That year I chemically prodded my rats into obesity, writing my thesis in experimental psychology, and I left Scott. He preferred to call it a separation, but that was another of our self-inflicted deceits. I left him. My rats raced around in a flurry of white fur and ate everything in sight - feces, pellets, bits of matted fur - and each night I went home to Scott and tried to explain to him why I was leaving. A week before we had it all settled, he asked me if I would be faithful to him while we were apart. I told him that was not the kind of question you ask somebody when they’re leaving you.

After we separated, I moved into an old house and took up jogging. I ran up and down the hills near my house, at the high school track, on the bypass near the interstate. I ran until I got tendonitis and every other kind of - itis you can get in a knee, and then I stayed home and watched TV, or injected my rats, or sat on the porch and watched the traffic. Often I thought of Scott and wondered how he was, in my mother’s words, “taking it.” My mother, in her cynical wisdom, had told me not to worry about him, that the ones you think are dying of a broken heart are the ones you’ll see a few months later with a new lover and not a care in the world. Maybe, but I wasn’t so sure. Scott is a decent guy, and decent guys seem to have a lot harder time “taking it” than most.

I knew that telling my father would be difficult, and I put it off for as long as I could. My father likes to be protected from certain truths, and I have a type of covenant with him. When I finally did drive out to the house one weekend, I found him in his garden, amidst stalks and vines and rows of sprawling blossoms lying on the ground, saying, “Why, Sarah,” as I walked up, smudges of garden soil on his cheeks and the pocket of his work shirt. He showed me the bounty of his garden, and I did my best at small talk, sensing all the while that he knew I had something to tell him. He was kneeling by the lettuce, pulling out weeds, when I said, “Scott and I are separating.”

He looked at the clump of weeds in his hand, then at me for a long moment. “You know I don’t approve.”

“I know.” I looked at sunlight forming broken shafts along a line of cornstalks, and at my father, who wanted reasons. “What is it, Sarah? What happened to you two?” He looked both concerned and irritated.

I wanted to tell him I could make up reasons for him if he wanted, but what did it matter now, after the fact? “I don’t know,” I said. “Nothing you can put your finger on.”

“That doesn’t seem like much of a reason to me, Sarah, something you can’t put your finger on.”

I looked at his dark eyes, the pale hollowness of his cheeks. “Sometimes it’s the only reason, Dad.”

He pulled out some more weeds and dropped them into a pile by his feet. “Does your mother know?”

“Yes.”

He sighed and picked a bug off one of the lettuce leaves. “Have you really tried?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“Really?”

“A lot, Dad.”

“It’s a shame this is happening,” he said.

“I’m sorry, too.”

He stood up, brushed some dirt off his hands. “Is there anything you need?”

“No, I’ve got enough money, and I’ve found a place to live.”

“Sarah, you know if there is any way I can help you, I will.”

“I know, Dad.” I kissed him on the cheek. “I’m fine, really.”

“Why don’t you go in and talk to your mother? I’ve got some spraying to do.”

“Okay, Dad.”

I watched him walk off into his meticulous garden. By the time I was on the patio deck, he was just a distant figure amidst the leaves and blossoms. I thought of my father tending his garden with all the love and care he would have liked to have put into his own life if fate hadn’t played so many strange tricks on him, none the least of which was Phyllis, my dear, crazy, charmingly sadistic mother.

I came in through the glass doors on the patio and found Phyllis in what she delighted in calling “the family room,” watching a game show on TV. She held up her glass to me and jiggled the ice cubes.

“Want one?”

“What is it?”

“Scotch and soda.”

“No, thanks. I’ll have a Coke.”

In the kitchen, I found an uncapped quart bottle by the refrigerator. A handful of ice helped take away some of the flat taste.

“Abraham Lincoln.”

“What?”

“Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth president. I got that one right.”

I came back into the den and sat across from her.

“Did you tell him?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Your father’s reactions are so predictable.”

Phyllis was at the liquor cabinet making herself another drink, then at the sliding glass doors, staring out.

“Would you look at that. He’s on his hands and knees weeding something.” She took a sip of her drink. “God, what a man. If it didn’t get dark, I’d never get him back in here.”

I finished my Coke and put the glass in the sink. Phyllis was still staring out the window when I came back in the room.

“I’m leaving now.”

She came over and hugged me.

“Be sure you’re here at six Sunday, and wear something decent. Your grandmother’s coming.”

“I’ll be here. Tell Dad I said goodbye.”

I kissed her cheek, and we walked out the back door to the driveway.

“Do you miss Scott, honey?” she said.

I started the car. “I’ll see you Sunday, Mother.”

I waved to her and watched the dust swirl up around the car bouncing on the long dirt driveway to the main road.

At my house, I turned on lights, then sipped coffee on the front porch, wishing I had something to do. I wanted to call Scott, but I dialed time, instead, and set all the clocks in the house. I watched a weather report with computer-generated clouds floating over the Midwest. I thought of my mother. I could hear her tell me, “Sensitivity is for the birds, Sarah. If you weren’t so self-absorbed, you’d know that.”

Sunday, I wore new shoes, jewelry, the works. Phyllis and my brother Matt were in shorts, and my grandmother Madeline wore a sun dress.

“What are you dressed for?” my mother said, looking at my tan suit and burgundy leather shoes. “You’ll die in that outfit. Take off your jacket before you have a heat stroke.”

I pitched my jacket over the arm of a lawn chair and gave Matt a hug.

“How are you doing?”

“I’m making it,” he said, the stump of his amputated leg jerking forward with each scrape of his crutches against the redwood deck.

“Say hello to your grandmother,” Phyllis said, leading me to Madeline. I gave Madeline a kiss on the cheek. Her perfume had the soft, sweet scent of lilacs. Matt took the seat next to her, propping his crutches against the deck railing.

“You look wonderful,” Madeline said. “Which is more than I can say for Matthew.” She patted his good leg. “I told him not to worry, though. Two-legged men are going out of fashion.”

Madeline was the most level-headed of our family, which is why Phyllis hated her. When Matt smashed his motorcycle into a tree, the wife of a local dentist in tow, Madeline was strangely calm. “Why don’t you try being grateful that he’s alive?” she told Phyllis. “He’s still your son, you know, no matter what condition he’s in when he comes out of that operating room.”

“We have to go into the house now,” Phyllis was saying, motioning to us all. “Raymond’s going to barbecue, and I don’t want us to be covered with smoke.”

Phyllis led us into the living room, then got my arm. “I can’t believe your father,” she said. “He dries out every piece of meat he cooks, but does that stop him? Oh God, there’s Emily and Charles.”

And quickly she was at the patio doors greeting the Denleys. She was in her element now, smiling and laughing, so gracefully animated that I almost forgot for a moment she was the Phyllis I knew. She left the Denleys with Madeline and moved about the room organizing, setting things right. She was straightening the salad forks when my father stepped in from the patio and announced that the steaks were ready.

“Wonderful,” my mother said, clapping her hands together and moving us all toward the table.

She had us all seated as my father brought in a platter criss-crossed with chunks of meat.

“Isn’t this just wonderful?” she said, smiling up at my father.

My father took a seat at the end of the table, unfolded a napkin into his lap.

“Matt, darling,” my mother said, “would you please say the blessing?”

Matt stuck his fork into one of the steaks. A trickle of grease rolled off the platter and onto the tablecloth.

My father cleared his throat. “I’ll say the blessing, Phyllis.”

“Thank you, Raymond.”

I looked at the charcoal lines seared into the steaks, the buttery glaze on the carrots. I didn’t feel like eating. I passed the string beans before my father finished.

I made it through coffee and dessert in the living room before I excused myself and went down the hall to Matt’s room. He was lying in bed watching television. A Shirley Temple movie was on.

In the hospital, my brother told me that he could taste his own blood in the water, after the accident, after his motorcycle had flipped him down the hillside and into a pond. I was thinking of this as I looked at him watching Shirley Temple.

“Have I missed anything?” Matt said. He leaned forward and changed the channel to a program on whales.

“No. They always say the same things.”

“How are you about Scott?”

“It’s taking awhile.”

“Phyllis told Dad that you were responsible because your eyes are bigger than your stomach. Dad read the paper and nodded his head a lot.”

I put my head on Matt’s shoulder for a moment. The program on whales was over, replaced by the local news.

“I was going through some things and I found these,” Scott said, handing some books to me. “I thought you might need them.”

A long series of twelve-hour days in the lab had exhausted me, and I was sitting in the back yard of the house I’d rented, trying to piece together my energies, when Scott had come in through the back gate.

I looked through the books, mostly old biology texts. “No, I don’t need any of these, but I appreciate that you’d bring them over.”

He stood for a moment looking around the yard, at the house. “It’s nice here,” he said.

“I like it. It’s very quiet.”

“A nice change from our last few weeks together, huh?” he said, smiling.

“A change. Would you like a beer?”

“Yeah, I would, thanks.”

I thought of inviting Scott in, but it was supposed to be a new life, at least for awhile. I brought the beer out into the shade of a pecan tree, instead, and we watched birds and squirrels, commented on how nice the trees would look when the leaves changed colors. Scott picked up a leaf, began splitting it down the middle, breaking it into little pieces. I watched his hands, thinking of their touch. I could recall isolated memories of our lovemaking, but nothing complete, no continuous sense of how our lovemaking had carried us through to deeper emotions. The clearest memories were of the difficult times, when the essence had begun to dissipate from our relationship and I became, in Scott’s view, more complex, less decipherable. “Why can’t we talk?” he would say. “We are talking,” I would answer. “Not about things that count.” “I don’t know how to talk about things that count any more, Scott. I don’t even know how I feel.”

We began to talk so much about not talking that we lost our meaningful words, allowed them to slip away into code words. I was complicated, neurotic, Scott was rigid, unsympathetic. We split our lives apart with those words, created spaces and divisions that we couldn’t cross as lovers, though we still made love as a type of necessary distortion, an inability to surrender the lies we needed, as we drifted through our empty lovemaking toward some illusory union, some point at which we could make ourselves believe that we had touched.

Scott stacked the broken pieces of the leaf into a pile. He looked at me, and a trace of wistful sadness filled his eyes.

I stood up. I didn’t want to relive any more memories. “I’ve got to go to the lab,” I said.

Scott looked up at me, surprised by my abruptness. “I’m sorry, Sarah,” he said, standing up. “I didn’t mean to keep you.”

“You didn’t keep me. I’ve just got some work to do.”

“What should I do if I find some more of your things? Do you want me to bring them over?”

“No, just call. I can tell you if I need them.”

“Sarah…”

“I’ve really got to go, Scott.”

“All right.” He had his hands in his pockets, a resigned look in his eyes. “Maybe I’ll see you again soon.”

“Maybe.”

I listened to the sound of Scott driving away, upset with myself for hurting him, sending him away. A part of me wanted to go after him; another part of me fought the impulse, knowing that we had tried to talk about our feelings before and had always ended up more isolated from each other than when we began. I went into the house, instead, and gathered up my things, then I drove to the lab.
I was thinking of the innocence of the dream Scott and I had begun with as I walked up the steps of the biology building, a love committed to itself, unaffected by external events. “Fairy tale land,” as Phyllis had called it, pointing out that nothing was more stupid to believe in than happy endings.

I arranged my rat cages in front of me on one of the lab tables and began weighing the control group, injecting the others. I grabbed the fattest rat and snapped him into the restrainer, getting three feet in before he started twisting and shrieking, jabbing at the air with his free foot. The screams went on unabated. I snapped the cuff on his foot.

Two other graduate students, finished with their experiments, dumped a cage full of rats into a garbage can and threw a rag soaked with chloroform on top. There was a frantic, metallic scurrying of claws, the thumping of rat bodies against the lid.

I concentrated on my rat, swabbing its inner thigh with alcohol, pressing a hypodermic needle into a vein in its leg. A rat threw itself with particular force against the garbage can lid and I jumped, ripping open the vein. My rat squealed, pulled against its restraints; blood coursed from a hole in the rat’s leg and matted its fur a thick, grimy scarlet. I unhooked the rat from the restraints, dropped it into the cage. The rat moved slowly to the back of the cage and began cleaning its fur.

The noise in the garbage can stopped. One of the graduate students took a stick and poked around in the can among the dead, white bodies. He dropped the lid back down and pushed the can out into the hall.

I began injecting another set of rats. Pete walked in from the lab across the hall. “Fat rats you’ve got there,” he said as he walked by. It was his favorite line. He got some Petri dishes out of the cabinet and came over and sat by me.

“What’s the matter with you today?” he said.

“Nothing.”

He leaned forward and looked at me. “Oh God, is it the usual again?”

“The usual.”

“You haven’t been the least bit interesting since you left Scott. No, you haven’t been the least bit interesting since you married Scott, which was a pretty dumb thing to do, considering most people live together these days so that when they split up it doesn’t mean anything.”

“I’ll remember that the next time.”

“God, that’s disgusting,” he said as he watched me take a blood sample from a rat. “Plus, these goddamn rats stink. Why don’t you give them a bath or something?”

“Why don’t you leave me alone so I can get some work done?”

“Touchy. You and Scott must have had a big one today.”

“I need to finish this, Pete.”

“Come see me when you get done. I’ve got an old friend with me.”

“Rats first, Pete, pleasures second.”

“That’s always been your problem.”

I took blood samples from rats for most of the afternoon. It was quiet in the lab. The other graduate students had left, and there was only the sound of rats moving in their cages and of a radio somewhere down the hall. When I finished with my rats, I went into the lab where Pete was working. He was sitting at his desk, surrounded by culture vials filled with fruit flies. He had prepped some microscope slides and was working on extricating hangnail size larvae from a thick wafer of culture medium he had taken from one of the vials.

“You kept me waiting so long, Sarah, I almost had to start without you,” he said as I approached. He opened a drawer beside him and took out a bottle of bourbon, poured some into a coffee cup for himself, and handed me the bottle.

“Here’s to your impending divorce,” he said, toasting me with his coffee cup.

I took a sip of the bourbon; it had the familiar smoky taste I was used to.

“Drink the whole bottle,” he said, filling a pipette with a reddish-brown solution. “Maybe it’ll help you remember my number one rule for emotional stability—if you can’t have what you want, want something else.”

“Cheers,” I said, taking another sip, looking at the slight smile on Pete’s face.

I had an affair with Pete before I was married, when his tough cynicism was something I thought I needed. We spent weekends in a cabin in the woods Pete had rented with some friends. Pete talked a lot about disillusionment and what a valuable purpose it served in life. “People who want life to be better than it is are a dime a dozen,” he said one night as we were undressing by the fireplace. When the affair ended, the leaves were in their last stages of crimson and had just begun to fall from the trees. Pete took that as a sign and later in the evening drove me home in his station wagon.

“Thanks,” he said as he dropped me off.

“Don’t mention it.”

Shortly after that, I met Scott.

I was looking beyond Pete, out through the windows behind him, at the swimming pool near the center of campus. The pool was open to the public during the summer; small children bounded off the diving boards, splashed in the water. It was a perfect late summer day, except for the wind, which blew harshly through the trees and scattered paper cups and small amounts of debris along the pool’s edge. I watched the children, thinking of how my brother used to swim like that when he was little, jumping from jetties, stretching himself out in the water for as long as he could hold his breath.

I turned away from the window and sat down on one of the lab tables near Pete. “I’m having problems,” I said.

“Love, sex, or money?” he said as he transferred flies from one vial to another.

“Real problems.”

He came around and sat next to me, poured some liquor into his cup and offered it to me. His hands smelled like the cultures he grew his flies in—overripe fruit, a type of pungent bitterness.

“Are you crying?” he said.

“Yes.”

He got up and brought me a paper towel from a stack by the sink.

“Don’t you think this is just some kind of about-to-be-divorced syndrome?” he said.

“That’s too easy.”

“What then?”

“Life.”

“Oh, that,” he said, dabbing my cheek with the paper towel. “You know, sometimes it helps to be cynical.”

“Helps who?”

“Hadn’t thought of that,” he said.

“I’d better go,” I said, getting down from the table.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m here all night if you want to call.”

I looked at my rats on the way out. Sleeping. It was getting dark.

The swimming pool had turned a silvery blue in the emerging moonlight. I thought again of Matt as a young boy, the swimmer—his little legs splashing him through the water, summers and summers ago.

I took out my cell phone and called Matt.

“Hi. What’re you doing?”

“Who is this?”

“Very funny.”

“Video games. Wanna come over?”

“What about the parents?”

“Phyllis is at the Denleys. Dad’s reading the newspaper.”

“You talked to him lately?”

“What about?”

“Anything.”

“No. He’s in his own world.”

“Aren’t we all?”

“Yeah, I guess so. You coming?”

“Sure, but I’m no good at video games.”

“That’s okay. I like to win.”

“Give me a few minutes. I’ve got one more thing to do.”

“Okay. See ya.”

I called Scott. No answer. I took it as a sign.

Lights were coming on in the labs. It was time to go.