A Theory of Relativity (26 page)

“No, my brother’s your age.”

“Ahhh, yes, Sir Ryan Reilly. We survived fifth grade together.”

“He says you were the big ladies’ man.”

“In fifth grade? I didn’t know which end was which. I’m a Catholic, too, you know.” Laughter. Relief. Perhaps they’d forget he’d nodded off.

“No, here. Right here at good ol’ Wildwood. Says you plucked more roses than—”

“Whoa there, big fella. We won’t be doing the mating dance in here until Thanksgiving.” More giggles. Good. From the syllabus, they knew

“the mating dance” was a genetics exercise. “And as for me, I’m in the army now. The parent army.”

“Did you get married, Mr. McKenna?” said Kathleen Zurich, little vixen in the pom squad who sat right next to Kelly Rafferty.

Rafferty.

God.

“No, I didn’t get married,” he finally answered.

“Accident?” Laughter. “Lady got you in trouble?”

“No, I’m adopting my baby niece. My sister and her husband died.”

“Oooooh. I know about that. It was on TV.”

“That’s right, and now I’m raising a baby. The most fabulous baby in the world, except she’s nocturnal. I can’t believe how much stamina your parents must have. How many of you guys are there now? Ten?

Eleven? How do they do it?”

“Every which way, I guess. . . .” Reilly shrugged. More raucous laughter.

“What I mean is, I’m asleep on my feet with one kid. How do they manage?”

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“They drink,” the kid howled.

Gordon didn’t drink. He quit softball with only three games left on their schedule. When Lindsay came over, he begged her at the door to take Keefer out so he could sleep for an hour. When she came back—

Lindsay swore she’d been gone two hours—he’d drooled all over the couch. On Saturday nights, when Keefer was with his folks or the Cadys and Nyes, he had no strength for anything but takeout and a movie, through which he slept. In his mirror, he was sure he saw licks of gray at his temples. His patience with the ordinary guy’s stuff of life was slim.

He’d almost got in a fight with a guy at the Wild Rose one night.

There were two of them, business twits probably invited here by Medi-Sun, sucking up expense-account cocktails in their seafoam green muscle-man sport coats and Clark Kent specs.

Twit One started with a loud, meant-to-be-overheard account of some office skirmish, “Look. Heywood is over. He will never recover. I understand his need. But he’s posturing. It isn’t going to fool anyone . . .”

“You speak the truth,” said Twit Two.

Behind the bar, Katie Savage, the bartender, rolled her eyes and made a “down, down, boy” motion with her palm. Did Gordon look as disgusted as he felt?

“I’m struggling with the same things in my setting,” Church began, affecting an English accent. “Ernie Blodgett can kid himself, but he’ll never paint hydrants again. He’s a broom man. That’s the reality. When he tried painting hydrants, he was simply out of his depth . . .” One of the twits next started on his boss’s daughter. Gordon couldn’t believe his ears. “And now she’s let it be known to old man Vander-wood that she wants a real princess wedding, no expense spared—”

“And she’s a dwarf?” guffawed his corporate twin.

“And so is the guy she’s marrying! We’re all expected to attend this very solemn occasion.”

“Well, at least they can save on clothes. Get them at the Baby Gap.

Get a Barbie’s Dream House and they’re all—” Gordon lost it. “Do you know what dwarfism is?” He snarled in the guy’s face. “Do you know that people who have congenital dwarfism Theory[113-221] 6/5/01 11:59 AM Page 170

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sometimes don’t live past forty? Do you know the courage it must have taken for those parents to raise their girl to believe she could live her life as a normal woman?” Twit Two made a dismissive motion, as if stroking an invisible violin. “You fat bastard,” Gordon hissed, “are you a father? Are you?”

“Come on, Squirrel,” Twit Two muttered. “Let’s leave Bob and Doug here to their cribbage—”

“Squirrel?” Church crowed happily. “Squirrel? Jesus Christ, Gordie, don’t mess with a guy named Squirrel! And who are you? Bullwinkle?

I’m Boris. Moose and Squirrel must die!” Then Kate was between them, holding on to Gordon and the bigger of the assholes, by the fronts of their shirts. “Next beer’s on me, buds. If you just get back to your . . . cribbage here. Come on, Gordie. You’ll never see these jerks again in your life.” Gordon got so hammered he had a gauzy recollection of burying at least part of his face in Kate’s bosom. He hoped he had not done wrong.

Kate had been his friend since sixth grade, when she brought her father’s
Playboy
s to him and Kip Sweeney in their tree fort.

But Gordon could gain no ground against his weariness. Up at five, he felt like Santa Claus heading out the door: book bag, diaper bag, briefcase, elf in stocking cap. All the way out Q to his aunt’s, and thank God for that. At the beginning of the year, he’d asked Lorraine what they were going to do about Keefer’s daytime care.

“Well,” Lorraine asked him, shrugging, “what do you want to do?” He’d been sure she was putting him on. Didn’t she already have a plan?

How was he supposed to intuit what kind of childcare situation would be best for an eighteen-month-old who also happened to be the subject of a custody battle everyone in the goddamned town seemed to know about? He was righteously pissed.

“I don’t think she should go to a day-care center,” Gordon had said.

“I also don’t think she should go to a day-care center,” said his mother.

“She’s had enough change in the past few months.”

“I agree.”

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“And plus, the only day-care center is that born-again place, the Rainbow Club. It always sounded like a topless bar to me. How come Catholics don’t have day care?”

“Catholics have grandmothers.”

“Are you going to quit, then?”

“Quit my job, Gordie?”

“Yes. Quit your job. Take a leave of absence.”

“I took a leave last year.”

“Then, quit.”

His mother had lowered her reading glasses. “Gordie, I most certainly am not going to quit my job. In case you haven’t noticed, we are running up substantial bills around here—”

“Well, Keefer’s insurance maybe could pay for some of that.”

“They’re our bills, not Keefer’s. Even if that weren’t illegal, I wouldn’t do it. And, anyway, there’s no money, because they’re still investigating the accident.”

“How long can that take?”

“I don’t know.”

“I still think she needs to be with one of us.”

“Then you quit your job. I make more money than you do. I’m two years from being able to take early retirement, Gordon.”

“Mother, I can hardly quit my job. I’m adopting a child, in case you haven’t noticed. How do you think the judge would regard unemployment as a factor in my suitability?”

Lorraine sighed. “You have a point.”

“And, so. . . .”

“Well, she can stay with Nora, I guess. For the time being. They’re picking, though. Nora can carry Keefer on her back in a sling. Like a Pearl S. Buck novel.”

“Bradie’s out there. She just cooks and stuff during the day.”

“We can’t just assume they’ll take her on.”

“Aunt Nora would do anything for Keefer.”

“Well, call and ask her then.”

“You.”

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“You call and ask her. You’re the one who wants the favor.”

“Favor?” What the hell was wrong with her, Gordon wondered?

What had he done?

In the end, Nora had offered. But that only meant that Gordon had to get up in the middle of the night practically, if he didn’t want to go to school unshaven and smelling of Happykids Blueberry Cobbler. A couple of times each week, Mark volunteered to drive Keefer out to the farm on his way to the plant. Gordon didn’t know why his father couldn’t manage to do it every day; he was a vice president, after all. He didn’t start work until an hour that was practically late afternoon in Gordon’s world. But Mark insisted that he needed his run three mornings a week.

Run.

How come he didn’t get a run?

Gordon’s father would certainly outlive him.

Gordon was so out of shape and skinny his legs felt like sandbags the few times he could get up enough gumption to drive over to Merrill and play volleyball. Even looking at the shapely butts of Alicia and her teammates didn’t energize him. He’d shown remarkable restraint with Alicia, though it had helped to learn that she was thirty-seven years old.

Still, he wished perversely he could boast about it to Lindsay. Lindsay helped him often, but it still didn’t feed the bulldog. When Lindsay did Keefer’s wash, he still had to pick it up and put it all away. He spent almost every night folding teeny shorts and dresses and socks. Keefer had at least seven hundred socks, no two of which matched.

Teaching, which had always been a breeze, had turned to stone. It had been easy to be a hotshot at work if all you had to worry about was your own care and feeding.

Keefer had been still in her sleep period when the term began. But within two weeks, he was out of luck, and out of patience.

What biology was mostly about, he’d said one day, was reproduction.

They who reproduce best laugh last, he’d said. They get to keep the marbles.

“In the beginning,” Gordon began, “before dinosaurs, before Theory[113-221] 6/5/01 11:59 AM Page 173

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worms, before cats, before the guys who design the little silver strips on CD packaging, before DNA, even before Mr. Reilly here, there was RNA. Ribonucleic acid. And these RNA guys were pretty limited in what they could do for fun, back around four billion years ago. The planet was probably pretty new then, and nobody knew where the good hangouts were—”

“Where did it come from?” Reilly, of course.

Gordon would later review the tattered ribbons of that class day and admit that it served him right. He’d needled the kid, because Dennis was linked in Gordon’s back brain to the dumbass older sibling, Ryan, who’d once tormented him about adoption.

“RNA?” Gordon asked now.

“Yeah, where did it come from? Because, if cells can only come from other cells, where did the first cell come from?” It was actually a decent question. “I don’t know. But we can presume that eventually these substances changed so that there was a bold new way of reproducing, a little more sophistication—”

“Like dinner and a movie first.” This from that big blond soccer jock, Kye Olstadt, a really sweet kid.

“Right. And once it tried and failed and tried and failed and tried and failed for a billion years or so, one of these RNA guys invented DNA.”

“I thought James Watson and Francis Crick invented DNA.” Reilly again. “And, news flash, Watson thinks man couldn’t have evolved from a single-celled creature so fast. Had to be aliens.”

“What he meant,” Gordon said, “was that it was possible that there was a life form that may have originated on a planet other than earth, like a supervirus. Not little green men. And, you know, evolution is just change. And it can happen really rapidly. Look how quickly bacteria become resistant to antibiotics . . . there’s microevolution taking place in front of our eyes every day.”

“Darwin’s theory of evolution was wrong,” Dennis Reilly said. “I have a cousin in Georgia who can get excused from class when they teach evolution because his family doesn’t believe it.” Theory[113-221] 6/5/01 11:59 AM Page 174

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“That hardly counts as a place,” Gordon said. He did not want to go down this path, particularly in his febrile, combative state of sleep deprivation. Why didn’t he start this year with ecology—nice, clean streams, big, bad polluters, sweet, smiling dolphins—like the other biology teachers? He was stubborn about starting with evolution because he had this hunch that every human being was most concerned with himself or herself, and so he’d use the rise of self as the bait to set the hook of fascination in a student. And yet, he knew from last year that it was a mined path, where at any turn he could tread on the belief systems of any number of small-town folks. He did not have the strength today. The room was stifling. The kids all looked to be a gathering of the recessive gene pool.

“Well, some people think Darwin was wrong,” Gordon replied patiently, thinking, as he spoke, stupid people. “Some people think he did a pretty good job with the tools he had at hand a hundred and fifty years ago.”

Reilly persisted, “But there’s this one period of time, and it’s only like ten million years, when everything supposedly evolved from bacteria to complex animals. If you’re talking billions and billions of years—”

“It’s called the Cambrian Explosion,” Gordon said, “and, well, look at the AIDS virus. It was around in a limited way for forty years, but it wasn’t until after 1980 that it began to really take off—”

“That was because of airplanes,” Kye Olstadt chuckled. “The guy who spread it all over was a stewardess.”

“And where’s the fossil record of the missing link? The chimpanzee thing that decided to become a human?” Reilly asked.

“I’m not no chimpanzee,” said Gunther Woffling, who, Gordon would have sworn, had been asleep five minutes before.

“Well, no, but you’re ninety-eight percent chimpanzee,” Gordon told him.

“The hell I am! I’m not no goddamned monkey!” No, Gordon thought, as the Woffling kid began loudly slamming his books together and shoving them into his backpack, you’re an insult to chimpanzees.

“Class isn’t over, Gunther,” Gordon said quietly.

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“If all this is true,” Dennis Reilly added, “then why aren’t chimpanzees evolving to be more like humans?”

“Because,” Gordon sighed, “they’re good at being chimpanzees.