Flux, chapter 22
Chapter 22:
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Two more chapters till the end!1 There’s still time to start at the beginning with the T.O.C.
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April 2010
“We should’ve done this in your kitchen. This is impossible,” Grace moves the bowl of blanched spinach from one side of the sink to the other to clear space for Ned.
“If she could do it, we can do it.”
Nad had discovered Grace’s recipe box with Francesca’s typed cards—her college graduation gift. He insisted on cooking their way through it, starting with her mother’s culurgiones. The recipe spans six cards and two days.
He cracks eggs directly into a pile of flour. Right on the counter.
“She has bowls and spoons, you know,” Grace says.
“Follow the recipe, that’s the key to success.” He gestures to one of the cards that he’s taped to the cabinets for easy reference.
Grace brushes off his smudge of flour. “Careful.” She and her friends used to make fun of these cards. Now she’s protecting them?
“Can you finish squeezing out the spinach? It should be cool by now. When it’s dry, fry it in the melted butter.”
She watches him mix the gooey eggs into the flour with his bare hands. Clouds of flour puff up, but he is undeterred.
“That really works?”
“Guess we’ll see.” He sprinkles more flour over the mess and dives in. “Oh, and the pecorino. Did you grate it yet?”
“Yeah, it’s on the table.” She surveys the room. Every surface is already claimed by some implement or ingredient. “Where we gonna put all these buggers?”
“I covered her dining table with wax paper. They can rest there until we’re ready to boil them.”
Grace tries to imagine how her mother made dozens upon dozens of ravioli by herself in such cramped space. She never once offered to help. Now it’s too late.
“You okay?” Ned asks.
Grace blinks. Nods. Squeezing out the spinach is oddly soothing. Bathed by fragrant steam rising off the bubbling sauce Ned made yesterday, it’s a relief to work with her hands. To create something from scratch. To step on the path of family tradition.
“Ever think about what sort of legacy you want to leave?” Grace asks.
“I used to dream of doing hard hitting investigative journalism, you know, winning a few Pulitzers. Best-sellers, Today Show, viral TED Talk—”
“Really?”
“Hell no.” They both laugh. “Too much work. I just want to . . . leave no trace.”
Grace spoons filling onto circles of dough. Ned cradles each one in his palm to crimp it closed.
“I’m embarrassed because most of that stuff you mentioned, I actually did want,” she says. “My TED Talk didn’t exactly go viral.”
He leans over to kiss her neck. “I know.”
She resists asking if he watched it. “It’s all so ridiculous.”
He lifts a cookie tray full of finished culurgiones to carry them to the staging area. “Hey, don’t beat yourself up. That grind is sold to us from childhood. Success equals self-worth.”
“I have no idea what I want as my legacy.”
“That’s a vast improvement.”
She laughs. “Being rudderless and without ambition?”
“Yeah, it’s freeing. You can do whatever your heart desires.”
She stirs the bowlful of filling. It looks like they’ve barely made a dent in reducing it. “We’re going to be at this for hours.”
“Imagine how long it took your mother, working alone.” He dusts the counter with flour and crushes a small ball of dough with the long rolling pin.
“I can’t relate to doing what my heart desires. I’ve always been guided by reason, not emotion.”
He nods. His dough-rolling is methodical and graceful. “I see that. And, sure, reason, science, is great for telling you how to do things. But what about life’s fundamental questions, like, why are we here? What’s my purpose?”
If Dr. Hack were here, she’d say, I’m a physicist not a metaphysicist. Or, is she here, saying that? Grace smiles. “That’s like my nemesis Barbara asking, What’s your why? It’s pretty fucking humbling to be this age and realize my life’s work does nothing to answer that question.”
“It’s not about the work, Grace, it’s about who you are. What lights you up? Not what you’re against, what are you for? Science is fine, but some things can’t be measured. Or even explained.” He shows her one of his completed culurgiones. “Look, I’m really getting the hang of the wheat-spike closure.”
She leans her head into his shoulder. “A man of many talents.”
“I’ll never compose a symphony or discover an asteroid, but I know my work matters, because—”
“Because you matter.”
“Awww. Not what I was gonna say, but I’ll take it.” He leans over for a long kiss. She wants to throw her arms around him, but they’re sticky with filling. “We all matter, Grace, that’s what I want you to hear.” He lifts the tray, which is full again. “To your students, you mattered.” When Grace scoffs, he adds, “I’m serious. Hell, to the kids at the middle school, your mother mattered.”
When he returns from the dining room, she says, “About that. I agreed to take the science class.”
“The what?” More flour, more dough, more passes with the rolling pin.
“At the middle school. The seventh-grade science teacher is on bed rest and they need someone to fill in until the end of school.”
“That’s fantastic!” He drops the rolling pin to embrace her, floured hands and all. “You’ll be perfect.”
“Not exactly legacy-making,” she says into his chest.
He pulls back to meet her eyes. “Take the win, Grace. This is a good thing.”
“I don’t know. They need a teacher whose default setting isn’t despair.”
“You wouldn’t feel so strongly if you didn’t care.”
“It would be easier if I didn’t.”
“You say that, but if you dull the pain, you dull the joy, too.”
Hours later, nine dozen parboiled culurgiones cool on fine cotton dishcloths. “I can’t believe how many towels the woman had,” Grace said as they raided her bottom kitchen drawers.
“Now you know why.”
After packaging them in wax paper batches for the freezer, they tackle the clean-up. Grace’s feet are sore from standing so long. She pictures her mother, well into her 60s, doing this on the regular. She was made of tough stuff.
Ned washes pots and bowls, while Grace raids the bottomless towel supply. “I found a meeting at the VFW,” he says. “I’ll head over there in a few.”
Grace figured since he never talks about AA meetings, he was past that stage. “What’s it like?”
“I’ll see when I get there.”
She can’t imagine listening to strangers talk about their problems. “I thought you were . . . better.”
“I don’t need meetings and stepwork any more to stay sober? Well, I don’t need shoes to walk on gravel, but it sure fucking helps.”
Grace laughs. “Point taken.”
He hands her a heavy pot to dry. “It’s hard to imagine unless you’ve been in the rooms. Some meetings are better than others, for sure.”
“And people just . . . talk . . .?”
“Some meetings are more formal, like, the big ones have a speaker or two. I prefer smaller, where you can see each other.” He shakes his head. “The stories, man . . .”
“Heroic?”
“Not really. They’re . . . ordinary, relatable, messy. Suffering and overcoming and we’re in this thing together.”
“Sounds . . .” She swallows the word, nice, refusing to say such a mindless thing.
“Often, someone’s story, their perspective, is exactly what I need to hear that day. It’s uncanny.”
“There but for the grace of God go I?”
“Not like that. I’m no less messed up. More like, what they take away from the experience, their hard-won wisdom. Yesterday, a woman said you can’t save your face and your ass at the same time.” His smile has a trace of wistfulness.
“Wise words.”
“Right? And this other guy said, the problem with sobriety is you have to face reality.”
She groans. “Oh I feel that.”
“There’s something about hearing it from a stranger. Like God delivering a message to me, through them.”
“Like God, God?” She winces, wondering if this is going to be a problem.
“Higher power, the Universe, Great Creator—take your pick.”
“Must I?”
“Oh, come on. You’re a closet mystic. Admit it.”
She laughs. “No way.”
“You talk to birds, Grace. I rest my case.”
“You’ll never let me live that down, will you?”
“Why would you want to?”
After dinner, Grace walks up the hill to St. Athanasius for her first choir practice. She passes the VFW on the way. Lights are on. She pictures Ned in there talking about his day. Or listening to a laid-off longshoreman’s story about hitting rock bottom. As she nears the church, she feels a flutter of nervousness. What was she thinking, signing up for this? She doesn’t even know if she can sing on-key.
And she never learned to read music. At her grandmother’s church, the music came to life passing from and among the bodies—young, old, hale, infirm, kind, cranky. The sound wove everyone together. No one held a hymnal. There was no organ, no piano. The songs emerged and swelled and grew, from seed to stem to branch, from creaky worn floorboards to dusty dark rafters.
The director smiles in warm welcome and gives Grace a binder full of sheet music. When the singing begins, she listens. She listens with her chest, her shoulders, her hands. The sound tickles her skin, caresses her scalp, tingles her spine. She mouths the words, pretending to read the foreign language of bars and notes. But really, she listens.
She’d forgotten the delicious sensation of being inside the music, the alchemy of eighteen pairs of lungs forming a single instrument. Grace listens to notes shaped by time and anatomy, animated by emotion, everyone’s mood lifting and lightening.
On the third verse, she begins to sing. It is neither conscious choice nor a willed act. She simply accepts the music’s invitation and allows herself to be carried by it. Tears track down her cheeks. Later, she’ll analyze and name the emotion as something like relief, but for now she immerses in the simple entanglement of human voices stirring ephemeral beauty for pure pleasure.
Grace’s throat aches after two songs. She keeps yawning. Despite a life of pushing through exhaustion, she’s never been a yawner. The choir director tells her later that it’s common with newbies. As she learns to breathe efficiently, more oxygen will reach her brain. Grace dislikes being called a newbie but doesn’t argue. On the theory it’s low blood sugar or exhaustion, she resolves to drink a Coke before the next practice. She draws the line at Red Bull. That’s for truckers and frat boys.
The morning of Hélène’s science fair, Grace and Ned lie with her on their backs in his tiny front yard. It’s a perfect spring day, coat weather with a cool breeze and a newly confident sun promising warmth. Generous clouds dance across a blameless blue sky.
Snuggled between Grace and Ned, Hélène points and calls out a galloping horse, a train, a potato. They all erupt in laughter at the potato. Grace, laughing so hard she might need her inhaler, points out mashed potatoes and a polar bear cub and vanilla ice cream in a snowstorm.
“Topped with whipped cream,” Ned adds. “I see it!”
The grass smells of renewal. The breeze tickles chill cheeks. A primal joy seizes Grace’s heart, shakes her awake. She gasps.
“What?” Hélène asks.
Tears leak into her hair. “Nothing. I’m just . . . happy.”
“Right? This is nice.”
Ned stirs. “We should do this more often.”
“Yeah,” Hélène says.
But now that she’s named it, a dark foreboding smothers Grace’s mood. She stiffens, shivers, checks the sky. The sun beams on. No storms up there. Down here, the suffocating certainty that joy is fleeting, joy ends, she barely deserves it, she doesn’t deserve it. Propelled by the need to protect her heart, she sits up. She needs to move. To flee, to hide.
“What is it?” Hélène asks. “What’s wrong?”
Ned sits up. “Grace. It’s okay.” He reaches across his prone daughter to caress Grace’s cheek with the back of his hand, like a wise old trainer gentling a horse. “We’re here. You’re safe. You deserve this.”
How does he know?
Hélène pulls on her arm. “Look, Grace, it really is an ice-cream cone. Don’t you just want to take a big bite?”
She looks up, following Hélène’s finger, and there it is. Vanilla gelato in a cake cone. Her mouth waters.
“That does it. We’re going to the Charmery right now.”
But instead of vanilla gelato (which they don’t have), Grace orders a double scoop of Old Bay Caramel and Coconut Ginger Wasabi.
Roland Park Middle School is everything Grace’s school was not. Hers was built at the apex of optimistic suburban reinvention, the early 1960s, when education briefly flirted with “open classrooms”. To a bird, Greenbelt Middle may have appeared as a brick and concrete daisy, each petal housing a “pod” where kids could, the theory went, find their own rhythm and teachers had, as the architects envisioned, ultimate curricular freedom. The reality was grim: an angular, hostile spaceship landed in a sea of parking. The vibe was more correctional than creative. Sound boiled through every corridor and classroom trailing distraction and disruption.
Hélène’s school is from an era of self-conscious civic valor: four stories of red brick, limestone trim, and big windows, with a tower proudly marking the arched entrance. Knots of nervous kids and parents gaggle in the generous forecourt, waiting to enter.
The science fair is set up in the school gym, a tall echoey space with red, black, green, and yellow lines of diverse shapes and thicknesses inset in tan sports flooring to denote various courts. Three-panel posters sit on rows of plastic folding tables, each with their anxious author standing by. They’re dressed in t-shirts, hoodies, sweaters, polos, jeans, khakis. One boy wears a red bow tie and navy blazer over cargo shorts. Grace pictures a dicey, high-stakes negotiation worthy of a U.N. ambassador. Kids wear expressions of eagerness, fear, curiosity, boredom, resignation, confidence.
Grace leaves Ned with Hélène to wander the aisles, smiling to telegraph mild encouragement while scoping out the competition. Hélène has it in the bag, if the titles are any indication: two boards study the physics of bubble gum; one compares different nail polishes for price and durability; another analyzes how color affects kids’ taste buds. She skims by reviews of moods, hygienic burger wrappings, toilet paper softness, and an investigation of whether birds see color.
The production values are, in a word, amateurish. Garish stick-on letters spell titles crookedly. Blocks of text backed by blue, yellow, dayglow orange, and hot pink construction paper are pasted at jaunty angles. Corners curl and cup. Text is too small. Or too large. Images are blurry or missing.
Hélène’s poster is a calm oasis by comparison. Elegant, thoughtful, clear, and no-nonsense—like the author herself. Her Literature Review has four citations, neither showy nor cursory. Grace recognizes McDonald et al, 2004, from a reference she’d emailed back in February. Hélène has even included Changes I could make at the end of Section 03, Results & Discussion. Grace points to, Trust my heart more.
“What’s this mean?” she asks.
Hélène shrugs. “I felt bad for the heavy-metal plant. That music is painful. She was obviously in distress. It just felt cruel to keep bombarding her with noise.”
Grace studies Hélène’s careful line drawings of the three sprouts at weeks 1 through 16. “Yeah, it didn’t fare well.”
“I swear I could feel that every time I went to water them. Alice kept asking me to turn the music down, or even off.”
“Who’s Alice?” Grace imagines one of Hélène’s friends from school.
“That’s her name. Alice.”
“The . . . the plant?”
Hélène nods.
“Do . . . the others have names, too?” Grace holds in a smirk.
Hélène gestures at the plant that had been left in silence. “That’s Minky. And the classical music one, I don’t know. She never said.”
Grace touches a leaf on the unnamed plant. “You . . . can hear the plants?”
“Yeah, usually. Honestly, Grace, no offense, but—” she sweeps her arm across her poster—“plants will tell you anything you want to know. This is an awful lot of effort to prove something you can just, like, ask them.”
Grace amuses herself with an image of Hélène setting pots of plants around a focus group conference table to ask about their musical preferences. “You make a good point.”
Grace and Ned wander the remaining aisles.
“She’s gonna win, no question,” he says.
“Right? No one is in her league.”
Ned, ever the journalist, stops to question a kid about his poster, How kids’ favorite drinks affect our teeth. Grace notes the proper placement of the apostrophe, then surveys the scene while avoiding eye contact. Easy to do, since middle schoolers aren’t known for their extroversion with adults. In her day, judges did consider how much you engaged with visitors. It never occurred to her until now how much those experiences trained her for a life of selling herself. The familiar heavy sadness pulls on her limbs, but she resists by watching Ned’s antics, his goofy cheer.
In the end, Hélène is edged out by a demonstration of sea level rise similar to the one Grace had suggested. The kid’s poster did not impress—the edges of his text blocks were surely gnawed by squirrels—but even she had to admit, he’s tapped into a zeitgeist moment. Climate change is a scientific juggernaut compared to plant emotions.
The three of them are standing by her poster when Does sound affect plant growth? was announced as the runner-up. Hélène’s groan opens a sick sinking emptiness in Grace’s gut. Years of crushing science-fair disappointments rush in. Not losses. Worse: her father’s indifference, his constant, deliberate absences.
The brew of body heat, glue residue, industrial cleaner, and—worst of all—youthful dreams being crushed, threatens to drag her under. She staggers off balance. Ned steadies her.
Hélène bounds to the dais to receive her award and stand in what Grace can only guess is hideous, burning shame. It’s all she can do to hold back tears.
Ned whispers in her ear, “Keep it together Grace. It’s not that serious.”
Not that serious? She nods, swallows.
“I hope you can find it in yourself to congratulate her.”
It stings to be known so well. She pauses to consider whether to lash out or to laugh. She chooses a weak smile.
“It’s . . . a lot.”
He squeezes her in a sideways hug. “I know. And you’ll be great.”
“Look at him up there, so smug.” The winner has hoisted the first-place trophy overhead like a Super Bowl-winning quarterback.
“So smug,” Ned says.
The three of them hurry the two blocks to Sal’s Pizza to beat the post-fair rush. After they order the Sal’s Special, Grace says, “ You did excellent work, Hélène. Gatekeepers are everywhere, but remember, you did your best. Be sure to enjoy that before moving on to the next thing.”
To her surprise, Hélène isn’t bothered.
“Simon needed it more than I did. His dad’s . . .not very nice to Simon.”
Grace sighs. “Oh, I feel that. Good for him. And you. What’s his dad do, if you know?”
Hélène laughs. “Oh, everyone in school knows. He’s a famous neurosurgeon.” She puts the title in exaggerated air quotes. “He makes more money than. . . I forget. Some football coach, maybe?”
Grace and Ned laugh. “Simon can milk that climate stuff for years if he wants to,” she says. She thinks of his unadulterated joy with that trophy. Not smugness. Her heart squeezes to recognize the fleeting, precious certainty that he did well, and is worthy.
Grace bustles around the seventh-grade science classroom, lit by horizontal shafts of early morning light. Unlike the soulless rooms at her former university, this one has windows that open and smells sweetly of pencil shavings and chalk dust. Instead of the dread and resentment she felt at her former institution, she bubbles with nervous energy.
The worn wooden chairs each have a single arm supporting a desktop sized to hold a spiral notebook. All but four are for right-handed students.
She sets up three experiments, one on each wall. Her plan is to cycle the kids through each station in groups of four, while the remaining six students read a short passage about atoms and molecules from the textbook.
It’s her third day teaching science at Curtis Bay Middle. On the first day, she had them arrange their chairs in a circle. What seemed like a simple request turned into ten minutes of raucous laughter and teasing, resulting in, at best, a squashed oval. Then she asked them to say their name, their pet’s name, one thing they liked, and one thing they didn’t like.
Sandra, a slight girl with wispy brown hair cut in a bob, said her cat is named Sandy, she loves the beach, and she dislikes cold weather.
Casey, Tanisha, Dante, and Carissa volunteered their pet names: Spike, a pit bull; Aurora, a box turtle; Diablo, a tomcat; and Pete, a parakeet. Likes included chocolate chip cookies, friends, music, and new clothes. Dislikes ranged from homework to asthma, being scared and big brothers.
“I would give anything to have a big brother,” Grace said. “Any other only children here?”
A few hands went up. “Lonely, isn’t it?” she said. They nodded, sharing a moment.
Their lightness was a surprise. She’d assumed Hélène was an exception, that most or all seventh graders were moody and rude, but these kids were open and expansive. Their teasing was in fun, not cruelty. Many grew up together. All were eager to be known, which lit in her the desire to be worthy of their trust.
“Your turn, Ms. Evans,” said a boy who looked more like a ninth grader.
Grace pointed to the board where she’d written her name. “That’s Dr. Evans.”
“Do you work at the clinic?”
“No, I have a PhD in microbiology.” Blank stares. “A doctorate? No? You know what? Never mind.”
A tiny girl in an oversized Ravens shirt asked, “What’s your pet’s name?”
Grace shook her head. “I’ve never had a pet.”
Stares of disbelief and pity. Their responses tripped over each other.
“That’s so sad.”
“No! Really?”
“Why not?”
“Do you like cats or dogs better?”
She held up a hand. “My dad didn’t allow pets, and then . . . I moved a lot.”
“That’s sad.”
Her eyes prickled. “Yeah, it is, isn’t it?” She squeezed them closed and shifted in her chair. “Okay, what do I like? That’s easy. I like flying.”
A squeal. “Like in an airplane?”
“In a glider.” More blank stares. “I’ll bring a picture tomorrow. Who’s next?”
The one girl wearing a dress raised her hand and blurted, “What about what you don’t like?”
I could fill a book. “How much time do you have?”
Most of them laughed. A few glanced at the clock.
“Okay, how’s this? I don’t like mean people.”
“Yeah, me either,” said a boy with curly hair and a faded blue polo. “Mean people suck.”
The classroom erupted in laughter.
On the second day, the spring weather was so spectacular, on a whim she took them outside. She turned it into a scavenger hunt, on the spot dictating twelve plants or signs of new life they had to find and document in their notebooks. It was a messy, beautiful disaster. At one point, the school’s principal came outside to suggest they might not need to laugh and shout quite so loudly, as there were other classes going on and students were distracted.
Grace had treated her own education as rungs on a ladder. Follow these steps, succeed, climb to the next rung, succeed there, climb more—until eventually you “make it.” A lab with your name on the door. Prestigious prizes. A tenure-track position. Tenure and promotions. An endowed chair. Books. More prizes. Always more climbing.
She played that game for years. Believed it would add up to a life. But it didn’t, not for her. She smiles at Lily Tomlin’s wise words, The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.
Years of comparison and competition had sapped her belief in herself and choked her spark. Hélène’s dedication to her science fair project reminded Grace of the joys of discovery. She’d worn cynicism over her own soft joy like armor, certain she needed such protection to climb that ladder.
Now, when she demonstrates the microscope, when her students see the cells of a leaf and gasp in excitement, their joy fills the classroom with light. Their enthusiasm is infectious. She considers that this is science at its best. Her purpose within these walls is no longer to study and catalog harm, as she had done for years. She’d expected to open her students’ minds to marvels, but instead she’s drafting off their abundant wonder.
Next chapter ➡️
One of the best things about reading serial fiction on Substack is the community that gathers around. This is slow reading at its best. Twice a month, everyone experiences a new chapter and gets to weigh in on what’s happening in real time. When I’ve read stories this way, whether short fiction or whole novels, the interactions with both readers and authors is one of the most enjoyable aspects.
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I loved being able to breathe a bit with Grace. And, of course, finding grace.
Of course... Grace feeding and illuminating the minds of children with her own hard fought knowledge and passions, this is almost like a benediction, grace for Grace!
Julie this was such a beautiful chapter, it felt light with the sheer relief of acceptance... at last!