by Sonja Yoerg
The question is, why is she sitting in her car hoping to catch a glimpse of him with her postdoc? Curiosity, certainly. Prurient curiosity. And beneath that, the desire to know how much Harlan will grant Nasira. Jackie was so patient during their relationship, and in the end, after five years, Harlan denied her. Already she suspects he is moving faster with Nasira, and Jackie must know why.
Why her and not me?
Jackie winces at her own weakness. She checks the dashboard clock and drives away, glancing at the house one last time in her rearview mirror.
Belize Drake, a thirty-year-old law student, sits across the table from Jackie, holding her infant son in her lap. The boy has his mother’s wide-set dark eyes and polished-bronze skin, but his dimpled knuckles are all his own. Jackie is always amazed at how much the babies change from when she first sees them at six months to when she sees them again at a year. This one-year-old, Xavier, is now his own person, solidly himself.
Gretchen, one of Jackie’s graduate students, also sits facing Xavier and his mother, but off to the side. Both Jackie and Gretchen are using iPads to record the child’s responses. The room is painted a sunny yellow and the floor is carpeted. Cabinets hold a vast selection of toys, plus playpens to confine children for certain tests. Video cameras and microphones record sessions, primarily for backup. The work is painstaking but Jackie is certain of its value. Finding the earliest signs of autism—at any point on the spectrum—is crucial in caring for these children and their families in the best way possible.
Jackie smiles at the boy. “How are you doing, Xavier? Ready to play some games?” He sticks his fist in his mouth. Jackie selects the rattle from the box on the seat beside her. She shakes the rattle in front of Xavier to get his attention, then moves it to her right. His eyes follow. Jackie moves the rattle back to the middle and over to the left side. Xavier tracks it all the way. “Bah,” he says as she puts the toy away.
Jackie types a zero next to “Visual Tracking 1” on the form on the iPad, indicating that his response was typical. Later in the twenty-minute session, Jackie will again challenge Xavier to track an object. Gretchen also enters something on her form, but they won’t compare the data until later.
The mother resettles her son. Jackie gets up and positions herself to the side of the Drakes. She waits until Xavier’s attention is elsewhere, then says his name. He does not turn to her. Belize Drake casts a glance at Jackie over her son’s head. Jackie nods to reassure her. Belize knows that Jackie will repeat the test, and how Xavier reacts to any one challenge is not crucial. When the Drakes signed up for the study, Jackie explained what all the assessments and procedures would entail. Today’s test, the AOSI, or Autism Observation Scale for Infants, has been the gold standard in the field for ten years, using a standard set of objects, plus free-play sessions, to score the eighteen items that make up the scale. Some of the items are social, like smiling when the examiner smiles and sharing an emotion. The rest probe other behaviors relevant to a diagnosis of autism, like motor control, attention, and visual tracking—following the rattle.
But Jackie understands why Belize can’t help but see any glitch in her child’s performance as worrisome. Xavier’s older brother, Charles, was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder two years ago, at the age of three. In Jackie’s study, that puts Xavier in the high-risk group, since he has about a 10 to 20 percent chance of getting the same diagnosis. Belize and the other parents who volunteer for the research are anxious to know as soon as possible how the die has been cast. So far, a diagnosis at six months has been impossible, and it’s pretty unreliable at Xavier’s age, too. But Jackie’s work is all about searching for early, reliable signs, and given that she interacts every day with parents who do the same searching in an informal way, she feels nothing but sympathy for Belize’s anxious monitoring.
“Why don’t we play on the floor for a bit?” Jackie crosses the room and kneels on the floor.
Belize holds her son under the arms and stands him upright. He teeters toward Jackie.
“Look at you!” She stretches out her arms, but he falls onto his behind in front of her. He startles, sees Jackie’s broad smile, and grins.
Jackie glances up at Belize in time to catch her smile.
After the session ends, Jackie digs her lunch out of the lab fridge and heads to her office. She clears away the stacks of papers and regards her kale salad dolefully. She ought to have chosen something that didn’t require quite so much chewing to have a chance of finishing before the lab meeting. This semester, Mondays are doomed: a 9:00 a.m. developmental psych lecture, followed by a graduate seminar on social development, then a one-hour break, during which she squeezed in the session with Xavier. Next comes the lab meeting, several more study appointments, and today, as the second Monday of the month, the departmental talk at 5:00 p.m. She considered moving the lab meeting to a different day, but in her experience, it pays to get everyone pointed in the right direction at the start of the week. Graduate students are prone to drift.
She sorts through her emails—delete, delete, highlight, delete—and pauses on the reminder for Thursday’s reception for new adjunct faculty, visiting professors, and postdocs. The word “postdoc” evokes Nasira, and Jackie struggles to dispel the image of Harlan and Nasira after the Dinner, walking away together in intimate conversation, and sharing breakfast at Stateside. As Jackie reads the details of the reception, however, thoughts of Nasira are replaced by those of herself at a similar reception ten years ago. Three recent faculty hires, including Jackie, were being honored.
She stood at the perimeter with a tepid glass of chardonnay, wondering if it was too soon to leave. The stacks of moving boxes occupying every room of her house called to her. Her lab and her classes held top priority, but living out of boxes wasn’t her style.
Harlan entered the room, scanned the sea of heads, and caught her eye. He snaked through the tight crowd at the refreshment table, nodding at those who greeted him. Jackie had first met him when she interviewed for the position. Their conversation had been brief, and she had no memory of the topic. She remembered him, though: his eyes, his voice, and that smile, warm and edged in mischief.
When Harlan reached her, he smiled that smile and extended his hand. “Harlan Crispin. Congratulations.”
“Thank you. I’m delighted.”
“I hoped the search committee would put you forward. You were the best of the ones they brought in, but they don’t always get it right.”
Jackie sipped her wine while she unpacked Harlan’s statement. No doubt it was complimentary, but it also suggested he didn’t think highly of some of his colleagues, either those on the search committee or the allegedly ill-advised hires. She was tempted to ask Harlan whom he viewed as weak, but opted for diplomacy. Who knew which way the political winds blew in this department? “I’m flattered you think so, but from what I know, Josslyn Burnes and Hamid Kamar are first-rate.”
He leveled his gaze at her. “You don’t have to do that. Not with me, certainly.”
“Do what?”
“Be evenhanded and thereby sell yourself short.”
Jackie cast about for a quip to end this line of talk; she distrusted bold flattery. Harlan watched her, waiting, his eyes deep brown and inquisitive. He was striking rather than handsome, and something about him drew her closer, the temptation of a door left ajar.
A long moment passed. Harlan selected a cube of cheese from the table beside him and held it aloft by the toothpick buried in its center. He nodded once, signaling, she supposed, his approval that she had tacitly accepted his edict. He pulled the cheese from its skewer with his teeth and scanned the room as he chewed. She should ask a question, make small talk, but now that Harlan had made it clear he expected her to be brilliant, everything she thought of she discarded as trite.
He turned his attention back to her. She felt the heat of it in her face, in her chest. He gestured to the refreshments, inviting her to join in his assessment of the discount
chardonnay and merlot, the perfectly symmetrical cookies that betrayed their supermarket origin, the unripe, outsize wedge of Brie, hacked by a translucent plastic knife. Jackie shrugged. The offerings were forlorn but predictable.
Harlan said, “I hope you don’t judge us by this. Academics can be pointedly lowbrow in their aesthetics.”
She laughed. “Our burning intellects must dull our other senses.” She flashed on a conference she had attended in graduate school, where a female professor had warned her not to appear too put together if she wanted to be taken seriously. “You should look as though you selected your clothes at random because you were preoccupied with more important thoughts.” The woman had only been half joking. It might be an anecdote Harlan would appreciate, Jackie mused, but she wasn’t sure. She did surmise that, concerning Harlan, one ought to be absolutely sure.
He dipped his shoulder, poised to offer her a confidence. She could smell his cologne—grapefruit and something else, like turned earth. “You probably have a few people you need to check in with, per protocol, but after that, if you’re not busy, we could find something palatable.”
Jackie’s standard response to flirtation was to pretend she didn’t understand it for what it was, then make excuses. Men had to lay siege to her defenses before she would consider them head-on, and most men, thank God, didn’t have the energy. She wasn’t playing hard to get; she didn’t want to be got, except on rare occasions, when she gave in to her craving for male company and intimate sex and lowered her drawbridge. During her junior year in college, Jeff Toshack had discovered her in such an unguarded state and pulled her close. A year and a half later, Jackie had retreated inside the fortress of her own making, and Jeff was three thousand miles away and, she assumed, bewildered.
She returned Harlan’s gaze. Was he flirting or only being friendly? Either way, the reception was drab and, having skipped lunch to set up her office, she was ravenous—and intrigued.
She set down her glass. “Give me fifteen, okay? I’ll find you.”
“I won’t be far.”
A kiss on the second date—if the evening of the reception counted as the first—sex on the fourth, sleeping over at his house on the fifth because it was a Friday, all within three weeks. Jackie wouldn’t call it a romance; there was no sense of losing her footing, of sliding or succumbing. If she had felt any of that, she would’ve turned on the sarcasm, stiffened her back, and drowned herself in work until the feeling passed and Harlan dissolved like the others. He was different, however. He was witty and interesting and interested, and, most important, did not appear to be either running away from or running toward her. It was as if they had both come to a standstill in mutual acceptance of their compatibility, although the idea of a perfect fit was itself too imbued with fate for her taste. She was certain Harlan held the same view. They would spend a few hours together and then return to their respective homes for sleep or chores or exercise, or to their labs to work.
As a new professor, Jackie put in long hours establishing her research program, developing curricula for classes, and mentoring graduate students. She had little spare time. As a full professor with an ever-expanding lab, Harlan had even less. Jackie and Harlan became a microcosm of two with limited scope and a predictable routine. They dated twice a week, usually Tuesdays and Fridays, with Fridays extending into Saturdays, though rarely past lunchtime. They never spoke of the relationship, only logistics, which gave Jackie permission to tell herself it wasn’t really a relationship at all. Given her fitful history with men, denying the relationship was the only way she could continue. Love wasn’t on the table; it wasn’t even in the room.
What made Harlan the exception was his focus on her. The first time she had dinner with him after escaping the tedious reception, she was astounded at how she immediately felt at the center of his world. There was no place he would rather be than sitting across the table from her, nothing she could say that would fail to interest him, nothing she could do to lessen her appeal. It was heady stuff.
Her assessment was the same after every date, from the first to the second to the third and on to whatever number they logged years later. When they were together, Harlan’s attention did not waver. In his light, she was smarter, funnier, and more fascinating than she had ever viewed herself. She was also sexier. He wanted her with a candid passion that rendered superfluous the need for lacy lingerie, fuck-me heels, or background music. The sex wasn’t inventive, which suited her, but it was intense, and had the same clarity as all their interactions.
She accepted the version of herself he reflected back at her, and extended this acceptance more generally, viewing her life as he framed it. She was the best of the younger faculty, a rising star, a talented teacher, a writer of unusual lucidity. With his guidance, which he readily offered, she would win grant money, attract the most able students, gain tenure in record time.
And she did.
Now, in her lab office, Jackie takes a final bite of her salad and throws the rest into the trash. She closes her laptop, grabs her coffee mug and the pastry box she picked up from Sweet Somethings, the bakery near her house, and leaves her office. She actually has two offices: her official one on the same floor as the departmental offices and this smaller one in the suite of rooms that constitutes her lab. She prefers the lab office, especially when wolfing down a meal, because she is less likely to be interrupted. It is also quieter, except when experiments are ongoing and a child screams loudly enough to defy the triple soundproofing. Jackie doesn’t mind the screaming; it reminds her that her work involves real people with real emotions and, often, troubled lives.
Jackie walks by the office space shared among the grad students—and her new postdoc, Nasira. The room is empty except for Kyle, her most senior student, hunched and tense over the computer, face inches from the spreadsheet displayed on the screen, long fingers poised above the keyboard, both legs hammering a silent rhythm under the bench. Jackie hesitates, reluctant to break his concentration, but the meetings aren’t optional.
“Hey, Kyle. It’s one.”
He frowns, still glued to the screen, then breaks out in a grin. His fingers drop onto the keys, execute dozens of keystrokes in seconds. He hits save and scrapes back his chair. “That pivot table was a hairy mofo.”
Jackie laughs and leads the way to the conference room, where the others wait: Gretchen and Tate, the other grad students; Rhiannon and Reese, the undergrads; and Nasira, seated to the left of Jackie’s spot at the end of the table with the whiteboard behind it. Nasira wears an oversize white sweatshirt, and her hair is pulled back in an artfully messy bun. Jackie has attempted a messy bun, but hers turn out more frenetic than artful. Nasira looks up from her phone and smiles, her tiny reserved smile. Jackie is reminded of three weeks ago, when Nasira, as a newcomer, presented her study plans to the group. Jackie and Nasira had a pleasant lunch together afterward, chatting about work and how Nasira was settling in. Jackie was optimistic about Nasira’s potential contribution to the lab and felt confident in being cast as a role model for the young woman. They would learn from each other, Jackie thought. Nasira brought neurological expertise to the lab, broadening the scope. Jackie would serve as a mentor, but in a different way than for her graduate students, as was typical for postdoctoral appointments. Nasira would be more like a younger sister, Jackie thought. Women, even very intelligent, capable women, need a hand at their elbow in the male-dominated world of science.
Now she’s not sure what to think. Nasira seems to have jumped right into the deep end with Harlan, possibly making Jackie superfluous as a mentor. Harlan is a much bigger fish than she is; his advice automatically trumps hers. In any case, Jackie isn’t feeling quite as sisterly today.
Jackie takes a seat. “Hi, everyone. If your Monday is like mine, you’re going to want one of these.” She opens the bakery box and pushes it to the center of the table. “Cookies from Sweet Somethings.” There’s a buzz of appreciation, and everyone except Nasira takes one. Jacki
e scans the room, waiting for her students to settle again. “Okay, let’s dive right in. Tate, you ready to tell us where we are with recruitment for the toddler study?”
Tate, pierced and tattooed and dressed in a vintage granny dress and combat boots, heads to the whiteboard, where she has already posted a summary. “Numbers are up from two weeks ago, but the new ad isn’t boosting it as much as we need.”
The team discusses recruitment strategies for several minutes; then Jackie moves on to confirming the research schedule. Nothing is more important than conducting the studies, and experience has taught her that students are more likely to show up to run the experiments if they commit to it at a meeting. What she would give to have a lab manager, like Harlan has, but she doesn’t have the funding. Somehow autism isn’t as sexy as lying. Most of her money comes from advocacy groups, and they are, quite rightfully, keen to ensure that every dollar is spent wisely. Research money from government agencies (like the FBI, in Harlan’s case), tech companies, and the pharmaceutical industry flows more freely. Jackie doesn’t resent a tight budget but does wish it came bundled with extra hours in the day.
After fifty minutes, the agenda is complete. “That’s all I’ve got. You know where to find me with any questions.” Jackie opens the Voice Memo app on her phone and records her action items as the meeting breaks up around her.
Gretchen comes around the far side of the table and confers with Nasira, who is typing on her phone.
Gretchen says, “You’re working on the four-year study, right? I’m using the social part of the AOSI for my thesis and can’t figure out how the cohorts are organized.” When Gretchen was ready to choose her thesis topic, Jackie suggested she concentrate on one aspect of the AOSI scale.
