Lauren Grodstein - The Explanation for Everything

“I don’t have a stamp, Linda.”

“Just tell me you’re not. This is a serious biology department. Nina? Wouldn’t you say we’re a serious biology department?”

Nina was half-slumped. “It is so serious, Linda. We are so very serious.”

Andy drained his glass, stood to go. Sheila stood too, smoothed her dress.

“The thing is, Andy, it has to start with us. We have to be the bulwark,” Linda opined, from her comfortable seat in the beautiful house. “And I get it, Andy, you’re such a sweet guy, you want to be nice to your students, but remember you’re doing them no favors if you let them believe in lies.”

“Gotcha,” Andy said.

“You can’t validate the lies.”

“Jane, where’s the bathroom?” Andy asked, even though he knew. Under an oil painting of a sunrise, Andy took a long, dribbly piss. Then he rifled through a basket under the sink for an aspirin but he found only tampons and condoms. For whom? What kind of guest bathroom stored condoms? Tantalized, rebellious, he pocketed a handful.

“Sheila, it was so nice to meet you,” Linda said, as Andy took his Tupperwared wedge of cake, his pocketed condoms, Sheila to the door.

“Thank you,” Sheila said. “Thank you. I had the loveliest time.”

The condoms felt heavy in his pocket. Sheila offered to drive, but he said no, he was fine, he would do it.

“Who is this Melissa character?” she asked him as they departed Lace Point, got back on Church Road toward their own forsaken strip of New Jersey. “They certainly seemed up in arms about her work.”

“Oh, just a student,” Andy said. “She’s nobody.”

“Then why were they so freaked out?”

“You ever hear of the Scopes monkey trial?”

“Tennessee, right? William Jennings Bryan?”

Andy was surprised; he hadn’t expected her to know it. “Well, Melissa might have come out on the other side.”

The lights which led them out of town abruptly turned dark as they crossed an invisible border. They were in the country.

“So she’s a religious fanatic,” Sheila said.

“If you believe in God are you automatically a fanatic?”

“Hey, whoa,” Sheila said, pressing an imaginary brake with her palm. “That’s not what I said. I’m just trying to figure out why you seem defensive when you talk about her.”

Andy didn’t say anything. The road twisted into the pines.

“At dinner, I mean.”

“I wasn’t trying to be defensive.”

“Well nobody ever does—”

“She’s my babysitter.”

“Ah,” Sheila said. She smiled like she understood. “And you like her.”

“I trust her with my girls,” Andy said. When he pulled in front of her house, she did not immediately open the door to get out. He wondered if he was supposed to open the door for her. Well, he wouldn’t. He was tired and his head still pounded.

“So,” she said, “you have a babysitter?” She turned to him with a heavy-lidded smile.

“Yes,” he said. “And I better get back to her. It’s late.”

“Oh,” Sheila said. “Okay.” She paused another second before opening her car door. “Well, thanks again. I really had a lovely time.”

“Me too,” Andy said, and because he was a gentleman, he waited to make sure she was safely in the house before backing out of her driveway to his own darkened home.

BUT WALKING TO his own front door, he felt lighter. Melissa had heard him jam his key into the lock and opened the door for him, smiling, leaning against the jamb. “Hey, Doctor.” She was so young, so untainted by that preposterous dinner party. And now that they hung out more often she called him Doctor, or sometimes Doc, although not Andy, never Andy.

“The girls were good?”

“They were great,” she said. “Noncombative.”

He followed her into the kitchen. It was starting to get icy out, and the windows were steaming; water was boiling in the kettle. She had put out a mug with a tea bag in it. Two mugs, in fact; two tea bags. She planned on staying, and she knew where he kept the tea bags.

“So did you like hanging out with the other biology teachers?” she asked. “What did you guys talk about? Did you talk about your students?” Here she turned and made a kissy face, the first adorable gesture he’d ever seen her make.

“Eh, nothing important,” he said, ignoring Melissa’s adorability, watching her pour water into the mugs.

“What’s nothing important?”

“Politics,” he said. “Family. I don’t know, what people talk about. Not students,” he lied. “There was too much booze, but otherwise it was fine.”

“You didn’t drink, though, did you?” Melissa asked, as she sat down with the tea, pushed a mug toward him across the table.

“I’m sorry?”

“You didn’t drink, right?” And here Andy wondered if he’d committed some foul, because when he counted up everything and included the scotch, he drank four alcoholic beverages over four hours, which wasn’t enough to become impaired but which was certainly more than he ever drank in ordinary circumstances. In ordinary circumstances, in fact, he didn’t drink at all! Should he tell her that? He couldn’t remember whether alcohol was specifically against whatever religious rules Melissa subscribed to but he didn’t feel like apologizing for it. She had never been subjected to one of Marty Reuben’s dinner parties and never would be.

She blew on her tea, casual. “Just because, you know, you had to drive. So you wouldn’t want to be drinking.”

“I know,” he said.

She sipped her tea. She probably wasn’t aware that she was needling him. She was twenty-one, with a twenty-one-year-old’s idea of right and wrong, a twenty-one-year-old’s unmalleable morality. And she had no real idea of his biography.

“Well, anyway, the girls really were great tonight,” she said. “I helped Rachel with her science homework. She’s doing a project on rock porosity? So we’ve been soaking those rocks. You’ll see, we left a bunch of buckets in their bedroom.”

“Melissa, I don’t drink and drive,” Andy said, although he knew he must be drunk, at least a little, to even begin this conversation. Why was he defending himself? Why were they drinking tea together? The clock above the sink said it was almost midnight and there was no reason for her to still be in his house. She had a Honda Civic parked in his driveway. He could give her money and she could leave.

“No, of course,” she said, quickly. She held her mug with both hands. “I didn’t mean to sound like I was—”

“My wife was killed by a drunk driver,” he said. And again, why say this? Except the look on Melissa’s face, of fresh horror and shame, made him feel stronger. Powerful. What had happened to him could still horrify people. And he was drunk, he’d admit it, four glasses in four hours, but he was drunk with something else too, loneliness, he supposed, and it felt an awful lot like being drunk on alcohol, the same resentment, the same headache. He thought about how he’d treated Sheila, like he didn’t know better, except he did, and he felt guilty about that, and resentful that Sheila made him feel guilty, and all that plus having to live every day with Louisa’s ghost.

“I knew your wife was gone,” Melissa said. Her eyes looked damp. “I didn’t know why.”

“Forget it,” he said. “It’s nothing we have to talk about.”

“I didn’t know what I was saying. I’m sorry.”

Andy was quiet. Melissa looked down at her tea bag, plopped it up and down a few times in the hot water to leech out the tea.

“She’s in heaven, you know.”

“Melissa,” he said. His head was pounding. Tomorrow, Sunday, a long Sunday with the girls at home, and if he remembered right the weathermen were calling for snow. What would they do with themselves all day? Homework? Would he have to supervise homework? Would the girls feel trapped, start picking on each other, bickering, would he have to send them to Jeremy’s house? Would he have to sit there and make chitchat with Sheila while the kids shot at each other on Jeremy’s PlayStation? Would he have to change Sheila’s lightbulbs? Fix her faucet? Stay for dinner?