“Says the woman with two papers in Nature and one in Cell. I’m just trying to catch up.”
I laughed him off and got to work. I had wanted to be in this lab because of its meticulousness, because of the fact that every result had to be tested and then tested again. But there was a point when confirmation became procrastination, and I knew that I was nearing that point; maybe I had passed it. Han was right. I was good at my work. Good at my work and hungry to be better, to be the best. I wanted my own lab at an elite university. I wanted a profile in The New Yorker, invitations to speak at conferences, and money. Though academia wasn’t the right route for making loads of money, I still dreamed of it. I wanted to dive into a pile of it every morning like Scrooge from DuckTales, the TV show Nana and I used to watch when we were young and money was scarce. And so, I tested and tested again.
Anne used to call me a control freak. She said it teasingly, lovingly, but I knew that she meant it and I knew it was true. I wanted things just so. I wanted to tell my stories the way I wanted to tell them, in my own time, imposing a kind of order that didn’t actually exist in the moment. The last text Anne ever sent to me said, “I love you. You know that right?” and it took everything I had not to respond, but I gave it everything I had. I took pleasure in my restraint, a sick pleasure that felt like a hangover, like surviving an avalanche only to lose your limbs to frostbite. That restraint, that control at any cost, made me horrible at a lot of things, but it made me brilliant at my work.
I returned to my lever-press experiment. I was using both opsins and fluorescent proteins that allowed me to record brain activity so that I could see which specific prefrontal cortex neurons were active during the foot-shocks. The fluorescent proteins were something of a marvel. Whenever I shone blue light on the protein, it would glow green in the neuron that expressed it. The intensity of that green changed based on whether or not the neuron was firing or inactive. I never tired of this process, the holiness of it, of shining light and getting light in return. The first time I ever saw it happen, I wanted to call everyone in the building to gather round. In my lab, this sanctuary, something divine. Light is sweet and it pleases the eye to see the sun.
Now I’ve seen it so many times, my eyes have adjusted. I can’t go back to that initial state of wonder, so I work, not to recapture it, but to break through it.
“Hey, Gifty, do you want to get dinner with me sometime? I mean, it was nice to share that Ensure and all, but maybe we can get a real meal this time.”
Han had gloves and safety goggles on. He was watching me warmly, hopefully, his ears glowing faintly red.
I wished just then that I had a glow of my own, a bright green fluorescent shimmer under the skin of my wrist that flashed in warning. “I’m horrible at relationships,” I said.
“Okay, but how are you at eating dinner?” he asked.
I laughed. “Better,” I said, though that wasn’t quite true either. I thought about the dinner parties with Raymond five years before, the excuses I’d made to get out of them, the fights we’d had.
“You spend more time with lab mice than you do with people. You know that’s not healthy, right?” he said.
I didn’t know how to explain to him that spending time in my lab was still a way for me to spend time with people. Not with them, exactly, but thinking about them, with them on the level of the mind, which felt as intimate to me as any dinner or night out having drinks had ever felt. It wasn’t healthy, but, in the abstract, it was the pursuit of health, and didn’t that count for something?
“You hide behind your work. You don’t let people in. When am I going to meet your family?”
The cracks in our relationship had begun to show. One crack—that I was bad at dinners. Another—that I worked too much. The biggest—my family.
I had told Raymond that I was an only child. I liked to think of it as a prolonged omission rather than an outright lie. He had asked if I had any siblings and I had said no. I’d continued saying no for months, and then by the time we started having the “When am I going to meet your family?” fight I couldn’t figure out a way to say yes again.
“My mom doesn’t like to travel,” I said.
“We’ll go to her. Alabama’s not that far away.”
“My dad lives in Ghana,” I said.
“I’ve never been to Ghana,” he said. “Always wanted to visit the motherland. Let’s do it.”
It annoyed me when he called Africa “the motherland.” It annoyed me that he felt close enough to it to do so. It was my motherland, my mother’s land, but the only memories I had of it were unpleasant ones of the heat, the mosquitoes, the packed bodies in Kejetia that summer when all I could think about was the brother I had lost and the mother I was losing.
I didn’t lose my mother that summer, but something inside of her left and never returned. I hadn’t even told her that I was seeing someone. Our phone calls, infrequent and short, were so terse it was like we spoke in code. “How are you?” I’d ask. “Fine,” she’d say, which meant, I’m alive and isn’t that enough? Was it enough? Raymond came from a big family, three older sisters, a mother and father, too many aunts and uncles and cousins to count. He talked to at least one of them every day. I’d met them all and smiled shyly as they praised my beauty, my intellect, as they called me a keeper.
“Don’t mess this up,” Raymond’s eldest sister had whispered, loudly enough for me to hear, as we left his parents’ house one evening.
But Raymond wasn’t an idiot. He knew there were things I wasn’t saying, and in the beginning, he was content to wait until I was ready to say them, but then, close to six months in, I could feel my grace period winding down.
“I’ll try harder, at the dinner parties. I’ll try harder,” I said one night after a fight had left us both ragged and teetering on the edge of our will to stay together.
He wiped a hand over his brow and closed his eyes. He couldn’t look at me. “It’s not about the fucking parties, Gifty,” he said softly. “Do you even want to be with me? I mean really be with me?”
I nodded. I moved to stand behind him and wrapped my arms around him. “Maybe next summer we can go to Ghana together,” I said.
He turned to face me, his eyes filled with suspicion, but also with hope. “Next summer?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll ask my mom if she wants to come too.”
If Raymond knew I was lying, he let me lie.
* * *
—
My mother has never been back to Ghana. It’s been more than three decades since she left with baby Nana in tow. After my fight with Raymond, I’d called her and asked if she ever thought about going back. She had money saved; she could live a simpler life there, not have to work all the time.
“Go back for what?” she said. “My life is here.” And I knew what she meant. Everything she had built for us and everything she had lost were held in this country. Most of her memories of Nana were in Alabama, in our house on the cul-de-sac at the top of that little hill. Even if there was pain in America, there had also been joy—the markings on the wall off our kitchen that showed how Nana shot up two feet in one year, the basketball hoop, rusted out from rain, disuse. There was me in California, my own separate branch on this family tree, growing slowly, but growing. In Ghana there was only my father, the Chin Chin Man, whom neither of us had spoken to in years.