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Authors: Nancy Rue

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“I can't skate down them,” she said, “so I just walk down backward. I don't know why, but I just tried it and I haven't fallen yet, but I do wear these kneepads so—”

“Great,” I said. “Have a seat.”

I pointed to the chair, and she skidded crazily toward it, sank into it, backpack and all, and let her feet roll out halfway across the room. She really did have the longest legs I'd ever seen on a girl, accentuated by the shorts she was wearing. Only the pink top that was fluttering at her waistline assured me that those legs didn't come straight out of her neck.

I sat down in my desk chair and looked at her, waiting for her to state her business. She just looked back at me, eyebrows furrowed over her big gray eyes in an expression of deep consternation. Her face wasn't bewildered and confused like the rest of her; it was just concerned.

“So,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

“I need help.” Then her arms came up for no apparent reason and flopped back down on her lap.

“With Math 19?” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. I flipped open my grade book and ran a finger down to Lane, Tabitha. Yeah, she needed help, all right. She'd failed the first quiz, and although she turned in every homework assignment, it was clear that calculus was still a mystery to her.

“What exactly is it that you're not getting?” I asked.

“All of it.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let's start with my explanations in class. Are they confusing you?”

Her eyes got bigger, if that was possible. “Oh, no!” she said. “No, you're a great teacher! I totally understand everything you say! It's just when I get back to my room to do the problems, it's, like, gone. Plus, I can't even study in the dorm. It's so noisy all the time—people are talking and going in and out all hours of the night. It's like, yikes, you know? So I go to the library and I look around and see all these people who are so smart and they obviously understand everything they're doing and I don't and I just start thinking I'm going to flunk out and be so humiliated and then—I just can't do the problems.”

Fortunately, she had to stop to take a breath. I took the opportunity to offer the only really compassionate thing I could ever think of to say to kids who were in over their heads.

“Look, math isn't for everybody,” I said. “I'm sure you do a lot better in courses for your major.”

She blinked. “Math
is
my major.”

I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying, “What are you, a masochist?” Instead I flipped open my date book and picked up a pen.

“You're going to need tutoring at least twice a week,” I said. “When can you come in?”

She disentangled herself from the backpack and pawed through it. I stifled a groan. Spending two hours a week with an eighteen-year-old who was short on confidence and long on nonstop monologues punctuated with the words
like
and
totally
wasn't what I'd had in mind when I applied for the coveted fellowship at Stanford.

I told Alan Jacoboni about her that afternoon while he was waking up over a cup of Starbucks coffee. Why I ever discussed anything with the man was beyond me. I'd have been content to sit in the office in total silence, actually getting work done, since I was teaching a course on my own that quarter
and
getting pressure from the department to organize a teaching seminar for the other graduate students
and
being available to see students three hours a week
and
trying to finish my dissertation
and
getting it together to apply for post-doc positions. But Jacoboni never seemed to have much to do except talk in that educated Southern accent that sounded phony to me—although who would
want
to put that on was a question I couldn't answer.

“How does a child like that get into Stanford in the first place?” he said.

“High school grades. Test scores,” I said.

“And she's flunking out?”

“Not yet.”

“Good luck, darlin'.”

He smiled for no apparent reason, the way he did at the end of almost every sentence, and then propped up his feet, legs clad in cargo shorts, on his desk. As usual, he was wearing sandals, in
spite of the fact that his feet were gargoyle-bony. It was his macho pose, one he had adopted early on when he'd discovered that he was the best-looking graduate student among the males in the math department. Math guys tended to be on the geeky side, so the fact that Alan was somewhat hip and played up his basic attractiveness made him look like Leonardo DiCaprio in a room full of Woody Aliens.

I personally didn't think he was all that handsome. He kept his generically brown, curly hair cut close to his head so it didn't go wild on him, and he was going to be fighting the proverbial battle of the bulge someday if he didn't stop living on beer and Cheetos. At twenty-eight, it was about time. Okay, so when he was dressed in nice slacks and a sport shirt and loafers he looked relatively attractive, but he usually schlepped around in shorts and T-shirts when he wasn't teaching, and he didn't do “sloppy-casual” well. He tended to just look sloppy.

He was still leaning back in his chair, hands behind his head, checking me out with his eyes, as if he hadn't been looking at me every day for the last four years.

“What?” I said coolly.

“Darlin', I bet it's days like this you wish you were already out there knocking down the big bucks instead of in here tutoring pathetic little airheads.”

“I'm not crazy about the pathetic little airheads,'” I said. “But I'm not here to learn how to make big bucks.”

“Oh, bilge! We all are. What really burns my biscuits is when I get an e-mail from one of my fraternity brothers telling me he's going to Cancun for a week. He's got a bachelor's in business and he's already making six figures a year. I've got twice the education and I'm still living like a pauper.” He lifted a foot so I could see the large hole in the sole of his sandal.

“Nice,” I said.

“You can't tell me that doesn't bother you,” Jacoboni said.

“It doesn't bother me.” I made a huge deal out of opening a
file folder and studying it intently, pencil behind my ear. He didn't pick up the clue that, for me, the conversation was over.

“It bothers
me
. But not for long. Once I'm out of here, I'm heading straight for industry. Then I'll be flying to Cancun for the
weekend
—in my private jet. Oh, yeah, baby.”

Since he was obviously not going to shut up, I turned and surveyed him with one of my I-see-through-you-pal stares.

“If you want to work in industry,” I said, “why did you come here? We have less applied math than almost any other school.”

“Because it's
Stanford
, honey. All I have to do is say the name and CEOs drop their dentures.”

“Oh,” I said. The stare wasn't working. I went back to the file.

“I like being one of the two oddballs around here,” he went on. “You and me, darlin'.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“The two of us are the oddities. We keep our moods cool and our eyes on the prize.”

I was grateful that Peter and Rashad showed up just then asking Jacaboni to come “see something”—undoubtedly the latest grad student scribbles on their office chalkboard.

“Sure,” Jacoboni told them. “I don't have anything else to do.”

He winked at me as he left. When he was gone, I feigned throwing up in the trash can, just for my own benefit.

I had Tuesday's lunch date marked in red on my calendar, and I'd circled it three times so I wouldn't forget. Mother, on the other hand, was still in her lab coat as she sailed into Marie Callendar's at 12:15. She didn't look much different than she did the night of her dinner, except that now she was wearing no lipstick at all. It made her look a little like a disheveled corpse.

“What?” she said to me as she slid into the booth. “You're looking at me like you've been waiting for two hours. I'm not that late.”

I shook myself out of my stupor. “No, you're fine.”

“I don't see why you wanted to meet all the way over here when there are places to eat on campus,” she said.

She propped her menu in front of her, which gave me a chance to shift my face out of stunned mode. Not only did she look even more unkempt than the last time I'd seen her, but her voice was more slurred in person than it had been over the phone. It did nothing but confirm my drinking theory, and at this point even Max couldn't have persuaded me otherwise.

The problem was, if I was noticing it, it probably wasn't escaping the people she was seeing every day—her colleagues, her employees, her superiors. I stared at my own menu without really seeing the words. If it was up to me as her dutiful daughter to say something to her about it, both of us were out of luck. Suddenly, I could conjure up the scene that would occur if I calmly said, “Mother, it's time for you to admit you have a drinking problem.” I would be filleted with her icicle of a tongue and left for dead right there in the Marie Callendar's booth. What had I been
thinking
, asking her here for a dressing down?

I hadn't thought at all, actually, and I was totally unprepared. It was throwing me—again.

“What can I get you ladies?” said a perky little waitress.

“Chicken potpie, order of corn bread, salad bar,” Mother said and then slapped her menu closed.

Perky and I exchanged momentary blinking stares, and then I hurriedly ordered the French onion soup. By the time the waitress was bustling away, Mother had already polished off her own glass of water and was reaching for mine.

“I'm sure she'll come back with a pitcher,” I said.

My mother drained my glass and set it down. “So what is this all ablout, Jill?” she said.

I leaned forward, as much to get a whiff of her breath as to speak. I couldn't detect any alcohol, though she seemed to have bathed in Clinique.

“Don't you want to go get your salad first?” I asked.

“What salad?”

“You ordered the salad bar.”

“I did not.”

“Oh,” I said. “I thought you did.”

“You thought wrong. Now what did you want to talk to me about? As soon as I eat, I have to get back to the lab.”

My stomach tightened. This was such a role reversal. It had always been my mother summoning
me
to an interrogation lunch or commanding
my
presence at a cross-examination dinner. I raked my hand through my hair and then winced, waiting for the inevitable “Stop that, Jill.” She didn't say a word.

“I just wanted to spend some time with you,” I lied. “Find out what's happening in your life.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because you're my mother, and I haven't had a whole conversation with you in six months.”

“I've been busy. And as you can shee—
see
—I'm fine.”

I got nowhere from then until the food arrived. From the way Mother had ordered, I expected her to devour it like a half-starved dog, but she picked at the crust of her potpie with her fork and then set it down. It occurred to me vaguely that I had never seen her eat a potpie anyway.

“Do you want to order something else?” I said.

“Since when did you start prashtishing—prashticing—your maternal instincts on me?”

And since when did you start talking like you have a mouth full of couscous?
I wanted to say. I did muster up the courage to get out, “Is there anything wrong? I mean, are you feeling all right?”

Big mistake. She slid her plate aside so she could get her elbows on the table and fold her hands close to my face. Her small, blue eyes were intense as they locked right onto mine. My upbringing snapped into place—the thousands of times I'd been told to
look
at my mother when she was speaking to me.

“There is nothing ‘wrong' with me,” Mother said. “I am perfectly
intact, functioning quite normally, thank you very much. Now rather than
insinuating
for the rest of the afternoon, I suggest you get to the point.”

I was actually relieved that my mother had suddenly returned—collected, eloquent, and razor sharp. Until she abruptly snatched up her handbag and lurched out of the booth.

“I have to get back,” she said.

Then she gave that vacant grin I'd seen on the night of her award banquet and literally bolted from Marie Callendar's, nearly mowing down Perky en route to the door. I stared after her until long after my French onion soup had gone cold.

THREE

T
hree nights later I realized how much of my think time was being consumed by the mental video of my mother. On my nightly run on the Stanford Loop, it occurred to me that for the last three nights I hadn't clocked myself, checked my heart rate, or monitored the effectiveness of my pre-run hydration. The minute I hit the first hill, I was completely preoccupied with the memory of her flipping back and forth from sloppy drunk to coherent doctor to schizophrenic bag lady.

My life at that point was neatly compartmentalized, and the Loop was where I went to concentrate on the fitness compartment. I'd turned into a runner in high school, when my mother had informed me that I had to take up a sport so as not to become lazy. The fact that I was already in advanced placement classes, National Honor Society, two academic fraternities, and private piano lessons three times a week made cross-country track the only option. Six weeks in the fall and it was a done deal, and it was enough to assure my mother that I was not going to lapse into a vegetative state.

Secretly, I fell in love with running—not the competition, but the idea of being out there alone on the road with no one in my face. Everywhere I'd been since high school—at Princeton for undergrad work, at Mercer County Community College in Trenton when I was teaching—I'd always found a place to end the day with a run. Here the place was the Stanford Loop.

Situated in the Stanford hills west of the main campus, toward
the ocean side of the peninsula, it consisted of a long, hilly, winding trail that challenged me physically—or, to use the vernacular, kicked my butt. At its highest point, you could see the San Francisco Bay, the Dunbarton Bridge, the San Mateo Bridge, and Hoover Tower—the main landmark of the Stanford campus. On clear days you could make out the Bay Bridge and sometimes even the city itself, though most of the time the fog curled around San Francisco like a pair of protective hands.

Personally, I appreciated the solitude of the Loop more than the view. Unlike a lot of the people who went up there, I was unconcerned about the recent Stanford edict prohibiting anyone from leaving the main path to follow the myriad of bunny trails that wound among the widely scattered trees. To do so, we were told, would irreparably damage the ecology of the area. All I wanted was a path where I could run literally for hours and not have to speak a word. Where I could pass other joggers who were in search of aloneness and not even feel the need to nod for the sake of politeness. Where I could focus fully on the fitness compartment.

At least I
had
been able to do that, until my mother wouldn't get out of my head. Working, teaching, dealing with Tabitha, putting up with Jacoboni, all of those compartments kept me too busy to wrestle with my mother issues the rest of the time. But once I hit the hills in my Nikes, my concentration went down the toilet.

Look
, I told myself the evening I finally put it together,
you can't let this mess with your head. Mother is a big girl. If she can't see she has a problem, you're not going to be able to do a thing to change that. Now get your tail on up this hill and stop obsessing
.

The first hill was a killer, shooting up for three hundred yards at a thirty-degree incline, and I prided myself on taking it on as a formidable opponent without batting so much as an eyelash. I normally latched my eyes onto the top and didn't waver until I was standing there, and then congratulated myself on the fact
that my thighs were still crying out for more. That night I took about two strides—pictured my mother lurching out of the booth at Marie Callendar's—and was ready to bag the whole run. Only sheer stubbornness kept me going.

By the time I got to the summit, I was breathing like a locomotive—no concentration whatsoever on controlling my inhale-exhale pattern. I actually started to get a stitch in my side, which hadn't happened since about freshman year in college, and I slowed to a walk, hands planted on my hips in self-disgust. Thus, I was completely at my best when a figure just ahead of me leaped over the fence that caged us on the path and practically scared me out of my Spandex.

He didn't see me. In fact, he continued on at a long-legged, lazy lope as if he
hadn't
just emerged from forbidden territory. That was fortunate, as far as I was concerned, because even from yards behind I could tell it was Socrates himself—Sam Whatever-His-Name-Was from the night of my mothers dinner. I'd rather have run into Alan Jacoboni at that point.

As I waited to let him get beyond catching-up distance ahead of me, I had a brief lapse and considered the fact that he had great legs. Nice muscle definition. Confident stride. Smooth, golden-olive skin—

I turned abruptly and headed back the way I'd come. If beating myself up about my mother and fantasizing about some religious fanatic's legs were my only two thought choices, I
did
need to bag the whole run.

The next day, I was wishing those
were
my only choices. When I got to my office, there was a Post-It note stuck to the door.
Jill
, it said,
See me ASAP
. It was signed
NF
.

NF. Nigel Frost.
Dr
. Nigel Frost. My advisor. The man who held my future in his hands at that juncture.

As I was going up the stairs to his office, Deb Kent was on her
way down, her eyes blinking furiously in her contact lenses as usual. Deb seemed to be in a constant state of high-level stress. You'd have thought she was running IBM.

“I was going to come looking for you,” she said. “Do you realize you and I have to do a tea in a couple of weeks?”

“If it's not today, I'm not worried about it,” I said.

“That's because you're organized. Some of us don't have minds that function like Day-Timers, okay?”

She tossed her naturally frizzy mop of chocolate brown hair and flipped open her calendar. I attempted to edge past her, but she actually put out a hand to stop me.

“It's the one before the seminar on wavelets or something. Doesn't matter, I don't know 90 percent of what they're talking about at those things anyway.”

Deb had a point there. Guest speakers came in to give seminars on a fairly frequent basis. Hence, the “tea”—a tray of bank cookies, a loaf of sourdough bread or two, a little fruit and a hunk of cheese—which grad students took turns setting up beforehand. The speakers were so specialized that you practically had to be a specialist yourself in the topic field or most of it was likely to blow by you. But everybody knew that was the case. I could never see why Deb claimed it made her feel like an illiterate moron.

“I'll pick up some cookies,” I said. “This is not the inaugural banquet, Deb. Relax.”

“Okay, okay, you're such a calming influence. Nothing bothers you. How do you do that?”

I shrugged and started up the steps again.

“Where are you going?” she said. “I thought you had a class this morning.”

“I have to see Nigel.”

“What a way to start the day. I hope you've had at least three cups of coffee.”

Actually, I didn't usually drink coffee. Jacoboni called me an “oddity” there, too, because I didn't kick off every day on a caffeine
high. I definitely didn't need it for a chat with Nigel. We had a great relationship: I did the work, he approved it, we both looked good. I didn't see how cappuccino could improve on that.

His office door was open, and he was standing up at the dry-erase board on the wall, tapping his chin with a marker. Most of the time I saw him behind his desk, so when I did come upon him standing up, it always struck me how big he actually was, which was probably part of the reason most undergraduates in his classes found him intimidating. He was definitely rotund, but in a distinguished way. At least he had the good taste to go to a bigger size than he'd worn in his forties, rather than let his shirts gape open at the buttons or his belly hang over his belt.

I tapped lightly on the door. “Dr. Frost?”

He turned and looked quizzically over his half-glasses, then gave me a brisk nod. I'd noticed my first year there that the gray fringe that was left on his balding head matched his moustache exactly in content as well as color.

“Come in,” he said, slipping the half-glasses into his shirt pocket. He headed in his typical unhurried fashion toward his desk. We were going into advisor-student mode. It was a safe bet he was going to bug me again about doing a teaching seminar.

“I got your note,” I said. “Did you want to talk about—”

“Sit down,” he said. “There's something you need to read.”

The half-glasses went back on, and he scanned his neatly organized desktop with his eyes. Jacoboni could have taken a few lessons from him in office decorum. Heck, maybe Nigel was going to assign me a new officemate.

“Take a look at this.” He produced a copy of
K-Theory
, which I recognized as one of about three hundred journals published monthly for math fanatics. “Page twelve,” he said. “It's marked.”

“More background reading?” I asked. “I thought I'd covered all that already.” Covered it—ha. I'd read my eyes into an almost permanent bloodshot state my third year before I'd started my own research.

“Just read it,” he said.

His face was, as usual, impassive as he rocked back in his chair and crossed his legs. You could never read him, which was probably another thing that intimidated his undergrads. Tabitha would have complete cardiac arrest if she ever got into one of Nigel's classes.

I flipped open the journal to the page marked with one of Nigel's ubiquitous Post-It notes and glanced at the title. Tabitha and everyone else disappeared when I saw the title of the article: “Topological K-Theory of Algebraic K-Theory Spectra.”

No way. My eyes darted far enough down the page to confirm what the title suggested.

I looked up at Nigel. He was watching me, glasses in hand, face without expression.

“He proved my thesis,” I said. “This is my dissertation.”

“More or less.”

“How much less?”

“Not enough, I'm afraid.”

I stared at the offensive page and tried to keep my lip from curling. I'd been scooped. Some math geek from the University of Washington had done the same research I was doing, and he'd reached his conclusion before I had.

My mother had never allowed me to swear; she'd always said it was a cop-out from expressing yourself with eloquence. Too bad. I wanted to blue the air. As it was, I flung the journal back onto Nigel's desk, where it landed on the neat piles like an inkblot.

“So what does this mean?” I said. “Do I start all over? Find a new thesis?”

“Not exactly,” Dr. Frost said.

“Not
exactly?
If I have to backtrack at all, it's at least a week added on—and I don't have that kind of time. What does not exactly mean?”

He continued to look at me, until I realized I was standing up, driving my index finger into the desktop. I dropped back into the chair.

“It means you can keep what you have,” he said. “You'll just have to take it further than he did.”

“Go further, go backward—it still means the same thing in terms of time. I'm so close. How many people on my committee will have read that article?”

“I didn't hear that,” Nigel said sternly, looking at me over the tops of his glasses, which had by then found their way back to his nose.

“No, you didn't because I didn't say it. I just…thought it out loud.”

“Well, don't think it. We don't breach integrity here.”

“I know. I don't want to duplicate somebody else's research. I wouldn't sleep at night. Not that I'm going to be doing any sleeping anyway. All right, what do I need to do? Come up with an amended proposal?”

“Give yourself a day or two to fume,” he said.

“I don't have a day or two—” I caught myself and consciously put on a calm face. “And I don't need to fume. There's no reason to. Every graduate student knows this is a possibility. I'll have a new proposal on your desk by, say, Friday, and then I'll double up on my time on the weekends and get caught up. I'll blow Mr. University of Washington right out of the water. Anything else?”

Nigel took off the glasses again and slipped them back into his pocket. He placed
K-Theory
back on its pile on the corner of the desk. Finally, he leaned back in the chair again and crossed his legs.

Come on, Nigel
, I thought.
If I don't get out of here so I can drag my hand through my hair, I'm going to drag it through
what's
left of yours
.

“I don't want to see a proposal until Monday. You need to take the time to determine how you're going to proceed. You may want to discuss it with me a bit, should you get into a bind with it—”

“I'll be fine,” I said. “I don't anticipate any problems. I'm well enough acquainted with K-theory to anticipate the challenges.”

Yeah, even my mother would have been proud of that exit line.

What I knew she wouldn't be proud of, I thought as I finally escaped Nigel's over-the-glasses scrutiny, was the fact that there was now a good chance I wasn't going to finish my dissertation before my funding ran out. The thought of asking her for money was about the most bone-chilling thing I could imagine.

By that afternoon, I had gone after my hair with my hands so many times that Jacoboni took one look at me when he came in and said, “Did you get the license number of that semi?”

Fortunately my cell phone rang just then, or I probably would have said something like, “Are you referring to the one that dragged
you
in here?”

“Jill!” Max said when I answered. “It's your Uncle Max.”

“Hi,” I said. “What's up?”

If he noticed my clipped tone, he didn't let on.

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