A Stranger's House (4 page)

“That's where the gorge is,” I said. “And the place is just past there, back in the woods. It's on a dirt road. And it's a three-quarter Cape.” I touched my hair in a couple of places, but, as always, nothing happened. It was just there on my head, down to my shoulders. Just my hair, brunette like Sandra's, but too fine. I closed the locker door.

I turned and looked at her, just then taking in what she had said about riding bikes to Chesterfield. “You mean you rode all the way out there?” I said.

She shrugged. “Sure. It's not really all that far away, when you think about it. We've ridden to Boston before. Ninety miles. Try that out sometime, and
then
decide whether or not Chesterfield is way out there.” She pushed herself off the locker door, spread her feet apart, and held her arms up. She started flexing them. “We're tough. We eat our Wheaties.”

I shook my head and laughed, pushed open the heavy door, and we headed back up the hall to Wendy and Paige's office.

The hall was dark, a wiring problem that the Physical Plant had never ironed out so that the hall, fifty yards long from one end to
the other, had only three lights, high-watt bulbs that whited out your face whenever you walked beneath them. Past the light the hall was nearly black again, the only light the reflection on the linoleum of the next bulb down the hall.

We turned into Paige and Wendy's office, and I had to squint, the sun from their window so bright. They were both at their desks, mugs of coffee before them, the sunlight catching wisps of steam rising from the mugs. Wendy had her elbows on her desktop; Paige was leaning back in her chair, her hands on the chair arms. Both stared at nothing.

“Wake up,” Sandra said.

I said, “And smell the coffee.”

They turned to us, their faces blank. Paige said, “This is how we work best. In contemplation.”

Wendy nodded. “We're simultaneously contemplating each other's navel.” She picked up her mug and took a sip.

I said, “Group research?”

“No,” Paige said, her face still blank. She leaned forward in her chair and reached for her coffee cup. “Introspective wallowing. That and the fact Will wants this grant done today, and we had hoped to go home before eleven fifteen tonight.”

I went to the coffee machine and filled my mug. All our mugs hung on a rack beside the machine. Mine was the one with the rabbits all over it; Sandra's had a nonsensical mathematic equation with no ending and no beginning wrapped around it. Wendy's had cartoon drawings of different animals—a turkey, a bear, a rabbit—each saying
mug.
Paige's was painted to look like a can of RC Cola.

I pulled down Sandra's for her and filled it. The only one left on the rack was Will's, an anonymous white mug.

“He's not in yet?” I said, and handed Sandra her mug.

“Nope,” Wendy said.

I sat down in the chair next to Paige's desk, Sandra in the one next to Wendy's. The chairs were aluminum-frame-and-black-plastic things brought in from some classroom on campus. My chair was positioned so that when I sat down the sun shone full in my face. I closed my eyes to let the warmth go into me, both hands around my mug. “How's Phillip?” I said.

“Perfect,” Paige said, “except for day care. Not that there's any
thing wrong with the day-care center, but just the whole fact of it. The whole idea that in order to get along both Rick and I have to work so we can live, eat, wear clothes, and pay for Phillip's day care.”

I heard her lean back in her chair, and I leaned my head against the wall behind me. My head just touched the bottom edge of Paige's bulletin board, and I imagined all the pictures of her boy, Phillip, she had tacked up on it. There was a picture of him in a bathtub, a yellow support ring around him that kept him from falling into the water. He was looking up at the camera, smiling, one hand reaching up as if to touch the lens. Another picture was of Phillip sitting on his father's shoulders. In the picture Rick has no shirt on, and Phillip is naked. They both look serious, as if the picture were some interruption of a private conversation. And there were other pictures.

I envied her, of course. I wanted that child, that beautiful boy. The day after he was born I'd been to the hospital to see him. A week later I held him, felt the small body in my hands, his eyes closed, his mouth moving in a sucking reflex, little lips in and out. Since then I had baby-sat for Paige and Rick most every time they asked me; it had become nothing for me to walk the ten minutes to their apartment and take care of the boy whenever they wanted to go out.

But they didn't go out that often, and I knew it was because they, too, hadn't had an easy time of having a child. Paige had had a miscarriage the first time. Not long after she had lost hers I went to her apartment, asked if she cared to talk, as if this passing on of misery might help her, help me. She had cried while trying to smile at me, as if she needed to hide her grief, and then she said, “It's pain. That's all it is. Two kinds of pain,” and she had come to me and put her arms around my neck and sobbed into my shoulder.

There was nothing to say after that. I knew what she meant. Just two kinds of pain: that in your womb, and that in your heart.

So Rick and Paige weren't often willing to give up their baby for an evening; baby-sitting was seldom, and usually for no longer than two or three hours while the two of them had a quick dinner and saw a movie.

But on those nights I baby-sat I did nothing but watch the baby.

I watched while he ate, in awe of his small hand guiding a spoon into his mouth, in awe of his small legs carrying him across the hardwood floors of their apartment to the television where he would stand, two hands pressed up against the glass of the picture tube like small crafted templates, perfect toddler hands. Once the baby was asleep I would quietly go back into his room, sit in the rocking chair next to the crib, and watch him sleep, amazed at the simple act of rolling over in his sleep, at a small fist thrust into the air, at his third and fourth fingers making their way to his mouth to set him off sucking again.

I opened my eyes, the light shooting through me, and I was blinded a moment. I closed and rubbed them, then opened them to see Will standing in the doorway, his hands on his hips.

“You women ought to get working,” he said. “The rabbits are waiting. They want you. I can hear them calling you. They're saying, ‘We want women.'”

He didn't smile, didn't move, but stood there, waiting for us to say something. Wendy was the first. She said, “You be careful or these women will revolt.”

Paige said, “We're the majority in this room. The only reason we allow you in here is to get your own coffee. That, and to pay us.”

“We'll get the rabbits to revolt if they want us so much,” Sandra said. “We'll train them to hook up electrodes to
your
nictitating membrane, then give you the shock treatment, see how
you
like it.”

I said, “Then we'll train them to put you through perfusion. We'll have our own French Revolution here.”

“Vive les lapins!”
Paige said, and we all laughed.

Will just stood there, his face straight. He brought his hands from his hips and walked over to the machine, brought down his mug. He poured himself a cup, then turned and walked out of the room. Once in the hallway he said, “Let's go, girls.”

Sandra mouthed, “Let's go, girls,” her face all twisted, her chest out, and we all laughed again, loud enough, we knew, to antagonize Will.

Sandra and I got up from our chairs. “Good luck,” I said to Paige and Wendy. “For whatever that's worth.”

Wendy said, “It's worth more than ‘Let's go, girls.'”

We stepped back into the dark hall and headed for Will's office three doors down.

He was already in his chair, the coffee cup set on top of dozens of loose papers spread across his desk. Inevitably he left coffee rings on important papers, whether reprints or originals, sometimes even grant proposals. Before the laboratory had enough money to hire Paige and Wendy, it had been me who had to take a bottle of Wite-Out and brush over brown spots, even retype pages and letters altogether. I'd bought him a ceramic coaster once, put his coffee on it one morning, but the next day I had come in to find half-a-dozen cigarette butts ground into it, the coffee mug back on a set of proposal guidelines, one more coffee ring to white out.

Sandra and I took our chairs, Sandra the overstuffed blue vinyl against the left wall, me the oak rocker against the right. We were facing each other.

As every morning, Will rummaged through the papers to find his memo pad, and started scribbling on it the list of the day's chores.

Sandra said, “Claire and Tom looked at another house last night.” She was smiling at me, her mug balanced on her knees, her fingers just touching it to hold it there. “How many have you seen now?”

“Seven hundred fifty-three,” I said.

Will finished his scribbling, and leaned back in his chair, the squeak of springs almost too high to hear, and I knew this leaning back would be followed by some great words of domestic wisdom from this professor who plugged electrodes into the brains of rabbits, and did it on government money. He loved these moments, I knew, when he put his hands behind his head, looked across the desk, and gave a smile.

He had done this same thing to me nine years ago when he'd interviewed me, a senior at the university. The lab hadn't even been in existence then, Will himself having been at the university only a year. He'd had more hair then, but wore the same oxford button-down and gray corduroys.

“Can you handle rabbits?” he had asked, and I remember I had looked past him to the window behind him, the shade up, heat shimmering in waves from the radiator beneath the window so that
the snowflakes outside seemed to dance even more, hang an instant longer before falling to the ground. I remember thinking that rabbits were nothing to handle. Timid, stupid creatures.

“Handle rabbits,” he had said again. “That's not as easy as it sounds, sweetheart. You don't go in every morning and sweep little rabbit turds out from beneath a cage. That's not what I mean. We've got flunky grad students to do that kind of shit. Hah.” He had laughed, and then I had laughed, too, just to be polite, all this time ready for him to ask a single question of my training, my course work, my psych background, any one question that might undo me and expose me to be what I knew I was: only a girl with no real training other than her psych courses. A girl who knew nothing about neuroscience and behavior, but who needed a job. I waited for him to ask one single question that might make me fall apart, show me to know, really, nothing.

But no such question came. Instead Will had leaned forward in his chair, that same squeak in my ears. He had put his hands on the table, reached into the mass of papers, and pulled out a memo pad. He wrote on it, then handed it across to me. I held it in my hands, my hands trembling, and read it.

1. Running rabbits

2. Stereotaxic surgery and atlas

3. Perfusion

4. Staining, mounting

I could still remember that list now. It had been foreign to me then, merely procedures read about in textbooks. Now they were routine.

“When you're looking for a house,” Will started in, and I looked at Sandra.

“Here we go,” I said.

She said, “I asked for it.”

Will ignored us. “You want to make sure you get a dry basement. Check out the basement first. That's the most important thing you can find in a house, a dry basement.” I could tell by his eyes, and how they were beginning to crease closed, that soon he would be lapsing into the next state beyond words of wisdom, when he would
begin to tell stories of either his first or second marriage. “It was our first house,” he went on, leaning even farther back in his chair, his eyes closed to near slits, “that we lost hundreds of dollars in water damage. Books. Books, I remember.”

“Will,” I said. Someone had to stop him. “For one thing, I don't even know if the place has a basement. More than likely just a crawl space down below. But if it does have a basement, you can be sure we'll check to make sure it's dry.”

Sandra said, “I'll vouch for her. She's responsible. Dry basements have always been tops on her list. I know it.”

He opened his eyes, leaned forward in the chair, and brought his hands from behind his head without looking at us. He tore the sheet from the pad and handed it to me.

I took it from him, and he said, “I don't know why I put up with this. I don't.”

“Because,” Sandra said, and sat up in her chair, “we do good work. We do damn fine work, and that's why we're working for you.”

The list in my hand, I looked across at her and could see she was serious. Because, I knew, she was right.

But Will only did what we expected him to do: he shrugged, still not looking at us, and simply waved us off. Slowly Sandra and I stood, still holding our coffee mugs. His mug sat On the middle of his table, there on a stack of papers, and I said on my way out, “You be careful with that coffee, not to spill it. Paige and Wendy have enough stuff out there to do, what with the grant and everything else. They don't want to be retyping manuscripts for spilled coffee.”

He looked up at me, a piece of printout in his hand, his face without expression, but then he smiled and looked back at the paper. He said, “That coaster's around here someplace.”

I said, “I think you broke it two years ago. The last time you tried to clear off the desk.”

He only shook his head, smiling.

I pulled running rabbits to start out the day. It wasn't such a bad job, considering the option: sitting at the computer and punching up references for a paper Will would be delivering at a convention up in Montreal later this year. That was the chore Sandra had been
given, and when we left Will's office for the black of the hallway, I had seen her look at me, her mouth all tight, her eyes wrinkled up to give me a death look, one side of her face lost to shadow, the other illuminated by the light from Will's office.