Gut Symmetries Read Free Page B

count they naturally add and multiply. Subtraction and division are harder to teach them, perhaps because reducing the world is an adult skill. I had long believed, and still did, that my father had at least two hundred handkerchiefs and that he had handkerchiefs as kings have treasure. Silk, spotted, plain, embroidered, cotton, paisley, patterned, striped, linen, raw, spun, dyed, lace like a periwig for his evening clothes. When he put one in his top pocket he sometimes gave it rabbit ears.
    'Alice?'
    And I followed him through corridors of make-believe and love.
    Right at the back of the drawer was his gold watch; a full hunter that chimed every fifteen minutes. Essential for a man whose time was measured in quarter hours.
    Is this what I would not be? Solid, reliable, valuable, conspicuous, extravagant, rare?
    I scattered the handkerchiefs like soft jewels. Is this what I would not be? Fancy, impudent, useful, beautiful, multiple, various, witty, gay?
    In what was left of the afternoon light I opened the lower drawers.
    Underwear, talcum powder, balled up socks.
     
    'Do you have to work so hard?' said my father, when I was anorexic and hollow eyed.
    I got a scholarship to Cambridge to read physics and I started eating again. Of sleep I remained suspicious.
    When I sleep I dream and when I dream I fall back into my fears. The gold watch is there, ticking time away, and I have often tried to climb inside it and jam the mechanism with my body. If I succeed, I go to sleep within my sleep, only to wake up violently because the watch is no longer ticking but I am.
    I told this dream to my father who advised me to slow down. It was not necessary to win every prize for physics in the University. There was a small mirror in my room. When I looked into it I did not see Alice, I saw underwear, talcum powder, balled up socks.
    I know that my father feared for me a lonely old age and a lonely young one too. He did not say so, but the words behind the words told me that he would rather have launched me into a good marriage than watch me row against the tide at my own work. It remains that a woman with an incomplete emotional life has herself to blame, while a man with no time for his heart just needs a wife.
    When I \vent up to Cambridge, my mother said to me, 'Alice, when you are at dinner with a man never look at your watch.'
    Like many women of her generation she expected to let time run its course through her without attempting to alter it. Her timepiece was my father, and it was by his movement that she regulated her life. She liked his steady ticking, although she once admitted to me that he used to make her heart beat faster, in days when the sun on the sun-dial was a game.
    They had come in from the garden, got married, settled down, and my father seemed not to mind the demands of his pocket watch. My mother never learned to be punctual and always has been vague about any appointment not directly connected to my father. She had a habit of taking my sisters and I to the dentist on the wrong day of the wrong week, and once, a year late. She had turned up a visit card in a coat pocket and marched us off to refill our filled molars. The dentist took it well. He said to my father, 'Women are like that.'
    When my mother began any sentence with 'When you get older' I thought I would perish in despair. I knew that she never remembered to wind the clock and that I would stay the same age forever. Only with my father could there be a chance to grow up.
    All children stumble over what Einstein discovered; that Time is relative. In mother-time the days had a chthonic quality, we ate, slept, drew, played, world without end, waiting without knowing we were waiting for my father to come home and snap his fingers and whisk us into the golden hour. We became aware, though I can't say how, that he was giving us four whole quarters of an hour. Perhaps that is when I began to study the vexed relationship of one minute to the next.
    After we had