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works weekend days at the lab, bent over proteins, fussing over radioactive isotopes, hearing outside his window the screech of plane wheels grabbing tarmac, the roaring of engines, the voices of people in a hurry, trundling suitcases with wheels over long distances of asphalt from car trunk to check-in. You lower your head while sitting in the bleachers, looking down at your hands, your signature veins popping out as if you just had too much blood running through you and the walls of your veins were on the verge of bursting. You remember what Thomas told you about a phenomenon, that of all the matter in the universe, we only see 4 percent of it. “Does that include air?” you asked. “Yes, it includes air,” he said. “We know what air is. We can see it. But there is so much we can’t see, and we don’t even know what it is. It’s invisible to us.” You knew you were supposed to be impressed by only being able to see 4 percent of what was around you and in front of you, but you couldn’t help thinking that for you it was less than 4 percent, because you couldn’t see air the way Thomas could see air. He could probably visualize water vapor and oxygen and CO 2 , but you could not.
    These are your fingers, sore at the ends from trying to pull up the competitive swim-team suit over Sofia’s body when you first arrived at the facility and you stood in the stall in the bathroom. This is you, dialing Thomas, who you think by now has left his work at the lab and gone home. This is you telling him you have arrived at the meet, telling him you guess you are lucky, you don’t have to time, and Thomas tells you he has been home already an hour and split wood, and that he has seen a fox come up close to the chickens. Already you have lost the duck and the rooster and a few hens to a fox.
    This is the fox, down in the woods that are not so thick, but the maples grow thin, and the pines only reach up to the waist, and the sun has a clear path to hit strong and full on the fox’s cinnamon-colored back. This is you telling Thomas that the girls here on the other swim teams look like Amazons, and that you are afraid for your girls, who are just of average weight and height, and the youngest, maybe not even average yet, maybe below average. This is the fox moving his ears from side to side, listening to Thomas’s deep voice as Thomas stands out on the porch talking to you, smelling on Thomas the chainsaw oil that dripped on the knees of his pants. This is one of the Amazon girls diving into the water, going down, so far down, on her dive, as if she is too heavy to control it, and then she comes up, breaches, is what you think, and you’re glad one of your children is not next to you, because if she were, you might say “breaches” out loud, and then your child would say, “Oh, Mom, how could you say that? You’re not supposed to say things like that.” Your children have been schooled in schools where guidance counselors give weekly lessons on bullying. Bullying is not what bullying was when I was a kid, you think. When you were a kid bullies were kids who threw another kid against the chain-link fence at recess and took the lunch money out of his pockets. Today, bullying is calling another kid a name, and bullies are kids who simply don’t want to play with another kid because they don’t like them. You know because Alex, your younger daughter, recently came home from school with a note saying her actions that day were considered bullying, because she and another girl openly agreed they did not want to play with another girl. The girls were overheard by a teacher. You felt then that you were only seeing a mere 1 percent of the universe. You reprimanded your daughter, and explained how that wasn’t nice, but then later that night, talking to Thomas, you told him you needed clarification. Since when did all this become bullying? you asked. Thomas