!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
Priscilla said, “Boom!” every time her daughter, Kimberly, knocked down the letter blocks. After only three tries Kimmie started giggling as she mouthed, “Bmm-m-m”, crashing the three-high stack with a wild sweep of her right arm. Priscilla sitting cross-legged, Kimmie on her haunches, they smiled with eyes engaged and looked ready to continue the exercise all afternoon. While Dr. Kagan spoke into the mike, “Thanks, Priscilla, that’s enough for now!” I noticed there was no column for “Smiles”.
“Uh, Dr. Kagan, in these mother-baby pairs, when they smile at each other, the baby seems to understand the task sooner. How do I record that?”
“Good observation, … Miss Stein, is it? Why don’t you design a new recording chart, one we can use with the next iteration of this project?”
With that, I felt I had been ushered through a narrow gate into a special garden, one where truth grew like flowers, watered by our questions, our eyes the sun. In high school, reading about science, with hypotheses generating research, followed by recording observations, had felt arid, barren, compared to the lushness of planning, then finally doing an experiment. At Avondale, Chemistry, with its mixing and heating, odors and stains, then Biology, our noses curled against formaldehyde as we dissected frogs, science had been off-putting and rote. But here in Kagan’s psych lab, I found a richness as we explored the foundations of personality. At last, I knew I had a calling. Not to be a research scientist, that was too confining. But to learn about, understand, and maybe help guide the path of these little unformed minds.
Feeling effervescent as I explained all this to Mike, I bubbled as we walked through the Square down to the river in early March. “Spring! It’s almost here!” I swept my arms around, encompassing the spiny trees arrayed along the shore, tiny buds on every branch seeking sun. Raising both arms, I twirled around, almost dancing, leaning my head back to face that sun. I hugged myself, laughed, and headed for a bench where we could sit, and talk.
“What got into you, Sarah Jane?” Mike wondered. Brows twisted, a half-smile growing on his face, he looked a little lost.
“I know what I’m going to do this summer. Kagan’s lab – those kids. He wants me to be a part of a new study, one I’ll get to help design.” Wrinkling his forehead, Mike cocked his head, asking for more.
“I don’t know yet exactly what it will be, the research protocol I mean. I don’t care, it doesn’t matter what, I get to be with Kagan all summer! He’s so gentle with those moms, doesn’t ever tell them what to do, just lets the action happen, then we observe, tally it up, and see what we can learn.”
Mike gave a little smile, the kind with his eyes still flat, almost sad. “That’s good. It’s what you want, what you’ve always wanted, I know. So you’re really on your way. Do you get to stay in the dorm over summer?”
“No, it’s closed, but I will be here, in Cambridge. Leslie’s graduating, Bev’s in town, working at Mass General, so there’s a room at their place. I can stay there with her, maybe Jeanne or Marcia too, go off-off for next year.” As I said this, Mike looked thoughtful, down at the grass, where he studied the few green shoots nurtured by the recently melted snow. I thought how our summer lives were similar, but so different. Me, in the Ivy Tower, studying children and how they grew; Mike in a lifeguard chair, watching them bounce and splash, trying to keep them safe. And those swimmers he’d help train.
Apparently ready to talk, he started by looking back. “A long time ago, when Kennedy announced the moon-shot program, they were talking on the news about how many scientists they’d need to get there, get there by this year. I’ll never forget, they said something like ‘Half of all scientists who have ever lived are working now.’ In the paper, or maybe it was in eighth-grade science class, I saw a graph about that.” Using his hands to demonstrate the upward slope, he explained, “Starting way back with Aristotle, thru the Dark Ages and the Muslims and the Chinese, up to Newton, the number of people doing ‘science’ was always very small. But then, like we learned in history, in the enlightenment, the number started going up. Not very fast, but up and up through the 16, the 17, the 1800s, and then it started to take off after the world wars.” His hand curved faster and steeper upwards towards to sky. “I drew that graph one day, and if it followed a regular hyperbolic curve, it would reach its asymptote at the end of this year.”
He seemed satisfied with his argument, but I suspected there was more. “So what happens then? After we get to the moon, with all the scientists?”
“After that, who knows? Knowledge will be spinning out of control. We’ve never been there before, had so many people studying so many things, finding new knowledge all the time every day. There’ll be too much to know to much for any one person to make sense of. It’s kinda scary, like the world’s gonna change and we won’t be in charge any more.”
“Don’t you think you’re one of them, a scientist? You’re going to med school be a doctor, right?”
Frowning, he spread a hand across his face, squeezing his cheeks, hiding his mouth, ring and little fingers tucked under his chin. “I remember my seventh-grade science teacher, Mr. Webb, wrote in my year-book, ‘When one has much, much is expected.’ And in the eighth-grade, Miss Brueggeman wrote, ‘Science in your future? You can handle it!’ But just because it was easy for me, just because I took AP Biology, Math, and Physics, that still doesn’t mean it’s what I’m supposed to do. I want to be a doctor because you get to deal with people at their very core, their true essence. They talk about the ‘Art and Science’ of medicine, don’t they? I can’t shake the feeling I’m an artist, somewhere inside, someone who sees the beauty, and wants to talk about it.”
“Isn’t that what being a psychiatrist is all about, talking to people? Using inter-personal interaction to help them?”
“You’d think, but that’s not what I saw working on the psych ward. Everybody there was on some kind of medication, for depression or schizophrenia, even the sociopaths. Watching them all sit around in a group therapy session was a joke, they were either nodding off, or in their own little world. If that’t what a psychiatrist really does, I don’t know…”
“So are you thinking you don’t want to be a doctor anymore? You wouldn’t really become a truck driver, would you? Don’t you have to start applying to schools soon? Which ones are on your list?”
“It’s funny, when we first got to W, they gave us an aptitude test, to see what professions, careers, our interests were most compatible with. My top five were psychiatrist, YMCA physical education director, musician, writer, and minister. Now I look at myself, and I see I am interested in all those things. I can’t really play guitar or sing very well, but I’ve got more records than most guys on our floor. I’ve started taking religion classes. So maybe there’s even a little minister in me, I guess. But yeah, no, I’m still applying to med school. Ten, I think.” He started to tick them off: Boston, New Haven, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Michigan, Ohio.
I scanned a mental map of the US. I could see California, the East, Cincinnati as a “safe school”, maybe Michigan as well. “Denver? Why Colorado?”
“Every time I’ve gone there, in the summer, and now to ski in the winter, it’s felt like home to me. When we were there over Christmas, everyday was a rush. Each time my sister and I would go down the hill, it was like stopping time, stopping my mind. All I could do was try and keep my body upright. We’d fall, get up, try again.” He shook his head, raised his eyes to the ceiling as if recalling a deep felt wonder. “I can see myself living there, so why not? If I was there, I could ski every weekend!”
“A ‘YMCA physical education director’. That’s the same as being a swim coach, in your mind? Working with kids, organizing things?” I asked. “I guess it makes sense you’d want to spend your summer, again, at that pool, with those kids. I don’t know, though, Mike. Why would you want to go back there? Shouldn’t you be doing something like the psych ward again, give yourself more experience to show when you apply? It won’t be like going to college from Avondale, where we all knew we’d get in somewhere. Not everybody gets into medical school, you know.” First his swimming, now an infatuation with skiing.
Three years earlier, I’d fallen in love with a debater, a boy who used both his mind and his hands, who wanted to spin words into beauty, as well as play at life. He’d seemed so sure of his direction, who he was. And now that I had decided on mine, had become clear on who I should be, he’d gotten hesitant, reluctant to grow up.
He grew pensive, resting his elbows on his knees as he stared at that scraggly new green grass again.
I pressed again, “You could do something here, stay with us at Bev’s place on Oxford. Why do you have to go back, what’s keeping you there?”
He said quietly, as if to himself, “I wish I knew, I wish I knew.” Then louder, stronger, “I get to be free there, to be in charge. The rules are simple, I always know what to do. Being in the sun, all summer, so warm…and the kids are fun, they look up to me.”
I remembered the poem that had fallen out of his pea coat, Debbie, a girl, “still a child” with an “unformed mind.”
Without thinking, I blurted out, “What about Debbie? Is she one of the kids who looks up to you?”
Instantly, his face grew firm, a mask to hide behind. “She’s one of the good swimmers, on the big AAU team.” Then he must have wondered, had we talked about her before? His eyes narrowed. “How do you know about her? What did I say?”
I could have lied; if I claimed he’d talked about her at some point in the previous nine months, he’d accept that. While I may have left some things unsaid at times, for three years with him, I had followed his dictum, ‘Always Be Honest’, and feared the consequences if I wasn’t.
“I saw a poem about her, it fell out of your pocket that night you showed up in the snowstorm.”
He scratched his head as if trying to remember. Maybe the same thought about the value of truth was racing in his mind. He kept looking at the ground, afraid to meet my eyes. Finally, “She’s really just a kid. I don’t know, it feels like we’re…connected somehow. When I first saw her, laughing at the front desk, where people check in, we locked eyes.”
“Just a kid? How old is she, Mike?”
Still not looking up, his cheeks now red. “Fifteen.”
My heart was pounding, but I couldn’t stop asking, “So why did she get a poem? When’s her birthday, are you gonna write her another one for that?”
Finally, he looked up, solemnly, then with the bare hint of a smile. “You’re the only one I’ll ever do that for. Don’t worry about her.”