Lessons in Chemistry: A Novel

The biggest benefit in being the child of a scientist? Low safety bar.

As soon as Mad could walk, Elizabeth encouraged her to touch, taste, toss, bounce, burn, rip, spill, shake, mix, splatter, sniff, and lick nearly everything she encountered.

“Mad!” Harriet shouted every morning as she let herself in. “Put that down!”

“Down!” Mad agreed, flinging a half-filled coffee cup across the room.

“No!” shouted Harriet.

“No!” agreed Mad.

As Harriet fetched the mop, Madeline teetered into the living room, picking up this, discarding that, her grubby little hands automatically reaching for the too-sharp, too-hot, too-toxic, the things most parents keep out of reach on purpose—in short, the best things. Nevertheless, she lived.

It was because of Six-Thirty. He was always there, sniffing out danger, blocking light sockets, positioning himself beneath the bookshelf so when she scaled it—which she did nearly every day—he would be the cushion that broke her fall. He’d failed once to protect someone he loved. He would not fail again.

“Elizabeth,” Harriet scolded her. “You can’t just let Mad do whatever she wants.”

“You’re absolutely right, Harriet,” Elizabeth said without taking her eyes off three test tubes. “You’ll notice I’ve moved the knives.”

“Elizabeth,” Harriet implored. “You have to watch her. I found her crawling into the washing machine yesterday.”

“Don’t worry,” Elizabeth said, still staring at the test tubes. “I never start a load without checking first.”

—

Yet despite her constant state of alarm, Harriet could not dispute that Mad seemed to be growing in ways her children never had. Even more unusual: the mother-daughter relationship had a symmetry Harriet could not ignore. The child learned from the mother, but the mother also learned from the child. It was like a mutual adoration society—you could see it in the way Mad looked at Elizabeth when she was being read to, the way she crowed when her mother whispered in her ear, the way Elizabeth beamed when the child combined baking soda with vinegar, the way they constantly shared whatever they were thinking and doing—chemistry, babble, drool—sometimes using a sort of secret language that felt to Harriet just a bit exclusionary. One could not—should not—be one’s child’s friend, she’d warned Elizabeth. She’d read that in one of her magazines.

She watched as Elizabeth popped Mad up onto her lap, then held her close to the bubbling test tubes. The child’s eyes filled with wonder. What had Elizabeth called her teaching method? Experiential learning?

“Children are sponges,” Elizabeth explained the previous week as Harriet chided her for reading aloud to Madeline from On the Origin of Species. “I’m not about to allow Mad to dry out early.”

“Dry,” Mad shouted. “Dry, dry, dry!”

“But surely she can’t understand a word of what Darwin wrote,” Harriet argued. “At the very least, couldn’t you read her the abridged version?” Harriet only ever read abridged versions. Reader’s Digest was her favorite publication for that very reason—they cut big boring books down to a chewable size like St. Joseph aspirin. She once overheard a woman in the park saying she wished Reader’s Digest would condense the Bible, and Harriet found herself thinking, Yes—and marriages.

“I don’t believe in abridgments,” Elizabeth said. “Anyway, I think Mad and Six-Thirty enjoy it.”

That was the other thing—Elizabeth read to Six-Thirty, too. Harriet was fond of Six-Thirty; in fact, sometimes she felt like she and the dog shared similar worries about Elizabeth’s que será, será approach to parenting.

“I wish you could talk to her,” Harriet told him more than once. “She’d listen to you.”

Six-Thirty looked back at her, exhaling. Elizabeth did listen to him—obviously communication was not limited to conversation. Still, he sensed that most people did not listen to their dogs. This was called ignoring. Or wait, no. Ignorance. He’d just learned that one. By the way and not to brag, but his word count was up to 497.

—

The only person besides Elizabeth who didn’t seem to underestimate what a dog understood, or what it meant to be a working mother, was Dr. Mason. As threatened, he dropped by her home about a year after the delivery, ostensibly to see how things were going, but more obviously to remind her about his boat.

—

“Hello, Miss Zott,” he said as she opened the door at seven fifteen a.m., astonished to see him there, in his rowing kit, his crew cut damp from a hard row in the morning fog. “How are things? Not to make this about me, but I had the most godawful row this morning.” He stepped in and walked past her, casually fighting his way upstream through the litter of babyhood until making it to the lab, where he found Mad contemplating her escape from her high chair.

“Well there she is!” he beamed. “All grown up and still alive. Excellent.” He noted a pile of freshly washed diapers, grabbed one, and began to fold. “I can’t stay long, but I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d check in.” He leaned down to take a better look at Mad. “My golly, she’s a big one. I guess we can thank Evans for that. How goes the parenting?” But before Elizabeth could answer, he picked up Dr. Spock’s baby book. “Spock’s a decent source of information. He’s a rower, you know. Won a gold medal in the Olympics in 1924.”

“Dr. Mason,” Elizabeth said, surprised at how glad she was to see him as she took in the smell of ocean on his clothes. “It’s nice of you to drop by, but—”

“Don’t worry, I can’t stay long; I’m on call. I promised my wife I’d watch the kids this morning. Just wanted to see how things are going. You look tired, Miss Zott. What about help? Do you have someone?”

“My neighbor drops by.”

“Excellent. Proximity is critical. And what about you—how are you taking care of yourself?”

“What do you mean?”

“Still exercising?”

“Well, I—”

“Erging?”

“A lit—”

“Good. Where is it? The erg.” He went to the next room. “Oh my lord,” she heard him say. “Evans was a sadist.”

“Dr. Mason?” she called, drawing him back to the lab. “It’s nice to see you, but I’ve got a meeting here in thirty minutes and I have a lot to—”

“Sorry,” he said, popping back in. “I don’t usually do this—drop in on patients postdelivery. To be honest, I never see any of my patients again unless they decide to swell the ranks.”

“I’m honored,” she said. “But like I said, I’m—”

“Busy,” he finished for her. He went over to the sink and started to wash the dishes. “So,” he said, “you’ve got the baby, the erg, your freelance work, your research.” He ticked off her commitments, lifting his soapy hands as he ran his eyes around the room. “This is a decent lab by the way.”

“Thank you.”

“Did Evans—”

“No.”

“Then—”

“I built it. During my pregnancy.”

He shook his head in wonder.

“I had help,” she said, gesturing to Six-Thirty, who stood by Mad’s chair like a sentry waiting for food to drop.

“Ah, yes, there he is. Dogs are enormously helpful. My wife and I found our dog was a sort of a child trial run,” he said, examining a pan. “Brillo pad?”

“To your left.”

“Speaking of trial runs,” he said, adding more soap. “It’s time.”

“Time?”

“Time to row. It’s been a year already.”

She laughed. “That’s funny.”

He turned to look at her, his hands dripping water on the floor. “What’s funny?”

Now it was Elizabeth’s turn to look confused.

“We have an opening. Two seat. It would work for us to have you back as soon as possible. Next week at the latest.”

“What? No. I’m—”

“Tired? Busy? Probably going to argue you don’t have time.”

“Because I don’t.”

“Who does? Being an adult is overrated, don’t you think?” he said. “Just as you solve one problem, ten more pull up.”

“Up!” Madeline shouted.

“The only decent thing I learned in the marines was the value of making my bed every morning. But a chilly splash of water in the face off starboard, just before dawn? It fixes things.”

—

Elizabeth took a sip of coffee as Mason prattled on. She was well aware that she needed fixing. She’d reached a new stage in her grief: from mourning the man she’d fallen in love with, to mourning the father she knew he would have been. She tried hard not to imagine how high Calvin would have tossed Mad in the air, how easily he would have plopped her on his shoulders. Neither of them had wanted children, and Elizabeth still fervently believed that no woman should be forced to have a baby. Yet here she was, a single mother, the lead scientist on what had to be the most unscientific experiment of all time: the raising of another human being. Every day she found parenthood like taking a test for which she had not studied. The questions were daunting and there wasn’t nearly enough multiple choice. Occasionally she woke up damp with sweat, having imagined a knock at the door and some sort of authority figure with an empty baby-sized basket saying, “We’ve just reviewed your last parental performance report and there’s really no nice way to put this. You’re fired.”

—

“I’ve tried to get my wife to row for years,” Dr. Mason was saying. “I think she’d love it. But she always says no and I have to assume it’s partly because there aren’t any other women down at the boathouse. I’m not crazy, Miss Zott. Women row. You row. There are women’s rowing teams.”

“Where?”

“Oslo.”

“Norway?”

“This one,” he said, pointing to Mad. “She’s definitely going to row port. See how she naturally shifts her weight to the right?”

They both looked to Madeline, who was staring at her fingers as if surprised to find they weren’t all the same length. Last night, when Elizabeth was reading aloud from Treasure Island, she’d felt Mad staring up at her, her lips parted in awe. She looked back down at her daughter, awestruck in a different way. It had been such a long time since anyone had shown her that kind of faith. She felt an avalanche of love for her misinformed child.

“You’d be surprised how much you can tell about a baby at this stage,” Mason was saying. “They constantly reveal their future selves in the smallest of ways. This one; she can read a room.”

Elizabeth nodded. Last week she’d peeked in on Mad during naptime and found the child sitting up in her crib explaining something in earnest to Six-Thirty. Elizabeth had hung back, watching in wonder as the baby, wobbling back and forth like a bowling pin threatening to topple, waved her hands as she chattered a steady stream of consonants and vowels strung together haphazardly, like laundry on a line, but delivered with the kind of passion that made it clear she was an expert in this area. Six-Thirty stood next to the crib, rapt, his nose stuck between the slats, ears tracking every syllable. Mad paused in midair as if she’d just lost her train of thought, then leaned forward toward the dog and started in again. “Gagagagazozonanowoowoo,” she said as if clarifying a point. “Babbadodobabdo.”

Having a baby, Elizabeth realized, was a little like living with a visitor from a distant planet. There was a certain amount of give and take as the visitor learned your ways and you learned theirs, but gradually their ways faded and your ways stuck. Which she found regrettable. Because unlike adults, her visitor never tired of even the smallest discovery; always saw the magic in the ordinary. Last month Mad had let out a shriek from the living room, and Elizabeth ruined an hour’s worth of work in her rush to her side. “What is it, Mad?” she said, swooping in like a helicopter in a war zone. “What’s wrong?”

Mad, wide-eyed, looked back at her as she held up a spoon. Look at this! she seemed to say. It was right here! On the floor!

—

“And it’s not just exercise,” Dr. Mason was saying. “Rowing is a way of life. Am I right?” He was talking to the baby.

“Ite!” shouted Mad, banging on her tray.

“By the way, we have a new coach,” he said, turning to Elizabeth. “Very talented. I’ve told him about you.”

“Really? And did you tell him I’m a woman?”

“No!” shouted Mad.

“The point is, Miss Zott,” Dr. Mason said, avoiding her question as he grabbed a towel, moistened it, then moved to the high chair, where he used it to clean Mad’s sticky hands, “we’ve been having an ongoing problem with Two Seat. Between you and me, he’s a terrible rower, was only ever in the boat because of some old collegiate connections. But that all ended this past weekend when he broke his leg in a ski accident.” He tried to hide his delight. “Fractured in three places!”

Madeline stuck out her arms and the doctor lifted her out of the chair.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Elizabeth said. “And I appreciate the vote of confidence. Still, I don’t have the experience. I was only in your boat a few times and that was because of Calvin.”

“Alv-in,” said Mad.

“Of course you have the experience,” Dr. Mason said, surprised. “Seriously? Trained by Calvin Evans himself? In a pair? I’d take that kind of expertise over some giant ex-college lackey any day of the week.”

“And I’m also busy,” she explained again.

“At four thirty in the morning? You’ll be back home before this one even knows you’ve been gone. Two seat.” He emphasized the phrase like this was a special deal that wouldn’t last. “Remember? We discussed this.”

Elizabeth shook her head. Calvin had been the same way—treated rowing as if it naturally superseded everything. She remembered a morning in particular when some of the other rowers in a different boat were expressing surprise that their five seat hadn’t shown up. The coxswain called him at home, discovering that Five Seat had a high fever. “Okay, but you’re still coming, right?” he demanded.

“Miss Zott,” Dr. Mason said, “I don’t mean to put you on the spot, but the truth is, we need you. I know I only rowed with you those few times, but I know what I felt. Plus, getting back in a boat will make you feel so much better. We all,” he said, thinking of his row that morning, “will feel so much better. Ask your neighbor. See if she won’t watch the baby.”

“At four thirty in the morning?”

“This is what is so unsung about rowing,” Dr. Mason said, turning to leave. “It happens at a time when no one’s really that busy.”

—

“I’ll do it,” Harriet said.

“You can’t be serious,” Elizabeth said.

“It’ll be fun,” Harriet said as if everyone agreed getting up in the middle of the night was fun. But really it was because of Mr. Sloane. He’d been drinking more and swearing more and the only way she knew how to deal with it was to stay away. “Anyway, it’s only three mornings a week.”

“It’s just a tryout. I may not pass muster.”

“You’ll be fine,” Harriet said. “You’ll pass with flying colors.”

—

But as Elizabeth wended her way through the boathouse two days later, small pods of drowsy rowers glancing at her in surprise, she began to feel that Harriet’s faith and Dr. Mason’s needs were both exaggerated.

“Good morning,” she said to rowers at random. “Hello.”

“What’s she doing here?” she heard someone whisper.

“Jesus,” said another.

“Miss Zott,” Dr. Mason called from the far end of the boathouse. “Over here.”

She plotted a path through the labyrinth of bodies to a disheveled group of men who looked as if they’d just received some very bad news.

“Elizabeth Zott,” she said firmly, holding out her hand. No one took it.

“Zott will be rowing two seat today,” Mason said. “Bill broke his leg.”

Silence.

“Coach,” Dr. Mason said, turning to a homicidal-looking man. “This is the rower I told you about.”

Silence.

“Some of you may remember, she rowed with us before.”

Silence.

“Any questions?”

Silence.

“Let’s get going then.” He tipped his head at the coxswain.

—

“I think that went well, don’t you?” Dr. Mason said later as they walked to their cars. She turned to look at him. When she was in labor and in horrific pain, convinced the baby was snatching her internal organs like suitcases as if to ensure she’d have plenty to wear on the outside, she screamed so violently the bed frame shook. Once the contraction passed, she’d opened her eyes to see Dr. Mason leaning over her. See? he’d said. Not so bad, right?

She fiddled with her car keys. “I think the coxswain and coach would disagree.”

“Oh that,” he said, waving it off with his hand. “Normal. I thought you knew. New rower gets blamed for everything. You mostly rowed with Evans—you don’t really understand the finer points of rowing culture. Just give it a few rows; you’ll see.”

She hoped he was being honest, because the truth was, she’d loved being out on the water again. She felt exhausted, but in a good way.

“What I find interesting about rowing,” Dr. Mason was saying, “is that it’s always done backwards. It’s almost as if the sport itself is trying to teach us not to get ahead of ourselves.” He opened his car door. “Actually, when you think about it, rowing is almost exactly like raising kids. Both require patience, endurance, strength, and commitment. And neither allow us to see where we’re going—only where we’ve been. I find that very reassuring, don’t you? Except for the flip-outs—of course. I could really do with fewer flip-outs.”

“You mean flips.”

“Flip-outs,” he insisted, getting in his car. “Yesterday one of my kids hit the other with a shovel.”