Liston was Ada’s favorite person in the world aside from David. She gathered scraps of information about Liston’s life as if assembling a quilt: Liston no longer had a husband. She had an older daughter, Joanie, twenty-six and out of the house now, and three younger sons. David had briefly recounted the story of Liston’s divorce: she married too young, at eighteen, because Joanie was on the way. It was to a boy from her neighborhood, he told Ada, someone who did not understand the scope of her talent and the particular requirements of her career. (Ada had vague memories of this husband, who was still married to Liston for the first five years of Ada’s life: she remembered a large, unpleasant figure who never made a noise, except to exhale occasionally after something Liston said.) After Joanie was born, Liston worked her way through UMass as an undergraduate and then, after several professors there noticed her outstanding scientific and mathematical mind, she earned her doctorate in electrical engineering from Brown. David hired her as a postdoc, and later full-time. Liston divorced her husband right after the birth of her son Matty, four years younger than Ada, and since that time had relied on a large network of the women friends she grew up with for child care and emotional support. In the words of David, the husband was no longer in the picture, and good riddance. “This must be the most important factor in your choice of a life partner,” he told Ada. “Who will most patiently and enthusiastically support your ambitions?”
“Shouldn’t she have recess, or something?” Liston once asked David, several years before, when she noticed Ada becoming pale from spending every day inside the lab. “Agreed,” said David, and so every day at lunch he had begun to march her around the Fens for thirty minutes, observing the flora, naming the birds by their songs, pointing out where Fibonacci sequences occurred in nature, once finding a mushroom that he said was edible and then cooking it up for the lab. Sometimes Liston joined them, and when she did it was a special treat: she derailed David’s monologues at times; she told Ada about her childhood; she told Ada about the music that her three sons listened to, and the television shows they watched, and at night Ada wrote down what she had heard in her journal for future reference, in the unlikely event that she was ever called upon to discuss popular culture with one of her peers. Often, Ada felt as if Liston were teaching her some new language. She consumed greedily everything that Liston told her. She looked at her with wide fixated eyes.
Now, entering their house, Liston said, “My God, David, it’s hot,” except her accent made it sound like hut. Of Liston’s many verbal particularities, Ada’s favorites were as follows: bahth, Liston said, for bath; and hoss for horse; and she used various expressions passed down to her by her mother that Ada rolled around in her head like marbles. “He’s been in and out like a fiddlah’s elbow,” she’d said once about David, who had a habit of letting his office door slam, not out of anger but out of forgetfulness.
Solemnly Ada brought a drink to her and Liston thanked her and called her her favorite girl, and she asked Ada to tell her why it was that her sons weren’t so polite, asked her to please explain what was wrong with them. David retreated to the kitchen to keep things in order and then the doorbell went again, and this time it was Liston who opened it.
The man on the porch was wearing leather driving shoes and fitted red shorts the color of the cooked lobsters and a white button-down linen shirt that looked cool despite its long sleeves, which he had rolled up to his elbows. He was impressively tan. Dark hair coated his calves and rose up from the top button of his shirt and rose thickly back, in waves, from his noble brow.
“Are you Ada?” he asked her, after greeting Liston, and she added another accent to her mental list of sounds to ponder and reproduce. She nodded.
“A pleshure. I’m Giordi,” he said, and introduced himself by kissing her one time on each cheek. Ada was used to this exchange from interactions with her father’s many European colleagues, and from the many graduate students who had come to the Bit from other parts of the world; but it never failed to fluster her and to make her feel impossibly self-conscious, aware of her physical self in a way she did not like to be. There was the feeling always that she should be prettier than she was. That she should be better dressed, more put together. Like Giordi. Like some of the other members of the lab, Charles-Robert, Hayato. Unlike Liston, who dyed her hair a tinny red and sometimes wore clothes that were too young for her, and unlike David, who prided himself on caring more about almost everything than clothing. Food, yes; science, yes; Ada, yes; clothing, no. And he expected this of Ada also—that she would rank her wants in the same order he ranked his own. The wants she did not tell him about (cable television, Nancy Drew books, a waterfall of bangs like Liston’s, a hair accessory called a banana clip that looked something like a foothold trap) felt to Ada shameful and perverse. They felt to her ignoble.
“Would you like a drink?” she asked Giordi, as she had been taught, and then she led him down the hallway toward the kitchen, where David greeted him. Giordi took the gin rickey in his hands, putting his lips to the rim of the glass, ignoring the straw.
“Did you made these?” he asked Ada, about the drink, and she told him that she did, fixating on the grammatical mix-up he had let slip, pondering its structure.
“Delicious,” he said. “Wherever did you learn.”
“From my father,” she told him.
She had learned everything from her father.
Ada was twelve years old. She would have been in seventh grade that year, if she had been enrolled in a school. She had never kissed a boy, never held hands with a boy. Had never, in fact, intentionally been within the vicinity of a boy her own age for more than a few minutes. Nor a girl. Her only interaction with boys and girls her own age had been with the children of her father’s colleagues, who in general led more normal lives than she did—normalcy being a condition that her father disdained and she revered. And even these interactions had been cursory. Ada’s behavior around these children was absurd. When she got near them she drank them up. She took them in. She was silent. She watched them like a television show. She took note of every turn of phrase they used. Like, they said. Rad. Prolly. No way. As if. Freaky. Whatsername. Hang out. What’s up? Duh. Creep. Freaked out. They were freaked out by her, probably. She didn’t blame them.
Ada was much more accustomed to spending time with adults, and tonight she would have been very much at ease except that she could sense her father’s tension and it made her tense. He had always been a perfectionist when it came to his dinners, but tonight was extreme: he had been preparing for days, writing down lists, stopping at the store each evening for things he had forgotten. She could not articulate what was different in his demeanor, but it triggered a deep-seated uneasiness in her. It was a hair in her mouth or sand in her shoe. She looked at her father now: he was lifting up the mixing bowls to show Giordi the cooked lobsters on the countertops.
“Aragosta, sì?” asked her father, who prided himself on speaking enough of every language to get by in restaurants at the conferences he went to in Europe, in Asia.
But Giordi shook his head. “Those are astici,” he said. “Aragoste have the little things like . . .” he said, and he mimed spikes. “And they don’t have the big . . .” and he mimed claws, pinching his thumbs and his tightened fingers together.