A Stranger's House

by Bret Lott

  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 anything 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 ps
ych 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.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Life in the world of Neuroscience and Behavior.”

  “References,” she said, and her face went back into the dark as she looked down the hall and away from me. She looked down, and her shoulders fell.

  “See you at lunch?” I said.

  She was silent, and turned to me. I could see her face again. This time there was no expression, no look at all.

  I placed my hand on her shoulder and gently rubbed it. “What’s wrong?” I said. I paused a second. I smiled. “You got your Wheaties today, remember?”

  She shrugged, though the movement, I knew, meant nothing. It was only a sign to me that she could tell I was trying to make her feel better.

  She said, “There’s nothing wrong, but then there’s plenty. Sure, we can have lunch.” She looked at me. “In the computer room.” She paused. “But if I told you it was my period, would you believe me?” She smiled. “If I told you I was part of that clinical study on PMS they’re doing over at Tobin, would you believe me?”

  I laughed at her, at this woman I’d thought had been hired by Will because she was pretty, because she was beautiful in her athletic way. At first I’d been jealous, not for any secret love I held for Will, but because, once I’d gotten to work with her in the laboratory, I’d seen how professional she was, even though she was only a senior back then; how meticulously she learned to block brains, slice and set and mount and stain, all within a week and a half, when it had taken me three. Since then Will had had her co-write three papers, the latest with her name listed first, when the closest I had come had been the second name on two papers, the third on two more.

  But that jealousy had disappeared over the last two years, when I had seen in her that this was her career, that co-writing papers and staining cresyl-violet thin slips of rabbit brain were what she wanted to do for the rest of her life. She wanted to be here in the laboratory, her white lab coat on, her eyes peering into a microscope to trace lesions made in single cells of the Red Nucleus, all this to contribute to a larger canvas, that of Artificial Intelligence. She wanted to try to find exactly where in the brain reaction occurred, which particular neuron fired which particular neuron and on and on into the circuit that would inevitably make a rabbit blink.

  There had been a time when I, too, had felt that way, when I couldn’t wait to get here in the morning, to get things rolling, to go downstairs to the basement and run rabbits so that I might contribute to the whole of science, but that, like the jealousy I had felt toward Sandra, had been lost, too. Now I merely came to work—work—and assisted in research. I would stay here, I knew, as long as grants from the government held out, and, judging from the success of the research done in this former boys’ dormitory, that money would keep coming in, and I would have a job. Nothing more: only a job. Sometimes I wept over this, over the realization that there might not be anything more for me to do than be here; but most times I just worked, collected my pay, accepted my benefits, comforted, somehow, by the knowledge that if indeed I ever had a baby, the insurance would have covered everything.

  I looked at Sandra, and thought I had seen some sort of hope slipping away from her. I thought maybe she was losing something, or perhaps she had already lost it.

  I said, “If you tell me you’re having your period, I’ll believe you. But if you tell me the truth at lunch, I’ll believe you even more.” I smiled at her, not sure whether or not she could see me in the darkness. “In the computer room.”

  “Okay,” she said, and took hold of my hand on her shoulder. She squeezed it, let go, and turned toward the computer room at the far end of the hall. I watched her move toward the bare bulb at the hall’s halfway point, and saw her burst into color as she passed beneath it, her white coat brilliant, her brunette hair shiny in the French braid, the pale blue of her shirt cuffs below her lab coat sleeves. Then she disappeared again into the dark.

  Rabbit running would be easy today. We were at the beginning of a new study, the rabbits fresh, delivered only last night by Mr. Gadsen, the animal supplier for most of the labs on campus. He was an old man, short and a little overweight, but you could tell by looking at him that he had been in shape at one time: his forearms were still thick and hard, his shoulders broad. He had a fringe of white hair just
above his collar in back, and always had on his Boston Red Sox cap, the bill crumpled and soft. He always wore a red corduroy shirt and ancient, dirty Levi’s and a Levi’s jacket, the elbows worn through to show red shirt.

  He was a good man, I knew; he treated the rabbits as best as anyone could, though none of us had ever been out to his farm in Leverett to find out what happened out there, how he was able to raise these animals so well. They were always healthy, bright, clean. Seldom did any of them come in sick.

  But Mr. Gadsen—no one, except perhaps Will, knew him to have a first name—drank too much, his nose and face flushed no matter what time of day or year. A couple of times I’d stepped into Will’s office, just after a new batch of rabbits had been delivered downstairs, only to find Mr. Gadsen leaning forward in the old rocking chair, Will in the blue chair, each with a Styrofoam cup in his hand, Mr. Gadsen with a fifth of some off-brand whiskey in his other hand.

  “To new rabbits,” Mr. Gadsen would laugh and look up at me each time. He always gave the same toast, holding the cup in the air as if it were fine crystal: “May your happiness multiply as quickly as do my rabbits,” and he would laugh again, knock back the slug of whiskey, his BoSox cap never falling off no matter how quickly he snapped back his head.

  I felt sorry for him, always smelling of booze and animals: rabbits, guinea pigs, blue jays, cats, everything else he handled. That smell made me want to cry for him sometimes, but most often I had to smile because he seemed happy, and he cared for the animals.

  About a year ago, for no other reason than that he wanted to try someone new, Will decided to buy some animals from a different supplier, this one out near Worcester. When Mr. Gadsen had called to find out how many rabbits we would need for the next study, it had been left to me to explain that we had used somebody else, Will in London to visit a laboratory, everyone in our own lab busy with something else.