Chapter 26: Mad Scientist, Grease Monkey
On callings and kisses
I’m in a teacup-sized dorm room that I share with three other roommates, waiting for my cell phone to ring. I make another Suisse Mocha, and look back over the notes I took from my orientation with Dr. Van Doren eight weeks ago,
Germ cells → pay forward genetic material of next generation Migration to somatic cells = gonad formation How do they recognize each other and become gonadal cells? If goes wrong, infertility, cancers As they migrate, mitosis stops…why? What cellular cues? Species: Drosophila, Dwnt-2 mutants, histochemical phosphorescent staining ….
These chicken scratch notes, a mountain of research studies, and my lab notes have been my bible. I wait for the Spirit or just some previously shy neuron to reveal to me what I’ve been doing with my life for the past two months. But despite the ubiquity of highlighting, despite the hours upon hours I’ve sorted out genetic mutants from nons based on their gut shape, despite vast stretches of time I’ve spent looking at baby flies under a colossally expensive microscope in the belly of Mudd Hall….
The only thing I know is this: I’m here in Baltimore, doing research at Johns Hopkins for a summer, and what am I studying? Gonads. Nuts. Nards. How fruit fly balls become balls, or don’t.
I’ve followed through with the research plan, and I’d love to hop on my flight next week and leave the lab’s aloof, competitive, East Coast bastards to sort out the results of my work. But to fulfill my work as a Howard Hughes research fellow, and to get college credit for this summer, I have to present (read: defend) my research to the entire Ivy League lab in a few days. And as of this moment, that makes me a one-legged woman in a butt kicking contest.
I sigh. The acrid smell of my highlighter is awakening a dull ache behind my right eye. So I cap it and let my mind wander back to last fall in El Paso, before this summer in Baltimore had convinced me that a career in the sciences was the wrong fit for my soul.
***
It’s last November, and Rob’s asked me to come out with him, his sister, and her roommate, making it less of a date and more of a “hangout” session. I’m wearing a wool coat and felt hat that Ken, my mom’s latest boyfriend, insisted on buying me. (Against all odds, I’m starting to like the guy. He seems to love my mother, but he won’t be her sugar daddy.)
We’re out at night and the desert air is still but surprisingly cold. Together, we crunch through a field of eight-foot high corn stalks mowed into a dizzying maze. The atmosphere is charged with playfulness--along the way teens hide in tucked away corners and scare their friends. I’m observing Rob’s behavior around his intimate connections. He’s looser, sillier, much more comfortable with this setup than our brakes date. But I’ve moved in the opposite direction. Costumed in these new clothes, unsure how to act around his tight-knit friends, I feel rather like the scarecrows that people the maze: stiff, inert, and conspicuous.
On the drive home, I ride shotgun in his ‘69 Buick Electra and glance at his sharp, stubbled jaw out of the corner of my eye. The car’s thrum, his faint, musky scent, the strobing of street lights on his geometric face--I’m sick with desire. We drop his sister and roommate off and head back to his house where my car is parked. He turns the ignition off, and we sit for a moment in stillness when an impatience that’s completely inappropriate for a second date consumes me. It’s been half a year that I’ve waited for something to ignite between us, and at 19 years old, that’s a lifetime.
I’m done being a scarecrow. I’ll try being a bull in a cotillion class.
As he moves to open the door I blurt out, “It’s time we had a DTR, don’t you think?”
“A what?”
“A DTR. Define The Relationship.”
“It is?”
“Mhmm,” I say and look him dead in the eye. “I want you. So what’re we going to do about it?”
***
I’ve been strictly warned against pursuing physical affection.
He’s made it clear that if this goes anywhere it’ll go there at a snail’s pace. He likes me, but being almost eight years older, he knows that drastic change will happen for me in my twenties. Will I remain who I am now as I get older? He doesn’t know, but he doesn’t want to be attached to someone whose values may deviate from his. Which makes it all the more important that we get to know one another without getting handsy.
Okay, fine. It’s an iron fetter around my heart, but I can live with it for a while longer.
Tonight, as we eat dinner with Mom and Ken, he’s talking about his love for painting, especially in the styles of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. Because most of his paintings are too large to tote around, he’s brought studies from drawing classes in architecture school: a pencil sketch of a Roman bust draped with fabric, a miniature inking of three buildings, and a Prismacolored, lilac kitchen faucet with ochre globs of water dripping out of it.
“Ah yes, Rothko and de Kooning and the like--they’re not far off from Romanticism,” Ken notes.
“Oh really?” Rob asks.
“Definitely. Both groups were obsessed with expressing their inner life and emotions,” Ken says.
I haven’t a clue what they’re talking about, but what I see in the hair-fine strokes of his bust sketch is technique, skill, perseverance. It’s a display of grit that challenges my prejudice about “flaky” artists. And I’m struggling to square it.
“But, anyone can splash paint onto a canvas,” I say, arguing with myself out loud.
Rob smirks. “People often say so. But a trained eye can see that there’s a composition beneath it all.”
Stinging from this condescension, I look away and roll my eyes.
***
It’s Wednesday night church service. I’ve got oodles of Statistics homework, but I’m here. The sermon is over and we’re “tarrying in the Lord’s presence,” which means the poor piano player’s riffed for over ten minutes and her fingers must be tired.
A small semicircle of us are up at the front, somehow signifying through our bodies’ proximity to the pulpit a desire to be closer to God. My hands are uplifted, my eyelids tightly shut, but I feel him admiring me and I wonder if I seem as spiritually hungry as his mother.
***
We’re at a Christian rock concert hosted at a local high school. Our church has won backstage access for bringing the most young people to the event, so we stand in the locker room off the main auditorium, awkwardly shaking hands with Switchfoot and Relient K.
When the scruffy young musicians get to Rob, he presents handmade masks: simple constructions of white paper plates affixed to pipe cleaner straps. For Switchfoot, he’s painted one with a black light switch across the face, the other a black footprint. For Relient K, a clown face bedecked with a red, 2-D afro.
Out in the main auditorium, Switchfoot takes the stage donning the masks and crank up the volume to ear splitting decibels. The crowd goes crazy and young bodies press against me on all sides. Yet despite the way that frenzy can buffer you and create a sense of anonymity, the scarecrow spirit seizes me again. I’m self-conscious, terrified of connecting with an energy inside me that’s ancient and unwelcome. So I bop my head just a little and look for Rob, who’s been swallowed up by the crowd.
In a moment, several teens move back to give someone room, and he emerges swaying and grooving. His lean body is contorting and bending, snapping and stomping. He pops and locks and head bangs violently. For half a second, I’m embarrassed for him. But then some chord of jealousy gets strummed inside. To be so free, so unburdened, so totally uninhibited, it cuts me like a knife’s blow. His torso arching back and forth, his eyes sealed shut so that nothing but sound is the focus. I see her again--forehead creased, golden locks hanging over the piano keys--and shudder away this association between Rob and my mother.
***
It’s nighttime. We’re alone at the church in a vacant office space, wrapping Rob’s Christmas gifts, photos he took of this year’s harvest. The overhead lights are off, but a tripod lamp creates an enveloping caramel haze. Mazzy Star plays “Fade into You,” and the sleepy vocals feel like my confession:
I want to hold the hand inside you/I want to take the breath that’s true.
But tonight I have a job to do, one that feels strangely symbolic, one that gives me purpose and its proxy: self-restraint. So together we gently flip each large picture frame. And then I swath them in butcher paper, folding in the seams, hiding what’s inside. Cover it up, tuck it in, and bind it--when what I really want to do is peel it away strip by strip, or in one brute tear, pick a style any style, but by God, undress it all.
You live your life, you go in shadows/You’ll come apart and you’ll go blind.
In my hands, now, the emerald green ribbon for bows. I loop and twist, loop and twist, pressing the fabric tightly between my fingers because if I drop a loop, if I let go before I secure them all with wire, it’s just a tangle of affections that no one wants to behold.
He’s watching me, dark eyes blooming and taking me in as I tie off the final bits of what we’ve made together.
Fade into you/ Strange, you never knew.
I borrow his CD and play that song on repeat all the way to my cold studio apartment, pressing my face into the seatbelt like a cat nestles into its owner after being left home all day.
***
I’m driving. It’s December 23rd, and we’re in a line of cars snaking through a neighborhood spangled with twinkly lights. I turn up the volume on “Baby it’s Cold Outside,” and when my hand returns to the gear selector, his meets mine and our fingers interlace.
As far as I’m concerned, Father Christmas can call it a day. Rob’s touch is more unexpected and spectacular than anything that could fit under a tree: it is gift, victory, and sensuous vindication. I’m giddy inside, but I press my lips together and play it cool, because what’s to be gained by pointing out he’s broken his own rules?
“I’m fine if we stay here, but we could also go up to Transmountain and see the city lights instead,” he says.
We can go to Mars for all I care, as long as his fingertips keep tickling my knuckles. So we exit the caravan and drive up the shoulder blade of the Franklins on a two-lane highway, the desert sky inky black above us. We’re heading to a notorious makeout spot. But I send thoughts of touching his face backwards and beneath my tires, one with every lane divider hash mark. Near the summit, I pull over into a gravel lot that overlooks the valley and turn off the engine.
“It’s time for my presents now,” I say, and pop out the door fearing that the silence and view will drive me to some foolish act of the flesh.
I come back from the trunk of the car with gifts, an odd mashup of the practical and romantic: a fat user’s manual for Photoshop, an ocean-scented pillar candle, and a trinket box on which I’ve hand-lettered a scripture verse ripped from its devotional context, “Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls. All your waves and breakers have swept over me.”
He returns the gesture with a framed photograph of a Venetian canal he captured on a college trip, and a Patsy Cline CD.
“Do you know her?” he asks.
“Maybe?” I shrug.
He slides the plastic cover off and puts the CD in my player. The achingly romantic chords of “Crazy” come on, and he takes off his glasses and sets them on the dashboard.
An inchoate suspicion stretches out its wings in my mind for half a second. But then his lips are on mine and it doesn’t matter if my being here on this romantic hill was his plan all along or not.
***
Back in the dorm room my phone finally rings.
It’s a call from Roswell, New Mexico where Rob’s moved to temporarily help at his grandfather’s auto garage.
“Hello?” I ask.
“Hi, Mad Scientist,” he replies.
“Well, hello there, Grease Monkey,” I say and it takes no science at all to observe the love that spills out between us like a riot of paint on canvas, like a sonnet captured in mad dash cursive.