A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman Page 4
After a year in Philadelphia my knee problems began again. I’d had bad knees on and off since the end of high school, when I had surgery first on one and then the other. At some points the pain had been so bad that any walking was difficult, and before my first surgery, my knee spontaneously dislocated a couple of times. My right knee was rapidly becoming unworkable again. My new surgeon said my knee was filled with scar tissue, and the whole joint lining needed to be removed. Was such a thing even possible? His track record convinced me, and I was determined to try, but I was filled with fear: I really needed my knee to be better. I could not imagine going through life as crippled as I was then.
In my moments of fear I felt tremendous shame as well. Shame of what, I did not know, but I felt I had failed in some terrible way, and I wanted to hide it, so I also felt defensive and secretive about the pain and the disability. I decided to move back to Ithaca, have my surgery, and then stay in Ithaca with Curtis and my parents. I sat in the office of the senior partner who had hired me and explained I had to go back to Ithaca to be cared for while I recovered from a big knee surgery. He was concerned and supportive, and asked when I’d be back. I’d done well and was welcome and wanted. Something in me shut down at the thought. Instead of going back to my job in Philadelphia, I started planning our wedding.
In Ithaca I found a job as the business manager of a magazine, The International Wine Review. While recovering from the knee surgery at home in Curt’s and my sweet little half-house up on South Hill, sitting at the kitchen table with my leg in a brace and set up on a chair, I interviewed candidates for a job opening at the magazine. On that day I met Sarah Ploss, and we began our friendship. Sarah handed me her reference letters. Her confident voice and steady gaze made me trust her immediately. I hired her. Sarah, as clear-eyed then as she is today, watched me unravel over the next couple of years as I tried to suit Curtis’s family, and in doing so, opened up my buried childhood issues and had my identity dissolve.
But in that season, all was wonderful. My knee was healing. We were preparing for our wedding, to be held in July at that Chesapeake Bay farm. Curtis, the scion of the family, was worthy of one of the biggest weddings of the social season. His mother presented us rapidly with her short list of the most critical one hundred people to invite, with hundreds more to follow. We looked at each other wide-eyed: We’d imagined a wedding of about one hundred people in total. With much compromising and conversation all around, we ended up with about 150 people, dancing under a tent. I wore a dress of my own design, with my mother’s and grandmother’s lace mantilla over my short dark hair. My brothers were there, Tom with his face in a funny expression halfway between happy and proud. Curt’s cousin sailed down in his gorgeous yacht and anchored just off the site of the wedding, all flags flying up and down the halyards. The next day, Curt and I left for a honeymoon at the Bitter End in the British Virgin Islands, where we sailed and snorkeled every day.
Back home, I wrote hundreds of thank-you letters for the wedding gifts and well-wishes, many to people whose names I knew from newspapers and history. Curtis wrote his thesis and then won a prestigious congressional fellowship and we prepared to move to Washington, D.C. We were moving from the town with my parents, the town I had grown up in, with skinny-dipping in the creeks and hiking in the woods, to the town with his parents—where his father, Buff, was soon to be sworn in as an assistant secretary of state—and his cousins who had helped finance the Kennedy Center. I had declined to change my name and I still believed that he and I were both pursuing our own goals.
We rented a brick house just off Massachusetts Avenue outside the D.C. line. Curt’s grandmother came to inspect it. She said it was respectable enough for us, but the red salvias in the flower borders had to go: they belonged only at train stations. Once her pronouncement was made, the family had a sigh of relief and Curt and I were allowed to go ahead and move in. I eventually landed a job on the business side of U.S. News & World Report, and I commenced riding the bus downtown each day. Curt became the science advisor for Senator Bill Bradley. We went to holiday dinners at the Cosmos Club, and swimming and hockey in season at the Chevy Chase Club. I never quite had the right clothes.
Sarah Ploss came down to visit. Janet took Curt, Sarah, and me to the Chevy Chase Club for drinks and dinner. Sarah’s bright friendliness was deflected by Janet. I felt myself charmed and wakened by the joy and authenticity of Sarah and the echoes of the life in Ithaca she brought with her. But I felt the disapproval of Janet. Sarah had a few silent pauses over my newly conservative clothing and the strict table manners that told me she thought I’d sold my soul. My friend, the barometer. After that visit, our friendship was left on the frozen tundra for a few years, until I found myself again.
Down at the Eastern Shore on the weekends I felt a little more in my element. I could school Janet’s Thoroughbred, a mare off the racetrack who had not really learned how to trot; she just walked or cantered. Or galloped. I could help prune the trees. I was learning to sail, and I was good at canoeing, and a demon at croquet. I did often say the wrong thing, though, and my sense of humor continued to be wrong: too sharp, too literary, too loud. The voice of the teacher from AP English would ring in my ears again: wrong poem, wrong choice. Up in the city, we traded social events with the family. Curt and I had a pre-Thanksgiving dinner party at our house for the whole family, and Buff and I traded some inappropriate jokes that had us both weeping with laughter over a big Toblerone bar.
And then one night in the respectable brick house in Washington, the phone on the bedside table rang, waking us. My mother was on the other end, telling me that my brother Tom had been killed by a drunk driver. I was twenty-four, and my life as I knew it was over.
I felt as if the world was getting louder and then softer, expanding and contracting around my head in waves. I was trying to listen to what my mother was saying. She was using her most soothing voice, the voice she used when a child or an animal needed to be calmed. What did we need to do? What happened next? Those questions felt impossible. This present could not be real, could not lead to a next step. This present immediately had to vanish into the hell it had come from and return us to what was right and normal. That feeling stayed with me for years.
The next day we drove to Ithaca. I think Curt was with me, but at that moment, it might as well have been just me, my parents, and my brother Jim, alone in howling darkness. Up to that point I had had the illusion that my family was tightly linked, like we were all holding hands in a circle. Now, with Tom cut out, our hands flew apart and our circle broke open and we no longer faced each other. My father was so stricken that he could not speak of Tom and for many years turned away when Tom was mentioned. I do not know what Jim’s internal process was; mainly I experienced his criticism that how I was grieving and what I was doing wasn’t right. And Mom had been gutted. She cried all the time. She decided there would be no service, and when we received Tom’s ashes from California, she took them in secret up into the woods on the hill behind the house and spread them by herself. We were cut out; we no longer existed for her either. She stopped eating. I pleaded with her to eat, and made her favorite dishes. Jim and Dad only told me they did not want to “interfere.”
Tom had been working as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, and then at Berkeley. He was a rising star in neurophysiology, and like so many people in that field in the 1980s, he was studying fruit fly genetics, working to understand the complex relationships between genetics and neurology. He was strong but slight, with a ready smile, curly dark hair cut short, and the soft look of a humble connection with you in his eyes. Growing up, he had been in the shadow of the brilliance of Jim, two years older, and I’d been in both their shadows, eight years behind Tom and also a girl. When I was a child I wanted to do everything with them. They taught me to walk everywhere in my bare feet. When I was very little and wondered where they went during the day (to school), they told me they were fighting dinosaurs on Mars. They told me it snowed in all different colors but I happened only to have seen white so far.
In high school, when I might have wanted to be out with my boyfriend, I canceled everything to be home every moment they were there over the holidays. There was no higher imperative than to spend all my time with them. Ever since I was ten they had both been away, mostly—college, and then graduate school. Without them, the house was cold and silent; the family with them gone was unrecognizable. But when they were home on vacation, anything was possible. The lights were on, the heat was on, there was cooking and food in the fridge, there were ideas and laughter.
Tom brought home things he thought I should know about. He brought me the album The Roches after he heard it at Cornell. He and I collected Beatles albums from the secondhand record store in Collegetown, working our way toward a complete collection. He introduced me to the right kinds of hiking boots, and how to play Frisbee, and the virtues of European chocolate. When he was in graduate school, and I was in college, I went to Madison, Wisconsin, to stay with him and his partner, Andie, for a week or two. I saw what it was to have an affectionate relationship, and a charming apartment, and jobs you wanted to go to each day. Andie, my dear heart to this day, and I sang Motown while we drove around looking at garage sales. This felt like my inevitable, desirable adulthood, just waiting for me, just ahead.
But that day in 1989, he and Andie had taken her visiting brother to Yosemite for the day. Another driver began driving toward him, playing “chicken,” veering into Tom’s lane to try to get him to veer out of it. As it was told to me at the time, Tom pulled off the road and stopped, but the other driver hit them anyway, killing Tom instantly and injuring Andie so catastrophically that she was hospitalized for six months. Her brother, in the back seat, suffered only a couple of brok
en bones.
The driver of the other car was drunk, driving and drinking all day in the park, we heard. He had his wife and children in the car with him. He was tried in federal court. I talked to someone from the court and asked if I could submit a personal impact statement, but she apologetically told me the date for those submissions was over. She had gotten one from my mother, but the court was not aware Tom had had any siblings. The driver received a sentence of five years in jail. I do not know his name or what became of him.
Mom was living in her own private hell and we were not invited. She had also had a deeply beloved older brother who was killed serving in the navy during World War II, while Mom was in college. Mom seemed to have had some kind of breakdown when he died. She couldn’t remember much about that time. She went to four colleges, one for each year of her four-year degree. Now, with the death of Tom, she lost her will to live.
I still have an aversion to telephones. I hate the sound of a phone ringing and I will do almost anything to avoid making or taking a call. Each time I get into a car, or when I know someone I love is driving somewhere, I have to remind myself: this is a normal risk we all choose to take. I was twenty-four when Tom died, and he was thirty-two.
Curt had reached the end of the time of his fellowship in Washington, and needed to find a next job. To my surprise, he started looking for postdoctoral positions all over the country. I had somehow thought we were settled in Washington, D.C., for a while. Then, one evening, as we ate dinner with his parents in the beautiful dining room of their Spring Valley, Virginia, house, he announced his front-runner job option was in a small college town in the south. A little shock ran through me.
Wait, I said, what would I do there? Everyone turned to look at me in silence.
Later, Janet pulled me aside. “Your job is to be with Curtis,” she told me. “You don’t get an opinion on where his job is or where you move. Your job is to support him.” I heard the anger in her stern, flat voice, and I felt my failure, and my inability, to accept and appreciate what life in this family meant.
We moved, instead, to Annapolis, where Curt got a job with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. We rented a little wooden house a few blocks behind the Naval Academy stadium, almost on the shore of Weems Creek. This felt more like home. We had a long backyard that sloped into woods, and a vegetable garden. His parents and I bought Curt a solo canoe for his birthday, and some days he commuted to work in it. I started a consulting business writing business plans for young companies, and we started trying to have a baby.
In relishing the woods and the creek and the vegetable garden, in all this reaching back to find the pieces of my childhood that had beauty, I was also reaching for animals. My knees were too bad to allow me to ride horses at that time, so I turned to dog training. I had met some new friends who raised sheep and trained sheepdogs, and I apprenticed myself to the generous, kind Barbara Starkey, and became her farm assistant a day or so per week. And then I got my first border collie, Kline. Choosing the dog reminded me of Tom, because he and I used to make lists of our favorite dog breeds, and discuss what the best combinations would be for our eventual housefuls. We made lists of dog names. Kline joined Curt’s Siberian husky, Natasha, in our household, and we started obedience classes together, and life felt right, and sure, even as my heart was still broken over Tom’s loss and I had more and more nightmares.
One day about six months after Tom died Curt saw me with tears on my cheeks, and I recall him saying, in surprise, “I thought you would have forgotten about all that by now, or gotten over it.” Responses flashed through my mind. I will never be over it, I thought. And who in the world in six months is over a terrible personal loss? Where was the foothold to start a conversation about this comment? Could it be that Curt’s family had treated any deaths that had occurred during his lifetime without emotional reaction? But I couldn’t reach that far from my own grief into a dispassionate analysis of his question. Curt had asked not with malice or resentment but instead a bit of surprise and wonder. I realized he had no emotional bridge to where I was right then. I was alone. Our lives went on as they were going.
At last I was pregnant. I went to the doctor’s to be checked because I didn’t know whether to trust the drugstore tests, and I happily gave Curt the doctor’s note of affirmation that evening. We were thrilled! His parents were thrilled! And on a visit to Ithaca with my parents, I sat them down and excitedly announced my surprise: we were going to have a baby! They looked at me steadily but a little blankly. With an internal shudder of embarrassment, and a feeling of floating into an empty space with no anchors, I realized that they had not been waiting for this moment. Having grandchildren was just not on their life list of joys to come. They were pleased, nothing more.
But the joy of the pregnancy was strong for us. We talked about names. We thought, if it’s a girl, she’ll have my last name, and a boy, he’ll have Curt’s. Curt’s parents did not approve. My parents did not care. Curt’s lovely cousin gave me a baby shower. What fun to open all the gifts! And our new, to-be-lifelong friends Ilene and Philip from a couple of blocks away gave us their own old crib.
By the time I was six months along and Curt’s family had taken us on a chartered sailboat trip out of Saint Lucia, I was no longer nauseated, and could snorkel and bodysurf along with everyone else. Curt’s beautiful, socially graced, and wonderfully welcoming and loving sisters were along, of course, and they knew exactly how to make everything smooth. I did not. Janet criticized the weight I had gained. And I needed to drink a lot of milk, and bought shelf-stable milk to keep in our cabin; she wanted it with the rest of the food, and when I insisted I be allowed to keep my own milk, she was angry, and I felt selfish and stubborn and wrong.
I kept having dreams that I was having a little boy who looked like Tom. And then, the day before giving birth, I had a dream that I had a little girl. I was absolutely sure I was having a girl; so easy to explain away the boy dreams as missing my brother. So when, the next day in the hospital, the nurse said, “He’s a boy!” I was so surprised that I could only say, “What?”
But this gorgeous, healthy, big baby boy looked so much like the baby pictures of Tom. We named him Turner, which was Tom’s middle name, and Kolbe, a last name in my mother’s family, and Bohlen, his father’s last name. Turner Kolbe Bohlen. So beloved from the very moment we met him. What a miracle a baby is.
We lived in that sweet house in Annapolis for a couple of years, and then Curtis needed to change jobs again. I asked him: “Could there be something you are struggling with that is not the job? Is it really the job that makes you unhappy?” But just as I was unable yet to start owning and shaping my own pain, so perhaps he was, too. The conversation was short as this paragraph. He took a new job at a biological station down on the Chesapeake Bay. We needed to move far south from Annapolis, down to southern St. Mary’s County, along the western side of the Chesapeake Bay. We found a little place with some land—eighteen acres—so we could raise sheep of our own and continue training our border collies to herd.
We set about converting the property from an old tobacco farm into a new sheep farm. We built a seven-strand electric fence around a ten-acre pasture. We had hand tools, but no tractor and no big truck, and no way to plant or hay. A dirt lane ran along the far side of the sheep pasture, through a hedgerow, and along fields to our neighbor’s house. One day soon after we moved in Curt and I drove over there. We stopped in the dirt area in front of the house, called out hello, and waited by the car. We’d already learned the country practice of waiting out by the vehicle and not coming up and knocking on the door, which was much too invasive. No sound came from the house. No door opened, and no curtain moved. Eventually, we got back in our car and drove home.
A few hours later, a little contingent came walking down the lane to our house. We met Nancy Zimmerman, and her husband, and several of their ten children. Living around us in southern Maryland were members of several different sub-denominations of both the Amish and Mennonite churches. Nancy and her family were Mennonites. They used only horses for transport, and eschewed even buttons as vanity, closing their long dresses with pins. Her oldest daughter was married and gone, but her littlest boy, adorable and mischievous, was Turner’s age. We exchanged greetings, and names, and a little history, and I was glad I was wearing pants at least instead of shorts.