Pretty scary, I said.
If I had married him then it would have been your father on the couch. Then he would have asked me, Aren’t we suppose to be married? And I would have said to him, Buddy, if you only knew.
My stomach hurts, I said. I’m staying home from school tomorrow.
Sure, honey. We’ll have a pajama day. Did you have a nice trip? he asked, like he’d just run into us at the supermarket. Is that a gun in your pants, Edward, or are you just happy to see my husband?
If he was my father, would I still have brown eyes?
Oh no. He had the most beautiful watery blue eyes. You could just drown in them. I had a weakness for blue eyes and brown hair, and big forearms.
But would I still be me?
Of course. You’d be you, but with gorgeous blue eyes.
How? I don’t understand.
Genetics, honey. Genetics. It’s complicated. She put out her cigarette, then held out another for me to light. Oh, what a life we could have had together. You and me and Edward Kent.
What about Jemma? I asked.
Yes, her too. Those Kent genes would shape her up.
So for years and years I would look at myself and think, if only Edward Kent were my father, then I would not be who I am, then I would never had been so angry all the time, or so sad, or had to know from the cradle that I was ruined. But I realized, of course, that Edward Kent was my father. He came to my mother, along with a host of other regrets, a host of lost opportunities, a disembodied god who rained down upon her and said, I am everything you have ever done and regretted — let us make a child together. And my father had a similar visitation, and so I was conceived.
It all comes out from me — circles and circles of corruption and regret and depravity, but before it was in me it was in them — my mother and my father. And before it was in them it was in their parents. And I say — and everyone says — I will not put it in my child, and yet everybody does. I make promises, I keep lists: this and this and this I will surely never do, because I never want to uncover in my child the sort of hatred my parents uncover in me with even the most innocent and benevolent action. But as surely as the moon rises and the sun sets, depravity passes down through the ages, because there is always a gap between who we are and who we should be, and our parents, molested by regret, conceive us under the false hope that we will be better than them, and everything they do, every hug and blow, only makes certain that we never will be.
39
Animals presented themselves at the windows of the hospitaclass="underline" a giant eye appeared in one of the small round windows of radiology; three steel-blue makos paused on a journey to pace at a second floor window and watch Maggie clog with her class. Transported by her dancing, it took her a while to notice that the class had stopped moving and were staring at the sharks. She shrieked at them to pay attention and follow along, then shrieked again at the sharks for interrupting her class, and shooed them off by kicking a clog at the window. She was an expert clog-marksman, and could hurl them with enough force to strike someone unconscious, but the glass was unbreakable.
Vivian was tuning and retuning a student’s violin — the pegs on the replicated instruments were always slipping — when a bright red fish appeared at her window. Her three students jumped up from their chairs and pressed their hands and faces against the glass. The little fish just hovered there, moving its lips at them silently. Vivian walked closer to the window and put her hand out to touch the glass. Then to the delight of her students, the fish puffed up to ten times its original size. Vivian did not find it so charming as her students. She thought the fish was glaring at her, and thought it might have been offering a lesson about ambition in its puffed-up display.
Rob’s gymnastics class cried out, “Dolphins!” and pointed behind him, but he thought they were kidding. They were meeting in a new room on the sixth floor, and every time he turned around he only saw the horizon and the empty sky. But as soon as he went back to standing on his head the cry would come again. After missing them three times he just sat down in the middle of his kids and waited. “You all have got to learn to stop joshing the teacher,” Rob said finally. A wrestling match broke out spontaneously between Tir Dufresne and Jarvis, and Rob was just standing to go break it up when he saw the dolphins come leaping at the window, first one, and then a pair, then three at a time, then four, and then a procession of twos, leaping in rapid succession and inclining their eyes toward Rob and the children at the top of their arc. He plastered himself, like the kids, by pressing himself against the glass, and called out tenderly to his fellow mammals. “There must have been a hundred of them,” he told Jemma later.
Dr. Snood saw an electric ray outside of his room. Dr. Sundae felt eyes upon her as she dressed and turned around to see a bigeye tuna staring through her window. A horrific-looking sargassum fish bumped against Father Jane’s window as she was working on her latest sermon. She was so surprised, and so unsettled by the ugliness of the fish, that she fainted.
Jemma was lying in bed, overcome by a late resurgence of nausea, trying to formulate a lesson plan, when she heard the tapping at her window. She was as miserable as she’d been in weeks, more because of her class than because of her persistent vomiting. Vivian and Rob had no trouble formulating lesson plans and executing them, in holding their students’ attention and even demonstrating progress in their learning, after only two weeks of class. Two of Vivian’s students who before, under a harsh Suzuki master, had had only four months of pretend-play on cardboard violins, now were playing “Amazing Grace.” Rob’s class was doing cartwheels in a herd all around the padded playroom, in form that appeared perfect to Jemma’s jealous eye, with none of the Oompah-Loompah awkwardness of just a week before, and Jarvis had mastered the round-off and started on a back handspring — he could only dive backward into a well of foam and colored plastic balls, but any minute he would get that, too.
Jemma’s class had learned to stare at her with great intensity. She had taught them to narrow their eyes, and furrow their brows, and square their chins. They could stare patiently for five minutes at the flame of a scented candle. They could sing in unison the mysterious Om that Jemma, desperate and almost bored with her inability to teach them anything real, had them sing with her. “Become the noise,” she told them, wanting to claw at her cheeks for shame and fraud-feeling, “and let the fire come up from inside you.” Dr. Snood and the others would not release her from the imposed obligation to teach what she could do.
“There’s nothing to teach,” she told him. “It just is. There’s no how.”
“I don’t doubt a certain person thought the same about the calculus, Dr. Claflin.” Jemma hated it when people called it the calculus, and hated calculus, anyway.
“I do doubt it, Dr. Snood. If there were a formula, I’d copy it down and hand it out.”
“Did you expect it to be easy? I think that’s your problem, Dr. Claflin. I noticed it from the day you came on my service. You want things to be easy, but just because you can wave your hand at say, familial polyposis and send it packing, doesn’t mean everything will be easy.”
“I don’t want easy,” Jemma said. “I’m just tired of impossible.”