“I’ll get him to put in for a raise. He’s kind of timid about asking, but I know he deserves it, and his boss likes him.”
Jeannie began to feel more cheerful, although the prospect of spending her Sundays teaching backward undergraduates was dismal. “For an extra four hundred a week we might get Mom a room to herself with her own bathroom.”
“Then she could have more of her things about her, ornaments and maybe some furniture from the apartment.”
“Let’s ask around, see if anyone knows of a nice place.”
“Okay.” Patty was thoughtful. “Mom’s illness is inherited, isn’t it? I saw something on TV.”
Jeannie nodded. “There’s a gene defect, AD3, that’s linked to early-onset Alzheimer’s.” It was located at chromosome 14q24.3, Jeannie recalled, but that would not mean anything to Patty.
“Does that mean you and I will end up like Mom?”
“It means there’s a good chance we will.”
They were both silent for a moment. The thought of losing your mind was almost too grim to talk about.
“I’m glad I had my children young,” Patty said. “They’ll be old enough to look after themselves by the time it happens to me.”
Jeannie noted the hint of reproof. Like Mom, Patty thought there was something wrong with being twenty- nine and childless. Jeannie said: “The fact that they’ve found the gene is also hopeful. It means that by the time we’re Mom’s age, they may be able to inject us with an altered version of our own DNA that doesn’t have the fatal gene.”
“They mentioned that on TV. Recombinant DNA technology, right?”
Jeannie grinned at her sister. “Right.”
“See, I’m not so dumb.”
“I never thought you were dumb.”
Patty said thoughtfully: “The thing is, our DNA makes us what we are, so if you change my DNA, does that make me a different person?”
“It’s not just your DNA that makes you what you are. It’s your upbringing too. That’s what my work is all about.”
“How’s the new job going?”
“It’s exciting. This is my big chance, Patty. A lot of people read the article I wrote about criminality and whether it’s in our genes.” The article, published last year while she was still at the University of Minnesota, had borne the name of her supervising professor above her own, but she had done the work.
“I could never figure out whether you said criminality is inherited or not.”
“I identified four inherited traits that
“How could you ever prove a thing like that?”
“By studying identical twins raised apart. Identical twins have the same DNA. And when they’re adopted at birth, or split up for some other reason, they get raised differently. So I look for pairs of twins where one is a criminal and the other is normal. Then I study how they were raised and what their parents did differently.”
“Your work is really important,” Patty said.
“I think so.”
“We
Jeannie nodded. That was it, in a nutshell.
Patty turned to her own car, a big old Ford station wagon, the back full of brightly colored kiddie junk: a tricycle, a folded-down stroller, an assortment of rackets and balls, and a big toy truck with a broken wheel.
Jeannie said: “Give the boys a big kiss from me, okay?”
“Thanks. I’ll call you tomorrow after I see Mom.” Jeannie got her keys out, hesitated, then went over to Patty and hugged her. “I love you, sis,” she said. “Love you, too.”
Jeannie got in her car and drove away.
She felt jangled and restless, full of unresolved feelings about Mom and Patty and the father who was not there. She got on I-70 and drove too fast, weaving in and out of the traffic. She wondered what to do with the rest of the day, then remembered that she was supposed to play tennis at six then go for beer and pizza with a group of graduate students and young faculty from the psychology department at Jones Falls. Her first thought was to cancel the entire evening. But she did not want to sit at home brooding. She would play tennis, she decided: the vigorous exercise would make her feel better. Afterward she would go to Andy’s Bar for an hour or so, then have an early night.
But it did not work out that way.
Her tennis opponent was Jack Budgen, the university’s head librarian. He had once played at Wimbledon and, though he was now bald and fifty, he was still fit and all the old craft was there. Jeannie had never been to Wimbledon. The height of her career had been a place on the U.S. Olympic tennis team while she was an undergraduate. But she was stronger and faster than Jack.
They played on one of the red clay tennis courts on the Jones Falls campus. They were evenly matched, and the game attracted a small crowd of spectators. There was no dress code, but out of habit Jeannie always played in crisp white shorts and a white polo shirt. She had long dark hair, not silky and straight like Patty’s but curly and unmanageable, so she tucked it up inside a peaked cap.
Jeannie’s serve was dynamite and her two-handed cross-court backhand smash was a killer. There was not much Jack could do about the serve, but after the first few games he made sure she did not get many chances to use the backhand smash. He played a sly game, conserving his energy, letting Jeannie make mistakes. She played too aggressively, serving double faults and running to the net too early. On a normal day, she reckoned, she could beat him; but today her concentration was shot, and she could not second-guess his game. They won a set each, then the third went to 5–4 in his favor and she found herself serving to stay in the match.
The game went to two deuces, then Jack won a point and the advantage was to him. Jeannie served into the net, and there was an audible gasp from the little crowd. Instead of a normal, slower second service, she threw caution to the winds and served again as if it were a first service. Jack just got his racket to the ball and returned it to her backhand. She smashed it and ran to the net. But Jack was not as off balance as he had pretended to be, and he returned a perfect lob that sailed over her head and landed on the back line to win the match.
Jeannie stood looking at the ball, hands on her hips, furious with herself. Although she had not played seriously for years, she retained the unyielding competitiveness that made it hard to lose. Then she calmed her feelings and put a smile on her face. She turned around. “Beautiful shot!” she called. She walked to the net and shook his hand, and there was a ragged round of applause from the spectators.
A young man approached her. “Hey, that was a great game!” he said with a broad smile.
Jeannie took him in at a glance. He was a hunk: tall and athletic, with curly fair hair cut short and nice blue eyes, and he was coming on to her for all he was worth.
She was not in the mood. “Thanks,” she said curtly.
He smiled again, a confident, relaxed smile that said most girls were happy when he talked to them, regardless of whether he was making any sense. “You know, I play a little tennis myself, and I was thinking—”
“If you only play a
Behind her, she heard him say in a good-humored tone: “Should I assume that a romantic dinner followed by a night of passion is out of the question, then?”
She could not help smiling, if only at his persistence, and she had been ruder than necessary. She turned her head and spoke over her shoulder without stopping. “Yes, but thanks for the offer,” she said.
She left the court and headed for the locker room. She wondered what Mom was doing now. She must have had dinner by this time: it was seven-thirty, and they always fed people early in institutions. She was probably watching TV in the lounge. Maybe she would find a friend, a woman of her own age who would tolerate her forgetfulness and take an interest in her photographs of her grandchildren. Mom had once had a lot of friends—the other women at the salon, some of her customers, neighbors, people she had known for twenty-five years—but it
