Lauren Grodstein - The Explanation for Everything

The wedding was held at the home of the bride, who was not, of course, planning to be a pastor herself (in the Korean Presbyterian church, women were not ordained), but who wanted to teach youth Bible, perhaps in New York, perhaps back home in Dallas. She was a second-generation American, and when Mrs. Lim met her parents, she was surprised at their heavy Texas accents—she had never met Koreans with Texas accents before—and from the way that they regarded her son, she knew he was not exactly what they had imagined for their daughter.

Still, a wedding was a joyful thing, a hot Texas wedding in June, and Anita agreed to take a break from Princeton and her work with Hank Rosenblum (Eddie had wanted to bet someone she’d just bring him along to the wedding so as not to interrupt her studies) and put on a peach-colored organza dress and be one of Diana’s eleven bridesmaids. At the rehearsal dinner, a big Texas barbecue, Korean food on the side, Anita was seated next to Eddie’s seminary friend Charles.

That night, in the corridor of the Holiday Inn, outside their adjoining rooms: had anyone seen Anita?

The next morning Anita was neither sleepy nor hungover but instead was as happy as Mrs. Lim had ever seen her. Gushing. Glowing! She didn’t need any makeup whatsoever but still she happily submitted to the makeup artist, who drew long lines around her eyes, lines around her lips, filled in the lines with sparkly colors. She floated into her peach dress. She walked down that aisle carrying her flowers like one of the heroines in the British novels she and Mrs. Lim both used to read. From the front pew where Mrs. Lim sat, regarding the processional, she thought: Oh, for heaven’s sake. Anita’s in love.

How she changed! Immediately she changed. She was happy. She was polite! She allowed them to tease her, kindly, about the size and squalor of her Princeton living conditions. She allowed them to bring her another glass of champagne. When it was time for her to say something to the bride and her brother, she raised her glass and spoke with more loving kindness toward Eddie than Mrs. Lim had ever heard her express. And she danced with all of them, with her brother, with her father, but especially with Charles, who escorted her onto the dance floor with a gentlemanly hand on her back and whom she gazed up at with eyes wide and joyful, never mind the sparkly makeup sliding off them in a welter of Texas heat.

She didn’t go directly back to Princeton but instead came to her parents’ house in Brooklyn, borrowed their car, and drove up to Rochester, where Charles was now an apprentice pastor. “Don’t worry, Mom, I’ll stay with one of the ladies from his church, Charles is old-fashioned about these things,” and Mrs. Lim thought that she had just been in London with Rosenblum and hadn’t even told her the name of their hotel.

Suddenly she was in Brooklyn all the time. Suddenly Charles was their guest for dinner, along with Eddie and Diana, and nobody could quite believe the girl Anita was or had become: demure, friendly, and most of all, smiling. Finally, finally, she helped Mrs. Lim prepare food in the kitchen. They ate together, like a family, in the dining room, the television turned off, the conversation friendly and engaged. Diana talked about her wish to start a big family, soon, and instead of rolling her eyes (Anita had always had strange ideas about children, thought the best thing to do was not have any in the first place) Anita just smiled.

All she asked of them throughout these performances—and Mrs. Lim couldn’t help but think of them as performances, because how else to understand these radical changes? How else to understand the daughter who now asked her how her day was, who asked if she could help out any, who wanted—and here Mrs. Lim almost dropped the phone—who wanted to meet them at church on Sunday before taking the train back to Princeton? All Anita asked of them in return was that they not discuss in any particular detail her work at Princeton, in part because she wanted to explain it all to Charles herself, and in part because she was kind of rethinking, she said, the whole thing. She was rethinking everything she’d ever believed.

ON A BUSY Friday morning at the store, October, Halloween season, Mrs. Lim received a strange phone call. The man on the other end was frantic, speaking so quickly that at first Mrs. Lim didn’t understand.

“Anita!” he finally said. “Where is she?”

Anita, at that moment, had just stepped out of the store to go for a jog in Prospect Park with Charles.

“I’m sorry?”

“Mrs. Lim, she hasn’t returned my calls. She hasn’t come to the lab. I’ve seen her on campus and she’s told me to leave her alone. Is she sick? Is she depressed? What’s happened to her?”

“How did you get this number?” Mrs. Lim said. That miserable unwashed professor at Princeton chasing her down like this—it was unprofessional. Maybe it was even criminal? Mrs. Lim thought briefly about calling the police.

“Can you tell me where she is?”

“I’m sorry,” Mrs. Lim said. “I don’t think I should.”

“Mrs. Lim, no disrespect here, but do you know anything about the award Anita won this spring?”

“Yes,” she said, and even here was she saying too much? “She went to London.”

“Right, but do you understand what a big huge deal this award is? Her viral theory—Mrs. Lim, this is one of the biggest deals in evolutionary biology in a generation. Did she tell you, Mrs. Lim? Have you seen the newspaper articles? Do you understand? I need to find her, Mrs. Lim. I need to talk to her.”

If there was anything she was sick of, it was people assuming she didn’t understand. “I’d like to end this conversation now, Mister.”

“Did she tell you about the money, Mrs. Lim?”

The money? “I must hang up the phone.”

“Two hundred thousand dollars, more or less, depending on the exchange rate. That’s the money that comes with the Kent-Hughes. She didn’t tell you?”

“Anita doesn’t talk about these kinds of things,” said Mrs. Lim, even though she felt her insides growing cold. What kind of daughter wouldn’t tell her about two hundred thousand dollars?

“Mrs. Lim—I—” the voice on the other end sounded less frantic now, now just broken. “She didn’t tell you?”

What was she supposed to say to this stranger? What she and her daughter talked about, didn’t talk about—the kind of daughter Anita was, or had been, was no business of his.

“Mrs. Lim, your daughter is the sort of genius I’ve been waiting to meet all my life. In all my pursuits, in everything—I think, if she continues the track she’s on—Mrs. Lim, I think Anita might explain some of the very fundamentals of life itself. How it started. Where it comes from. The very origins, the lightning in a bottle. Do you understand, Mrs. Lim? We need to continue working together because—because if we don’t, Mrs. Lim, I just worry—I worry about all the people who will suffer. That’s what I think about. That’s what a big deal she is.”

Oh, the grandiosity of these people. Mrs. Lim was glad she’d taken the Harvard sticker off the wall.

“Do you understand, Mrs. Lim?”

“I have to go now.”

“Do you understand what’s at stake?”

“Good day.”

She did, of course, have every intention of asking Anita about the phone call and the money and the prize—two hundred thousand dollars never even mentioned—and maybe she would even ask about all the people who would suffer, but instead, an hour later, when Anita jogged into the store, sweaty and trailed by a beaming Charles, she ran straight behind the counter and into her mother’s arms. “Anita!” This hadn’t happened since she was a toddler. “What’s happening?” Between this and the phone call—Mrs. Lim wondered about her own nervous heart.