“Does my body offend you, Mother?” The words are a challenge, but the tone is tremulous, as though Stella has gone much, much further than she intended, and does not know her way back. Katerine turns slowly, deliberately, and looks at Stella.
Lore wonders what Stella sees in her mother’s eyes. Her sister goes utterly blank. She steps from the pool mechanically and reaches for her dress. No one says anything while she fastens her buttons. She looks at the bottle, but Katerine is still holding it. Lore understands that Stella is unwilling to step any closer to her mother to reach for the vodka.
Stella, hair dripping, uncertain whether to reach for the bottle or leave without it, looks like a whipped dog.
“Your father will want to see you here when he gets back,” Katerine says. She smiles, and Stella sits abruptly, leans back against the stone fountain rim, and closes her eyes. Just like that, she absents herself. Gone. Lore has seen Greta do that: just disappear. Tok returns his attention to whatever he is building from sticks.
Katerine lifts the bottle from the stone rim, checks to make sure the cap is secure, then looks at Lore speculatively. “Tell me,” she says, “if Stella had dropped the bottle in the fountain and it was, by some miracle, both uncapped and full, how would you have gone about the remediation of the pond system?”
Water tinkles, the sun beats down, and Tok strips the bark from a twig while Lore tries to work out the approximate flow per minute in gallons from this fountain to the next pond and the next; the effect of about a pint of raw alcohol on the flora and fauna; the breeding rate of carp…
Tok makes some involuntary movement.
“What?” Lore asks.
He sighs. “It’s a trick question, Lore. We were taught that the first thing to remember when faced with-”
“The first thing to remember when faced with a problem,” Katerine interrupts, “is not to make the problem more complicated than it is. With this surface area,” she gestures at the series of ponds, “and this heat, a pint of vodka would evaporate before it did any damage that would not remediate itself naturally in a week or two.”
Lore digs a hole in the turf with her finger. She feels stupid, the idiot younger sister, the one who never knows what’s going on, the one always left out of the joke. But when she looks up, Katerine is smiling at her and it’s a nice smile, not cruel at all.
“You looked like you were working out some pretty complicated reactions. Had you considered and included the lethal-fifty dose for fish?”
“Yes,” Lore admits shyly, “except I don’t know the alcohol concentration L-fifty for freshwater fish so I was going on the figures I read in that report last year on the spill of ethanol in the salmon fishery in Scotland, so –”
“You read that?”
Lore nods cautiously. “I try to read as much as I can.”
Katerine smiles. No, she beams, and Lore cannot remember getting that kind of approval from her mother before. She smiles back, tentatively.
“That Scottish job was complicated by the fact that the ethanol was contaminated by printers’ ink.” Katerine absently fills a plate, hands it to Lore.
“I know. I tried to compensate for that. But it was mostly guesswork.”
“It often is, at least in the evaluation phase of a project.” Katerine begins to fill another plate for herself. “Did you try for a differentiated flow rate or go for a median rate?”
Lore sits up straighter. “Wouldn’t a median rate defeat the object? I mean, when Willem took me round the plant in Den Haag he said the whole point was to calculate and bear in mind the different rates at which living things speed up or slow down flow.” She gets a nod and an encouraging smile for that. “And that’s not even taking into account the different ways those plants act on the contaminant…”
And Lore finds that she is enjoying herself. Her mother is talking to her as an equal, not as the family pawn, the commodity to be traded on for points. When she is the center of attention she does not have to think about Stella, does not have to worry about Tok and what he saw. And she finds that while she talks of flows and systems, she has images in her head of bright water and cool colors, of sunshine and green plants. It is a miracle to watch phenol turn to carbon dioxide, to see metal absorbed by moss and made harmless, to see a natural ecosystem survive because someone, somewhere, bothered to sit down and think about a way to design a biosystem to augment it.
As the sun begins its downward slide and the blades of grass cast longer shadows, and she and Katerine continue to talk, she wonders if her grandmother—the rich one, the one who was stupid enough to spend money playing with their genes but smart enough to also tailor bacteria that made her family’s company possible—ever saw whole systems shining in her head that way Lore does that afternoon.
When Oster gets back wearing his clean, dry clothes, Lore looks up and is about to smile at him, happy, when she realizes Katerine is grinning, hard, in triumph, as if to say, See? Her heart is mine!, and Lore’s smile falters and she feels the shining systems in her head crack and tarnish.
Spring is long gone and the summer grows tired and hot and brown around the edges. Tok suddenly announces that he is ready to take on more responsibility and leaves immediately for Louisiana to take charge of the family’s ongoing remediation project in the bayous. He has avoided everyone since the picnic, even Lore, and she suspects he wants to work harder not because he wants to assume the burdens and privileges of adulthood, but because he does not want to have time to think about the place he went to, the thing he saw, when he looked at Stella in the fountain.
Lore spends some time with Oster, trying to count the number of fish species in the azure and turquoise waters off the island. Her hair turns gray-white, like ash, and her skin darkens. Oster gets more pensive.
The water is as still as glass, and Lore is staring out at the distant horizon, thinking of nothing, when he asks, “Has Stella talked to you?”
Lore does not turn to look at him and does not ask what he means. “No.”
“She must have said something.”
“She didn’t. She never talks to me.”
“What about Tok?”
“What about him?”
“Don’t be difficult, Lore.”
Lore feels something rising up inside her, hot and empty, like an air bubble. “Tok hasn’t said anything, Stella hasn’t said anything. Nor have you or mother, not even Willem or Marley or Greta. No one ever really says anything.” As she lists the family she notices how easily they slat into subsets, all but her.
Oster has the grace to look down at his feet. “It’s just that I forget you’re not little anymore. I’m used to you being the baby of the family. I think of you as being seven, of sitting up in bed demanding to know why your hair is gray. And it’s still gray.”
“What do you mean?”
He opens his hands, pleading for understanding. “Stella started dyeing her hair when she was eleven. Tok when he was twelve. Yours is still gray. I look at it and immediately think: Still too young to dye her hair, thank god.”
Lore touches her white-gray hair self-consciously. Her youthful vow to never dye it now seems childish, as irrelevant as milk teeth.
Lore is fourteen two days before term begins. She arrives at school in Auckland with hair dyed in black and white flashes, like a head of lightning.
Lore is someone else and it excites her. She wonders why she didn’t start dyeing her hair years ago. Now when she looks at herself in the mirror she sees a young woman who has designed herself. She can do anything she wants. She toys with the idea of wearing lenses but decides she likes the gray eyes and black and white hair. It gives her a cool, distant look, like the faces of dead heroes buried under ancient ice. It is a face that knows.