Hex - Rebecca Dinerstein Knight Page 0,52

it, they are no longer people. Carlo’s going to be blank for a long time before he waltzes again and I do hope he waltzes again.

Barry is taking care of Carlo’s “operations,” which again sounds more like bowel movements to me than whatever it’s supposed to suggest. He’s very sad to have lost his marriage but I don’t think he’s more sad than he’s happy to have gotten this job. He’s escaped academia for all time; he’ll be consequential now, and welcome among the consequential. His new crowd will be full of his next wives. Mendelson promises him as much. But more immediately, I’m sure Barry has a few recent graduates in mind. They too have just left the university. They too need a hand to hold.

Mishti no longer holds Barry’s hand, or Carlo’s, or anyone’s. She won’t allow any more sex. Mishti used to believe, believe fervently, that hard work will be rewarded, and beauty will be desired, and that being wonderful is worth it. Since the smut of our Christmas dinner, she’s taken up new theories: liars win, lust is disgusting, trust is impossible. This kind of total ideological crash is only available to those who are capable of fervent belief in the first place. Mishti used to hold colossal faith in the great glow of the world; she’s now colossally depressed. Her gates have crashed down around her, like before a battle: her eyes are closed, fists are closed, lust is closed, ears are closed even to sympathy. She’s turned herself off, as if with the flipping of a power switch, and really, I cannot see her lights anymore. She is miring in a kind of hate—who knows how long this stupor will last—hate of passion, hate of connection. She finds love ludicrous. She says that love is only vanity, delusion, and greed. She says she doesn’t want any part of it. I have heard her say she wants to die.

Mishti is too alive to die, but she’s making a pretty good show of it. She’s started skipping class, as if rebellion were only now occurring to her, at age twenty-six. She’s removing the enormous jewels from her fingers and lifting her bare middle finger to the world.

I’d like to return to the world, if it will have me. In Joan’s words, I’d like to get something done. My one sprouting castor bean is rising a little higher every day; the other is still dormant. I’d like to test and treat the soil of my monkshood potting, adjust the pH, give it the supplemental nutrients it may need to get going. All I need is one good leaf and then I can literally turn it. Maybe when I finish Rachel’s project, this project that was never even mine, I can decide what my own project will be. It won’t be oaks, maybe it won’t even be a biological science. Maybe Mishti and I will give it all up and start from scratch. Start a taco truck. A scarf store. A pillow factory. Joan would finally implode in disappointment. Good, I would like that.

Hildegard, have you heard from Joan?

BARBER

My parents called me. I guessed that someone necessarily had died, but they only wanted to say hello. Hello is not something we say in our family.

“Hello,” I said.

“It’s a new year,” my father said. Even pre-coffee math insisted that it had been a new year for at least seventy-five days.

I put the coffee on and thought, My father is only one-half Jewish. His mother, one Esther Rosenbaum of Albany, NY, married to her mother’s infinite discontent Harry Barber, the hat man. (“Hat man?” I once asked. “He sold some kind of hats” is all I’ve ever been told.) But Esther, in allegiance to her mother or to protect herself from vanishing, became Jewisher and Jewisher with time, bar mitzvah–ing my father so thoroughly he can still recite the haftorah blessing by heart. The hat man didn’t mind.

“It’s March,” I said.

“My flowers will be out soon,” said my mother, who must have been holding the extra handheld in the kitchen.

The truth is I’d forgotten about my mother’s garden. One way I have never thought of her is as a gardener. I have thought of her as a geophysicist, which is what both she and my father were until their retirement. Having borne so little in-person witness to their retirement as I have, I guess I missed her point. Her point about new interests, which happened to be my interests, translated,