Futures

Abby knew that her older sisters didn’t care if she lived or died.

In her office at the Illinois Soybean Council, she analyzed numbers. Click, click, click went the computer all day: she looked at spreadsheets, databases, charts, the Wall Street Journal, soybean futures, agricultural magazines and textbooks. She was a walking encyclopedia about soybeans. She knew all about biodiesal fuel made from soybeans. She was officially a financial analyst, but her job entailed much more: the education of lobbyists, politicians, food companies, farmers, and biodiesal companies. She was a fan of Boca burgers and had served them to Megan and Abby the last time they got together.

You really eat this? Megan had been snotty. Megan was always snide because she thought she knew more about diet than Abby. Megan would not eat soybeans if her life depended on it. She was a carnivore. It’s perfectly healthy to eat meat. You’re a soybean demirep.

A demirep?

It’s a Scrabble word.

Abby had memories of losing to both her sisters at Scrabble. They’d sat at the table when their mother demanded they have a “family night.” They couldn’t watch TV on Family Night. She said that was “part of the problem.” Part of the problem? Yes, part of the problem with late 20th century society was that no one conversed anymore. Their mother wanted them to converse and do an activity together, not watch TV or listen to records.

The Beatles, yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever happened to violin lessons and classical music?

We failed at the violin. We were all bad violin players, Megan said.

Don’t mouth off at me, young lady. I shouldn’t have allowed you to quit.

We would have had a sit-in then.

Their mother had taken them to plenty of protests and sit-ins. She had also gone to political meetings and written pamphlets for some organization they had called "SDS" to tease her, though it had been much less radical than SDS and almost unknown. She hadn’t had a babysitter, so the three of them had to go along. It had been so boring. Abby had been given coloring books and sometimes played dolls under a table. Her older sisters were supposed to do their homework. Usually they doodled, gossiped, or played a Password game they made with index cards they found in the office. They wouldn't play with Abby. Sometimes she used to cry and seek revenge later: tearing up a valuable document like a letter from their penpals in Europe.

Family night meant pizza and conversation on a set subject. They’d have to talk about newspaper articles or school. They played Scrabble most Friday nights. Other times they did stupid art projects: making Christmas ornaments, painting with watercolors (Abby’s were just a blur), and sticking plastic polka dot decals on ceramic pots.

Neither of her sisters could do math. Abby took over Megan’s geometry at the age of eight when she discovered it made sense to her while Megan simply couldn’t do it. Abby had a genius for math. Yes, they tested her: a genius, her teachers said. But she was only good at one thing: math. From earliest childhood she had solved the math puzzles her cousins and uncles set for her. Her teachers wanted her to skip two grades on the basis of her IQ, but her mother wouldn’t allow it for social reasons. Abby was immature, she said. Abby liked her class and was relieved she got to stay. She gossiped with her friends at school and then came home, breezed through her own homework, and did Megan’s math homework for money.

There was a little glitch when Megan started flunking geometry tests. Then Abby had to teach math to the panicked Megan.

I can't flunk. I just can't. You have got to tutor me.

That had been hard. Abby just saw the math. She didn’t have the language to explain it. Her mind went BAM! and knew how the theorems worked. She was skipping steps. Suddenly she had to explain.

What? What you said makes no sense.

Can’t you see? Abby shrieked. Just look at the angles. That one’s A.

How do you know how many degrees or whatever it is?

Well...you just do.

When their mother found out what was going on, she grounded Megan for “exploiting” Abby .

What’s “exploiting?” Abby asked. She tried to explain to her mother that it had been fun, not exploitation. I like geometry.

But she wasn’t an all-around genius. She was a math whiz.

Although she went home as seldom as possible, she was in touch with her mother and heard all about Megan’s book. She was cynical. Essentially she had always hated Megan and didn’t want to believe that she could write a book. Megan was a dope fiend and an idler, as far as she was concerned. Abby remembered their last family reunion at a park nine or ten years ago: there she had been with her husband and her four children, all of them in Polo shirts and khaki shorts, a cute preppy family look she worked hard to achieve, and there was Megan in some kind of hippie garb, a flowing shirt over jeans and a gypsy scarf around her head, her husband with his beard and T-shirt and old bell-bottoms, and their teenage son Jason, pierced nose, dirty shaggy hair, and shabby clothes that looked as though they came from a Salvation Army dumpster. Megan and her family had infuriated everybody by passing a joint around. Their mother Carrie was in tears.

Rose said, Is that in good taste, Megan?

Abby said, Put that out. I don’t want my children to take drugs.

Megan had been amused. She had put the joint out, though. I didn’t mean to upset anybody. It’s just that I trust you.

People at another picnic table were looking. Megan was such an exhibitionist. Or had been. Now everyone said she was agoraphobic.

Abby hesitated before she went to the blog. She knew no one in the family could write. Her sisters were the kind of people who got A’s on their English papers, but they had no style. If there was one thing she didn’t want to read, it was Megan’s “blog-book.”

Born in 1958, Megan couldn’t care less about the 1960s. But when she finally looked at the blog, it wasn’t so bad. In a way it was a family record. No one outside the family would read it, and that was just as well.

Megan went back to her futures.