouldn’t have been possible if our mother were at home. So an argument must have happened between them, not surprising with Steven.

  I grabbed my raincoat from a hook by the front door, slipped a red umbrella under my free arm and turned the knob quietly so as not to wake him.

  At first, when I stepped onto the front porch, shut the door behind me, adjusted the coffee and umbrella and backpack over my shoulder, I didn’t see the large blue flag draped over our round wrought-iron table and stretched along the floor covering half the porch.

  And then I did.

  The flag was midnight blue with an eagle in profile in the center, holding sheaves of wheat in its talon. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE was written across the top. An oily black smudge across the fold, as if the flag had been run over by the tire of a bicycle. My first thought was Faith.

  Steven had followed me outside, sleepy-eyed, his coat wrapped around his shoulders.
<
br />   “What is this is about?” I asked.

  His face took on the dark, defended look he sometimes had.

  “It must be a gift,” he said.

  A sense of dread washed over me. Steven was a lightning rod for trouble.

  In those dreams you have as a child, thinking what would happen to you if your mother died or your father died—who among your family could you bear to sacrifice without dying yourself?—it was always Steven I couldn’t lose if I had to choose to save one of them.

  “A gift from whom?” I asked.

  “I can’t answer that,” he said.

  “Maybe it has something to do with Faith’s work at the Department of Justice.”

  “Not likely,” he said, crouching down and gathering the flag in his arms.

  “What are you going to do with it?” I asked.

  “Get rid of it before you come home with Julia or she’ll flip out.”

  “Maybe it’s a prank?”

  “Probably guys at law school. Some of the Young Republicans who give me a hard time.” He ruffled my hair.

  I had started across the lawn toward the car when he called.

  “I’ve got another op-ed piece in this morning’s paper,” he said.

  “About what?”

  “It’s not very complimentary of the present administration, and I’d be just as happy if Julia didn’t know for a while. She’s not going to love it.” “Julia loves everything you do,” I said.

  “She won’t like this piece.”

  I left uneasily, Steven still standing on the porch as I pulled out of the driveway, his arms folded across his chest, his thick, black, untamed hair sticking out in all directions, looking frazzled as he used to look when he was a grumpy little boy.