"Lessons in Chemistry"

[fiefoe]

There's a strange energy to Bonnie Garmus's voice (channeled by narrator Miranda Raison, which largely manages to make one overlook how startlingly anachronistic the heroine is, (kiwi? Margaret Mead?) or how heavy-handedly are the villains drawn, if not down-right in caricature. I eventually understood this tale as an aggressively woke fairy-tale, a meritocratic wet-dream.
The bits on rowing are surely exaggerated but ring true.

• Because while musical prodigies are always celebrated, early readers aren’t. And that’s because early readers are only good at something others will eventually be good at, too. So being first isn’t special—it’s just annoying.
• But Madeline offered it to Amanda because friendship requires sacrifice,
• she stood, hands on hips, her lips unapologetically red, her skin luminous, her nose straight. She looked down at him like a battlefield medic assessing whether or not he was worth saving.
• As any non-rower can tell you, rowers are not fun. This is because rowers only ever want to talk about rowing. Get two or more rowers in a room and the conversation goes from normal topics like work or weather to long, pointless stories about boats, blisters, oars, grips, ergs, feathers, workouts, catches, releases, recoveries, splits, seats, strokes, slides, starts, settles, sprints, and whether the water was really “flat” or not. From there, it usually progresses to what went wrong on the last row, what might go wrong on the next row, and whose fault it was and/or will be. At some point the rowers will hold out their hands and compare calluses. If you’re really unlucky, this could be followed by several minutes of head-bowing reverence as one of them recounts the perfect row where it all felt easy.
• “You can’t have your beakers back.”
  “So, you do remember me.”
  “Yes. But not fondly.”
• she loved him and he loved her with a certain kind of fullness, of conviction, of faith, that underscored their devotion to each other. They were more than friends, more than confidants, more than allies, and more than lovers. If relationships are a puzzle, then theirs was solved from the get-go—as if someone shook out the box and watched from above as each separate piece landed exactly right, slipping one into the other, fully interlocked, into a picture that made perfect sense. They made other couples sick.
• whenever it was about a certain finding or formula, eventually, invariably, one of them would finally have to get up and take a few notes.
• Thus the topic of family was like a cordoned-off room on a historic home tour. One could still tip a head in to get a vague sense that Calvin had grown up somewhere (Massachusetts?) and that Elizabeth had brothers (or was it sisters?)—but there was no opportunity to step inside and sneak a peek at the medicine cabinet.
• “did you know pistachios are naturally flammable? It’s because of their high fat content. Normally pistachios are stored under fairly rigid conditions of humidity, temperature, and pressure, but should those conditions be altered, the pistachio’s fat-cleaving enzymes produce free fatty acids that are broken down when the seed takes in oxygen and sheds carbon dioxide. Result? Fire. I will credit my father for two things: he could conjure a spontaneous combustion whenever he needed a convenient sign from God.”
• it’s completely normal— a basic fact of human biology. I have no idea why people don’t know this. Does no one read Margaret Mead anymore? The point is, I knew John was a homosexual, and he knew I knew.
• while we may be born into families, it doesn’t necessarily mean we belong to them.”
• “One thing I’ve learned, Calvin: people will always yearn for a simple solution to their complicated problems. It’s a lot easier to have faith in something you can’t see, can’t touch, can’t explain, and can’t change, rather than to have faith in something you actually can.” She sighed. “One’s self, I mean.”
• They lay together like felled trees. From several blocks away, a church bell tolled.
• “A meeting?” Calvin said, as if she’d just announced she was attending an execution. “If you worked in my lab, you’d never have to go to meetings.”
• But in a more somber tone, he also explained that although he and Elizabeth spent all of their free time together—they lived together, they ate together, they drove back and forth to work together—it didn’t feel like enough. It wasn’t that he couldn’t function without her, he told Four Seat, but rather that he didn’t see the point of functioning without her. “I don’t know what to call it,” he’d confided following a full examination. “Am I addicted to her? Am I dependent in some sick sort of way? Could I have a brain tumor?”
  “Jesus, Six, it’s called happiness,” Four Seat explained.
• And then there was the illogical art of female friendship itself, the way it seemed to demand an ability to both keep and reveal secrets using precise timing... She listened to these confessions, faithfully promising she would never tell. And she didn’t. Which was all wrong because it turned out she was supposed to tell. Her job as confidante was to break that confidence by telling Boy X that Girl Y thought he was cute, thus initiating a chain reaction of interest between the two parties.
• “Now I’m disrupting the egg’s internal bonds in order to elongate the amino acid chain,” she told him as she whisked, “which will allow the freed atoms to bond with other similarly freed atoms. Then I’ll reconstitute the mix into a loose whole, laying it on a surface of iron-carbon alloy, where I’ll subject it to precision heat, continually agitating the mix until it reaches a stage of near coagulation.”
• To get to the point where rowing might resemble skimming, you’ve probably reached the Olympic level and the look on your face as you fly down the racecourse is not one of calm satisfaction but controlled agony. This is sometimes accompanied by a look of determination—usually one that indicates that right after this race is over, you plan to find a new sport.
• “I get it,” she said, skimming a physics textbook later that day at work. “Rowing is a simple matter of kinetic energy versus boat drag and center of mass.” She jotted down a few formulas. “And gravity,” she added, “and buoyancy, ratio, speed, balance, gearing, oar length, blade type—” The more she read, the more she wrote, the nuances of rowing slowly revealing themselves in complicated algorithms. “Oh for heaven’s sake,” she said, sitting back. “Rowing isn’t that hard.”
• He and Edith were a team the way couples were meant to be a team—not by sharing hobbies like rowing for fuck’s sake—but in the way their sexes deemed socially and physically appropriate.
• She’d once overheard Calvin telling someone at the boathouse that his Cambridge coach insisted that they even blink at the same time. To her surprise the guy nodded. “We had to file our toenails to the same length. Made a huge difference.”
• Before Elizabeth was even ten blocks away, he’d successfully stuffed Calvin’s rigid body within the suit’s confines, shoving the hands that had once held her down dark sleeves; cramming the legs that once wrapped around her through woolen cylinders. Then he buttoned the shirt, buckled the belt, adjusted the tie, and knotted the laces, all the while brushing the dust that was so much a part of death from one end of the suit to the other.
• But when he saw her sitting on her stool in the lab in a daze, he avoided her, too. Later, after it was clear that everyone was only going to “be there” for her as long as she was “not there,” she took Donatti’s advice and went away.
• She had work to do; it was all she had left. And yet here she sat with self-appointed guardians of moral conduct, smug judges who lacked judgment, one of whom seemed unclear on the process of conception and one who went along because she, like so many other women, assumed that downgrading someone of her own sex would somehow lift her in the estimation of her male superiors. Worse, these illogical conversations were all taking place in a building devoted to science.
• She’d also installed metal pans under all the burners to aid in alcohol denaturation, purchased a used centrifuge, cut up a window screen to create a set of 4 x 4 wire flats, dumped out the last of her favorite perfume to create an alcohol burner—including cutting one of her lipstick containers, which she then stuck into Calvin’s old thermos bottle cork, creating the stopper—made test tube holders out of wire hangars, and converted a spice rack into a suspension structure for various liquids.
• but the truth was, he still didn’t understand what “smart” meant. The word seemed to have as many definitions as there were species, and yet humans—with the exception of Elizabeth—seemed to only recognize “smart” if and when it played by their own rules. “Dolphins are smart,” they’d say. “But cows aren’t.” This seemed partly based on the fact that cows didn’t do tricks. In Six-Thirty’s view that made cows smarter, not dumber.
• “You’re very welcome,” he said clumsily. “I hope he—she—enjoys it.”
  “She.”
  She as in banshee, Six-Thirty explained.
• The only excitement had come at the beginning but it had worn off like cheap nail polish.


• 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.
• 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.
• She read the article twice just to make sure. The first time, slowly. But the second time she dashed through it until her blood pressure skipped through her veins like an unsecured fire hose.
• She’s forced to be productive despite the fact that she’s in a potentially fatal time zone—the Afternoon Depression Zone.”
  “It’s classic neurogenic deprivation,” Elizabeth said, nodding. “The brain doesn’t get the rest it needs, resulting in a drop in executive function and accompanied by an increase in corticosterone levels. Fascinating. But what does this have to do with TV?”
• “There were times,” she explained matter-of-factly, “that I would wake up in the middle of the night filled with desire—I’m sure that’s happened to you—but Calvin was in the middle of a REM cycle, so I didn’t disturb him. But then I mentioned it later and he was practically apoplectic. ‘No, Elizabeth,’ he said, ‘always wake me up. REM cycle or no REM cycle. Do not hesitate.’ It wasn’t until I did more reading on testosterone that I better understood the male sex drive—”
• It was that last word that cemented their odd, tell-all friendship, the kind that only arises when a wronged person meets someone who has been similarly wronged and discovers that while it may be the only thing they share, it is more than enough.
• God was big on burdens, and He made sure everyone got one. Besides, if you didn’t believe in God, you also didn’t get to believe in heaven or hell, and she very much wanted to believe in hell because she very much wanted to believe that Mr. Sloane was going there.
• “I’m sure it’s all in the preparation. Your mother could probably make anyone taste good.” Except for Mr. Sloane, she thought. Because he was rotten.
• Third, we never say fairy godfathers. The fairy person is always female.”
  “Because of organized crime?” Madeline asked.
• There were so few people who actually did things in the world that mattered—who made discoveries that changed things. Evans had slipped between the cracks of the unknown and explored the universe in a way that theology completely avoided.
• “Families aren’t meant to fit on trees. Maybe because people aren’t part of the plant kingdom—we’re part of the animal kingdom.”
• “That brings us to the third bond,” Elizabeth said, pointing at another set of molecules, “the hydrogen bond—the most fragile, delicate bond of all. I call this the ‘love at first sight’ bond because both parties are drawn to each other based solely on visual information: you like his smile, he likes your hair. But then you talk and discover he’s a closet Nazi and thinks women complain too much. Poof. Just like that the delicate bond is broken. That’s the hydrogen bond for you, ladies— a chemical reminder that if things seem too good to be true, they probably are.”
• “What did I tell you? Your bond with that boy is hydrogen only. When are you going to wake up and smell the ions?”
• The room filled with a thick silence, the weight of her ridiculous dream hanging like too-wet laundry on a windless day. Open-heart surgery?
• From the other end of the phone, Wakely paused. The man was lying. He listened to liars every day; he knew. But what were the odds that two men of the cloth would lie to each other at the same time?
• “Wilson sounds like a very noble man.”
  “He sounds misinformed,” Mad said, examining a scab. “Like he’s never read Oliver Twist.”
• “I’ve been trying to get my wife to row for years. As you know, I believe women have a higher threshold for pain.
• At Camp Pendleton, the dog was only meant to locate the bomb, not remove it—removal was the handler’s job. But occasionally some of the show-offs—the German shepherds—even did that part.
• “I’m referring to atoms and molecules, Roth,” she explained. “The real rules that govern the physical world. When women understand these basic concepts, they can begin to see the false limits that have been created for them.”
  “You mean by men.”
  “I mean by artificial cultural and religious policies that put men in the highly unnatural role of single-sex leadership. Even a basic understanding of chemistry reveals the danger of such a lopsided approach.”
• “Really?” she said, surprised. “I think it lets us off the hook. I think it teaches us that nothing is really our fault; that something or someone else is pulling the strings; that ultimately, we’re not to blame for the way things are; that to improve things, we should pray. But the truth is, we are very much responsible for the badness in the world. And we have the power to fix it.”
• your mother is absolutely correct when she was quoted in the article saying our society is based largely on myth, that our culture, religion, and politics have a way of distorting the truth. Illegitimacy is but one of those myths. Pay no attention to that word or anyone who uses it.”
• “Chemistry is change and change is the core of your belief system. Which is good because that’s what we need more of—people who refuse to accept the status quo, who aren’t afraid to take on the unacceptable.