No Cure for Being Human by Kate Bowler

Author:Kate Bowler [Bowler, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2021-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

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My father left the house when I was fourteen. He did not leave me and my sisters, nor would anyone in their right mind have abandoned a wife who was a dead ringer for Diane Lane. But he was gone, and we had helped him pack his meager collection of clothes—five shirts, one blazer, two sweaters and one pair of navy slacks—into a floppy suitcase and scoured the house for anything else he might need. Most of the weight in his luggage was books, which we asked him to reconsider. We could keep them until he was ready, whenever that was.

It was in our family bathroom, dusty rose wallpaper peeling from the humidity, that I took inventory of his absence: his razor, toothbrush, and a wide-tooth comb for his hair, copper as a handful of pennies. He left one of his dozen pairs of reading glasses beside the tub because he deemed it perfectly natural for a bathroom to have a fully stocked library, which I deemed to be wildly unsanitary. My mom would regularly leave him notes to replace the toilet paper roll (You can do it! Yes, you can!), but he was much more invested in a well-stocked mind.

Both my parents had, in their twenties, done what no one in their families had ever accomplished and gone to college, where, for some reason, they made quite a show of it. Both received scholarships at English universities to pursue their doctoral degrees, my father in history and my mother in music. My dad was a spark plug who loved cricket, Tudor history, and keeping two toddlers from getting concussions (with mixed results) in a tiny apartment up eight flights of stairs. My mother had a spectacular mezzo-soprano voice and performed around Europe in an avant-garde singing group called Electric Phoenix, whose greatest hits sounded like classically trained ghosts haunting what was left of the disco era. She even met Prince Charles. Twice.

When they decided to move back to Canada to find employment, jobs were sparse. They followed the faint trail of university work until it led the family to the University of Manitoba. There my mom shone, later becoming the first woman with a doctorate to be tenured at their school of music.

When my sisters and I were too sick for school, we would nap in my mother’s office under her maplewood piano or run shrieking through the hallways to hear the acoustics made by three girls high on orange soda. We rarely visited my father, who was housed in an honest-to-God storage closet in a building that caused us all to wonder why the university had financed its own renaissance in Stalinist architecture. He was an adjunct faculty member, a Latin term meaning subordinate, and was treated as such. Every few months, he was expected to reapply for his job, if he hoped to work again the following semester. Or find himself applying for unemployment insurance again. Most of my childhood memories of my

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