She was in the lab a few days later, with a rat in the ether jar, when the phone rang. It was late in the afternoon. “I’ll call you back,” she told Jake. “Fifteen minutes.” Then she added, “I miss you,” to soften her abruptness.
The rat ran around the jar frantically. For an instant he stood up on his hind legs, his front paws against the wall of the jar, and looked at Lottie with his weak pink eyes. He took in gulps of the etherized air, ran, stood up, and then dropped. His breathing grew fast and hoarse. She waited two minutes, then lifted the unconscious animal out of the jar and laid him on a paper towel beside the sink. Attached to the cage six inches above the rat was a feeding bottle that had been filled with fixative an hour earlier. Now it was two-thirds empty. A piece of clear plastic tubing was hooked to the neck of the bottle and clamped off there; the other end of the tube reached to the counter. She opened a sterile needle package, then cut through the rat’s rib cage with scissors and, holding his heart between her fingers, slipped the needle into the aorta. She hooked the needle to the plastic tube—a little blood backed up—and taped it in place. Then she cut through the auricle, and as the blood oozed out into the sink, opened up the clamp: the fixative, a clear liquid, gushed down the tube. The animal stirred and began to convulse violently, first his upper limbs, then the lower, and finally the tail. After a moment he was still.
Lottie had fixed him alive, arresting all his cells in motion as if she were filming a sports event, a football game, perhaps, and had stopped the film at one particular frame where the players were all moving in different but coordinated directions: this one leaping into the air, that one starting to fall, another blocking for the passer as torn-loose clods of earth flew into their faces but never reached them. She had stopped the rat dead so that her results would be less artifactual in her critics’ eyes. Poor creature, he was really all artifact. With his soft white fur and pink eyes he looked like a store-bought Easter bunny. Put him out there on his own with all those streetwise rats and he wouldn’t last half an hour. Swiftly and cleanly, she slit the animal’s throat, then dissected out the salivary glands. She lifted them gently with the forceps and placed them in the vial of buffer. She unhooked the rat, washed her hands, and called Jake.
“I’ve got a job for tonight,” Jake said. “A choir concert up in Winango. The accompanist took a nap this afternoon and died. An old guy, in his nineties. I played with him once in a group.”
“That’s lovely. I mean, about the job.”
“Well, he was very old. It’s two hundred bucks. They’re desperate.”
“That’s okay money.” Lottie said. Then she remembered. “What about Ruth? What about the dinner she’s making for you?”
“She told me to fuck myself.”
Lottie let out a sigh.
“I have to leave now. It’s a two-hour drive.”
“And Lila’s got a date.”
“I feel bad about it but I’m not going to turn down two hundred dollars to eat the casserole at its peak.”
“Ruth will have to babysit,” Lottie said.
Mincing the glands, she had a moment’s pleasure thinking about that snotty kid feeding her fancy dinner to a six-year-old and a two-year-old. Ruth had begun to cook when her mother took an expensive course at the Cordon Bleu school in San Francisco, paid for, naturally, by Jake. His ex-wife had not remarried and when she cried to him (collect), Jake’s heart bled money. It angered Lottie that he was such a soft touch and they’d had terrible fights about it. But there was no budging him. Behind his stubbornness was his belief that leaving his daughter was the worst thing he’d done in his life. She remembered how bitterly he’d laughed one day when he got a printed request to adopt a fatherless child for an evening a month: “I already have a fatherless child.”
Once when they were arguing heatedly, he’d yelled at her, “What about your arrangement with your good old ex? How come we never talk about that?”
“What’s one thing got to do with the other?”
“It’s not relevant that you get a hundred bucks a month when old Charlie remembers? That doesn’t affect our finances?”
“You’re clouding the issue. You’re dragging in extraneous things to take the heat off yourself!”
“A hundred bucks a month for sixteen years! What about inflation?”
“You’re just trying to change the subject!” Lottie screamed.
“And he’s a professor now and his wife works, too!”
“He’s just an associate professor! And his wife’s a secretary!” In a shrill voice she reminded him how badly paid academics were in the Southwest and that Charlie had two little children to provide for and a third on the way. She also explained grimly that she’d agreed to such a small amount in the first place because she didn’t want any trouble with Charlie all those years when she was on her own—he could have tried to take Lila away.
“Those years are over,” Jake said. “The college years are beginning.”
“You don’t want to help out, you don’t have to. We’ll get by, we always have.”
Jake took a deep breath. “That’s a mean thing to say.”
After a moment, Lottie apologized. “I just meant she’ll probably get a scholarship.”
“Like hell, that’s what you meant,” Jake said. “If she gets one, terrific. And if Charlie kicks in some money, that won’t kill anybody either. But Lila will have whatever she needs, regardless. She’s my child and you’re my wife, whether either of you knows it or not.”
“Sorry,” Lottie said. “Sorry.” She squeezed his hand.
“Still, I wish you’d think over why you can’t ask him for anything.”
Lottie said she’d think about it, but thinking about it was like fingering a boil. She would have to remember how everything had dried up between her and Charlie, and how she’d abandoned him and taken his daughter away. And although she could hear Jake remonstrating with her in her mind’s ear (Don’t you think the statute of limitations has run on that? And what’s it got to do with Lila’s going to college now? And isn’t Charlie responsible if Lila’s a stranger to him? There were summers, there was Christmas, there were spring vacations), still it didn’t quiet her conscience much.
She wondered if she also felt guilty about having Jake and the children and her career. But why should she? She hadn’t taken him away from anybody. She hadn’t stolen Davy and Simon, plagiarized her Ph.D. thesis. Yet once it crossed her mind to ask Jake if he thought they were paying money for their happiness, for the fact that they genuinely liked each other and the kids and their work, as if such everyday pleasures were wild flukes, random happenings not really in the order of things.
Hours must have gone into that dinner Ruth had prepared, that duck casserole. Of course, Ruth had nothing else to do with her time. The girl had no friends in town because she was never around long enough to make any. And while Lila didn’t mind lending Ruth her books, Ruth couldn’t sit still. She had her physical life—her dancing, exercising, jogging, swimming in the town pool; her Saturday night cooking feats; and her father.
Did it hurt Ruth, being surrounded by a family that she was part of, but not part of? And when she returned to her mother, did she miss them? Did she want her mother to remarry and have more children? Or was Ruth glad to be free of her father’s brood, with all the dirt and noise and competitiveness, and be once more the only child, her mother’s focus? Although Lottie had known the girl for seven, almost eight years, it was as if Ruth put on a lead shield in her presence so that she was ignorant of her stepdaughter’s inner life.
Did Ruth armor herself because she felt in danger of being drawn to Lottie? One summer Lottie had come upon her old paperback copy of Great Women in Science, which she’d had since high school, in the girl’s underwear drawer. She also noticed that in family discussions Ruth was especially attentive to whatever Lottie had to say, although in the end, as though catching herself, she would make a derogatory remark. And Lottie was usually missing a scarf or
handkerchief in September after Ruth had gone.
As Lottie washed the minced fixed tissue with buffer, she tried not to breathe in too deeply. The fixative, that lethal film, could fix her lungs as well as the rats’. Many of the chemicals she worked with routinely were carcinogens or poisons of other types. She was killing cells in order to have a look at them. At least when she was using osmium she tried to work under a hood, a high-domed chamber with an air vent that sucked off fumes. But the noise was annoying and she felt confined. Occasionally she wondered if she would die of her work. Madame Curie’s precious radium had destroyed her blood cells. At least Lottie wasn’t working with anything radioactive.
Lottie called home but hung up after one ring. She did another rat. Then she called again and asked Davy, who picked up the phone, to get Ruth.
“If you can wait until eight thirty to serve dinner, I’ll come home and eat with you.”
After a long pause Ruth said, “Suit yourself.”
At seven o’clock she tried to sort out what to take home with her. Having planned to stay at the lab until late Sunday afternoon, she had brought rations as if she were going camping: tuna fish sandwiches for tonight’s dinner and peanut butter sandwiches for tomorrow’s breakfast, a quart of skim milk, two thermoses of iced tea; Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and the most recent issues of the Journal of Histochemistry and Cytochemistry and the Journal of Anatomy; also a heavyweight blue wool scarf she was knitting for Lila as part of a hat, scarf, and gloves set for college. In the end Lottie took everything home because, although she would probably return to the lab Sunday morning, she might not, and then the sandwiches would go stale. She set the vials containing the glands minced in buffer in a big bucket of ice, and one of the janitors took it down to the station wagon for her. She put several bottles of alcohol of different strengths, and a large dump jar, on the floor in the back of the car, then packed thick rags between them so that each was cushioned and wedged in tightly.
Although it was not yet dusk, the light was thinning. Lottie double-parked in front of a row of open stores. She bought a cold bottle of Chablis and thought about getting a small bunch of deep-colored rosebuds, tight dark ones that hadn’t begun to open yet. She decided not to.
“It’s nice of you,” Ruth said uneasily. She unwrapped the wine as if it would blow up. Lottie tried not to smile.
Davy and Simon wanted to help Lottie unload the car. She said that she had her lab work with her and they were to keep away from it. “You could get hurt.”
“How come you brought it home?” Ruth asked.
Lottie explained that she was halfway through a tissue preparation and that there were different procedures she had to do in a strictly timed sequence, otherwise the tissue would be ruined.
“What kind of tissue?”
“Rat salivary glands.”
“Yich,” Ruth said. “You kill the rats?”
“You know that.”
After a moment Ruth said, “How can you?”
Lottie began explaining her procedures.
“How can you stand it, I mean.”
“Oh.” Lottie laughed. She thought for a moment. “It’s really very complicated. If you want to come to the lab sometime, you’re welcome.”
“Thanks, but no thanks.”
“Where’s Lila?”
“Showering upstairs.” Ruth was sponging off the table. She looked at Lottie standing by the back door. “You need a hand?”
They carried in the ice bucket together.
After Lottie set up in the downstairs bathroom, she told the boys, “You have to pee or M, you go upstairs. I don’t want you in here.”
“What’s rat sally glands?” Davy asked.
“Salivary glands,” Lottie said. “Spit glands. They make spit. You have them, too.” She pushed her fingers up at the angles of Davy’s lower jaw.
As she closed the door, she saw Davy push his fingers up under Simon’s jaw.
Lottie worked in the bathroom with a stopwatch, pipetting the buffer out of the vials and into the dump jar, careful not to touch the tissue. She replaced the buffer with a 30 percent alcohol solution. In the kitchen she could hear Ruth washing dishes. Ruth felt the dishwasher didn’t get them clean enough; when she made her special dinners, she didn’t want any film on the plates detracting from the taste. Lottie had always assumed Ruth went through this to embarrass her, but if she was washing dishes when Lottie was out of the room, then maybe there was something wrong with her. Maybe she had some washing mania. Was Lottie responsible for this girl or not?
Lila called down, “Ma, can I use your blue eye shadow?”
“What’s the matter with yours?” she yelled up, putting her finger on the vial she’d just filled so as not to lose her place.
“Simon put it in the toilet.”
“Sure,” Lottie screamed. “It’s down here. And don’t yell from upstairs.”
Lila wore a cherry-red sleeveless blouse and a ruffled skirt that tied in back at the waist. Her skin was pink from the shower. She had on gold hoop earrings and Lottie’s white sandals. She was fuller than Lottie had been at her age. She was coming into her own time, like a bright bloom of some promising new strain.
“Can I wear the sandals?”
“You’re wearing them.”
“Do you mind?”
“Not much. They look better on you than on me.”
“Oh, Ma.”
“Truth is truth. Even your feet are beautiful.”
“Oh, Ma. Just tell me where the eye shadow is. Why don’t you wear gloves? That stuff can’t be good for your hands.”
“They’re clumsy, gloves.”
“How can they be clumsy? Surgeons wear them.”
“You really look lovely.”
“Oh, Ma.”
Lila put her pinkie into the pot of pale-blue eye cream, traced a soft shadow over her lid and up toward the outer tip of her blond eyebrow. Lottie watched her daughter as if she were doing something of extraordinary interest. Often she found herself caught in this way, looking on with intense absorption as one of her children did a routine thing.
“Ma, what is this stuff? It stinks. And your eyes are tearing.” They looked at each other in the mirror. “Don’t touch yourself,” Lila said. With a piece of tissue paper she wiped her mother’s eyes.
The doorbell rang.
“I got it! I got it!” Davy yelled.
“Go talk to him, Ma, would you? I’ll be a minute.”
Lottie pipetted alcohol into the last two vials and wrote down the time. Then she washed her hands and patted her eyes with cool water. In the kitchen she asked Ruth if it would be all right to offer Ted, Lila’s boyfriend, a glass of the wine Lottie’d brought home.
“Suit yourself,” Ruth said.
It took Lottie a few minutes to find the corkscrew. It was at the bottom of a shelf of utensils they rarely used, beneath a set of pastry brushes, a small pasta machine, a cork you could recork champagne with; most of these were presents from her first wedding. Lottie went into the living room to shake hands with Ted.
“Hi, Mrs. Hart. Nice to see you.”
He always called her Mrs. Hart. Davy had corrected him several times but it didn’t stick. Lottie had explained that it was Lila’s last name, not hers, but she really didn’t care one way or the other. Davy cared and every time Ted called her Mrs. Hart, Davy would frown or cough or stamp his foot. This evening he threw his head back repeatedly as if he had hair in his eyes, then offered Ted his hand. Ted bent down and shook it.
Holding out his hand, Simon toddled over after Davy.
“You remember my daughter Ruth,” Lottie said.
“Stepdaughter,” Ruth corrected. “Would you like a glass of wine?” She had the bottle in her hand.
“Sure, thanks. Let me open it for you.”
“Oh, that would be wonderful!” Ruth said, beaming.
“Yeah, sure,” Ted nodded.
Simon said, “Wonderful!” and toddled into the
kitchen after Ruth.
“Well,” Lottie said, amused. “Thanks.”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” Ted smiled. He seemed about ten feet tall and he had his shirt open to the fourth button, two silver chains around his neck. His skin was red from the sun and he had a few blond, almost white hairs on his chest. He was a nice-looking boy, on the basketball team and in the honor society (Lila had told her about him with pride). There was something good-natured and easy in the way he treated Davy and Simon.
Lottie wondered if Ted resembled Lila’s father but she could no longer remember what Charlie had looked like in high school. The Charlie of her mind’s eye was on the football field at the end of college or in bed watching TV at the end of their marriage. He was always massive, even in depression.
Lottie and Ted stood sipping wine and making small talk while Ruth did ballet exercises, occasionally touching Ted’s knee with a toe. After what seemed a long time, Lila came out, apologetic and radiant. Ted reddened, both his face and his chest. Lottie resisted the impulse to look at his crotch. She waved from the door as he helped Lila into the front seat of his father’s pickup truck.
Ruth had laid the table with a white cloth and napkins, a bouquet of wildflowers—yellow buttercups and honeysuckle and dog roses—in a crystal vase in the center. At either side of the flowers she had lit a long white candle, despite the warmth of the night. The candles drew attention away from Davy’s baseball glove on the floor under his chair and one of Lila’s big lacy bras hanging over a basket of unfolded laundry, and focused it instead on the fresh flowers, the wine bottle, which Ruth had set in a glass bowl filled with ice, the name cards she’d put at each setting (an unnecessary act since each of them sat in the accustomed place). The glasses and the silverware shone, even in the candlelight, and Lottie wondered if maybe that was what Ruth had been scrubbing—the glasses, the silverware. Or perhaps the silver candlesticks. These new possibilities cheered her. The glass of wine had gone to her head and she was feeling pleased with herself for having made the pain-in-the-ass trip home.
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