Atmosphere

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

So it came as a huge shock to the men in the department, many of whom fancied themselves secretly destined for victory, to see that the woman they’d overlooked was lapping them in a race they did not know had started.

I told my mom that I wasn’t going to help him, and my mom said that if I was going to be proud of myself for being generous, that I had to do it even when it meant I might lose something. She said, ‘You have to have something on the line, for it to be called character.’ ”

Because the world had decided that to be soft was to be weak, even though in Joan’s experience being soft and flexible was always more durable than being hard and brittle. Admitting you were afraid always took more guts than pretending you weren’t. Being willing to make a mistake got you further than never trying. The world had decided that to be fallible was weak. But we are all fallible. The strong ones are the ones who accept it.

“It’s 1981, and I’m done pretending sexist jokes are funny just so men will give me a chance at something I’m probably better at than they are.”

“Because I do not believe there is any original sin in any of us and I cannot sit there and listen to someone say there is. I don’t want to believe in any being who would judge and punish like that. And I’ll pay the price if I’m wrong and God does exist. Because I will not submit to a God like that willingly.”

“The Jewish philosopher Spinoza said that God did not necessarily make the universe, but that God is the universe. The unfolding of the universe is God in action. Which would mean science and math are a part of God.” “And we are a part of God because we are a part of the universe,” Vanessa said. “Or better yet, we are the universe. I would go so far as to say that as human beings, we are less of a who and more of a when. We are a moment in time—when all of our cells have come together in this body. But our atoms were many things before, and they will be many things after. The air I’m breathing is the same air your ancestors breathed. Even what is in my body right now—the cells, the air, the bacteria—it’s not only mine. It is a point of connection with every other living thing, made up of the same kinds of particles, ruled by the same physical laws. “When you die, someone will bury you or turn your body into ashes. Eventually, you will return to the Earth. You already are a part of the Earth. What better reason do we have to take care of this Earth and everything on it than the knowledge that we are of one another?” Joan thought about this so often that it startled her now to realize she’d never put it into words before. What a thrill it was, to say it all. “The trees need our breath, and our breath needs the trees,” she continued. “As scientists we call that symbiosis, and it is a consequence of evolution. But the natural consequences of our connections to each other—that’...

Joan felt, so acutely, that the incurable problem with life was that nothing was ever in balance. That she could not have toddler Frances and fifth-grade Frances at the same time. She could not meet adult Frances and have a moment to hold baby Frances all at once. You could not have a little of everything you wanted. Joan tried to remind herself that when Frances had been younger, she had held Frances’s little hand every single chance she got. When Frances had been a baby, she had smelled her hair sometimes for whole minutes at a time. She had been present for all of it. Didn’t that mean that she would not grieve its loss, since she had voraciously and self-indulgently taken all of it that was offered? No. It did not.