The Explanation for Everything (13 page)

Too thrilled to sleep, head still half-pounding, Andy got out of bed and stood by the window, leaned his forehead against the window. He stayed that way, head soothed by the cold, until the first fat snowflakes started to fall.

NINE

The girl's name had been Anita Lim. She was the daughter of Korean immigrants who had established a small grocery store in Brooklyn during the first year of the Reagan administration, and who had hung by their shop's front door a large framed photograph of that president, along with a reasonable facsimile of a handwritten note from him, thanking them for their good wishes in the wake of his shooting. It spoke to how well the Lims were liked in their part of Brooklyn that none of their friendly and pushy customers ever gave them shit about that photograph, even as the old conservative Italians died out and were replaced by tattooed mothers pushing fancy strollers and novelists buying cigarettes at two in the morning.

As the years went on, the Lims sold fewer cans of tomatoes, more boxes of organic soy milk, and continued to do a brisk trade in cat food, toilet paper, and soap. They remembered their customers' names and preferences, never ran out of Progresso chicken noodle for Chris and Julie Butler's boys, never ran out of energy bars for Catherine Marcello, the marathoner. They had fresh flowers out front, seasonal and expensive, and a wide variety of craft and regional beers in the coolers in the back.

The Lims lived in an apartment above the store, which they had secured, rent-controlled, for three hundred dollars a month when they moved to Brooklyn from Pusan, and which they eventually bought when their landlord, a cranky old Italian, announced a sudden and hasty move to North Carolina in 1982. What was he going to North Carolina for? The Lims never found out, but they rallied their family in Korea, took out some loans, bought the building, watched its value rise precipitously during the first years of the century, and paid back their family with interest.

In 1979 and '80 they had their children, who, because the Lims themselves were always working, seemed to grow up in the store, between the shelves of soup and the shelves of macaroni. Eddie and Anita attended the public school down the block from the store when the school wasn't considered particularly good, and attended the Bethany Presbyterian Church in Sunset Park even though there was a bigger, fancier Korean church in Manhattan. But the Lims liked Bethany, its homey feel, its pastor practically an old neighbor from Pusan. Eddie, their elder child, did them proud by believing the Word of God. Anita, on the other hand, did not believe, and in fact often refused to go to church at all, but although this rejection made her parents sad they agreed with each other, at night, when Anita's light still burned from behind her bedroom door—my goodness, how many hours could that girl study without wearing out her eyes?—that she was such a marvelous daughter, such a credit to them in so many ways, that truly they could not be too saddened by her. Besides, were they really going to force her to go to church when all she wanted was to play the cello, play tennis, study biology, study chemistry, write short stories, and win so many high school prizes and medals that her father actually built her a trophy case for her room? Were they really going to complain about a daughter whose teachers called home not just occasionally but on a regular basis to exclaim that they'd never met a kid quite like her, so articulate, so self-possessed, so conscientious, so very, very brilliant?

Some Sundays other churchgoers wondered out loud, “So where is your Anita this morning?” Well, usually she was traveling to Washington DC for her model UN or perfecting her experiment for the Intel Science Talent Search or playing cello in France with the International Youth Symphony. Eventually the other churchgoers grew sick of hearing about Anita and left the Lims in peace.

Had Mrs. Lim felt truly connected to any of the ladies at church, the ones who masked their jealousy with probing questions, she might have said: “I do not wish that Anita were here at church by my side so she could walk with God. I wish she were here so that I could spend some time with my daughter.” It was her fondest secret that she wanted the kind of relationship she suspected American women had with their daughters, the kind where they shopped together for shoes or went out for lunch at restaurants in Manhattan. This was foolish, she knew, but it was still what she longed for, and if she couldn't have that (there were a million reasons why she would never have that) she would settle for church, for Anita sitting at her side the way that Jackie Park sat next to Mun-hee Park and Casey Rho sat next to Soo Rho.

Nevertheless, despite these quiet disappointments, the Lim family prospered in a general American way. They bought a car. They perfected their English, although they still preferred reading newspapers and watching movies in Korean. They replaced their car with a nicer car, installed air-conditioning and a high-tech security system in their store. They lamented that Eddie was not quite the student his sister was, but still he graduated from high school and gained admission to Hunter College and the Lims were delighted to send him there and hang a Hunter bumper sticker on the wall of pride next to their shop's front door, where it joined the photo of Reagan and also Bushes I and II, a signed portrait of Billy Graham, and postcards from customers' travels around the world.

A year later, when Anita graduated as Stuyvesant's valedictorian and headed off to Harvard, Mrs. Lim worried about whether or not she should place a Harvard bumper sticker near the Hunter one on their wall. She didn't want to embarrass Eddie; moreover, she didn't want their customers to think she was a braggart. She had already received innumerable e-mails of congratulations from distant cousins in Korea, and her sister back in Pusan told her that their mother, practically deaf, practically bald, subsiding on nothing but tea and gruel, had smiled her first smile of the month upon hearing the news. Harvard!

In typical Anita style, the girl herself was sanguine about the whole thing; she liked Harvard but she'd also liked Stanford and MIT and Yale, and only chose the former because their financial aid package was comprised mostly of grants instead of loans.

So Anita went to Harvard, and Eddie went to Hunter, and the Lims stocked Seventh Generation diapers and coconut water and baked seitan in their store, and found themselves, against all expectations, having detailed conversations about Korean food with almost obnoxiously knowledgeable white kids from the neighborhood who wanted Mrs. Lim's take on their home-brewed kimchi or crispy handmade squid pancake. Mrs. Lim asked Anita, on the phone, what it was with these white kids.

“They're called foodies, Mom,” said Anita, far away in Cambridge, sounding as distracted as ever. “They're looking for authentic food experiences.”

“Why don't they make their own authentic food?” Mrs. Lim wondered.

“They don't have any,” Anita said. But Mrs. Lim knew this wasn't true, because her own children had raised themselves on white food whenever she turned her back; until they left the house, she hadn't realized how much pizza they used to eat, how much spaghetti, how many (grimace) turkey sandwiches. Now that they were gone, Eddie in an apartment with some roommates on the Upper East Side, Anita in Cambridge, she and her husband ate omelets or English muffins or nothing at all. They drank endless cups of coffee, like real Americans.

“Anita? Will you be coming home for Thanksgiving?”

“I don't know, Mom. I have so much work to do.”

“Maybe we'll come up there? We could bring Eddie?”

“I guess,” Anita said. “But don't you have to work?”

Another fond secret—Thanksgiving was Mrs. Lim's favorite holiday. More than Christmas, more even, God forgive her, than Easter. Her old Italian landlord had taught her to make pumpkin pie with ricotta in it and the kids ate it up every year, even her husband asked for seconds, and then they would watch football together on the television, the one game of the year they watched, Eddie explaining everything, play by play.

“So we'll come up to Cambridge then,” Mrs. Lim said.

“God, Mom, I don't know, let me check my schedule, okay?”

Mrs. Lim imagined, across the country, American daughters helping their mothers bake pies.

“What are you so busy with, anyway?”

“Um, I don't know, only everything?”

“Come on, Hae Sun. Tell me.”

“Graduate school applications, midterms, GREs, everything.”

“GRE?”

“You know—that test. For graduate school. Forget it, you wouldn't understand.”

Mrs. Lim sighed. She would understand, of course, but it helped Anita to shut her out and concentrate if she thought her mother was just a storekeeper, nobody she had to pay too much attention to. Then she thought, don't be silly, don't be sorry for yourself. Think here of everything you have. A sweet son, a brilliant daughter, even though it might have been nicer to have it the other way around.

Of course Anita could have majored in anything—English or anthropology, French or chemistry—but after a class with Stephen Pinker of linguistics fame, she chose to study linguistics, specifically the way that the evolution and dispersal of various language patterns mimicked biological evolutionary trends. Pinker had suggested to her that she continue her studies at Princeton, which had an excellent evolutionary biology program, helmed by the brilliant Henry Rosenblum, the author of
The Homo Sapiens' Backbone
and
Religion's Dangerous Lie.
This sounded like a good plan to Anita, who was beginning to formulate a plan for her life: school, more school, a PhD, and a tenured job at a school. In her spare time she would continue to play the cello and tennis.

She met Rosenblum for the first time at a conference at MIT's Whitehead Institute, where she was presenting a paper she'd coauthored with one of her lesser professors. He introduced himself after her presentation, told her he'd heard a lot about her, looked forward to working with her in the fall. She should look for an official acceptance letter in the mail in the next few weeks. “That's it?” Anita asked him. She was startled by Rosenblum's enthusiasm; she had taken him for a cheerfully drunk old man when he'd first approached her. He was tall, with a large belly and ears full of protruding white hairs; the pictures she'd seen of him had clearly been taken twenty years earlier.

“That's it,” Rosenblum said. “You'll be working closely with me. I look forward to it.”

“So do I,” Anita said, startled and a bit underwhelmed.

“Princeton!” Mrs. Lim's mother was dead in Pusan at this point but she could feel her spirit smiling down at her, whispering praise.

“I barely even had to apply,” Anita said. Even she sounded impressed with herself.

“And you'll be close again! New Jersey!”

“Yes,” Anita said, and suddenly that distracted sound was back in her voice. “I guess I will.”

Eddie, at this point, was at seminary in upstate New York, studying to be a pastor, and was dating a nice girl and collecting some nice friends, including a roommate, Charles, whom he spoke of fondly and frequently. Charles was from Los Angeles, his family originally from Seoul, and everything he did seemed to be haloed with luck and success. Charles was the smartest in the class, Charles spoke three languages fluently, Charles delivered sermons with such grace that he could make their weathered old teachers weep with newfound devotion. The Lims met Charles on their trips to visit Eddie upstate and were impressed by him, if a little put off by his fierce-eyed determined belief in not just the Lord, but himself. He offered to pay for dinner for everyone when they went out, as though the Lims wouldn't be happy to pay, or as if they couldn't.

As for Anita, she lived in a tiny apartment in Princeton, across from a record store, one room with a hot plate and a bathroom that even a tiny girl like her could barely squeeze into. No closet. One window. The Lims offered to help her with something better but Anita declined, said she was happy there, and anyway she spent so much time in Rosenblum's lab she was rarely home anyway. Her research was incomprehensible to her parents, although this new, satisfied Anita—as satisfied as they'd ever seen her, although still distracted, and more focused than ever on academic success—this new PhD-candidate daughter did try to explain to them what she was doing. Her research worried them because it seemed to be less about language at this point and more about evolution, strict Darwinian evolution, which contradicted everything they knew from church and everything they believed in their hearts. But they knew that they had let Anita go her own way all those years ago when they allowed her to play cello instead of go to church, study chemistry instead of read the Bible, so whose fault was it, really, that she was now studying Darwinian evolution? Could they blame anyone but themselves?

And surely devout Eddie was making up for whatever lapses they'd allowed in Anita.

They met this Rosenblum several times in Princeton, and he seemed to be a nice enough man (“But so foul-mouthed!”) who praised Anita constantly and without moderation. “She's doing brilliant work, Mrs. Lim. I've honestly never met a student like her in my life. Her theory on the viral origins of life—has she explained it to you? In our field this is groundbreaking stuff. And for someone like her, doesn't even have her PhD yet—for someone like her to be publishing these kinds of papers, it's really unbelievable. You must be very proud.”

On their drive back to Brooklyn, Mrs. Lim noticed how worried her husband looked. “That professor,” he said, “what do you think he wants with her?”

“No, no,” Mrs. Lim said, glad that her husband had articulated what they were both worried about so that she could reassure him, and thus herself. “He really just thinks she's very smart, that's all. He doesn't want anything else.”

“But why is he always around? Every time we visit, there he is.”

“She works in his lab,” Mrs. Lim said. “They have a very close professional relationship.”

“What if he takes advantage of her?” he said. “She's still so innocent.”