Angry at you for leaving me on my own, I made myself an omelet, opened a beer, and sat in the dark kitchen to eat. I would have killed to hear your voice. Even just that awful question: Who are you to say who’s alive? I tried to answer—there’s nothing there, other than numbers—but I felt like a fool, talking to no one. What happened to us? I asked the silence. What could I have done? My remorse grew tentacles. If I had just, if you had just—But nobody answered. It was quiet enough to suffocate.
After that, I’ll admit, I tried to picture my hippie girl. I tried to take pleasure in how correct I’d been to turn her away, but it was no use. I washed my dishes alone. I realized you were probably out with one of the graduate students you’ve taken to encouraging. Buying him an expensive dinner. Flattered by your attention, he’s shoveling coq au vin; otherwise, he’s eaten nothing but white bread for weeks.
It pains me to think about. These unassimilated, mechanical children, blessed with the presence of my shy professor wife, savior of colonial captivity diaries, speaking with expertise about Turing machines, binary languages, compression, and code sequencing. My graduate student is blushing before you. Which of them is it? Max Stein, with his inflated sense of his own genius? Or young Toby Rowland, with his walleye and his twitch? These modern American children, born with computers for brains.
And at home, your husband, defeated by this solitude. Cowed by our dark furniture. Trying not to think how far apart we’ve fallen, how dispensable I am to your hopes. Was it always this way? Was I too dumb to notice, but did I always cling to you like a prosthetic limb, easily unclipped and discarded? Even back in the beginning, when I first met you, standing at that water fountain and wiping your mouth with the back of your wrist, did you think that you could take me or leave me?
You agreed to go to the Mütter Museum, a plan I later regretted while we were browsing through bottles of fingers, hairballs, and misshapen skulls. But you didn’t look away. You blinked through your glasses at each of them. You could face all those errors full on. Afterward, we ate a picnic I’d planned, under a cherry tree on the banks of the Schuylkill.
How embarrassing now, all my overeager attempts. I hadn’t seen a woman in months. I told you about the computations I used in my meteorological measurements. You caught on immediately. You were intelligent, quiet, and sturdy. If everything behind me was dropping away — bombed, forgotten, untranslatable into English — you were solid. I thought even then, on the banks of the Schuylkill, grapes and turkey fanned out before us, that if I could hold on to you, I’d finally have the weight I was lacking.
But I’m back in my own head, and I was trying to know you. How did you feel during that picnic? For you, I imagine, it was a grave disappointment. After asking a few pointed questions, you ascertained that I had no power to help. I had no connections in Germany. My family escaped early. We’d severed all ties. I couldn’t even remember the names of streets I walked along. I was only good for predicting the weather, so that bombs could be dropped on the city to which you were still writing letters.
The park was now empty. Everyone but us had gone home. The art museum’s stone walls had been gold as the sun dropped on the other side of the river, but now they were drained of their color. You rubbed your arms with your hands. You declined when I asked you to dinner. You wanted to go home. I asked if I could have permission to write. You said no at first, but I was relentless, so you gave me your address and I let you go home.
For a year, from my weather station, I wrote you letters. You never wrote back. After a year, the war ended. You learned that your family — your mother, your father, your grandfather, and your little sister — had all been killed. Several months later, a package came for you in the mail. A new family had moved into the apartment where your family once lived. They’d found some of your letters and your sister’s diary.
You lifted this out of the package and remembered it immediately. Its heft in your hands was familiar: a thick leather book, embossed with your sister’s initials.
After a long time holding that book, you decided to go for a walk. By the time you reached the Schuylkill, you felt nothing but blankness. The memories you’d been preserving were emptied of necessity; the money you’d saved had no real purpose. As you moved along the cold streets, your legs felt exceedingly heavy. Each step was a labor. Eventually, two choices presented themselves: Exhausted, you could simply stop walking. Or you could attach yourself to some force. Someone or something to demand you keep moving. Carrying your sister’s book, keeping it present.
As you headed back home, you noticed the cherry tree under which we’d shared a picnic. The tree was now bare. You passed it without stopping, but your steps quickened. That night, you wrote me a letter. When you heard back — and of course you heard back; I wrote at once, I’ve always been eager for us to start talking — you learned that I’d returned to Wisconsin to complete my degree. I was studying mathematics, and with my advisor I was building a computer. I told you about punch cards and soldering metal, about cycling to other universities to learn about their computers and the inventive energy I came across there. I was a geyser of enthusiastic reports.
When you wrote back, you were more reserved. You told me you were also considering college, to study English perhaps. Your sister, you told me, had loved to write. That was all you gave me about the family you’d lost.
When you finally visited me, I was frantic with romantic intentions. I took you for a walk using snowshoes. I imagined we’d laugh together at our big-footed clumsiness. Instead, as if you’d been walking in snowshoes for years, you set your jaw and headed off. It was all I could do to keep up. We kissed in an ash grove, under a rain of icicles, where I’d imagined us kissing. I’d brought us there with that express purpose. So many nights, waiting for your arrival, I’d imagined the sweetness of that first kiss, and it was in fact very sweet, but now that I remember it I can’t shake the feeling that you went about kissing me in the same spirit with which you embarked on our walk: jaw set, determined to arrive at the destination.
On our way home, I took your hand. Did I foil your rhythm in those snowshoes, attaching myself to your body and clomping too close alongside you? If so, why didn’t you tell me? I’d have let you walk apart. But you allowed me to feel protective. “Your sister,” I said, broaching the difficult subject, emboldened by just having kissed you.
“Yes,” you said. “My sister.”
I saw it at once: that softening of your face, as if a little monster had reached up its claws and was dragging your features down in its grips. You were under threat; I thought I might lose you. I wished I hadn’t asked the damn question. I wanted to slap that monster away, to tell it that now you were mine and it had no right to take hold.
“She was younger than I,” you started, slowly, glancing up at my face. “But sometimes she seemed older. She was. .”
And then you trailed off, before you’d really started. You removed your hand from my hand.