Lab Girl (24 page)

“Now you're getting it,” Bill acknowledged.

“You've never been on a date, have you?” I asked. It seemed to have been hanging in the air, and it just felt right to say it.

Bill stood up and raised both arms into the endless blue-white sky that seemed, on that bright July day, to be incapable of darkness.
“I never went to the prom!”
he howled.

When our laughter died down, I thought a little and then spoke. “So why not now?” I suggested. “We're in the middle of nowhere, with no one to see you. You could dance now.”

There was a long pause. “I don't know how,” said Bill.

“Yes, you do,” I insisted. “It's not too late. C'mon, we came all this way. Jesus,
this
is why we're here. I just figured it out. This is the place where you dance.”

To my surprise, Bill didn't joke it off this time. He took a few steps toward the glacier; he stood and stared at it for a long time with his back to me. Then he slowly began to turn in a circle and stomp, and do rough jumping skips in between stomps. It started out awkward, but he soon threw himself into it, spinning and stomping and jumping. Soon he was moving with abandon, but deliberately, not frantically.

I sat directly in front of him, held my head up, and watched. I watched him, as a clear-eyed witness of what he was doing and of what he was, of all of it. There at the end of the world, he danced in the broad and endless daylight, and I accepted him for what he was, instead of for what he wished he could be. The potency of my acceptance made me wonder, just a little, if I could turn it inward and accept myself. I didn't know, but I promised myself that I would figure it out on another day. Today was already taken. Today was for watching a great man dance in the snow.

ALL OF THE SEX
on planet Earth is biologically designed to serve one evolutionary purpose: to mix the genes of two separate individuals and then produce a new individual sporting genes identical to neither parent. Within this new mix of genes are unprecedented possibilities, old weaknesses eliminated, and new weaknesses that might even turn out to be strengths. This is the mechanism by which the wheels of evolution turn.

All sex involves touch: the living tissues of two separate individuals must come into contact and then attach. Contacting and attaching to another individual is a big problem for plants: they are anchored in place and their survival depends upon their immobility. Nevertheless, the vast majority of plants faithfully produce a new crop of flowers every single year, fulfilling their half of the reproductive bargain, even though the odds of these flowers eventually becoming fertilized are small.

Most flowers are built simply: a platform of petals surrounding the “male” and “female” parts. On the outer ring of this circle is the male component: a few long stalks with wads of pollen glued loosely to the ends. In the center and at the bottom of a chute sit the ovaries. Of all the things that could travel down this open chute, a grain of pollen from the same plant species is the only thing that might activate fertilization. Self-fertilization is slightly more likely to occur, which means that the ovules will come in contact with pollen from the same flower. This can result in a seed, and then possibly a new individual, but no new genes will have been introduced. For the species to persist and evolve, real fertilization must happen periodically, and this means that pollen from one, or ten, or ten thousand feet away must successfully arrive at the ovaries.

There is a wasp that cannot reproduce outside the flower of a fig; this same fig flower cannot be fertilized without the help of a wasp. When the female wasp lays her eggs inside the fig flower, she also deposits the pollen that coated her when she hatched within a different fig flower. These two organisms—the wasp and the fig—have enjoyed this arrangement for almost ninety million years, evolving together through the extinction of the dinosaurs and across multiple ice ages. Theirs is like any epic love story, in that part of the appeal lies in its impossibility.

Such specificity is extremely rare in the plant world, so rare as to be hardly worth mentioning, except as a feel-good example of symbiosis between ecological soul mates. Much more than 99.9 percent of pollen produced in the world goes absolutely nowhere and fertilizes nothing. As for the infinitesimal number of grains that arrive in the right place, it seems irrelevant to claim that it matters how they got there. Wind, insects, birds, rodents, or the empty corners of FedEx boxes—the vast majority of plants have absolutely no preference as to the method of pollen delivery.

Magnolia, maple, dogwood, willow, cherry, and apple trees—they spread their pollen on every kind of fly or beetle, luring them near with sweet nectar but providing only enough for a brief taste. The value of an insect as a pollinator lies in the distance that it may travel, and thus less time spent lounging about on a petal means more time traveling in the air. Many shrubs in North America and Europe bear flowers with petals set to spring once weighted by an insect, smacking the bee full of pollen and back on his way.

In contrast, the elm, birch, oak, poplar, walnut, pine, and spruce, as well as the grasses, all release their pollen to the wind. It goes farther than it would by insect, but never as directly to another flower. Wind-borne pollen travels for miles and then rains down indiscriminately. Enough of it hits its target, however, to keep the world perpetually blanketed by the great conifer forests of Canada, the Giant Redwood groves of the Pacific Northwest, and the expansive spruce forests that stretch through Scandinavia and Siberia.

One grain of pollen is all that is necessary to fertilize an ovum and then develop into a seed. One seed may grow into a tree. One tree can produce one hundred thousand flowers each year. Each flower can produce one hundred thousand grains of pollen. Successful plant sex may be rare, but when it does happen it triggers a supernova of new possibilities.

WHEN I WAS THIRTY-TWO
I learned that life can change in one day.

Within certain social circles of the married, a single woman over the age of thirty inspires compassion similar to that bestowed upon a big, friendly stray dog. Although the dog's unkempt appearance and tendency toward self-reliance betray its lack of an owner, the way it gravitates hungrily toward human contact suggests that it might once have known better days. You consider letting it eat on the porch after you confirm that it is not mangy, but then you decide not to, vaguely worried that it might start hanging around because it has nowhere else to go.

In the right venue—at a casual outdoor picnic, perhaps—a stray dog is a curiosity and even an asset; its muddy clowning provides a rosy window into the carefree life of a simpler being. As everybody's pet and nobody's responsibility, it is at least friendly, if not wholesome, and is remarkably happy given its humble lot. If a single woman can be thought of as a dog at such events, then a thirtysomething single man is effectively characterized as the guy manning the hamburger grill. He's sure to be plagued by the dog from start to finish, whether he likes animals or not.

I met Clint at a barbeque of that sort, and he couldn't have shooed me away even if he had tried, because he was easily the most beautiful man I had ever seen. A week later, I worked up the nerve to ask our hostess for his e-mail address, and then I wrote and invited him to dinner. After he accepted, I phoned to tell him the location, which was the trendiest restaurant I could identify near Dupont Circle. I'd certainly never been there, but it seemed like a place where people went on fancy dates, and Washington, D.C., was much cooler than Baltimore—I did know that. After giving him directions I further stipulated, “I'll only show up if you agree that I am paying for dinner.” I had always paid my own way through life, and I wasn't about to give that up now.

“Okay.” He laughed good-naturedly. “But you have to let me pay the next time.” I didn't promise anything, but I took his words as a good omen.

At dinner I couldn't eat a thing because I didn't want to be distracted from the fact that something wonderful was happening. We left the restaurant laughing over our waiters' disapproving stares during the course of our three-hour meal. We went to a pub a few blocks away and talked for hours while our drinks went untouched. We argued over the essential difference between measuring something and modeling it. We discussed mosses and ferns. It turned out that we had attended Berkeley and studied the same subjects at the same time. I knew many of his friends and classmates, and he happened to know many of mine. We even determined that we had sat in the same room on more than one occasion, both listening to the same seminar. We marveled over how in the world we could have missed each other all these years. It seemed obvious that we should make up for it now.

They closed the bar and I still didn't want to go home. We decided to go to his house, and he asked me if I wanted to walk or take a taxi. He saw the look on my face and then stepped into the street to wave for a taxi. Where I grew up, we only ever saw taxis in the movies. Taxis were for people so sophisticated that they left their houses wearing shoes they couldn't even walk in. Taxi drivers were exotic guides into the unknown who dispensed detached wisdom while delivering you faithfully to an important place that you couldn't have found on your own. I was stunned to find that the ultimate proof of love for me was nothing heroic, but an easy and superfluous gesture performed just to make me smile. The love that I had to give someone had been packed too tightly and too long in a small box, and so it all tumbled out when opened. And there was more where that came from.

We love each other because we can't help it. We don't work at it and we don't sacrifice for it. It is easy and all the sweeter to me because it is so undeserved. I discover within a second context that when something just won't work, moving heaven and earth often won't make it work—and similarly, there are some things that you just can't screw up. I know that I could live without him: I have my own work, my own mission, and my own money. But I don't want to. I
really
don't want to. We make plans: he will share his strength with me and I will share my imagination with him, and in each other we will find a dear use for our respectively obscene surpluses. We will fly off to Copenhagen for the weekend and live in the south of France each summer; we will get married in a language that we don't understand; I will have a horse (a brown mare named “Sugar”); we will go to avant-garde theater productions and discuss them afterward with strangers in coffeehouses; I will give birth to twins like my grandmother, but we'll keep the dog (duh) and we will always take taxis and live like in the movies. And some of these things we do, and some of them we don't (like the horse), and it is better than a movie, because it doesn't end, and we are not acting, and I am not wearing any makeup.

Within a couple of weeks I had convinced Clint to quit his job in D.C. and move into my house in Baltimore, knowing that his incredible talent for mathematics could get him a job anywhere. Soon after moving, he reentered academia and took a job at Johns Hopkins researching the deep Earth, in the same building as my lab. He spent his days writing fantastically intricate computer models designed to predict million-year flow within unfathomably hot and pressurized pseudo-solid rock, thousands of miles below the depth where the lava of a volcano brews. I couldn't understand—still can't—how he was able to study the Earth in his mind only, how he could imagine and observe its workings through the baroque equations that he writes so fluently, the corner of his mouth always inky from the ballpoint pen that he doesn't notice he's been chewing.

I have to see my science for it to be real: I must hold it in my hands and manipulate it; I need to watch plants grow and make them die. I need the answers that can come only from control; he prefers to set the world in motion and then watch it flow. Tall and thin and dressed in khaki, he looks and acts just as a scientist is expected to, and so acceptance into the profession has always been relatively easy for him. Nevertheless, his sweet, solid, and loving nature was a treasure overlooked until I recognized it and then decided to never, ever let it go.

Clint and I met in early 2001, and during the summer that followed, we took a trip to Norway, so that I could show him the places that I love most: long, low hills of pink granite with purple wildflowers pushing out of the cracks, sparkling fjords superintended by sober-faced puffins, white birch trees illuminated by salmon-colored sunsets that last all night long. The Oslo leg of our trip was transformed into an impromptu wedding party after we took a number, waited in a queue for twenty minutes, and got married in the RÃ¥dhus (City Hall).

Upon returning home to Baltimore, we went straight to Bill to surprise him with the good news. Bill had never commented on the guys that I dated, probably because it was obvious that there wouldn't be very many dates to comment on. But he'd been acting strangely since Clint had come on the scene, avoiding us the same way that a reformed felon avoids driving by the hoosegow. For his part, Clint was confident that Bill just needed time to get used to the situation; it was exactly the same as with me and his three little sisters, he kept insisting.

About a month earlier, Bill had moved out of my attic after buying the run-down house located just a few doors down. He now owned a four-floor row home that must have been beautiful in its day, but that day was long past. When he moved in, Bill had dumped all of his belongings on the first floor, having carried them over from my house one by one over the course of several days. He kept a few key items (coffeepot, razor, screwdriver) in a corner next to the nest of laundry that he crawled into and back out of when it was time to sleep and wake up. Bill had grand renovation plans for the place, but during that summer it looked like a heroin den, complete in every detail except for the drugs.

The day after we returned from Norway, we knocked hard on Bill's door and then also rang the doorbell. At length we heard someone shuffling around, and a bit later we heard the lock turn. The door opened and there stood Bill in a ripped T-shirt and some faded swimming trunks. His hair was mussed and he was rubbing his eyes: we'd obviously woken him up. It was three o'clock in the afternoon.

“Hi!” I greeted him, standing there with Clint's arm around me. Then I burst out, “Guess what? We got married!”

There was a long pause while Bill looked at us blankly. “Does this mean I have to buy you a present?” he asked.

“No,” answered Clint, while I simultaneously responded, “Yes.”

We stood there for a while, Clint and I with giddy smiles on our faces. Finally I said to Bill, “Get dressed. There's a Civil War reenactment downtown at Fort McHenry and we're going.”

“I'd join you, except that it's probably the War of 1812, you're a dumbass, and I have about a million other things to do,” Bill answered, looking uncomfortable.

“Watch your mouth, you filthy hippy,” I chastised him. “I won't have you dishonoring our fallen heroes that way.” I added, “Now, put some fucking pants on, start acting like an American, and get into the Toyota.”

Bill still looked at us, and I knew he was conflicted over whether to consent or withdraw. I looked up at my new husband, the strongest and kindest man I had ever met, firm in my belief that everyone who had ever earned my love had a natural claim to his as well.

“C'mon, Bill, you're with us now,” Clint said while offering his car keys. “Why don't you drive?” he added. Bill took the keys and we spent the day at Fort McHenry bobbing for apples and dipping candles and forging a real horseshoe. We ate hot dogs and cotton candy and watched the three-legged race and petted animals at the petting zoo. And we all got in for a reduced rate because it was, after all, Family Day.