In the Field

by Rachel Pastan

  Kate laid her hand on Sarah’s sleeve. “Thank you,” she said. “It was a very nice holiday. It was the nicest holiday I’ve ever had.”

  “Please don’t ruin it,” Sarah said. “Retroactively.” Then she stepped back, frowning down the hall.

  Paul stood in the doorway of his lab, watching them. “I didn’t mean to interrupt anything,” he said. “I just wanted say, there’s a guest house, Kate.” He spoke very gravely—very formally—like a suitor in a novel. “If you wanted to stay for a couple of days, I’d be happy to put you up.”

  CHAPTER 25

  Kate told Sarah she’d be back Sunday, but then she pushed through the last bits of work in a great flurry in order to make the Saturday afternoon train. It had taken no little effort to sort out Neurospora’s cytology, but she’d gotten it done, and in just a couple of weeks. After the long summer of illness and idleness, her brain felt bright and clear.

  Paul was pleased. Early that last morning, she walked him through the meiotic cycle—prophase, fuse, synapse, and then the extraordinary elongation after the synapse where the chromosomes ballooned up to fifty times their usual size. That was the crucial stage, the moment you could make out their markings.

  “I knew you’d do it,” Paul said, looking up from the microscope, his green eyes glinting with pleasure and triumph. “We’ll go out tonight and celebrate. We’ve earned a good dinner. We’ll toast to the meiotic cycle.”

  But Kate had already checked the train schedule. “Next time,” she said.

  “Whatever’s in Ithaca can wait another day,” Paul said.

  Something in the way he said it made Kate think he knew what it was she was hurrying back to. Knew and understood it, and at the same time discounted it.

  “This is great work, Paul,” Kate said. “Whitaker is going to be so proud of you. He’s going to take all the credit.” She laughed, and he laughed, too, and stopped pressing her to stay.

  He drove her to the station in Boston and waited with her on the platform. They talked about what came next—the new experiments he’d have to do, the first paper he would write—until the train thundered in, blasting dust and grit over them. Paul took her hand. “This was quite a time,” he said.

  For a moment, she felt the thrill of their connection. Women and men, sweating in their summer dresses or in their shirtsleeves with their cuffs turned back, descended from the broiling train, which would pause here for just ten minutes before barreling north. The pleasure of what they’d done was a coolness settling through her. She squeezed Paul’s hand, then hopped up onto the train.

  Dusk was falling as the train pulled into Ithaca. Kate walked up the hill from the station, the grass softening from green to gray under the massed trees. At the Sonnenfeld house—usually quiet on a Saturday night—lights blazed, and the sound of the gramophone drifted out onto the street. Kate stood at the back door listening, then lifted the latch and went in.

  “Hello?” she called as she moved through the kitchen, which smelled of roasting meat and cut flowers. A frantic scramble of footsteps, then the dogs were there, whining and jumping up, their shiny auburn fur silky and clean.

  “Holly! Rose! Get down.” Sarah appeared in the doorway, tall and lean in a sweater and pleated skirt, her hair as bright and silken in the lamplight as the dogs’ long ears. “We didn’t expect you until tomorrow.”

  “I managed to get away early.”

  Sarah sauntered over, kneed aside the ecstatic dogs, leaned down, and touched her cheek to Kate’s. The smell of her—oranges and cigarettes and lipstick—washed over Kate like the first cold ocean wave. “A friend’s come for dinner,” Sarah said. “Mutti made her famous veal roast.”

  In the pause that followed, a voice in the other room could be heard saying, “I might go to Canada. There’s snow on some of the mountains all summer.”

  “I don’t think you’ve ever met Justine,” Sarah said. “She’s been away, training in Switzerland.”

  Kate followed Sarah into the living room, where Mrs. Sonnenfeld enveloped her in a whirlwind of talcum powder. “Kate!” she pronounced, savoring the consonants.

  “Sorry to barge in.”

  “Please,” Mrs. Sonnenfeld scoffed. She directed Kate to the leather armchair.

  “Kate, this is Justine Garr, the skier,” Sarah said. “Justine, this is Kate Croft, the geneticist.”

  Justine was tall with a wing of blond hair on either side of her tan, hard face. Her eyes were startlingly blue and light-flecked, the irises rimmed with black like a Siberian husky’s. “Pleased to meet you,” she said.

  “Justine skied at Lake Placid,” Sarah said. “She took eighth in the slalom. Now she’s training for Garmisch.”

  It look Kate a moment to realize Sarah was talking about the Olympic Games. “You must be very good,” she said stupidly. Justine smiled. She wore a long white jacket that cinched in at the waist and a svelte white knee-length skirt from under which her shins gleamed in their silk stockings.

  “Ah, Garmisch!” Mrs. Sonnenfeld said. “We took holidays there sometimes when I was a girl. In spring, the mountain was a sea of wildflowers. All pink, like walking up the side of a cloud when the sun is setting.”

  “There won’t be any wildflowers when I’m there.”

  “You should see Justine ski,” Sarah said to Kate. “She’s like a flash of lightning on the slopes.”

  “You’ve skied together, then,” Kate said.

  “I’ve chugged along in her wake once or twice.” Sarah took out her cigarettes and lit one, blew smoke through her red pursed lips.

  Mrs. Sonnenfeld turned to Kate. “Sarah says you have been working very hard, when you should still have been resting. Just look at the pouches under your eyes. Tonight you will go to bed early, and tomorrow you will sit out in the garden and admire my flowerbeds.”

  Kate smiled. “Tomorrow I have to go look at my field.”

  Justine laid a finger on Sarah’s wrist. “What are those, Players? Let me have one.”

  Sarah held out the silver case. “Help yourself.”

  The skier, thrusting her hand in, spilled the contents all over the floor.

  After Justine Garr had gone home, and the washing up had been done and the ashtrays emptied and the sofa cushions plumped, Mrs. Sonnenfeld let out a long sigh and announced that she was heading up to bed.

  “I’m coming up, too, Mutti,” Sarah said. “I’m bushed.”

  “It’s Kate who should be bushed,” Mrs. Sonnenfeld said.

  “I’ll just finish this cigarette first,” Kate said.

  Kate went out to the back porch to smoke and wait for Sarah to come out. Ten minutes passed, then another ten. Leaves whispered on the branches of the tulip poplars. Bats fluttered and plunged above the black lawn. It was quiet here in Ithaca after two weeks in Cambridge, where the trolley clattered and groups of carousing undergraduates swarmed by at all hours. The first few nights, unable to find a way into the Neurospora problem, she’d lain awake in the dark listening to the clamor, doubting herself and missing Sarah and worrying about her plants. But after she’d broken through—after everything began to come clear—she had slept soundly and awakened early in the August heat, impatient to pick the work up again. She had thought about Sarah less, but that didn’t mean she didn’t miss her. Now, sitting in darkness, looking out into darkness, her longing lodged in her throat like a bone.

  Tomorrow she would see her field. She would get the first hint whether her few long-shot crosses had produced anything interesting. She knew it wasn’t likely. Still, she had to work with the data she had, which was better than no data. Sarah had been right about one thing: she needed to find a project that was as exciting as Paul’s. Half as exciting.

  At last Kate went back into the house, moving clumsily among the shadowy furniture. At the second-floor landing, she hesitated. Mrs. Sonnenfeld would be asleep in
her room at one end of the corridor, dreaming of mountain slopes covered with wildflowers, perhaps. At the other end was Sarah’s room. Kate took off her shoes and slipped along the hall and tapped on Sarah’s door.

  No answer.

  She waited and knocked again, softly, but loud enough.

  Still no answer. Was she asleep? Angry?

  Had she slipped out to meet Justine Garr?

  Tomorrow I’ll see my field, she reminded herself, as she marched back down the corridor and up to her own room, shoes in hand. She pushed the door open carelessly so that it banged against the wall.

  Out of the darkness, Sarah’s voice said, “I thought you’d never come! I’ve been waiting hours.”

  Kate stopped dead on the rug. She began to tremble—with relief, or with fury, or maybe just exhaustion. Sarah sat up on the bed. Her hair was loose and tangled, and her thin cotton pajama bottoms rode up her long pale shins. She seemed very far away to Kate, on a different scale, like a figure in a dollhouse. Kate longed to step through into that dollhouse and lie down in Sarah arms, but something prevented her. She kept thinking about the blond Olympian, her obvious intimacy with the family. What would have happened if Kate hadn’t shown up? Did Sarah wish she hadn’t?

  She could turn around and walk down the stairs and out of the house if she had to, she told herself. She had done something like that before.

  She pushed the memory back down into the dark where she kept it hidden. But its horror was not so easily dissipated.

  To calm herself, she opened the suitcase she had carried up before dinner and began to unpack. One by one she shook out her white blouses and slipped them onto hangers and hung them on the wardrobe rail.

  “What are you doing?” Sarah said.

  “Putting away my clothes.” Nightgown in the top bureau drawer, underclothes and socks in the next drawer down, cardigan sweaters in the bottom drawer.

  Sarah leaned back against the headboard. “Did you figure out that man’s cytology for him?” she asked coolly.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s good. He must be pleased.”

  “He is.” Her face felt hot and soft, her belly cold and metallic. She knew they were fighting, but what were they fighting about?

  “I guess it was worth it, then,” Sarah said.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Worth sending me back alone. Worth two weeks apart.”

  “I didn’t want to be apart,” Kate said.

  “If that were true,” Sarah said, “you wouldn’t have stayed there.”

  “I came back as quickly as I could,” Kate said. Couldn’t Sarah see that only something that mattered deeply could have kept her there? Was it really necessary to spell all that out? At the bottom of her suitcase was the little pouch of sand Sarah had given her. She took it out and stood holding it in the dark.

  “I don’t like him,” Sarah said. “He’s arrogant and self-centered.”

  “I know,” Kate said. “I know all about him.” She forced herself to turn away from the dresser and go over to the bed. She sat carefully on the very end, holding the pouch of sand, and looked at Sarah. She looked very fragile and beautiful in her dark blue pajamas.

  “He looked ready to eat you up,” Sarah said.

  “No one’s going to eat me up,” Kate said. “Besides, what about that skier?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Sarah said. “Why are you being so stupid?”

  Was she being stupid?

  The mattress shifted as Sarah moved toward her. Kate could feel the warmth of her as she crouched, inches away, her arms wrapped tightly around her knees, the smell of her sharp and thrilling. “I hate being away from you,” Sarah hissed. Then she tilted forward and buried her face in Kate’s neck.

  Something hard and rubbery inside Kate’s chest slackened, opened. “I missed you so much,” she whispered fiercely into Sarah’s ear.

  It was such a relief to realize it was true.

  In the morning, Kate got up early, slipped an apple into her pocket, and drove to campus. Even though she knew what to expect, it was still a shock to see the decimated field, like visiting an old friend who has been ill.

  But the twenty-six plants that had survived the flood looked healthy enough, their stems sturdy, their leaves lifting toward the cool clear sky. Slowly, Kate moved from plant to plant. The carefully fertilized ears swelled in their sheaths, ragged shocks of browning silks drooping from the tips. Most of the leaves were bright green, but a few were mottled or striped. Some of these changes were caused by known mutations on chromosome nine, and these were what she was particularly eager to see.

  She was halfway through the field when something caught her eye.

  On a whitish leaf covered with small green streaks, two long odd patches lay side by side. The leaf itself—its background pattern—wasn’t what was odd. She’d seen that kind of thing before.

  But the patches were something else altogether. One thing that was peculiar: they were adjacent, yet they didn’t match. She crouched down in the dirt to see better.

  Like the rest of the leaf, the patches had pale green streaks. But in one patch, there were very few streaks compared to the background: a sparse flurry. In the other patch, by contrast, there was a blizzard.

  Two different oddities, unfurling side by side. Different, yet clearly related.

  Reciprocals.

  One with fewer streaks, and the other with more: as though some fixed quantity had been divided unequally between them.

  As though one had taken some of what belonged to the other.

  A loose fist of heat moved through her chest.

  Step by step, her mind climbed the ladder—yet so quickly that the idea felt like one full-blown thought. The words bloomed in her mind: twin sectors.

  Twins, but not identical twins. One had gained something that the other had lost.

  Side by side as they were, the cells of the two sectors would have developed from a single ancestor: one cell that had divided and distributed something unevenly. But what?

  What was gained? What was lost?

  Her heart raced like a bird skimming a wave. Here, in her field, she had stumbled on a door in the wall.

  PART FOUR

  1935

  CHAPTER 26

  Dusk was creeping up from the woods by the time Kate finished the harvesting. Her back ached and her clothes were stiff with dust and sweat as she dragged the sacks of corn to the drying shed. But she felt good. This season’s crop was all descended from the twin-sector plant of two years before, and she had high hopes for it.

  “You look like a pig that’s been wallowing in mud,” Sarah said as Kate came into the kitchen. “Mutti left a plate in the oven for you. She’s off at a concert.”

  The kitchen, with its checkered floor and yellow gingham curtains, was spotless. It smelled of roast pork, oregano, and flowers. On the table, fringed crimson tulips yawned wide, pollen dusting the linen cloth with dark purple grains. The dogs sniffed at Kate’s trousers with interest until Sarah chased them away.

  It hurt to bend over and unlace her boots. It hurt to peel her socks off her feet. “I’m going to get everything dirty,” Kate said.

  “Then you’d better undress right there.”

  Kate started unbuttoning her filthy shirt. “Sarah,” she began. The letter had arrived four days ago, and she still hadn’t said anything about it.

  “Wait,” Sarah interrupted. “I’ll do it.” She took her time, easing each button through its buttonhole, her fingers as close to Kate as they could get without touching her. Kate’s breath fluttered. She swayed forward, but Sarah drew back. “Patience.”

  At last Sarah finished the buttons. She moved around behind Kate, easing the blouse off her shoulders, tugging the sleeves down by the cuffs so that Kate’s arms were pulled taut behind
her. Kate shivered. “Listen,” she said.

  “Are you cold?” Sarah teased. “Let me put your shirt back on.”

  “No,” Kate begged. “No.” She let the thought of the letter fall away.

  The khaki trousers had buttons, too, which Sarah undid even more slowly. Kate’s legs trembled, waiting for the brush of Sarah’s fingers. At last she was naked. Slowly Sarah began to touch her breasts, her sides, her sensitive ass. Kate reached out and pulled Sarah close. She kissed her neck and mouth, tugged at her until they fell together onto the cool clean floor, closed her eyes.

  “Look at me,” Sarah said.

  Kate opened them again and looked. Sarah’s face was lovely close up, the clean planes of bone under the skin, the tiny freckles scattered like stars. She was still dressed, but that problem was quickly solved. Grazing Sarah’s spun-sugar breasts with her lips was almost too much pleasure to bear. Kate’s eyes closed again the way they always did, her mind drifting away to wherever it went, leaving her body behind, that robin’s-egg shell of nerve endings like bundles of ribbons.

  Later, as they lay entangled on the floor, a pattering of rain started up in the leaves of the poplar outside the window. Sarah was already dozing, but Kate was wide awake. “Sarah.”

  “Mmm.”

  Kate looked at her white shoulder and at her dark hair, threaded now with a few silver strands. Maybe she should wait a little longer. Wait till Sarah woke up on her own; till tomorrow; till it was too late to do anything and silence had become its own answer.

  “Sarah,” she said. “Listen.”

  Sarah blinked her eyes open. “We should get you into the bath.”

  Kate blurted out: “I got a letter from Fred Zimmer. His institute has finally gotten some real funding, and he’s offered me a job.” In the silence that followed, it seemed odd for them to find themselves naked on the cold checkerboard kitchen floor.

  Sarah sat slowly up. She tossed her hair back over her shoulders and raked it back from her face. “Isn’t that marvelous!” she said. And then, almost casually: “I forget where Fred Zimmer works.”