In the Field

by Rachel Pastan

  “What do you see?” Kate said, close to her shoulder.

  “I don’t know. A shimmering.”

  “Let me look.”

  “Wait.” Thea’s fingers worked the focus knob. “Something’s moving,” she said. “Lots of things.”

  “What do they look like?” They had been given a list of organisms their drops might contain, and they were supposed to sketch what they saw.

  “A blob,” Thea said. “A shimmering blob.”

  “Let me look,” Kate repeated, putting her hand on Thea’s arm.

  “Patience,” Thea said. But she let Kate look.

  “Hey, Gold,” someone said. “You need help?” Gold was Thea’s surname.

  “From you?” Thea said haughtily.

  “I got a microscope for my twelfth birthday,” the boy said. “This pond water stuff is interesting, I guess, if you’ve never done it before.”

  “We’ll manage,” Thea said.

  The conversation buzzed in the background as the world inside the microscope rushed into focus. With a flick of Kate’s fingers on the ridged knob, the faint shimmering Thea had described resolved into a tumult of individual things. No, not things: living beings! There were roundish ones and long spindly ones, greenish ones and transparent ones, swimming and squirming across the field of view. Small creatures like fingernail parings wriggled and flittered. One large monster, shaped like a club with spikes, wobbled around in a slow rotation, while a lithe clear swimmer with a poppy seed eye darted past it. Warmth gathered in Kate’s belly and spread outward. This must be how the Earth looked to—to whom? To God? To a star? In this small galaxy, Kate was the Sun, burning.

  “My turn.” Thea’s voice startled Kate back into the room. Straightening up, she blinked at the strange human shapes: their jerky movements and clumsy limbs, heavy heads swiveling on their skinny, stalk-like necks.

  At the second lab meeting, Dr. Krause talked to them about corn, only he called it by its Latin binomial name, Zea mays. He explained how scientists used Zea mays, and before that peas (Pisum sativum), to learn how the traits of ancestor plants got passed down to offspring plants. “Gregor Mendel,” he crowed sternly. “Now there was a scientist! A humble friar from Brno, in Moravia, unlocking the secrets of life.”

  Kate, who hadn’t heard of Gregor Mendel, nor of Moravia, listened carefully, trying to follow the train of his thoughts.

  “What is more important,” Dr. Krause demanded, “than understanding how we come to be the way we are? How each of us is connected to our ancestors, yet is also an individual? Explaining these mysteries—possibly, in the future, breeding better human beings! Those are the promises of genetics.” The room shifted restlessly as Dr. Krause ticked off Mendel’s laws of heredity on his long, hairy, age-spotted fingers. But Kate was hypnotized. Beside her, she could feel Thea breathing faster, both of them taking it all in. Dr. Krause gazed around the room with his soft brown damp eyes, his thick wiry eyebrows rising with emotion. “I only wish I were younger, so I could live to see how it all comes out. I confess I would have liked to be the first to understand something basic about Nature’s design. Instead, most of my life has been given over to teaching you ungrateful cabbage heads.” But he said it fondly. The long toll of the bell clock interrupted his digression, and he took out his watch and examined it as though needing to establish for himself that the bell was right.

  Kate and Thea lay squashed together on Kate’s bed on top of the dusty coverlet, waiting for the moon to rise. The night before, Kate had seen it glowing right in the middle of the window, bright as a pearl, and she wanted to show it to Thea. They had turned out the light so they would be more dazzled when it came. In the meantime they quizzed each other for their upcoming test, taking turns in the dark. Kate’s side fitted into the curve of the taller girl’s. Was this what it was supposed to be like, having a sister? At the foot of the bed, their four shoes wagged back and forth.

  “What are the principal parts of a flower?” Kate asked. The hue of the sky seemed to shift as she looked: crow black to charcoal to iron gray. There was always so much more to everything if you looked closely. That was the main thing college was teaching her: a thousand shades and subtleties to what had seemed the simplest truth.

  “Pistil,” Thea said. “Stamen. Those are the female and the male parts. Also you’ve got—let’s see—petal and sepal.” Now it was her turn to ask something. “About the pistil,” she said. “Name the part that is sticky and sweet, and the part that ripens into a fruit.”

  “Stigma,” Kate said. “Ovule.” Beside her she could feel Thea breathing. If she were a plant, she would be fed by Thea’s CO2.

  “Right,” Thea said. “Your turn.”

  “Name one common vector for cross-fertilization.”

  “Bees,” Thea said dreamily. “Aren’t bees amazing? I mean, they make honey with their own bodies! They communicate by dancing!”

  “Yes,” Kate agreed. “Bees are wonderful. Much to be wondered at.” Was that the edge of the moon drifting into the darkness of the window frame? Or was it just her own wanting that made her think she saw the pale curve.

  “God was inspired when he thought of bees,” Thea said.

  “Do you really believe there’s a God?” Kate said.

  “Of course!” In the dark, Thea sounded shocked. “I mean, it’s not a question: the existence of God. It’s a given. The given. Even you gentiles know that.”

  It was warm in the small room. Late September, but the weather was still fine. People said Ithaca would soon be buried under drifts of snow, but Kate and Thea had agreed they’d believe it when they saw it. Now Kate said earnestly, “Everything is a question.” Surely they agreed about that.

  Thea squirmed. “Not everything. Some things are answers to the questions.”

  Kate grasped Thea’s elbow as though her friend might slip away if she didn’t hold on to her. “Listen,” she said. “God is too easy an answer. Why is the sky blue? Why are there mountains here and gorges there? Why is your hair curly and mine straight? A person could spend a lifetime trying to answer those questions! But if you just say, It’s like that because of God, you haven’t said anything at all.”

  Thea’s springy hair tumbled as she shook her head, loose strands tickling Kate’s face. “But I wouldn’t say that,” she said. “Why would God care if my hair were straight or curly? Or even about the color of the sky! You’re talking about one kind of question, but I’m talking about something else. Something deeper.”

  “What do you mean, deeper?” Kate’s stomach fizzed. She felt excited, and agitated, as though something were on the verge of being revealed. She could feel Thea’s pulse beating under her skin beside her.

  “I mean behind all that. Under it. Underneath everything!”

  “You mean like the floor?” Kate asked.

  “No. Underneath everything.”

  “Like the cellar? Like the foundation of the house? Like the ground?” Her mind began to rattle away down its own track. She thought about the Earth’s thin rocky crust, which she was learning about in geology, and the great slice of silicate mantle below. And under that, the dense and smoldering core, so hot that metals turned to liquid and seethed in the darkness. She was not prepared to reopen the question of God; but there was something. Something hidden. It had to do with the way disparate parts were connected, maybe. The color of the sky and the location of the mountains and the texture of Thea’s hair. Sometimes, if she stood very still—if she kept her mind very still, like a grain of sand—she could feel it thrumming, like overtones on the piano, or like blood in the veins, or like the sound a falling star made in the vacuum of space.

  Now the silver disk of the moon moved upward, floating for a long moment in the exact center of the window. But the girls, preoccupied with their argument, didn’t notice

  CHAPTER 3

  In early October, Ka
te borrowed a tennis racket and went down to the courts to see if she could pick up a game. It was a cool bright autumn day. The soft yellow leaves of a chestnut tree blew and swooped through the scrubbed air, and spiny green chestnuts lay scattered across the grass. Down at the far courts, two boys dashed around, laughing and shouting. At the near end, a lean blond girl in a long pleated skirt slammed a ball against the backboard, hitting the same spot twenty times in a row. When she stopped to fix her hair, Kate said, “That’s quite a backhand.”

  “Is there something wrong with my forehand?” the girl said.

  Kate laughed. “Do you mind if I take a look at your racket?”

  The girl held it out. “Slazenger Demon. Brand new model. Want to give it a try?”

  Kate ran her hand around the beveled frame. “All right.”

  She hit five forehands against the wooden slats, then switched to backhands, picking up the pace. It felt good to be moving, her body opening up and settling down like a sailboat finding its angle to the wind. The girl watched her, looking down her long pink nose.

  “Thanks,” Kate said at last, stopping and handing the racket back.

  “You’re good,” the blond girl said.

  Kate blotted her face with her sleeve. “Want to play a set? An education for the mind is all very well and good, but one should not neglect the body.”

  The girl laughed, showing big white teeth. “You’re funny,” she said and spun for serve. “Up or down?”

  They were quite evenly matched. The girl, whose name was Marian, blasted hard shots to all corners, her height helping her slam the ball off the court, but Kate found she could use spin and misdirection to hold her own. She tapped the ball short when Marian expected her to blast it past her, or lured her in with a drop shot then lifted a lob skyward. They ended up splitting sets, 6-4, 5-7. Kate wanted to play a third—or at least a tie-breaker—but Marian tossed her racket into the grass and lay down under the chestnut tree.

  Kate sat beside her and wrapped her arms around her knees.

  “If only someone would come along and serve us lemonade,” Marian said, and she began to reminisce about the club back in Buffalo with its chipped ice and swimming pool and Saturday night dances. Two years older than Kate, she had come out at a cotillion at the Lenox Hotel when she was seventeen. She was studying French, which her mother deemed an acceptable subject for a girl. “But if she knew what’s in some of the books we read, she’d be very surprised.” Marian rolled onto her side and looked up at Kate. “Houses of ill virtue. Adulterous women! Young girls brought up not for marriage, but for the other thing.”

  “What other thing?” Kate pictured secretaries at typewriters, their hair in tight chignons.

  “Lounging around all day in silk negligees,” Marian whispered, giggling.

  “Negligees?”

  “And sometimes—” Marian moved closer. “Sometimes two men …” Her breath tickled Kate’s ear.

  Kate was sure she had misunderstood. Nonetheless, her cheeks burned, and she could not summon the words necessary to ask for clarification.

  “The Greeks did it, too, Professor Mallory says! Can you believe the scandalous things you learn at college? Of course, I’m really here to get my MRS degree.” She stood up and brushed the leaves from the back of her skirt. “You meet so many nice boys up here. Delta Gamma, my sorority, has a lot of mixers. You should rush.”

  “Do you have a dress I could borrow for a semi-formal?” Kate asked her housemates in the kitchen that evening. “It’s a rush party,” she added, trying out her new vocabulary. “At the Delta Gamma house.”

  A little shock ruffled the air.

  “It’s a lark!” Kate said. “And if they don’t want me, I don’t care. I don’t have to live there,” she added, thinking maybe that was what was upsetting them. “I wouldn’t leave you in the lurch.”

  Standing over the stove, Lena stirred a pot of canned mushroom soup, clattering the ladle. “Don’t you know about those people?” she said.

  “I guess I know you don’t want to rush,” Kate said. “But why do you care if I do?” She looked over at Thea, who was plonking spoons onto the table.

  “I don’t care!” Lena said. “Why should it matter to me if you want to spend your time with people who are only interested in status and money?”

  Kate turned away. She found the remains of a hard, dark loaf in the cupboard and began hunting around for the bread knife, wishing Lena didn’t always buy pumpernickel. “The girl who invited me is perfectly nice.”

  “They walk around with their noses in the air,” Thea said darkly. “It’s like they teach them that in debutante school.”

  “I never said this girl was a debutante,” Kate said.

  “Well, is she?” Lena said.

  “What does it matter?”

  “So she is?” Thea said.

  Kate felt ganged up on. “Marian’s not a snob. Maybe some of them are. I don’t know. But then,” she added, sawing at the pumpernickel, “there are different ways of being a snob.”

  “I don’t know why they even bother going to college!” Thea said. “All they care about are clothes, and diamond bracelets, and getting married.” She banged a plate of pickles onto the table. “And they don’t allow Jews.”

  Kate looked up from the bread board. Thea was standing by the messily set table, glaring at Kate, and Lena was frowning out the window. On the stove, the forgotten soup bubbled furiously. “That’s ridiculous!” Kate said. “What makes you say that?”

  “The fact that it’s true,” Thea said.

  The smell of scorched mushroom swirled through the kitchen.

  Kate had told Marian she would go to the dance, and she meant to go. Besides, what Thea and Lena said piqued her curiosity. Surely they were wrong, but she would see for herself. She wore her own dress, brown with a white collar, the best she had brought with her.

  The Delta Gamma house was a large gabled building with a porticoed entrance. Inside, a cornucopia of sofas and low cushioned chairs and little tables with frilly legs sat on a blue carpet. Chandeliers glittered and shivered, and small anchors (the DG symbol) rose in columns up the papered walls. She found Marian in the dining room with a few of the other DGs—Cindy and Lindy and Deb—all with pearls around their white necks. A gaggle of other rushees with shiny hair and dresses in mint green and daffodil yellow crowded around a table of canapés.

  “Punch?” Marian offered, ladling out crystal teacups of something pink.

  “Thanks,” Kate said.

  “It’s so much tastier than the punch at KKG,” said a strawberry blond with sharp little teeth. “What do you put in it?”

  “Rose water,” Cindy or Lindy said. “Oranges of course. Extract of almonds. And”—she lowered her voice—“don’t let the house mother know, but—”

  “Hush,” Marian interrupted. “It’s a secret. If you pledge, of course, you can find out.”

  Kate sipped the punch, which really was very good.

  “That’s some dress,” Lindy or Cindy said, looking Kate up and down. “It’s the exact color of a baked potato!” The gaggle laughed, and Kate laughed along good naturedly, and held out her glass for more punch.

  “Careful,” Marian said, handing her the refilled glass cup etched with flowers of a variety not found in nature. “Don’t go too fast.” But the warning went right past Kate, who never dreamed they would serve alcohol to girls.

  The conversation turned to football. Everyone except Kate had gone to the game that afternoon, which the Big Red had lost by a humiliating margin. The word was that the quarterback, a senior with a devoted following among the DGs, would be benched the following Saturday in favor of a sophomore whose eyes, it was agreed, were not half so blue as the starter’s, which were the exact color of robins’ eggs.

  “Though of course robins’ eggs are not all the exact same co
lor,” Kate remarked. “They vary.”

  “That interception really was not his fault,” Deb said.

  “What kind of offense did they run?” Kate wanted to know. She had played football with the boys on the street until she was thirteen. “Because a single-wing offense can leave a quarterback vulnerable. But if, on the other hand, they ran the Notre Dame box …”

  After a minute she noticed that the other girls had drifted away. She helped herself to another glass and wandered into the next room, where several of the Delta Gammas were preparing to perform a skit. There was a stage, covered with a velvet cloth, against one wall. Aphrodite, draped in white, and Athena, draped in silver, recited rhymed couplets and bestowed symbolic gifts on a trio of girls in blue. It was all very grave and allegorical. After the skit, a gramophone was cranked up, and girls waltzed around the room in twos, draped in ribbons and garlanded with flowers. Watching them spin made Kate dizzy. She sat down on one of the little sofas and shut her eyes, opening them sometime later when she felt a tap on her shoulder.

  “Are you all right?” It was Marian, her face flushed and rosy.

  “Fine,” Kate said. “I’m just—” But she couldn’t think how to describe it.

  “Did you like the skit?”

  “It wasn’t bad. Who made it up?”

  “I don’t know,” Marian said. “It’s handed down.”

  Kate thought this sounded funny. “Handed down!” she repeated. “Handed! Right or left?” Suddenly she felt much better. In fact, she felt wonderful. “Shall we dance?” she said.

  “All right. I’m taller, so I’ll lead.”

  They joined the other pairs of girls revolving around the room. “Dancing is so much nicer without boys,” Kate sighed, which made Marian laugh.

  After the dancing there was cake with white frosting and tiny edible silver balls, and more punch, golden-colored this time and fizzy. Kate found herself in the middle of a group of rushees speculating about their chances.

  “It’s hard when you’re rushing four different houses,” said a girl with a big silk rose pinned to her bosom. “Because you have to memorize the history of all of them.”