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What about Hannah? They set up her nursery in the bedroom in the attic, where things that were not wanted were kept,
汉娜呢？他们把育儿室设在阁楼的卧室里，那些不需要的东西都放在那里，
and even when she got older, now and then each of them would forget, fleetingly, that she existed—as when Marilyn, laying four plates for dinner one night, did not realize her omission until Hannah reached the table.
即使她长大了，他们也会时不时地忘记她的存在——就像玛丽琳某天晚上摆了四个盘子时，直到汉娜走到桌边才意识到她的疏忽。
Hannah, as if she understood her place in the cosmos, grew from quiet infant to watchful child:
汉娜仿佛明白自己在宇宙中的位置，从一个安静的婴儿成长为一个警惕的孩子：
a child fond of nooks and corners, who curled up in closets, behind sofas, under dangling tablecloths, staying out of sight as well as out of mind, to ensure the terrain of the family did not change.
一个喜欢角落的孩子，蜷缩在壁橱里，在沙发后面，在晃来晃去的桌布下面，既远离视线，又远离思想，以确保家庭的地形不会改变。
A decade after that terrible year, everything had turned upside down. For the rest of the world, 1976 was a topsy-turvy time, too, culminating in an unusually cold winter and strange headlines:
那可怕的一年已经过去十年了，一切都颠倒了过来。对世界其他国家来说，1976年也是一个混乱的年代，以一个异常寒冷的冬天和奇怪的新闻标题而告终：
Snow Falls on Miami.?Lydia was fifteen and a half, and winter break had just begun. In five months she would be dead.
雪落在迈阿密。莉迪亚十五岁半，寒假刚刚开始。再过五个月她就要死了。
That December, alone in her room, she opened her bookbag and pulled out a physics test with a red fifty-five at the top.
那年12月，她独自呆在房间里，打开书包，拿出一份物理试卷，试卷上方有一个红色的55。
The biology course had been hard enough, but by memorizing kingdom, phylum, and class?she’d passed the first few tests.
生物学课程足够艰辛，但是她通过记忆界门纲而通过了前几次测试。
Then, as the course got tougher, she had gotten lucky: the boy who sat to her right studied hard, wrote large, and never covered up his answers.
然后课程越来越难，很幸运的是，坐在她右边的那个男孩学习很用功，写字很潦草，而且从来不掩饰答案。
"My daughter," Marilyn had said that fall to Mrs. Wolff—Doctor?Wolff—"is a genius. An A in a college?class, and the only girl, too."
玛丽琳在那个秋天对沃尔夫博士说：“我的女儿是一个天才。她是大学里的优等生，也是唯一的女生。”
So Lydia had never told her mother that she didn't understand the Krebs cycle, that she couldn’t explain mitosis. When her mother framed the grade report from the college, she hung it on her wall and pretended to smile.
所以莉迪亚从来没有告诉妈妈她不理解克雷布斯循环，她无法解释有丝分裂。母亲把成绩单装裱起来挂在墙上时，她假装微笑。
After biology, Marilyn had other suggestions. "We'll skip you ahead in science this fall," she'd said. "After college biology, I'm sure high school physics will be a snap."
生物学之后，玛丽琳有了其他建议。她说：“今年秋天，我们会跳过科学课，学过大学生物学之后，我相信高中物理会很容易。”
Lydia, knowing this was her mother's pet subject, had agreed. "You'll meet some of the older students," her father had told her, "and make some new friends." He’d winked, remembering how at Lloyd, older had meant better.
莉迪亚知道这是母亲最喜欢谈论的话题，便同意了。父亲告诉她说：“你会遇到一些年长的学生，还会交到一些新朋友。”他眨眨眼，想起了在劳埃德，年龄越大越好。
But the juniors all talked to each other, comparing French translations due next period or memorizing Shakespeare for the quiz that afternoon; to Lydia they were merely polite, with the distant graciousness of natives in a place where she was a foreigner.
但三年级的学生都互相交谈，比较下一节课要交的法文译本，或者为当天下午的测验背莎士比亚；他们只是礼貌性对待莉迪亚，就像对待一个外国人一样。
And the problems about car crashes, shooting cannons, skidding trucks on frictionless ice—she couldn’t make the answers turn out.
关于车祸、大炮射击、在无摩擦的冰面上卡车打滑等问题，她无法给出答案。
Race cars on banked tracks, roller coasters with loops, pendulums and weights: around and around, back and forth she went. The more she thought about it, the less sense it made.
坐着倾斜轨道上的赛车，带有环圈、摆锤和砝码的过山车，她转了一圈又一圈，来来回回。她越想这件事，就越觉得没有道理。
Why didn't?the race cars tip over? Why didn't the roller coaster fall from its track? When she tried to figure out why, gravity reached up and pulled down the cars like a trailing ribbon.
为什么赛车没有翻倒？为什么过山车没有从轨道上掉下来？当她试图找出原因时，地心引力像一条飘动的缎带一样把车拉了下来。
Each night when she sat down with her book, the equations—studded with k?and M and theta—seemed pointed and dense as brambles. Above her desk, on the postcard her mother had given her, Einstein stuck out his tongue.
每天晚上坐下来看书时，那些缀满了k、M和西塔字符的方程似乎像荆棘一样密密麻麻。在她的书桌上方，在母亲给她的明信片上，爱因斯坦伸出了舌头。
Each test score had been lower than the last, reading like a strange weather forecast: ninety in September, mid-eighties in October, low seventies in November, sixties before Christmas.
每次考试的分数都比上一次低，读起来就像一个奇怪的天气预报：九月九十度，十月八十度，十一月七十度，圣诞节前六十度。
The exam before this one, she'd managed a sixty-two—technically passing, but hardly passable. After class, she’d shredded it into penny-sized scraps and fed it down the third-floor toilet before coming home.
在此之前的考试中，她62分勉强及格，但很难过关。下课后，她把成绩单切成小硬币大小的碎片，在回家之前扔进三楼的厕所里。
Now there was the fifty-five, which, like a bright light, made her squint, even though Mr. Kelly hadn't written the F?at the top of the page.
现在又有了五十五分，就像一道强光，让她眯起了眼睛，尽管凯利先生并没有把F写在这一页的最上面。
She’d stashed it in her locker for two weeks under a stack of textbooks, as if the combined weight of algebra and history and geography might snuff it out.
她已经把它藏在柜子里两个星期了，藏在一堆课本下面，仿佛代数、历史和地理的综合作用可能会掐灭它。
Mr. Kelly had been asking her about it, hinting that he could call her parents himself, if necessary, and finally Lydia promised to bring it back after Christmas break with her mother's signature.
凯利先生一直在问她这件事，暗示如有必要，他可以自己打电话给她的父母，最后莉迪亚承诺在圣诞节过后让母亲在卷子上签名。
All her life she had heard her mother’s heart drumming one beat: doctor, doctor, doctor. She wanted this so much, Lydia knew, that she no longer needed to say it.
从小到大，她一直听到母亲的心咚咚跳着。莉迪亚知道，她是那么需要这个，所以也就用不着再说了。
It was always there. Lydia could not imagine another future, another life. It was like trying to imagine a world where the sun went around the moon, or where there was no such thing as air.
它一直在那里。莉迪亚无法想象另一种未来、另一种生活。这就像试图想象一个太阳绕着月亮转的世界，或者一个没有空气的世界。
For a moment she considered forging her mother's signature, but her handwriting was too round, too perfectly bulbous, like a little girl's script. It would fool no one.
有那么一会儿，她想伪造母亲的签名，可她的字写得太圆，像个小女孩的手写体。这骗不了任何人。
