The Greenwich Diner kept its Christmas decorations up all year, so when I passed through the swinging front door, I was greeted by an animated Mrs Claus standing on top of the hostess stand. Her white hair was in a bun, her delicate doll lips puckered into a smile, and she wore tiny, wire-framed glasses. Her legs moved back and forth, making the velvet of her red pantsuit swish. Beneath that, I heard a small squeaking noise: the plastic of her inner thighs brushing together. I felt embarrassed for her.
Dr Hughes hadn’t arrived yet, so I slid into the first open booth and took out my notebook. The pamphlet fell out, the one about the fellowship. Dr Shea is known for his connections to genetic communities around the world, said a random snippet.
This was going to be the second time I’d met Dr Hughes, my NYU biology adviser, at this diner. It was the middle of the day, past lunch, so there were only a few old ladies in a booth behind me, all slowly drinking milkshakes. More Mrs Clauses gathered behind the counter, along with Santa and his elves and a toy train. Next to me were a bunch of dog-eared Time magazines, including one I remembered on the newsstands over a year ago-Timothy McVeigh in a white sweatshirt and orange prison pants, all ready for his sentencing for the Oklahoma City bombing. He leaned forward, staring at the camera calmly, as if to say, Why should I feel guilty for anything? Should He Die? the headline implored.
A waiter leaned down. ‘Coffee?’
I jumped. ‘Sure.’
‘You startling my students again, Victor?’ Dr Hughes suddenly hovered over my table.
The waiter pulled her chair back and Dr Hughes sat. We’d met when I was in her junior-level Principles of Genetics class five months ago. Upon entering college, I gravitated to biology, barely looking at the major requirements for English Literature or Art History. It was only natural that I would study genetics, as it had been the only thing that had held my interest for years. The first few freshman and sophomore-level biology classes were simple and basic, but once I got to Dr Hughes’s level, things became complicated, full of diseases to memorize, case studies, new technical methods by which to isolate DNA, a lot of genotypes and markers and chemicals and a lot of problem sets. At that level, we were learning how to look for mutations in a gene, and that these mutations could lead to dire outcomes, impacting not only our general health, but also our behavior and psychological well-being.
I’d studied harder for her class than I ever studied for anything before, gobbling up the information. A few days after the first exam, Dr Hughes had pulled me aside and told me she wanted to meet me here, at this diner. I had never said a word to her before that.
Dr Hughes had stared at me when I walked down the diner’s aisle toward her. I was wearing a long skirt, and so was she. I thought perhaps she might be angry that we were dressed too similarly. When I reached her booth, she said, ‘You got every question on my exam correct.’
‘Every single question?’ I repeated.
‘Yes. No one has done that before.’
Not the group of Russian boys who sat up front and answered everything? Not the overweight girl in the back who seemed to have the textbook memorized? Not the pale, fleshy boy named Dieter who wore the athletic-inspired t-shirt that said Watsoncrombie & Crick, Genetics Department? I was a little bit afraid of people in the genetics class-they took themselves so seriously.
‘I’m sorry.’ It was the only thing I could think to say.
‘Don’t apologize.’ She narrowed her small, brown eyes. ‘But how did you get every question right?’
‘I don’t know. I studied.’
Her mouth fell open. Apparently, this was novel to her. I had paused, still not sure if I should sit down.
Now, Dr Hughes blotted her forehead with a napkin. ‘This humidity is killing me. I need to live somewhere dry. Arizona. Or maybe California.’
‘My brother’s in California,’ I volunteered.
‘Lucky.’ She clucked her tongue. ‘What’s he doing out there?’
‘He’s at Berkeley, taking some graduate classes. Or at least that’s what he was doing last time I talked to him.’ After my father told Steven that my mother had written him a letter, proving she was alive, Steven had dropped his fascination with terrorists, which made me wonder if he truly had linked the two things together. He’d taken off for California that following year. We got letters from him every once in a while-he was taking computer science classes and doing freelance work for various Internet start-ups. Everyone in Northern California, he intimated, was doing freelance work for Internet start-ups.
Dr Hughes settled down and looked at the menu, pushing up the sleeves of her thick, cable-knit sweater. She dressed more like an artist than a scientist, and had stiff, frizzy, salt-and-pepper hair, a long, thin nose, and glasses that magnified her eyes. She liked to yell at people during class, to give impossible exams, to say, on the first day, while passing out the syllabus, ‘We move fast because science moves fast. If you can’t keep up, I suggest you study something in the liberal arts.’ She called everyone by their last name-Davis, Cameron, Lorie. She never specified gender, and admitted to me once that she hated how the science departments were disproportionately male.