“Why?” my mother asked.
Eva did the unthinkable. She smiled again. “No agenda,” she said quietly. “Hungry, maybe?”
“Oh, boy,” my father grinned and rubbed his hands together like a child rolling strands of clay spaghetti. “Merci, Dr. Rozen, mon amie,” he said with a contrived French accent. “Where are we going?” He sounded like a cross between a poodle and a Chihuahua with phlegm in its throat.
“North Shore. Company car and driver’s waiting. Come on, Marta, relax. When was the last time we had a friendly outing?”
“Not in a long time,” my mother conceded. “If ever,” she added under her breath.
If I heard her, then Eva did, too.
Eva snorted. “Oh, you kidder,” she deadpanned though her smile remained. “How about you let down your hair tonight?”
My mother looked startled and was about to reply when my father stepped between them, turned to Eva, and said, “Sounds great. You buying?” Eva nodded, with a brief roll of her eyes. “Then let’s go,” my father said. He turned to my mother with a smile, offered his arm, and said, “Mademoiselle?” This act of exaggerated gallantry defused the tension. Or maybe it was the ludicrous attempt at dialect. My mother took his arm and smiled at Eva. Her arched eyebrows settled first into the facial equivalent of parade rest, then, at ease. Eva’s face returned to expressionlessness. The strain that normally bound the two abated. She took Eva’s hand.
They were warily rebuilding their friendship. There were clumsy moments, like a musician stumbling over a difficult passage in a work that had lain unpracticed and the muscle memory lost. They were still friends when they moved from Los Angeles to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to study at Harvard University. Maternity and a crushing pre-med courseload demanded all of my mother’s strength. Eva seemed to skate through her courses, a facility that likely nettled my mother. Perhaps it contributed to their falling out.
The driver opened the door for us and we piled in. My father got in the car and bounced on the resilient car seat a few times after the driver closed the door. He rubbed the seat covering and murmured, “Ooh. Could this be this real leather?” Then to the driver, “Are we sitting on cows?”
“No, Mr. Ecco, nanofabrics.”
“I wonder how many atoms had to die for us to have this luxurious ride.”
“And I wonder how many times I have to hear that tired old joke,” my mother said. She smiled and accepted the festive character of the day.
My father played with the various passenger controls. The air flow stuttered on and off, while the music alternated among disparate genres.
“Jim, will you please sit still? You’re worse than a child.” She looked at me and said, “Tell me you’re not going to grow up like that.”
He just smiled and continued to play. The many gizmos he now had at his disposal at NMech seemed to help him compensate for the rigors of New England life. He had been raised in Southern California shirtsleeves and never adjusted to the extended cold of northern winters. He complained every time he offered a friendly greeting to a passerby and was met by downturned eyes. A hidebound Puritan legacy had gripped Boston for four hundred years: “Keep your eyes down, mouth shut, and thoughts hidden.”
“Where are we going?” my father asked, as he settled down.
“Fine dining,” Eva said. “Nothing but the best.”
“I’m not dressed for anything fancy,” my mother complained mildly.
Eva bit off a retort. Instead, she replied, “I mean, fine dining as in good food.”
That evening her eyes afforded me an intimacy she seldom shared. The vulnerability was ephemeral and genuine. I could see a panorama of torment and joy—her madding fight for survival and the orderly structure of science in which she took refuge. My father, despite his uncanny abilities of observation, never seemed to notice, nor did my compassionate mother respond to this damaged woman’s concealed disquiet.
Decades later, at the funeral, one that was shunned by all except a few members of the media, her eulogy included a quote from an earlier century’s actress, Audrey Hepburn. Eva, the officiant said, “was born with an enormous need for affection, and a terrible need to give it.”
It was an odd comment, given the context, but accurate. My birth gave Eva an outlet to express herself in a way that would have otherwise been impossible for the driven woman. We forged a curious bond. She was both playmate and mentor. My father told me that when I was an infant, she and I relished endless rounds of peek-a-boo. “Hello, Baby!” she’d call out, a bit too loud, and startle, then delight me. Otherwise, Eva never spoke to me except as she would to another adult. When we made up songs together—that was not her strong suit, it was too much like made-up stories—we were never quite able to work ‘graphene’ or ‘quantum particle’ into the lyrics and rhyme scheme of a child’s song. We didn’t care. We had fun.
As I grew, we competed. Our favorite contests were insults and math games and by the time I was ten or eleven, I seemed to hold my own with both. It’s hard to imagine a juvenile matching wits with one of the great minds of the time, but it’s equally hard to imagine Eva choosing to forfeit any competition.
There was one off-key note in those wonderful years. I think that my mother sometimes felt eclipsed. Eva held a role something like a grandmother and a grandmother figure evoked the pain and the loss my mother felt when her own mother died. Her eyes might glisten just before she issued an edict to end whatever game Eva and I had invented. “Dana, time for your bath”—or dinner, lunch, snack, homework, chores, or an errand for which my help was suddenly indispensible. Eva would give me a sly smile, as if to confirm the temporary nature of the interruption and then she would turn back to granite.
The car glided silently to a stop at a roadside stand in Revere, a seaside town just north of Boston. The eatery was famous for its fried clams and the aroma of fresh oil and the sea drew a hungry mob. They milled about the same service windows that greeted customers for close to a century. People pushed their way up to the front of the throng to order and then drifted back to wait for their food, and then returned when their dinners were ready. They were like geese in flight, a few birds flying at the point to carve a path in the atmosphere, and then moving back to rest and draft behind the skein before pulling forward again.
We took our food and walked across a pedestrian walkway to sit on the sea wall. The broad ribbon of concrete unrolled along the three-mile length of the beach. We relaxed, ate, and watched people strolling past. My mother seemed engrossed in the ocean, lit now by low-angled rays as the sun set behind us. The colors that dappled the ocean’s surface changed with the trajectory of the setting sun, violet and blue streaks giving way to yellow and orange, and finally blood red, the last wavelengths of the sun’s declension.
After the sun set, an onshore breeze chilled us. As soon as we were back in the NMech car I kicked off my sandals and stretched out along the bottom segment of the sofa-like seating area. My mother and Eva bracketed me, each sitting on opposite banquettes, uprights of the U-shaped passenger area. My father was next to my mother, engrossed in a holographic depiction that only he could see.
Eva selected some music, Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The simple aria that begins and ends the composition stands out in my memory. Even today, Bach’s melodies take me to a place of peace, and the counterpoint takes me to one of balance. My mother stroked my forehead with idle affection. I looked up at her face. It was framed by her sable hair and a slight smile caused her eyes to sparkle.
I felt another hand. Eva gently tickled my feet. Twin caresses bracketed me, like the music’s counterpoint. I floated in the music and the satisfied exhaustion of a day well-lived and hard-played. Then both sets of hands froze. I looked up and saw that my mother’s and Eva’s eyes were locked, one on the other, each with a gaze that held equal measures of compassion and possession.