I didn’t want to talk to anyone, and especially not about Ruby, but the professor’s voice was so very level and calm. He sounded like some kind of radio reporter and I wanted to listen to this personal radio; I wanted his voice to play and play. Mother was lighting another cigarette outside, leaning against the glass, a dark bra visible through her wrinkled oxford.
Okay, I told the professor. I’ll listen.
He sat down slowly, his knees angled toward me a little.
I’d only known Ruby since the semester started, when she became my TA. I knew she was overqualified, of course. She was talented, you know, and had been working on some incredible proofs.
His sentences were hard and plain, like he had been polishing them all afternoon.
I never understood what she did here, I said. We never talked about it.
Well … I don’t know how to describe it, what Ruby seemed like today. I suppose I have a hard time reading faces, emotions, you know, the descriptive stuff. I’m more of a numbers person. But she seemed, just — maybe a little distracted. She gave me some papers she’d been working on. She said she wanted me to check them over, and she left.
What was it?
What do you mean?
The papers. Was it something important?
Um, no, not really. Something most grad students could do. She was capable of so much more than that. She’d been working on some very interesting stuff lately.
Oh.
I’m sorry.
No, it’s fine. I mean, it doesn’t matter that it was just regular stuff.
No, I mean, the whole thing. That she—
And I wished right then that I could gently cry, just cry — politely, humanly. Outside, my mother was screaming at someone, her breath making tiny smoke and steam clouds.
Thank you, I said to the professor.
He nodded, put his hands on his knees, leaned back a little, then leaned forward again. He looked at my mother, who was still screaming, then he looked at his feet.
When I was twenty my mother did it the same way as Ruby and, I just, well … today I’ve been thinking about it a lot, you know. Probably the most since it happened.
I didn’t say anything. Mother was lighting one cigarette with another. A section of her hair was pushed over her head the wrong way. She turned around and waved at me with one limp, little hand, a royal dismissal. Lipstick rimmed her mouth like ice cream on a toddler.
I’m sorry for that, he said, for saying that. I know it’s what people always do, try to tell you they’ve already dealt with what you’re dealing with, trying to tell you how they grieved — I know it doesn’t help. I’m sorry. It was just on my mind.
You don’t need to be sorry, I said.
We didn’t say anything for a little while.
He put his hand on my shoulder as if he was taking someone’s advice to do so and he let it stay there for a moment and after that moment water did come out of my eyes and I felt more appropriate and more human to myself. The professor put his arms around me and I collapsed a little, making a wet spot on his navy jacket.
6
Exactly, Simon said, and he smiled and I knew that smile, and I remembered when I smiled like that at boys who smiled like that, but I hadn’t seen that smile in at least seven years, and I’d never known my husband when he was young enough to let a gesture reveal himself so plainly. We had stopped for a sandwich and Simon was still filling up all the silence, and I did not smile back at him. I was no longer listening — most of my attention was on a man strumming a ukulele at the other end of the bar. A woman was looking at a menu and trying to get the man’s attention, but he had his eyes closed. The woman waved her hands in front of the ukulele man’s face but he just kept whistling, swaying. I looked back at Simon and copied his expression — serious, but with raised eyebrows — to make him think I was listening. Maybe he was too young to catch that trick. Maybe in the world of a twenty-one-year-old boy, no one had to fake an interest in you. The woman took away the man’s ukulele. He looked, dejected, at the menu.
Here’s something that may or may not be right in front of your face, Simon said, you know, in front of your face in the sense that you already know it.
Simon held my shoulders with both his hands, which felt larger and denser than I would have expected.
This is important — you and I, right now. This is important.
How’s that? I said.
What’s between people is more important than anything in the physical world. This is God, Elyria. Anytime two people can look at each other and talk honestly, that is God.
I wondered for a moment if he was trying to get me to join a cult, but I realized it was just his youth talking, not a dogma. I hadn’t spoken much to Simon and what I’d said wasn’t any kind of honesty, but Simon had perfected the art of seeing what he wanted to see, because it’s easier to go through life like that, to see the world as a series of familiar things, a place where everyone feels how you feel and sees what you see. I was still impersonating Simon to his face to get away with ignoring him, and that seemed almost sustainable, a way to spend a few weeks, but when he went to the bathroom I went out to his unlocked van and strapped on my backpack and started walking somewhere even though Simon had told me he’d pitch a tent outside tonight and let me lock myself inside his van—To prove a point, he said, I’m not a bad guy and I trust you—but I didn’t want to bear Simon anymore and I didn’t want to be the thing under those projections anymore because I did have somewhere to go, in a way — Werner’s farm, a place to sink into and forget about movement, about vibrations, about projections, about relying on whoever happened to pity me at that particular moment, increasingly disheveled, smelling more and more like the earth or an animal, caring less and less about how little I cared.
I walked through a forest near a highway until I found a clump of moss to sleep on and I remembered that Simon said possums were not indigenous to New Zealand, that they had been brought here by somebody a long time ago, some European, and since there were no animals here that liked to kill possums, all those unkilled possums had fucked up the whole fucking ecosystem by eating plants, too many plants, by wanting so much, and now there were what? — ten or fifteen possums per person in New Zealand? Something fucked-up like that; and I imagined my dozen fucked-up possums gathered around me, a personal audience, and I wondered which things inside a person might be indigenous or nonindigenous, but it isn’t as easy to trace those kinds of things in a person as it is in a country. I wished that I could point to some colonizer and blame him for everything that was nonindigenous in me, whoever or whatever had fucked my ecosystem, had made me misunderstand myself — but I couldn’t blame anyone for what was in me, because I am, like everyone, populated entirely by myself, which made me think, again, of Ruby on that Thanksgiving night on the swings, or maybe it was another night like that night when she was talking, I thought, about how predictable she felt—I’m Asian so I’m supposed to be good at math and skip grades and I did and I’m adopted so I’m supposed to be messed up and I am—and I tried to tell her she wasn’t predictable, she wasn’t a cliché, she wasn’t a statistic—You’re a person, Ruby, like everyone else—