In the Field

by Rachel Pastan

  But something was wrong. The snapshot of cell division laid out under the microscope, busy as a train station, didn’t look right. “They’re not paired up,” Kate cried, suddenly making sense of what she saw. “Lots of the chromosomes. They’re just, single!”

  “Of course they’re paired up. Let me look.”

  Kate peered harder, taking it all in. Some of the chromosomes were partnered, the way they were supposed to be. Others, though, while they might be more or less in the vicinity of another chromosome, were too far off, so that the duos were more like strangers sharing a park bench than like couples promenading. “They’re univalent,” she said. She raised her head and stared at Jax, whose nostrils were twitching. “Univalent! How can they possibly make viable gametes if they don’t pair up?”

  Jax stepped forward and put his eye to the scope.

  “See?” Kate said. “Those ones at the top are fine. But the ones toward the bottom are all floating free. Unattached!” Suddenly she was furious. How lucky Jax was to have a slide like that! And he didn’t even know it. He didn’t even know what it was. If she hadn’t come along … She stared into his oily dark hair, so shiny she could see herself reflected in it: a distorted shimmer. “Do you see?” she demanded.

  “I knew it was interesting,” he said. His hand reached absently toward the focus knob.

  “Don’t touch that!” she said.

  He dropped his arm; he knew she was right.

  “If I hadn’t come along,” she said, “you’d have tossed this slide, I bet!”

  “Of course I wouldn’t have!”

  “You didn’t even see what you were seeing.”

  “If they’re univalent, they can’t possibly make viable gametes,” Jax said slowly to himself. She could see him beginning to forget, as much as he could manage to, that she was even there.

  CHAPTER 11

  That evening, Kate stayed in the lab long after Cole had gone home. She finished up the table she was making and filed it away. Then, safely alone in the quiet room with the door shut, she took out her notes on Belling’s squash technique and the carmine stain. Whatever she did after hours was her own business, just as it was Cole’s business whatever he was doing now: carving a roast, or dozing in an armchair, or making more little Coles. She fired up the Bunsen burner and began on the preliminary acetic acid solution. When it was ready, she added the carmine, one drop at a time, watching the color bloom in the beaker as she stirred with the glass rod. While it cooled, she went to work on the ferric oxide. It was a fiddly business. She had to start over twice. But except for the waste of materials, she didn’t mind. Time glided past unmarked as breathing, the minute hand sweeping the clock face clean, the spinning earth sailing through space. Kate’s mind was on the work: the heat, the flask, the pipette, the solution. The stain, when it was done, would be the rich red of a king’s robe. Everything humans were—everything in the universe—was constructed from simple chemicals, which, it was believed, had been forged inside stars. You had to concentrate to hold on to a truth like that. You had to stretch your mind wide open to let it in.

  In the morning, once again, Cole was late. Maybe he had another meeting. Maybe he was sick. Maybe the hay fever had laid him low. Sometimes he sent a message when he wasn’t coming in, but other times he just failed to appear. For an hour Kate worked on the trisomics project, speeding through the new slides, each of which told her nothing: Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. She noted the details of the nothing in her log. When she finished this, Cole still hadn’t shown up. It was nearly eleven.

  She had intended to wait till evening, after he went home, to try the new stain, but she couldn’t see the point of that now. She got out the right notebook and settled in. The sun streamed through the windows, making shafts in the air like bars of gold, through which she walked back and forth fetching things from the shelves and cabinets. At her bench, steady-handed, she tapped the cover slip gently with the needle end of a probe.

  Suddenly, loud footsteps and the door was flung open. Cole barreled in, his head thrust forward and his shoulders hunched. He didn’t say a word to her, didn’t even glance her way. He jammed his arms into his lab coat, went to his bench, and began looking through his slides, picking them up and screwing them to the microscope stage so violently she was sure he would break something.

  Kate tried her best to be invisible, moving silently, keeping her head bowed. If he asked her what she was doing …

  But maybe he wouldn’t ask. Sometimes they didn’t speak for entire afternoons! As long as their silence lasted, it was as though they did not exist for each other: as though each of them was alone, which was, she was sure, how they both wanted it. Her heart was beating fast as she screwed the first slide to the stage, but it wasn’t because she was afraid of being caught. It was the excitement of what she might see.

  She lowered her face to the eyepiece.

  And there they were. Long dark threads—the chromosomes! So clear. Her body seemed to melt away. It was as though she disappeared inside the microscope and stood among them as they unspooled like a nest of caterpillars someone had spilled out onto the grass. She looked and looked, as hard as she could.

  Each chromosome was squeezed in at the middle, as though it was wearing a belt. But the indentation was not exactly in the same place on the different chromosomes, any more than a belt was worn in exactly the same place by different people.

  One chromosome had a dark knob toward the top: a bulge like a mouse makes in the snake that has swallowed it.

  Like snakes, too—or like people—the chromosomes were all slightly different lengths. If only you could stretch them out, line them up like children waiting at the classroom door to be dismissed! Kate traced each one with her eye, memorizing it, so that later she could line them all up in her mind. If she could see just a little more clearly …

  Cole cleared his throat. He slammed shut a drawer. He sighed loudly and rattled his glassware. Kate was counting: one, two, three, four, five …

  “Miss Croft!” Cole barked.

  Kate’s head jerked up. “What?” It was always hard, moving from one world to another. A rending of something.

  “I said, we’re nearly out of acetic acid.”

  “Oh! I can order some more. In the meantime we can borrow—”

  “Haven’t I asked you to be frugal with the reagents? Do you have any idea how much it costs to run a lab like this?”

  She did know, actually. She had seen the budget when he’d left it lying around. She knew, too, that her labor came cheaper than Thatch’s or Jax’s—or than that of any of the male graduate students. “I’m sorry,” she said, and bowed her head to conceal her blazing joy.

  The sun had moved around the building and the overhead lights were on by the time Thatch loped into the lab with the cheerful air of a dog with its ears pricked up. He had another young man with him, tall and serious-looking with a square, solid face and square, solid farmer’s hands. Well, they were all farmers here, even Whitaker. Even Jax, who had grown up on Beacon Hill and gone to Dartmouth.

  “This is Paul Novak,” Thatch said. “Paul, this is Dr. Hiram Cole. He’s trying to nail down some tricky maize trisomics. This is Kate Croft, a year ahead of you in terms of seniority, probably light-years ahead in terms of raw brain power.”

  “Pshaw,” Kate said.

  “I understand you’re going to be working directly with Professor Whitaker,” Cole said. There was something in his voice as he pronounced the Great Man’s name: a chilly bile Kate hadn’t heard before.

  “Yes,” the new student drawled, yawning and looking around the room. “Trisomics, eh?”

  Cole, blinking like a rabbit in his overstarched lab coat, began laboriously explaining the project, while the tall young man rocked back and forth on his heels.

  After a few minutes, taking advantage of a pause, Thatch broke in, “By the way,
Cole, congratulations!”

  Cole looked blank. “What for?”

  “I hear you and Mrs. Cole are expecting another baby.” Thatch grasped the older man’s hand and shook it.

  “What a surprise!” Kate said. Well, no wonder he’d been out of sorts! “All my best wishes to you and Mrs. Cole.”

  “Thanks, thanks.” Cole looked past Thatch’s head in the direction of the door. In another minute, he found an excuse to exit through it.

  “My goodness,” Kate said when he was gone. “The last one is barely walking.”

  “I guess he’s a quick worker,” Paul remarked.

  “Not in every way,” Kate said.

  “Poor Cole,” Thatch said. “He’s not so bad. Just a little plodding. Whitaker shouldn’t have assigned you to him. Just being in the same room with you saps his energy. Anyone can see that.”

  “Is that right?” Paul asked.

  “I told you, Kate’s a phenomenon,” Thatch said.

  “Have you asked Whitaker to reassign you?” Paul was wandering around the room, peering at things.

  “Asked Whitaker?” Kate said.

  “Maybe he would.” Paul yawned again. “If you asked him.”

  “You’re in a position of influence,” Kate said. “Maybe you’d ask for me.” She wondered if it was true that he and the Great Man were related.

  Paul was picking up Cole’s slides, holding them up to the window and squinting at them. He managed to look both alert and bored, as though he were searching without much hope for something worth his attention. If he really had gotten a girl pregnant, Kate thought, he certainly wouldn’t have married her. “How did you know about the baby?” she asked Thatch.

  “I was passing by Whitaker’s office and Cole came out. Looking not very happy. And Whitaker said, Congratulations on the new little F1 anyway!” That was a joke: F1 was the term for the first generation of a genetic cross. “My guess, and this is informed by a conversation with Miss Floris—that’s Whitaker’s secretary, Novak, she likes chocolates, in case you ever need anything—is that Cole went to see Whitaker to ask about some sort of promotion now that he’s going to have another mouth to feed.”

  “I guess Whitaker couldn’t help him out,” Kate said.

  “Couldn’t, or wouldn’t.”

  Now Paul was standing by Kate’s microscope which still held the slide with the carmine-stained chromosomes. “Do you mind?” he asked.

  “It’s not—” Kate began. “I don’t …” But she wanted him to see! She wanted everyone to see. Besides, she was sure he wouldn’t have any idea what he was looking at.

  Bending over the scope, Paul’s loose-limbed body grew taut. “This is maize?”

  “Yes.”

  He raised his head and looked at her differently: a charged, hard, calculating look. “I’ve never seen maize chromosomes so clearly. What did you do?”

  “It’s called the squash technique,” she said. “The stain uses carmine and ferric oxide. But really I’d like to get them clearer than this.”

  “So you got Cole to agree?” Thatch asked.

  For a moment Kate had forgotten all about Thatch. But there he was, watching her steadily. She knew he knew she hadn’t asked Cole.

  Paul began to pepper Kate with questions about her preparation. “Cole must be beside himself,” he said.

  “Oh,” Kate said, feeling her cheeks pinkening. “There’s no need to mention this to him. I’m still working out the details.”

  “So you didn’t talk to him,” Thatch said.

  “I will,” Kate said. “Obviously.”

  Paul’s hard eyes glinted. “A little private project on the side?” he said.

  “Dr. Cole wants to just concentrate on the trisomics for now,” Kate said primly.

  “Then he’s a fool,” Paul said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you could see those well enough to characterize them.”

  She felt as though it were she who was splayed out under the microscope, his eye boring down. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” she said.

  Thatch walked over and put his eye where Paul’s had been. Paul’s sudden lazy, self-amused smile made Kate wonder how she could have thought he looked like a farmer. “So your advisor thinks you’re working on trisomics, but really you’re secretly characterizing chromosomes?”

  Kate lifted her chin. “I’m working on trisomics,” she said. “Almost all the time.”

  Paul laughed. Then he said, almost casually, “I’m working on triploids.” Triploids were like trisomics, except that, instead of just one extra chromosome, they had a whole extra set. He began to tell her about his project, which was quite interesting, and not so different from Cole’s—which, she knew, might be a problem. But she couldn’t worry about that. All the time he was talking she was aware of Thatch bent over the microscope, his eyes on her slide. At last she couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “What do you think, Thatch?” she asked. “They’re clear, aren’t they?”

  “Very clear.” Slowly he straightened his long back. His face was clouded. “Cole’s not going to be happy that you did this without talking to him.”

  “He’s never happy,” Kate said.

  “I see I’ve walked right into a blackmail opportunity,” Paul said cheerfully. And then, when Kate’s head whirled around, he added, “Kidding. Of course. But, Miss Croft, maybe you’ll let me bend your ear about triploids sometime.”

  “Kate,” she said.

  “Kate,” Paul said.

  She could feel Thatch’s exhale, like a quiet snort.

  “I’d hate to waste my time basically duplicating what Dr. Cole is doing,” Paul said.

  “I wouldn’t worry about that,” Kate said. “He’s hardly making any progress. He’d do better if he listened to me, but so far he hasn’t, much.”

  “Kate,” Thatch said.

  “It’s only the truth,” Kate said.

  “For my own sake,” Paul said, “I guess I should hope he keeps on not listening.”

  CHAPTER 12

  At the Tuesday lab meeting, people took turns reporting on the progress of their work. Today Jax stood at the foot of the long conference table. The overhead projector beside him sent out waves of heat. It was July, and the thermometer on the lab windowsill had read ninety-six at noon. A big fan on a steel pole rumbled in the corner, the tepid breeze rattling everyone’s papers. All around the table, the men in their khaki pants and white or blue shirts with the sleeves rolled up sweated, wiping their foreheads with their handkerchiefs. Thatch appeared to be listening closely, and probably he was. He had the gift of being interested in everything, and he seemed to have room for everything in his clear, capacious mind. Paul, sitting beside him, was frowning over a scratch pad on which he seemed to be doodling. Cole seemed lost in his own thoughts, his head tilted up toward a corner of the ceiling where a cobweb fluttered. Whitaker puffed on his pipe, his eyes half closed. It was not unheard of for Whitaker to fall asleep during presentations, but this did not prevent him from asking sharp, informed questions the moment the lights went up.

  From the foot of the table, Jax droned on, reviewing the work that had been done up until now, the approach he and his adviser had at first pursued, and their initial lack of success with that approach. “But finally,” he said, “I had a breakthrough.”

  Kate sat up straighter, staring at Jax, whose haughty face stretched into an expression of nonchalance as he slid a new transparency onto the glass.

  “Diakinesis,” he said, “turns out be the crucial stage. As you can see from this sketch, the chromosomes are not pairing up as we would expect.” He looked up at the screen, admiring his own drawing.

  Sweat stood out on Kate’s face, dripping into her stinging eyes. She stared at Jax’s sketch, which was like the slide she had seen under his microscope, only exaggerated, the unpaired chromo
somes slightly farther apart.

  “They are univalent, as you can clearly see,” he said. “As such, they are unlikely to pair up and make viable gametes.”

  Everyone was paying attention now. Paul was frowning thoughtfully and drumming the eraser end of his pencil on his scratch pad. Cole stared furiously at the screen and mopped his brow. Whitaker was nodding, the smoke from his pipe jogging up and down, making a new pattern—a pattern of approval—as Kate waited for Jax to tell the room that she had looked at the slide, that she had told him what was there. To look at her, to nod in her direction, to say her name.

  Carelessly, Jax surveyed the room, savoring his triumph even as his face wore a studied waxy blandness. As his eyes swept past hers, Kate thought she saw a glimmer, like a shard of hate, flare out. He switched to the next transparency.

  After the meeting, as the men stood around chatting, Kate took hold of Thatch’s sleeve and pulled him out of the conference room. She led him down the hall and into his office and shut the door. The room was stifling. Thatch leaned against the wall and gestured to her to take the chair, but she was too angry to sit. “I’m the one who saw that the chromosomes weren’t pairing up!” she said. “I’m the one who showed Jax. It was right there on the slide, but he didn’t see it.”

  Thatch blinked several times, quickly, as he often did when he heard something he couldn’t square with his view of the world. As if clearing his vision would resolve the problem, wash the unpleasantness away. The ends of his lips twitched down and then up again. She knew he wanted to shake his head and tell her she must be mistaken. Instead he said, “Start at the beginning, please.”

  The short history came out in a series of terse, orderly sentences, which she offered up like sticks of dry firewood, waiting for him to strike the match. Instead, he stood for a long time, his shirt very white against the dark paneling of the walls.