Saving St. Germ (18 page)

If I could reproduce that moment,
in theory,
the moment the cosmic soup thickened
—
say I got my chiral molecules to find each other and flip correctly, what do I prove? I don’t know. Maybe the circumstances of chiral recognition will indicate how the four forces of the universe (electromagnetism, gravity, strong nuclear force, and weak nuclear force) influenced molecule formation; maybe I’ll get a glimpse of the hierarchy of these forces. If it gets hot enough, the center will not hold, as Yeats said; the bonds will blow apart, the molecules blast off. You see, they touch, they kiss, then
BOOM,
the kernels pop. What is there before the moment of conception? The
thought
of conception?

Jay comes into the kitchen, Jay opens a beer, his brain calibrates exactly what infinitesimal adjustments are needed to guide his extremities. Pop the top, flip the cap in the trash, shift the bottle to the other hand to pass the beer to a right-handed receiver. Shake hands with a right-hander at a party, palm the bottle to the other hand, lift the fork from the left side of the plate to your mouth, turn to the right to tell a joke, flip the beer (a trick), drop it, watch it shatter. Turn to make a point over your shoulder to your wife, whirl around to face her, furious, raise the left hand to point at her, shout, let the left hand make a fist, threaten, let it drop. Sit with the left hand over your eyes, slumped at a kitchen table. Crawl into bed later, touch her with your left hand, touch her left breast with your left hand, begin to talk to her in the strained tones of the wounded loyal. And
stutter
: The synapse circuit closes, the neurons quiver, but the tongue resists slightly the cerebral command—this is not a misfire, this is an exquisite hesitation, pre-aural sabotage by the mind, which wants to say something else, something different, something it will never be able to say.

In space, my molecules keep turning. They have to fit together, and now my calculations are telling me they have to have three pairs of centers on the atoms where they touch
—
in other words, they can’t just
like
each other, they have to attach surfaces, they have to have a lot in common. It wasn’t enough that they made each other laugh, it wasn’t enough that they had dynamite sex. They had to recognize each other, on some other level. They had to
fit.
So Ollie, they’re still spinning Out There. And Daddy’s gone now. I can’t say if he’ll be back. I don’t think he will be. I’m the one who failed. His nature was, I suppose, kinder, till he realized I didn’t believe in his kindness. The cruelty he invented to defend himself. Marriage allows you an unremitting gaze at the other person; even when you don’t want to stare any longer, you can’t stop looking. You have to know when to look away. Then you can move together again; your eyes search each other out again, abashed, humbled. I could not let him love me, I could not muster the attention forgiveness demands, because I lived in distraction. Now he is falling away through the space I am trying to reassemble in a theory. To understand
—
what? The origins of life, the order of the universe? Will I walk out into the cosmos? Giddily, gladly. But I won’t follow him out the door, I won’t stand by the car, arguing. I have no interest in human drama. Why don’t they understand that the damage has already been done? Even Q misunderstood me there. I am in a despair so joyful only the elegant precision of your inward-turning face, Ollie, of your unconventional speech, expresses it exactly. The damage has been done to us. But I can choose the conditions of my defeat. And that’s the end, Ollie. The End. Except they’re still out there, whirling, turning around and around each other, stalking each other, in the vast, indifferent, storybook night.

You must obtain a laboratory coat and wear it in the laboratory. In addition, please be aware that some instruments are hazardous (for example, the ultraviolet light sources and the high-voltage power supplies) and that many of the chemicals and reagents may be harmful if ingested (for example, ethidium bromide) or dropped onto exposed skin (for example, phenol). Therefore, you must take care and wear appropriate apparel when necessary—for example, plastic goggles when using ultraviolet light, and gloves when using ethidium bromide and phenol. As far as is known, the biological materials—phages, bacteria, enzymes—are harmless; nonetheless, we will use weakened strains of
E. coli
to prevent any possible spread of recombinant DNA molecules out of the laboratory.

The instructions were taped to the lab door. I stood reading and rereading them, not seeing them. Rocky was in there, I knew: I could hear the strains of Traffic. I couldn’t bring myself to push open the pneumatic door; I couldn’t bring myself to put on a public, cheerful face or even a private, suffering one. Jay had left me. He’d been gone for five days and I was edgy, sleepless.

I slumped down the hall to my office, let myself in, and turned on the harsh overhead light. My desk was covered with papers and graphs and spilled beakers and bent tubing. I moved to the bookshelves that lined the walls and ran my fingers along the dusty spines. I reached in my pocket for a crumpled pack of cigarettes and lit one, throwing the dead match at the wastebasket, just missing.

I smoked and stared at the titles: abstracts and biographies. There were occasional lives of women along the shoulder-to-shoulder stories of men in science. And what kind of lives were the lives of women scientists? Could they (should they?) be categorized as a
type
of life?

I crushed the cigarette in an old crusted beaker. It hadn’t tasted good. On my way down the hall, I’d been consoling myself with certain self-serving daydreams: even if my husband
had
left me, I was going to be renowned in my field (and here I might light a smoke and swagger a little). OK, OK,
not
a
Nobel laureate,
but a theoretician in whose wake perceptions of reality exploded, re-formed? As if a scientist’s life was in itself a neat vengeance!

I wrenched open a stuck window, sat down, and pulled my journal toward me. Papers fluttered a little; a photograph of Stonehenge I’d taped to the wall a year ago blew under a cupboard.

Imaginary Lecture:

A Brief History of Women in Science

After your father left me, I went on in the tradition of ... whom? I glanced up at a little wall chart I’ve made for myself—a random litany of the lost names.
Aspasia,
physician;
Annie Jump Cannon,
astronomer;
Nettie Marie Stevens,
cytogeneticist;
Amalie Dietrich,
naturalist;
Jane Sharp,
midwife;
Hildegard of Bingen,
cosmologist;
Hypatia of Alexandria,
mathematician and philosopher;
Augusta Ada Byron,
mathematician, inventor;
Caroline Lucretia Herschel,
astronomer.

All those lost
lives
! Of women who (like me) wanted only a little space, a little time to putter or theorize. Craved a little knowledge, dying to pursue an answer or two. I could hear the voices: a cry here, a comment there, bits of lives outside narrative, circling.

Late one night I made some notes, picking up volumes: personal memoirs, histories, biographies of men—extracting the odd offhand insight into the silent lives of sisters, mothers, wives, teachers, friends. The bits of lives flew to me like iron filings to a magnet.

Here’s
The Compleat Midwives’ Book
by Jane Sharp, a seventeenth-century British midwife. Jane stood at the childbeds of women who died, feverish and hemorrhaging—women who couldn’t have read their own tombstones. There is no anger in Jane’s voice, only resignation. Women, she says, are “denied knowledge,” not “bred up” like men.

Bred up,
an interesting phrase. Because represented here are
bred up
women, women bred within an inch of their lives, like Byron’s daughter, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, a mathematician, a genius who, in the 1840s, helped Charles Babbage invent “the difference engine,” a precursor of the computer. Her breeding got her essentially nowhere, except into a footnote in Babbage’s biography. We do have an exasperated quote from her, a snap at old Babbage, who
would
fuss with her mechanical descriptions: “I cannot endure another person to meddle with my sentences!” One can almost recognize Father in these tones, except no one ever fussed with George Gordon’s lines.

But even if I put together a narrative, where would it begin? Fourth century A.D.? Hypatia?
She
was torn apart by a mob of fellow Alexandrians, led to riot by a certain Bishop Cyril, who was jealous of “her wisdom exceeding all bounds, especially in the things concerning astronomy.”

Well what the hell business did Hypatia have, anyway, knowing so much? Wasn’t playing dumb the smart thing for a smart woman to do? I’m thinking now of Caroline Herschel, astronomer, sweeping the skies with her telescope, credited with discovering eighteen comets. She gave all the credit to her brother, William, who allowed her to work as his laboratory assistant. She called herself a “well-trained puppy dog.”

Or Mary Fairfax Somerville, mathematician, experimentalist, talking about herself and
all
women:

I was conscious that I had never made a discovery myself, that I had no originality ... no genius; that spark from heaven is not granted to the sex. We are of the earth.

So what do
I
have to complain about, Ollie? These voices betray suffering I don’t bear. I’m alone now, but I’m my own woman. I have my own lab; I run it myself proudly. I
am
the only female in a department of men—but my work is respected, I am compensated. I am free to work.

But look, here’s a publication on a bookshelf just a hand’s reach up, as recent as 1982, that says I have
the wrong kind of brain
for scientific achievement! I page through the issue of
Science
magazine. Published inside is a famous study: results of tests that present seemingly definitive proof that the posterior end (the splenium) of the corpus callosum (the great bundle of nerves, commissural fibers) that connects the right and left hemispheres of the brain is
larger
in women than in men, thus making communication swifter and easier between the two halves of the female brain. From this fact, the test’s authors drew an interesting conclusion. They said that this indicated the male brain is more specialized, giving rise to further conclusions such as, This is why more men are musical, mathematical, and scientific geniuses. In other words, the more
lateralized
your brain, the
smarter
you are. And where does that leave
women
—leaning over the neural picket fence and
talking
faster?
How
is it that what could be interpreted as a biological advantage (communication of short-term memory and learned tasks
faster
across the divide) becomes evidence of how male genius is made?

I picked up a framed black-and-white photograph of Jay (next to one of a just-born Ollie) on my desk. He was wearing his Dodgers cap, squinting into the sun at the beach. I’d always loved this picture of him. I opened my desk drawer and put the picture inside.

I watched myself start to slide to the floor, then sit up, ready to kick ass. (
Aspasia, Annie jump Cannon ...
) Instead of arguing that women have “less hemispheric specialization,” why wouldn’t it be
as valid
to say men could use more intercortical communication? I know common wisdom used to be that women couldn’t
think;
men used to make fun of women for being—what?
Scatterbrained,
intuitive, emotional, incapable of focusing? Now, some people argue that this kind of multiburner thinking is a
power.
In fact, you could argue that what the male physicist—at the apex of cosmological theoretical speculation—is in essence trying to do is
to think like a woman.

Trying to align his cognitive rhythms with spatial
flux:
soaping the baby’s rib cage, counting parallel universes,
saying aaah,
tracking gluons as they pass through walls, fixing the wheels of the broken toy, soothing the high fever, talking to the high fever, noting infinities that plague calculation. Ollie, listen: To pursue the merely abstract is to overlook the nature of the brain
and
the universe. Thought is given to us in
metaphors,
which bridge worlds,
crossing over
: the corpus callosum itself a metaphor for that intersection.

Now, on my feet again, I ran my finger along the book backs and stopped on the biography of Madame Curie by her daughter, Eve. God, Madame Curie. Why was it whenever anybody anywhere was asked to name a woman scientist it was always Madame Curie? Well, she was indeed the chosen, the only one of us granted enormous recognition and prestige. In her spousal research team, she had the original ideas, did most of the cutting-edge experiments. After her husband’s death, she finally did it all, but she is often listed second: his appendage.

Curie did what no man has ever done: She actually won
two
Nobel Prizes—in two different fields, physics and chemistry. She crossed right over those “specialty” boundaries a lot of scientists squawk about. The year she received her second Nobel was the same year the French Academy of Sciences refused to admit her because she was a woman. She was married, very happily; she didn’t seem to be a witch or a dyke or a madwoman, she was approved by the patriarchal judges of professional character.

But she was never called by her name, Marie Curie; she was
Madame
Curie, Pierre’s wife. Imagine the two of them: inseparable, together in the lab all day, every day. So close they barely had to speak. But poor Pierre was an absentminded fellow. One day he was crossing the rue Dauphine in Paris, his eyes turned inward on his radium-cure theories; he slipped on the wet pavement and fell under the wheels of a heavy wagon drawn by two horses. His head was crushed. It was a showery spring day, April 1906. Not long before this gruesome event, his wife had had a weird premonition. She’d come running to Pierre, her face wild, in tears, crying that if one of them disappeared the other could not go on, was that not right?