An Answer in Search of a Question

“Flummoxed” is a word you used to know. You were in a spelling bee in second grade; you studied words like “abdomen” and “abomination” (and apparently, “flummoxed”) during ESL class, when you were supposed to be writing the alphabet in cursive. Your handwriting is still terrible today, all chicken scratch but without the M.D. and massive student loans. Instead you goofed on the word “eclipse,” of all things. Spelled it with an “X.” “E-x-l-i-p-s-e,” you said, knowing it was wrong, but by then it was too late anyway; the X had already left your lips, never to return again. Your whole class looked disappointed when you showed up at your desk 15 minutes before recess; early was a bad sign. If you had won you would’ve stayed in the assembly through the end of lunch probably. Even Ms. Sachs looked at you funny, the way your doctor eyes you now when you show up and can’t remember why.

“What’s ailing you, Lins?” he asks.

“Tylenol or Advil, that is the question,” you say, stalling.

“You don’t have a heart problem,” he says. “Go for the Tylenol.” And then, “Is that it?” You shake your head idly as if philosophizing. Philosophizing—is that a word?

He tells you to go home. “I am flummoxed,” you reply, bluffing.

~

At home you are standing in front of a plate of strawberries. Or rather, there are two intact strawberries, and three strawberry remains macerating in their own juice, like an abandoned zombie movie. It is unclear what to do next in these types of situations. Are you coming or going? Also, do you even like strawberries? “Honey?” you call out—a flare gun in search of a soft landing. But honey can’t help you now.

At work the two Natalies walk by your door every hour. They peek in and wave each time, but their eyes linger on your desk a second too long. In one corner of your desk you have a black plastic tray that says “Natalie B.” printed in block letters; in the other corner, an identical one that says “Natalie C.” One Natalie is short and heavy in a way that suggests supreme niceness and an inability to say no, which you’ve always appreciated in your employees. The other Natalie is average height and sexy, with pursed lips and sad eyes; she talks little but always manages to be useful. You suspect one of the Natalies is sleeping with your boss, who also walks by your door constantly, but never to check in on you—always, instead, to hand-deliver something to Natalie. Once he walked all the way to her office to hand her a post-it. This was the same man who routinely doled out emails with the same abandon that a back-alley hooker gives out chlamydia, so it riled the right amount of suspicion in you. Today you can’t remember which Natalie he wants. You also don’t know which Natalie is which. So you leave the Natalie trays empty, and let their eyes linger as long as they want.

~

Your daughter calls. “Mom, how about a beach day?” she says. She sounds awfully cheerful for a single 38-year old with a potbelly and freckles. She got your disposition but your husband’s coloring—navel-orange hair, complexion with a hint of albino.

“Where to?” you ask.

“Laguna,” she says, without asking your opinion. “We can go to Nick’s for brunch.”

“Lauren Conrad,” you say. “Wasn’t she on the Hills?”

“That ended in 2010,” she says. “But it did take place in Laguna beach”—a verbal olive branch.

“I saw her things on sale at Kohl's,” you tell her. “The Lauren Conrad Collection. You might like it.”

“I only buy second-hand now,” she says.

“Stay away from the shorts and pants,” you tell her. “You can pick something up that way.”

“I wash everything,” she says.

“You’re not poor, are you?”

“I’m fine. Besides, it reduces my carbon footprint.”

“You’re approaching 40 with no children to inherit the earth. Why give a fuck about your carbon footprint?”

“Are you on something, Mom?” She is emphasizing the word on.

“Why?”

“You never curse.”

“I do when you’re not around,”

“But I am.”

“Who’s this?” you ask. You regret it immediately, but the words have taken off the tarmac. “There’s not an X in eclipse, damn it,” you say.

~

Your husband is on the phone. “Today’s not a good day,” you can overhear him saying to whoever it is on the other line.

“Who’s that?” you ask, yelling.

He smiles with his mouth only. He lowers his voice and it sounds like he is spelling every other word out in whispers, the way you two did when your daughter was four and in the room. Now, some decades later, your roles have changed. Age is like a game of musical chairs; you never know what you’re going to get, until you do.

~

Your boss hands you a stack of applications. “Boss-man,” you say, against your better judgment. “What’s this?” You are too old to use terms like “boss-man.”

“Very funny,” he says, but a trio of fork tines emerges between his eyebrows. “Is the end of the week enough time? I just need two or three recommendations to pass on to the Dean. Five tops.” He walks out and runs into one of the Natalies stalking your door before you have the chance to answer, which is good, because you were going to say “Maybe.” That’s always the wrong answer.

You glance at the top of the stack. Up on the top, it lists a White-girl first name, weird hyphenated last name. She is either adopted or ethnic or married. You consider calling out “Natalie” and waiting to see which one shows up first, then asking about the current demographic composition of the department; also, what does our mission statement say about diversity again?

“Natalie—" you say.

Only when no one answers do you realize that it is dusk outside all of a sudden. Time never flies; it only pauses briefly before falling down the stairs.

~

You pick the application at the very top of the pile. You cannot make sense of all the numbers—GPA, GRE, impact factors, H-indices—but you do remember how to read, so you read a story she wrote for her diversity statement, on the very last page, the one no one else bothers with because diversity is mostly preferred in the abstract, and awfully problematic in person. It is about a little girl who goes into Manhattan looking for a wolf. You cry sticky tears, the kind that do not drip linearly down your face like in the movies but explode like a celestial body meeting asphalt. You borrow a post-it from sexy Natalie and write “THIS ONE”; you stick it on the application without looking at the research statement or CV. After all, you are in the only field dumb enough to think it smart enough to understand the most complicated piece of equipment known to humankind; drawing conclusions in a discipline like yours is like planning out your future condo’s color palette on Mars after the next Great Migration, when Earth has become too cracked of a blue-green marble to inhabit—you could, but it would all be rather premature, given all the unknowns. You place the application and the note, along with your letter of resignation, in the plastic black trays, a copy for each Natalie.

~

At home you call your daughter.

“How about international instead?” you ask.

“Instead of what?” she says, forgetting all about the beach.

“I’ve always wanted to go to back to New Zealand,” you say.

“What’s in New Zealand?”

“Don’t be a downer,” you say. You book the flights to Auckland before your husband gets home. You print them out and leave them on his pillow, but he only sighs at you weakly when he discovers them before bed.

“Happy anniversary,” you confabulate.

“Try again.”

“Happy birthday?” you ask.

“How about just, ‘Surprise!’”

“Surprise,” you say, obeying.

~

Mid-flight, your husband says to your daughter, “Your mother—”

“Is she gone forever?”

“Doesn’t matter,” she says eventually, when he is unable to muster an appropriate answer. Life is a bell-shaped curve where the children and old people are interchangeable, and thus treated with an identical, benevolent deception.

New Zealand is not as you remember it. True, the glacier-borne lakes pooling near the Alps of the Southern Island are as heart-breaking as ever, with an existential blue so dense it makes you wonder if the sea is jealous. But you cannot find the coffee shop that used to sit on the edge of where sand met concrete, with the Welsh-looking owner who would give you a gold-wrapped chocolate with every brewed cup, nor can you locate the small child in Dunedin who taught you that “avocado” could only be correctly pronounced as “ever-cardeau.” “Where is she?” you whisper, careful to hide your conviction of her existence from the orangey, albino guardians judging your every move. You probe the faces of other, lesser children you meet on Queen Street, staring until they turn away, ashamed that they are not her.

When your daughter tells you to cut it out, you’re creeping out the kiddos, you remind her that there is no such thing as a female pedophile, and parents, they know this, so there isn’t a problem, no one is getting arrested, because women’s brains don’t sway that way, don’t degrade in that particular configuration of wrong. You eye your husband with newfound skepticism, him and his catastrophic male brain. He confirms your suspicions by sighing loudly and tells you to maybe avoid certain words in public, lest we raise any concerns. I said pedophile, not cunt, you tell him, loud enough for the stroller moms to hear, and abruptly you are alone again, in a room with windows that never truly open and beds adorned with an excess of matching cushions and a singular chocolate on the pillow, which you consume madly and with great relief. You have a striped card in your hand and a roller backpack at your feet. It remains unclear whether you are coming or going.

The beaches of Auckland are black and resplendent, like the hair of the missing avocado girl, like the hair you used to own. If you look closely, the sand will wink at you with the glimmer of a thousand eyes, complicit. Now you have monkey hair and paws that do not fully close. When the water touches your feet, it sizzles and foams, as if scorched by the heat swimming inside the veins that bind them. There are no people here, only rocks that have lived for a millennium and will gladly live for a millennium more. You do not know how to swim and are not about to learn now. But the new world is awash before you, or perhaps it is the old world dressed in new emperor’s clothing, so fine and so beautiful that it cannot be anything but invisible to the naked, irresponsible eye, the same ones that stopped reflecting and recording reality as the rest of the world knew it a rather long time ago. In a different universe you once stood here, unawares, yet desperate for yonder. Now you are yonder, desperate for a here to hold onto.

When you wake two sets of eyes are blinking at you like the warning light on a waffle maker, the kind that signals that time is up. You register the freckles and Seussian hair. “What?” you ask. The owners of the two sets of eyes look at each other, as if disappointed by your capacity for sentience. You try swiping the lint from their eyes. “Don’t miss me too much,” you say.