“Please, you’re hardly old either. Don’t worry, I can look it up.”

One of the big memory burdens for anyone with a serious career in the sciences was knowing the years of the published studies, the details of the experiments, and who did them. Alice frequently awed her students and postdocs by offhandedly rattling off the seven studies relevant to a certain phenomenon, along with their respective authors and years of publication. Most of the senior faculty in her department had this skill at their fingertips. In fact, there existed an unspoken competition among them to see who possessed the most complete, readily accessible mental catalog of their discipline’s library. Alice wore the imaginary blue ribbon more than anyone.

“Nye, MBB, 2000!” she exclaimed.

“It always amazes me that you can do that. Seriously, how do you hold all that information in your head?”

She smiled, accepting his admiration. “You’ll see, like I said, you’re just at the beginning.”

He browsed through the rest of the pages, his eyebrows relaxed. “Okay, I’m psyched, this looks good. Thanks so much. I’ll get it back to you tomorrow!”

And he bounded out of her office. That task completed, Alice referred to her to-do list, written on a yellow Post-it note stuck to the hanging cabinet just above her desktop screen.

Cognition class

Lunch seminar

Dan’s paper

Eric

Birthday dinner

She placed a satisfying check mark next to “Dan’s paper.”

Eric? What does that mean?

Eric Wellman was the head of the psychology department at Harvard. Did she intend to tell him something, show him something, ask him something? Did she have a meeting with him? She consulted her calendar. October eleventh, her birthday. Nothing about Eric. Eric. It was too cryptic. She opened her inbox. Nothing from Eric. She hoped it wasn’t time-sensitive. Irritated, but confident that she’d recover whatever it was about Eric eventually, she threw the reminder list, her fourth one that day, in the trash and pulled off a new Post-it.

Eric?

Call doctor

Memory disturbances like these were rearing their ugly little heads with a frequency that ruffled her. She’d been putting off calling her primary-care physician because she assumed that these kinds of forgetting episodes would simply resolve with time. She hoped she might learn something reassuring about the natural transience of this phase casually from someone she knew, possibly avoiding a visit to the doctor entirely. This was unlikely ever to happen, however, as all of her friends and Harvard colleagues of menopausal age were men. She admitted it was probably time that she sought some real medical advice.

ALICE AND JOHN WALKED TOGETHER from campus to Epulae in Inman Square. Inside, Alice spotted their older daughter, Anna, already sitting at the copper bar with her husband, Charlie. They both wore impressive blue suits, his accessorized with a solid gold tie and hers with a single strand of pearls. They’d been working for a couple of years at the third biggest corporate law firm in Massachusetts, Anna practicing in the area of intellectual property and Charlie working in litigation.

From the martini glass in her hand and the unchanged B-cup size of her chest, Alice knew that Anna wasn’t pregnant. She’d been trying without success or secrecy to conceive for six months now. Like everything with Anna, the harder it was to obtain, the more she wanted it. Alice had advised her to wait, not to be in such a rush to check off this next major milestone in her life’s to-do list. Anna was only twenty-seven, she’d just married Charlie last year, and she worked eighty to ninety hours a week. But Anna countered with the point that every professional woman considering children realized eventually: There’s never going to be a good time to do this.

Alice worried about how having a family would affect Anna’s career. It had been an arduous journey to tenured full professorship for Alice, not because the responsibilities became too daunting or because she didn’t produce an outstanding body of work in linguistics along the way, but essentially because she was a woman who had children. The vomiting, anemia, and preeclampsia she’d experienced during the two and a half cumulative years of pregnancy had certainly distracted her and slowed her down. And the demands of the three little human beings born out of those pregnancies were more constant and time-consuming than those of any hard-ass department head or type A student she’d ever come across.

Time and again she’d watched with dread as the most promising careers of her reproductively active female colleagues slowed to a crawl or simply jumped the track entirely. Watching John, her male counterpart and intellectual equal, accelerate past her had been tough. She often wondered whether his career would have survived three episiotomies, breast-feeding, potty training, mind-numbingly endless days of singing “The wheels on the bus go round and round,” and even more nights of getting only two to three hours of uninterrupted sleep. She seriously doubted it.

As they all exchanged hugs, kisses, pleasantries, and birthday greetings, a woman with severely bleached hair and dressed entirely in black approached them at the bar.

“Is everyone in your party here now?” she asked, smiling pleasantly, but a little too long to be sincere.

“No. We’re still waiting for one,” said Anna.

“I’m here!” said Tom, entering behind them. “Happy birthday, Mom.”

Alice hugged and kissed him and then realized that he’d come in alone.

“Do we need to wait for…?”

“Jill? No, Mom, we broke up last month.”

“You go through so many girlfriends, we’re having a hard time keeping track of their names,” said Anna. “Is there a new one we should be saving a seat for?”

“Not yet,” said Tom to Anna, and “We’re all here,” to the woman in black.

The period of time that Tom was between girlfriends came with a regular frequency of about six to nine months but never lasted long. He was smart, intense, the spitting image of his father, in his third year at Harvard Medical School, and planning on a career as a cardiothoracic surgeon. He looked like he could use a good meal. He admitted, with irony, that every medical student and surgeon he knew ate like shit and on the fly—donuts, bags of chips, vending machine and hospital cafeteria food. None of them had the time to exercise, unless they counted taking the stairs instead of the elevator. He joked that at least they’d be qualified to treat each other for heart disease in a few years.

Once they were all settled in a semicircular booth with drinks and appetizers, the topic of conversation turned to the missing family member.

“When was the last time Lydia came to one of the birthday dinners?” asked Anna.

“She was here for my twenty-first,” said Tom.

“That was almost five years ago! Was that the last one?” Anna asked.

“No, it couldn’t be,” said John, without offering anything more specific.

“I’m pretty sure it was,” Tom insisted.

“It wasn’t. She was here for your father’s fiftieth on the Cape, three years ago,” said Alice.

“How’s she doing, Mom?” asked Anna.

Anna took transparent pleasure in the fact that Lydia didn’t go to college; Lydia’s abbreviated education somehow secured Anna’s position as the smartest, most successful Howland daughter. The oldest, Anna had been the first to demonstrate her intelligence to her delighted parents, the first to hold the status of being their brilliant daughter. Although Tom was also very bright, Anna had never paid much attention to him, maybe because he was a boy. Then, Lydia came along. Both girls were smart, but Anna suffered to get straight A’s, whereas Lydia’s unblemished report cards came with little noticeable effort. Anna paid attention to that. They were both competitive and fiercely independent, but Anna wasn’t a risk taker. She tended to pursue goals that were safe and conventional, and that were sure to be accompanied by tangible accolades.