We Begin Our Ascent. Joe Reed Mungo

      Liz did not allow herself to settle too readily into this new life. She did not take her mother’s prompts to decorate or get to know the mostly older neighbors. She was keen to hold off the routines and compromises of our new suburban existence, I sensed, and I was glad to see this but also worried by the sense that her wariness strayed into a wider feeling of dissatisfaction. The more she progressed with her job, the more it seemed a source of distress. Her colleagues marveled at her fluency, but in her actual accomplishment of the position she had built so long toward, she was truly faced for the first time with the scant effect of the work she had chosen, the world’s apparent indifference to all her expertise.

      It was not logical to think that the slow, steady science she was doing should have won her wide recognition, and yet we are not always logical in our hopes. I thought of all my slow progress in my career and the sense I used to have that others did not recognize the difficulty of all I did, that people around me did not take time to understand the milestones I was passing. I made a point to highlight her successes, to talk of what went well with her work. She was grateful but dissatisfied with the praise. I was partial, after all. It was not my role to offer the affirmation she sought.

      For a while she exercised rigorously. She would borrow my turbo trainer after work, attach her own bike to it, and sit in the bike room, spinning, rubbing sweat from her forehead with a hand towel. She would go to the gym on her way into the lab. She jogged on the weekends when I went out to ride.

      Liz had been a swimmer when she was at school. I could imagine it: the bleached-out hair, the loose walk, the smell of chlorine on her skin.

      Her exertions seemed a way to channel frustration, to displace energy, and yet I also felt that there was some part of her that wanted to show that she could have, had she wanted, been doing what I did. I believed it. I did not deny that my work was more straightforward, that she would, had she really wanted to, have easily succeeded in my realm. My work was not the work of a lifetime though. There was that. It advanced more predictably, but then would be done so much faster.