Felix proposed after he took her bowling. Win had grown up with candlepins in New England, and had never used a big, heavy ball. When she drew her arm backward, the ball popped off her fingers and smacked Felix in the mouth, knocking out his two front teeth.
He asked her to marry him at the emergency dental surgeon’s office.
It was a sure thing, he tells me. If she didn’t love him, he figured she could still be guilted into saying yes.
—
ON MY WAYhome from Win’s, I pull into a lot near Boston Harbor. It is by no means on my way, but it’s the place I go when I want the world to stop spinning.
On any given day in the summer, you can see the whale watching boats, as large and steady as the prey they search for, tourists streaming on board like krill through baleen. There are ice cream vendors and couples with selfie sticks and men dressed up like Colonial patriots promoting historical tours. In the distance you can see the USSConstitution,and in the other direction, the angled roof of the New England Aquarium, where my mother would teach kids who weren’t us about mollusks and sea stars and tide pools.
My mother was the first person to bring me here. She had Kieran in a baby sling across her chest and she held my hand so tight it hurt. “When I first came to Boston,” she told me, with her lilting accent—which always reminded me of summer, and the way bees would bounce from blossom to bright blossom—“it was the last place I wanted to be. I’d come to this spot every day because I thought maybe, if I looked hard enough, I could still see home.”
There was no way that Ireland was visible, even on the clearest of days, but it didn’t stop her from hoping.
“One day I couldn’t wait anymore, and I jumped into the harbor from this very place and started swimming.”
None of this had surprised me. My mother was meant for the ocean. In Ireland, she used to swim off the coast of Kerry each morning, no matter how cold the water. She told me that dolphins followed her and that sometimes she would swim for hours and wind up so many miles down the coast that her father would have to come and pick her up in his old truck. When she was pregnant with me, she swam for hours at a YMCA. I was a breech baby, the midwives said, because I had no idea what gravity was, which way was up, which way was down.
My mother said that for a while, no one noticed her in the water. Her stroke would have been clean and sure, slicing between buoys and boats until the waves turned darker and choppier, the invisible line where the harbor turned into ocean. She told me that a cormorant guided her, its elegant white belly an arrow forward as it flew overhead. She told me that night had already fallen when she was picked up by the captain of a tugboat who only spoke Portuguese and who kept pointing to her legs and shaking his head, as if he were otherwise convinced she was a mermaid.
“Here’s the thing, Maidan,” she told me, using her nickname for me, the Irish word formorning. “I almost made it. The ocean’s different in Ireland, you know. Sweeter, less salt. And I could see the shoreline. I wasthatclose.”
I believed her, when I was little. Now, of course, I know it is impossible that one small woman might have swum across the Atlantic in a matter of hours. But that doesn’t really matter, does it? We all have stories we tell ourselves, until we believe them to be true.
My mother spent most of her life wondering who else she might have been, if she hadn’t left Ireland. An Olympic swimmer, maybe. Or just someone who worked in her father’s pub. A different man’s wife, a different girl’s mother.
I’ve thought about that, too. If you had asked me fifteen years ago, I would have said that by now, I’d be published and well established in the field of Egyptology. Maybe I would be a curator for the Met, living in Chelsea, with subway maps memorized and a little dog I took running in Central Park. Maybe I’d be a professor with my own concession in Egypt, taking students twice a year and pulling secrets out of the dusty earth. Maybe I’d teach at Queen’s College at Oxford, wandering the stacks of the Ashmolean or presenting at the annual conferences for Current Research in Egyptology in Madrid or Prague or Krakow.
Maybe I would be at the Grand Café on High Street, scrambling through my purse to find a few pound coins for my latte, when the man behind me in line offered to pay instead.
Maybe that man would be Brian, in town to give a guest lecture on multiverses at Oxford’s physics department.
This is what I tell myself: that we were inevitable.
That it was meant to be.
—
WHENMERET WASseven, Brian bought her a microscope for Christmas. I argued that it was an expensive gift for a child who really shouldn’t be playing with glass slides, but I was wrong. Meret spent hours hunched over it, switching among the five magnification settings, looking at prepared slides of dragonfly wings, cucumber ovaries, horsehair, and tulip pollen. She would meticulously use tweezers and swabs to make her own specimens, highlighting them with eosin or methylene blue. Her bedroom walls were filled with magnified drawings of what she saw: the lace of an overblown lilac leaf, the tangled spaghetti of bacteria, geometric evil eyes of onion cells. That was the beginning of her love affair with science, and to date, it hasn’t stopped.
Teachers love her, and why shouldn’t they? She is smart and curious and wise beyond her years. They look at her and they see what she has the potential to become. Other students, though, can’t seem to get past how she looks.
When most kids in elementary school began to outgrow their round bellies and chubby cheeks, Meret didn’t. It is not that she isn’t active or that she doesn’t eat healthily. It’s just how she is made, and if that isn’t everyone’s standard of perfect, then maybe they just have to revise their damn standard.
But.
I remember what it felt like to be fourteen. I remember looking in the mirror and not recognizing myself. I know that’s what Meret sees, when she forces herself to see her reflection—although I also notice the way she avoids that at all costs. What’s different is that my body was changing, and that’s what made me uncomfortable. For Meret, it’s the opposite. Her body stays the same—curved, softer, larger—and that’s what she is desperate to hide.
Last year, when she started wearing clothes that were bigger than mine, I told her that sizing wasn’t standard; that I could wear a four in some brands and an eight in others. She stared at me for a long moment.That’s exactly the kind of thing a skinny person would say,she told me, and she locked herself in her room for the rest of the day.
As her mother I am damned if I do and damned if I don’t. If I cook only vegetables for dinner, she thinks I’m judging her. I try to completely avoid the topics of food, of exercise, of therapy, of weight. I know every time someone tells her she is the spitting image of me, she is thinking:yeah, buried under the extra pounds. I wish I knew how to get her to see that her name describes her: a homonym for a word that meansworth.
Brian is equally at a loss. He was never overweight as a kid; he isn’t now. His relationship with Meret has one advantage over mine, though—she does not look at him and compare herself. Maybe for that reason, the bond they have has always been a little fiercer, a littlemore. Say what you will about Brian, but he loves being a father more than anything in the world. He would have had ten more kids, but that wasn’t in the cards for us, and eventually we stopped trying.Clearly,he would say to me each month, when I told him—again—that I wasn’t pregnant,we can’t improve on the original model.
This summer, Meret is at a STEM camp for teenage girls. We had to nearly force her to go, but since she will be moving into a new school next year as a ninth grader, this gives her the chance to make some connections with new kids before the academic year begins. It seems to be working. She keeps talking about a girl named Sarah, who like her, is a budding biologist. Today she texted me, asking if she could go to Sarah’s for dinner.
Which is why I’m surprised when she walks through the front door while I’m cooking for myself and Brian. “Hi,” I say. “What are you doing home?”
