Chemistry
By Sarah Gilligan
“Chemistry,” as I say every autumn, “is the study of matter and change.”
The afternoon sun glints off the row of flasks, and I take in the smell of ammonia from the freshly cleaned floor. Arms crossed, face passive, I wait for the students to stop their chatter. Finally, I speak again.
“This year, people, we’ll learn about the chemical and physical laws that must be obeyed by all matter. These laws govern everything you see, touch—everything you are. We’ll start with atoms, and we’ll go through molecules, elements, bonds, reactions. We’ll use these”—I wave my hand, gesturing like a game show host to the beakers, burners, scales and other equipment laid out on the table before me—“to make our own reactions. And we’ll blow things up.”
This line, as in every other year, causes the students to snap to attention, some laughing, some cheering, some even clapping.
They want to see things happen, these young people. They want oxidation and combustion; they crave smoke, noise and flames. They want old bonds broken and new bonds formed. And that I will give them.
When I made it clear that I would indeed be returning to teach in the fall, the department head called me with her concerns. That was followed by a call from the assistant principal, a call from the principal, then, finally, an in-person visit from the district social worker.
I assured them all that I was as fine as any other teacher, and if I wasn’t, the students would never know.
Have these people never met me?
Finally, my lawyer, with whom I have become quite familiar over the last year or so, made the necessary calls, sent the necessary letters, and here I am.
As a scientist, I deal in facts, so here are the pertinent ones: at the start of the new year, my husband, Hal, left me for another woman. Then he returned. In June, he left for good, hanging himself in the addition behind our garage, where he had set up a little boxing gym.
There. Now you know.
When Hal walked out at the start of the new year, he said he was unhappy and needed change. It is more accurate to say he had become happy and wanted change—wanted to be with this younger woman, this Maya. Well, they were together barely two months when I returned from work one afternoon to find a newly evicted Hal asking to come home.
Maybe I should have said no, told him he had to live with his choices, just as I had to live with them. At the time, I felt that would have been spiteful, but now I think it would have been the better path.
Because, make no mistake, I was spiteful. Well, what did he expect?
Still, I let him come home, and we were cordial, no more, no less. What was I supposed to do? Welcoming him back with open arms was not a possibility. We ate dinner together and discussed the day’s events. I sat in the same room with him in the evenings, while he watched the sport of the season and I graded papers. At nine o’clock, Hal went to the kitchen and returned with two dishes of ice cream, cherry vanilla and mocha chip. But I did not share a bed with him; that was another impossibility.
I knew it would take time, trying to return to something approaching our old normal. We went through the motions, some of them anyway, dancing a wary dance around one another. But we didn’t talk about what had happened: not why he left, not why he came back. And we didn’t talk about what he wanted us to be from now on, or what I wanted. As if I knew.
So, we were cordial. Two electrons orbiting in the void, never touching, keeping our distance and stable for now. As dumb as electrons, not knowing why we did what we did, not knowing what the nucleus was anymore.
Here in the classroom, the days pass by quickly, between the paperwork, the lecturing, the experiments, the cleaning up. Sometimes the students look at me funny, or so I imagine. Yet, I don’t care. I’ve decided that my purpose now is to demonstrate the immutable truth that elements cannot be broken down into other elements. No matter the chemical reaction, the smoke, the sound: the essence remains unchanged.
As I explain this concept one September afternoon to my period five class, mostly juniors with a salting of seniors, I notice Dalton, one of the senior boys, paying more attention to his lab partner than to my words. Elise, a junior, blushes as he whispers to her.
Do they, sitting to my left in the front row, think I won’t see? I proceed, but monitor them from the corner of my eye.
“Brass is an example of a mixture of elements. It’s not a constant composition and it can be easily separated into its disparate elements. Compounds, on the other hand, are––”
“Dalton!” Elise’s voice isn’t loud but it’s enough. I need to stop this, to set the tone for the class. I turn toward the couple as Elise tries to push away the boy’s arms, but those limbs stay tightly wrapped around her shoulders. He meets my eye and grins.
“Hands to yourself, Dalton,” I say calmly but firmly. With a laugh and a shrug, he lets go of the girl. As I turn back to the class, I catch Elise, too, giving me a shrug, hers with a small smile and half-tilt of her head. She, like so many of these girls, wears entirely too much eyeshadow.
I was a researcher. The organometallics lab was my home, where I considered problems, designed experiments, ran and reran procedures, drew conclusions, proved or disproved hypotheses. Then: new hypotheses, new experiments, new conclusions. New knowledge. It was a quiet life but not a bad one.
I was thirty-six when a coworker at the university lab set me up with Hal. I was not looking for a relationship; it was awkward at first and the attraction was lacking. But inertia works both ways, and once we had become friendly and settled into dating, events took their course and we became engaged and then married. Not very romantic, really. I’ve wondered about that, now that it’s over.
I will say that I assumed that what we had was love, even if I accepted that we were brass, not copper. A mixture, never a new element. Nonetheless, I was aware that the quality of the relationship changed over the years, settling into routine and cooling off over time. Well, fire itself is merely a chemical reaction. The heat and light of combustion inevitably dim once the fuel is depleted.
Eventually, my interest in research cooled as well, and a decade ago I began teaching at the high school. I find the students fascinating, if sometimes maddening, and I feel as if I run experiments on them, not the chemicals. You might say I manipulate the entropy in the classroom.
What if? What if I sit those two opposites together? What if I encourage this girl and discourage that one? What if I spring a quiz on a clearly unprepared class? What if I veer from the lesson plan and tell them how a packet of phosphorus in a young man’s front pocket, dampened by the sweat of his groin, can ignite at room temperature? I’ve learned that third-degree burns on a penis will grab adolescents’ attention every time.
Meanwhile, I keep my eye on Elise and Dalton. I do not particularly like the pattern I observe; it’s a phenomenon I’ve witnessed repeatedly over the years in these young people: Elise allows Dalton to dictate the tone of their classroom interactions. If he is surly, she is solicitous. If he is garrulous, she laughs, ducks her head and pats him on the arm.
Do not lose yourself, Elise. Not when you haven’t yet found yourself. Not when you don’t yet know what you are made of and what you can become.
It is at home alone at night that the time slows and crawls, dragging itself through the evening until I finally feel tired enough to attempt to sleep. Sleep itself remains somewhat elusive, but I don’t know if that will ever improve.
I have discovered that, once I’ve cleaned up the day’s few dishes, finished the evening’s grading and eaten my mocha chip, playing game after game of Boggle tires me. It has become the soundtrack of my evenings: that jarring rattle, the gentler clicking as I nestle the letters into the plastic grid, the soft scratch of the pencil once I’ve turned the little timer over.
I suppose I’m addicted to the simple game: finding everything you can in what is there in front of you, constrained only by time. I can play for hours in my bathrobe, feeling my eyelids grow a little heavier as I tot up my score. Never actually winning, of course.
On those nights when I can’t sleep, I lie in our bed—my bed now—and try to understand how I got here, how it all came undone. I think about these things not to help me sleep—how could they?—but to try to work them out logically, to see things as they are, as any scientist would.
I wonder about what Hal needed that I did not give him. About the countless actions and reactions that turned us radioactive, shedding energy and particles as we decayed. And I wonder why I took Hal back. You would imagine that after witnessing my parents’ foolishness, I of all people would have said no to that.
I’m not one to dwell, but that’s what I do now at night. I rub my thumb over my ringless ring finger and remember what it was like to be fourteen and watching my parents veer between silences and snarling skirmishes. Then: Dad moving out with just a few bags of clothing, and Mom, slumping on the couch every evening, staring blankly at the TV, weakly asking me about my homework.
And there were my friends at school, treating me as if I had cooties, keeping their distance so they wouldn’t catch my infection and break up their own families.
So I took refuge in my high school’s chemistry lab: in the coolness of facts, the structure of formulas and the reliability of measurements.
I see now, from the perspective of decades spent applying the known to the unknown, that the appeal of science lay in its opposition to chaos. But at that age, I only knew that the orderliness and predictability of the lab soothed me like nothing else in my world. There, I was in control.
After a year, my riven family having settled into a more or less stable routine, my parents began talking again: about money, sometimes about me. I overheard phone calls from my room at night: Mom murmuring, then laughing as she hadn’t for years. I allowed myself to hope. And at last, there was Dad back in his old spot at the kitchen table one morning, drinking coffee out of his favorite mug.
The second wedding was a quiet affair, with just me and my parents’ siblings in attendance, minus Aunt Linda, who predicted the whole thing would collapse. Soon enough, the snarling started up again, and within a year, Aunt Linda was proven correct.
I learned then to depend on no one, because no one could be depended upon. I resolved never to be made a fool: not by friends, not by family, certainly not by any man.
And yet, here I lie, humiliated twice over by Hal. So maybe the question is not only why I took Hal back, but why I let him in at all.
Was I attempting to rerun my parents’ experiment, trying to arrive at a different result? We all like to think that we’re the independent variables in our own lives, acting as we choose and observing the effects on those around us. But now, exhausted as I am in my sleeplessness, I suspect that I had it all wrong: I see now that I was the dependent variable and Hal was the one in control, running his experiments on me, whether he knew it or not.
Perhaps it is this simple: I let my guard down. The flesh is weak, as Aunt Linda said to my mother all those years ago.
I left it until early October to deal with Hal’s boxing gear: the gantry he had constructed out of two-by-fours, the heavy bag, the speed bag, the collection of wraps and gloves. I hired a local handyman to disassemble the gym, with instructions to pile it all up in the back of the yard.
On a warm evening, I dragged one of the Adirondack chairs over to the side of the heap. I gathered a glass of wine and a box of matches from the kitchen and the gasoline can from the garage and set them by the chair. Finally, I unspooled the hose and pulled it out to the chair.
With the fire going steadily, the flames eating at the pile and the smoke dark against the last of the day’s light, I sat back and admired my work. “Cheers, Hal,” I said drily as I raised my glass to the sky and watched the bits of matter swirl and dart on the air currents.
Once the flames died down, I hosed the blackened pile until the sand and ashes were soaked. In the dark, I carried the gas can, the matches and the wine glass back to the house, making a mental note to reel in the hose in the morning and call the handyman to haul away the remains.
That night, I slept perfectly.
The Dalton issue continues. A teenaged cliché in jeans and flannel, he takes his sweet time finding his seat once the bell has rung. I can tolerate a little dawdling. I don’t mind waiting for my students to simmer down; I believe it helps them focus. But when Dalton finally tears himself from the scrum of boys and sits down, his attention pivots to Elise. He slings an arm around her neck or drapes it over her leg; he leans his shaggy head to hers and mutters. She pushes away, always with a smile and a blush, but it does no good. He persists.
Last week, I was introducing a module on heating a closed system, explaining that the built-up pressure inevitably finds an explosive release. As I was about to place a peeled hard-boiled egg in a microwave, I noticed the Dalton–Elise pas de deux beginning anew. I slapped my hand on the table in front of me and called out, “Dalton!”
Heads snapped to attention, even his. But then, that grin slid across his face and a spatter of soft laughter traversed the room. Action and reaction.
Again, I slapped the table. “Phosphorus, Dalton,” I said. “Phosphorus.”
The laughter grew more nervous and was undergirded by soft groans. Dalton squinted coolly at me, dropped his arm from Elise’s shoulder and pushed his chair back from the table. Elise, too, sat back in her chair, arms crossed, eyes hooded under smoky blue lids.
Now, Monday morning, the principal awaits at my classroom door to inform me that there have been complaints about me. Specifically, that I had threatened a student.
“Complaints?” I ask. “Or one complaint by two students?” The latter, of course. Elise remains under the thumb of her thuggish Romeo.
We discuss the matter briefly as I set up for first period, meaning that I listen while the principal warns me. He says I have been hectoring the student in question since the school year began. As the first students filter in for home room, I try to explain the dynamic, but the principal cuts me off.
“No more threats. If you need to take a break, if you want to talk to someone, we can arrange it. But no threats, however clever you think you are. That girl doesn’t need your protection.”
I had found Hal a week after school got out in June. I’d finished cleaning out my classroom and could sleep a little later. That morning, Hal wasn’t in the kitchen and hadn’t bothered to bring the newspaper in, so I assumed he’d skipped breakfast and gone to work early. I assumed I’d slept so well that I hadn’t heard the garage door open and close.
I assumed wrong.
After my breakfast, I brought some trash out to the garage and saw his car still there, side by side with mine. I returned to the kitchen and called down to the basement. “Hal?” Nothing. I opened the back door and yelled outside, to no response. Back in the garage, I opened the door to the addition. And there he was, suspended from the crossbar of the gantry, several feet from his heavy bag at the far end. A stool lay on its side beneath his feet.
I covered my mouth and sagged against the doorframe.
It was Hal, but not Hal: eyes open and bulging, tongue protruding. Face and hands blue-purple. One slipper had fallen to the floor, leaving his slack foot showing the blackish-purple of livor mortis. I understood that he had been here for hours, maybe all night. There was no point in cutting him down.
Was it that hard to be with me?
My shock gave way to a stony fury. I reached out a hand and pushed on his torso, and watched him sway and slowly twirl. That flesh, now cold, that I had held and loved. No longer flesh now, but meat.
I grabbed his gloves from the cubby next to me, slid my small hands into them and pulled the Velcro tight. I knew the basics from watching him practice, and I stood, hands by my chin, left foot forward.
Jab. Jab, cross. Jab, cross. Hook, hook, hook, cross. Hal recoiled, swung and spun, a heavy bag of meat.
The meat that had betrayed me, and betrayed me again.
Soon enough, my spell broke. I slowed my breath, returned the gloves to the cubby and called the police. In minutes, the driveway was filled with vehicles, lights flashing, and a few neighbors came out to witness Hal’s departure.
A police officer stayed behind to fill out paperwork while I called Hal’s sister. Together, the officer and I checked the guest room and found Hal’s note on the bed.
“I can’t do this,” he wrote. “Sorry, Buttons.”
That old nickname. It had been years.
Weeks have gone by and the classroom détente remains in force. Dalton holds his fire and I pretend nothing has happened. The principal has stopped in just once to discuss something—an obvious ploy to evaluate my functioning and temperament. I had begun to think the molecule was stable.
Until today. This time it’s Elise who disrupts things. She, I have noticed recently, is now the one to drape herself over Dalton’s frame: leaning in to whisper in his ear, rubbing his arm, even tickling him. As I begin to demonstrate an acid-base experiment, I see her poke his side. Dalton flinches and his elbow smacks into their acid-filled Erlenmeyer flask, knocking it to the floor. I step to their table and squat down to sprinkle neutralizer on the spill.
“That’s it, Elise!” I scold. “I’m splitting you two up. Dalton, switch with Roberto.” Still crouching, I gesture with my gloved hand toward a boy in the back corner. Dalton frowns, but he reaches for his backpack.
“Dalton, don’t,” says Elise. “She can’t make you.” And that little thing jumps up from her seat, looks down at me and glares. “You can’t.”
I stand and look down at my petite foe, all prettied up in her sparkling green eyeshadow. “I most certainly can.” I take a step back toward my work table and call out, “Roberto, you’re sitting here now.”
“See, Dalton. This is why he did it,” she says. Righteousness filling her voice, she looks directly at me. “This is why he hung himself.”
It’s a gut punch. The air leaves my thorax and I freeze. All motion in the room seems to stop, too, except for Roberto. Oddly, my gaze falls on him, shuffling across the room, muttering apologies as he threads his way to the front. Finally, even Roberto halts and looks around, trying to gauge the situation, trying to figure out what he had missed.
Dalton pulls at the young woman’s arm. “Elise!”
She brushes him off. “Who could live with her? She’s just an old––”
Transfixed no more, I sweep my arm across my demonstration experiment, sending glass and acid flying. Now Elise is the one who freezes.
I take one quick step and, eyes locked onto hers, reach for the Erlenmeyer on the table next to the couple. With a snap of my wrist, I fling the contents at Elise, hitting her square on her aproned chest. She screams and spins toward Dalton, who recoils for a second before grabbing her arm to pull her toward the door.
The room erupts, as the students shout and scream and push out of the room. I, though, am still. Understanding at last how I had miscalculated the entropy in the system, I lean back against my work table and observe the chaos. As the final student flees the room, I notice blood running down my wrist and dripping off the glove, and I find that odd, because I don’t feel a thing.
Sarah Gilligan’s stories have appeared in the Two Sisters Writing & Publishing Anthology and the 2020 Northern Connecticut Writers Workshop Anthology. A lifelong resident of Connecticut, she’s working on a collection of linked short stories set in Hartford in the 1980s called The Genius of Connecticut.