Helen Keller Really Lived: A Novel

"E12.03.11: There will be two of us and we will be graded."

Helen Keller Really Lived 183 E12.03.11: There will be two of us and we will be graded. She will be an A. I will be a B+. I will be a B+ because on day three my eight blastomeres will be very slightly but visibly less spherical and uniform in size than hers. Also, there will be a small patch of blebbing along the inner curve of my zona pellucida. Inside, grades will not matter. I will occupy the best exit position, your cervix a firm cushion for my head, and I will receive the better part of all nutrients due to superior placental function. When I am born I will weigh almost a full kilo more than my sister. Dabbing the cheesy crud of vernix caseosa off my pink, well-oxygenated skin a young, newly-hired neonatal nurse will exclaim: “He’s perfect.” 184 Elisabeth Sheffield But of course I will not be perfect. I will have a non life-threatening heart defect. The defect will cause a murmur. The intensity of the murmur will be low, the pitch high. The quality will be musical. I myself, however, will not be musical. The heart defect will be congenital. The lack of musical talent will be congenital as well, but I will try to compensate by learning to play the piano. I will play the piano like a bear wearing mittens. I will also look like a bear, although I will not wear mittens. From a young age I will refuse to wear mittens, as well as a coat. I will seem not to feel the cold, which anyhow will be less acute than before due to global warming. I will seem not to feel the cold, such as it will be, and you will think I have no feelings. You will think I have no feelings because I will often hibernate in my bedroom with earbuds in my ears listening to the music I cannot make rather than to you complaining about how you gave up your career to have us. My sister, despite her embryonic excellence, will have defects as well: dyslexia and malocclusion. You will arrange for therapy for the dyslexia. She will overcome her learning disability completely, eventually achieving perfect scores on her CATs. You will write a longish piece about what a struggle it was for her, which will be published in the New York Times’ Sunday Magazine and lead to an invitation to contribute regularly to “Motherlode.” You will never become visible enough to compensate for the erasure of your academic identity, but between your freelance work and regular alimony/child support payments you will be able to pay upfront for my sister’s orthodontia. Eventually, she will also have beautiful teeth and a perfect bite. You will not hear the words she hisses at me behind your back: doofus, bonehead, bozo, basket case, shrek face, disaster zone. With her sinuous body and long silky hair, Helen Keller Really Lived 185 she will not look anything like a bear. When she goes off to a university on the opposite coast, part of the same system but actually superior to the one in which you once taught, the two of you will skype several times a day. I will enroll at the community college, and take a Great Codexes survey course so that you, your new younger even than the preceding boyfriend, and I will have something to talk about at dinner. You will have read only two of them. Your new YETPB, whom you will have met after a five minute facelift at the mall, as you were emerging from Sephora and he was standing handing out Heat Death Certificates for Green Peace, will have read none. While I stack the dishes in the dishwasher, you and YETPB will go out to the garden together, first to inspect the dripless watering system in the vegetable potager, and then to withdraw for sex inside the solar pagoda. The next day, I will drop out of the community college, dutifully filling out all the necessary forms so that I can collect a refund from the Bursar’s. I will now stay in my room nearly all the time, listening to Rachmaninoff and masturbating, emerging only to use the bathroom and to raid the kitchen when I know you will be out of the house. One day, just as I have begun to...