There’s a situation in Afghanistan, Bobby, the president will say.
Bobby’s response will sound something like Nice twinkles for your banana flames. His speech will be precise and fluid, each syllable articulated perfectly and without hesitation. What comes out will be absolute gibberish: not code, not broken speech, but the ramblings of what we once called an idiot—in the clinical sense of the word.
It’s all I can do to keep from smiling. I have to bite the inside of my cheek—hard—to maintain the proper visage of seriousness, of concern, of duty.
I flip through the other pages. The MRIs, or magnetic resonance images, show a substantial lesion exactly where I expect it, in Brodmann area 22. “This was from a skiing accident?” I say. “No indication of prior damage?”
Of course they don’t know. Thirty-four-year-old men aren’t in the habit of having brain scans, not unless there’s cause.
“Did he suffer from headaches?”
Reverend Carl shrugs.
“Is that a yes or a no, Reverend?” I say.
“I don’t have that information.”
Now I turn to Patrick, but he shakes his head. “You have to understand, Jean, we can’t release the president’s family’s medical history.”
“But you want me to help.”
“You’re the country’s leading expert, Dr. McClellan.” Reverend Carl has stepped in, or leaned in across the coffee table. His face, all sharp lines, is inches from my own. There’s something anime about him, but he’s still handsome. He’s still wearing his suit jacket, despite the heat, but under the fabric is a solid frame. I wonder if women like Olivia King are secretly in love with him.
The chance to correct his tense is too good to miss. “Was,” I say. “I don’t need to tell you I haven’t worked for the past year.”
Reverend Carl doesn’t react, only sits back and steeples his hands together, his long fingers forming a perfect isosceles triangle. Maybe he practices this in front of a mirror. “Well, that’s why we’re here today.” He pauses, like he used to do during his televised sermons, a bit of extra razzle-dazzle suspense-building effect.
But I already know what he’s going to say. My eyes wander from his to Patrick’s to the other men in the room.
“Dr. McClellan, we’d like you on our team.”
On our team.
A hundred responses bubble up inside me, ninety-nine of which would mean forced resignation—or worse—for Patrick. But anything approaching agreement or eagerness will never make its way through my brain to my mouth. Instead of excitement, I feel a gut punch of pain, as if Reverend Carl just reached out with a claw instead of words and bored into me. They might need me, but need is different from want. And I don’t trust any of these men.
“Do I have a choice?” I say. It seems safe.
Reverend Carl unsteeples his hands, separating them into a saintlike gesture of prayer. I’ve seen him do this before, on television, when he’s asking for help, for more Pure Women and Pure Men and Pure Families to join his fold, for money. Right now, those hands seem more like the sides of a vise ready to squeeze me until I burst.
“Of course,” he says, his voice overgenerous and falsely kind. “I know how you must feel, how leaving your home and your children to go back into the daily grind must be—” He searches for a word as his eyes search my house. There’s clutter and mess everywhere: three pairs of my shoes where I kicked them off last week, dust on the windowsills, an old coffee spill on the carpet next to his shoes.
I’ve never been an ace at housekeeping.
He continues. “We talked to another scientist, Dr. Kwan, in case we need a backup. You know her, I think.”
“Yes.”
Lin Kwan is the chair of my old department. Or was, until they replaced her with the first man they could find. I don’t need to ask why they haven’t approached him for this project—if Lin had gotten her way, the guy’s funding would have been severed after the first disaster of an experiment. He was that inept.
“So,” Reverend Carl says. His hands are down now, and he’s no longer looking at me, but at the steel cuff Thomas has been holding for the past twenty minutes. “It’s your choice. You can set up a new lab, recommence your research, and move forward. Or—”
“Or?” I say. My eyes find Patrick’s.
“Or everything can go back to normal. I’m sure your family would like that.” He doesn’t look at me while he’s talking, but at Patrick, as if he’s studying my husband’s reaction.
As if anything about our lives in the past year has been normal. Then I get it—Carl Corbin actually believes what he preaches. At first, I’d thought he’d spun the Pure Movement, that his motives for resurrecting the Victorian cult of domesticity and keeping women out of the public sphere were purely misogynistic. In a way, I wish that were true; it’s less creepy than the alternative.
Steven was the first to explain it to me, on a Sunday morning two years ago.
“It’s sort of traditional, Mom. Like in olden times.”
“Olden times? Like what? Greece? Sumer? Babylonia?”
He poured himself a second bowl of cereal, mixed in two bananas, and topped it with half-and-half. By the time Sam and Leo reached fifteen, I’d have to buy futures in Cheerios. “Well, yeah. It was there with the Greeks, the idea of public spheres and private spheres, but it goes back further. Think hunter-gatherer communities. Biologically, we’re suited to different things.”
“We?” I said.
“Men and women, Mom.” He stopped crunching and flexed his right arm. “See this? You could go to the gym every day for a year and you still won’t have muscle like I do.” He must have seen the look of pure disbelief on my face, because he reversed course. “I don’t mean you’re weak. Just different.”
Christ.
I pointed to my temple. “See this, kiddo? Ten more years of school and you might have one like it. Or you might not. And it has absolutely shit to do with gender.” My voice was rising.
“Calm down, Mom.”
“Don’t tell me to calm down.”
“You’re getting kind of hysterical. I’m only saying that it makes biological sense to have women do some stuff and men do other stuff. Like, for instance, you’re a really great teacher, but you probably wouldn’t last more than an hour if you—I dunno—had a job digging ditches.”
That was it. “I’m a scientist, Steven, not a kindergarten teacher. And I’m not hysterical.”
Well, I sort of was.
I poured my second cup of coffee with shaking hands.
Steven didn’t let up. He opened his textbook from that goddamned AP class—Religious Nuttership 101 or whatever they called it—and started reading. “‘Woman has no call to the ballot-box, but she has a sphere of her own, of amazing responsibility and importance. She is the divinely appointed guardian of the home. . . . She should more fully realize that her position as wife and mother, and angel of the home, is the holiest, most responsible, and queenlike assigned to mortals; and dismiss all ambition for anything higher, as there is nothing else here so high for mortals.’ That’s Reverend John Milton Williams.