In the Field

by Rachel Pastan

  He showed her the back room that served both for storage and as an office, and he demonstrated how to cut paper shapes to affix to the leaves to prevent light exposure. It was finicky work. Kate was surprised by how deft Thatch was. The excess paper scraps fluttered away, leaving perfect ellipses or precisely irregular fringed ovals. “You should have been a girl,” she said, tossing her hair out of her face and trying to concentrate.

  “I grew up with my hands inside farm machinery,” Thatch explained. “On my family’s dairy farm. Inside cows, too,” he added, then turned red.

  Kate kept her eyes politely on her cutting, but what did she care if he stuck his hands into cows? Her father had delivered human babies. She worked the scissors around a tricky curve, using one of his cutouts as a pattern.

  “I’m here to study dairy science, really,” Thatch said. “Other than Bio 1, I’m taking Milk Composition and Intermediate Cheese.”

  “How about ice cream?” she asked, laughing. “I’d take a class in that.”

  “That’s next semester,” he said.

  Kate saw he wasn’t joking. “So you’ll go back and run the farm when you graduate?”

  “My father wants to modernize. I wish I could study botany, though. Plants are so interesting.” He looked at her appealingly. His nose was a bit too long and his forehead was a bit too broad, but with his regular features and nicely shaped mouth, he wasn’t bad looking.

  “Are they?” Her hair had fallen into her face again, and as she tossed it back, she saw that she had cut her shape too small, mangling Thatch’s prototype in the process.

  “Cows are big and stupid,” Thatch said with sudden passion. “Plants are subtle. Canny. They can’t run from their predators, so they grow thorns and secrete poisons. They can’t hunt down a mate, so they make beautiful scented blossoms to lure bees.”

  Kate pulled her hair back, twisted it into a knot, and slid a pencil through it. “I think it’s amazing that they live on sunlight,” she said.

  “Think how wonderful that must be,” Thatch agreed.

  “Except on cloudy days.” The knot of hair was already loosening. Greasy-feeling strands slid onto her temples and slithered down her cheeks. Again the scissors slipped.

  “You’ll get the hang of it,” he said.

  Kate flushed. “It’s my hair. It makes it hard to see.” She turned her chair around and thrust the scissors at him. “Can you cut it? Here.” She touched her neck just below her ear to show the length she wanted.

  “Cut it off?”

  “It’ll only take a minute.”

  “No. I won’t.”

  “It’s not a whim,” Kate said. “If that’s what you’re worried about.”

  He tucked his hands into his armpits. “It’s not right.”

  Kate didn’t like the embarrassed look on his face, as though what she had asked were somehow shameful. “What’s not right?” she demanded. “A girl with short hair? A girl deciding how she wants to wear her own hair? A girl asking you to help her do what she wants to do with her own hair?”

  Thatch just shook his head.

  “And how,” she wondered aloud, “does that not right compare with, say, the not right of cheating? On a lab report, for example.” She hadn’t known she was going to say it—hadn’t even known she was thinking about it. But now that the words had surfaced, she was glad. She’d been angry about it all this time without even realizing.

  Thatch’s face tightened. “I didn’t cheat.”

  “You let that boy copy.”

  “That was Jimmy.”

  “It was your work, though, wasn’t it? So what’s the difference?” She tossed her head. Her hair clung to her sweaty neck.

  “There’s a difference,” Thatch said.

  They were both sweating now, in the humid greenhouse, both of them flushed and hot and irritated. “You knew he was doing it,” Kate said. “You knew, and you didn’t say anything.”

  “I didn’t snitch,” Thatch said. “If that’s what you mean.”

  “So if Jimmy committed murder, you would just keep quiet?”

  “That’s not fair,” Thatch said.

  “Okay, forget it,” Kate said. “Will you cut my hair or not? After all, you’re the one with the experienced hands.” She waited for him to blush.

  But he didn’t blush. “You can do what you like with your hair,” Thatch said. “But count me out.”

  Kate seized the hair and positioned the scissors.

  “I can recommend a good barber,” Thatch said when she hesitated. “If you’re worried.”

  Snip snip snip. A moment later, the hair lay on the floor between them like the dead thing it was. Kate ran her hand along the ragged ends.

  Thatch looked at her curiously. “How does it feel?”

  A shimmering bubble seemed to be inflating inside Kate’s chest: buoyant, odd. She ducked her head, feeling how easily it moved. “It feels light,” she said.

  Kate found a room in a boardinghouse full of graduate students who spent their time elsewhere: in the submarine depths of the library churning through the murky pages of old books, or in the far-flung experimental barns raising better chickens and sheep. She sent a note to Myrtle Street asking that her mail be forwarded, but she didn’t go back for her things. They could keep them, throw them out. Stick pins in them and burn them. She didn’t care.

  Dr. Krause gave her a fat book to study: W. E. Castle’s Genetics. When she wasn’t in class or in the greenhouse, she liked to stretch out on the sitting room chesterfield with a mug of tea and read it. “The human mind is characterized above all by curiosity, the source of all our wisdom as well as of our woes,” Castle wrote. “We demand a reason for everything, and if none is forthcoming from an outside source, we straightway construct one for ourselves out of our own imaginings.”

  Was that true? Lots of people didn’t seem curious about anything much. With its confident, direct, slightly pompous style, the book seemed to speak to her directly, the ideas soaking into her brain. Sitting on the hard, slick horsehair, she flipped through plates illustrating the coloration of hybrid guinea pigs.

  There was a chapter on Mendelian terms: homozygote, gametes, unit-character.

  There was a method for calculating the probabilities of unit-characters being passed from parent to offspring, with capital letters representing dominant unit-characters, and lowercase letters representing recessive ones:

  She learned that a recessive unit-character could be passed along unexpressed for generations until the right circumstance caused it to show itself again.

  Kate had always been interested in where things came from and how they worked. In hidden connections, like the one between the caterpillar and the butterfly. In what was going on under the rubbery skin of the visible world. These connections might be revealed at the most unexpected times and places. Once, when she was four or five, she had wandered into the kitchen to find her mother standing over the stove, her face shiny, stirring something in a great black kettle. As Kate stood watching, her mother lifted the ladle to her lips. A dark red viscous liquid, runny and goopy, trickled down her flushed, pointy chin. Blood! Kate stood in the doorway, frozen with horror, until her eyes fell upon on the great heap of strawberry hulls lying on the kitchen table. She felt an electric jolt as two ideas connected. Blood, that most mysterious of substances—usually glimpsed only when you fell and scraped your knee, or cut your forehead on the edge of the coffee table—came from strawberries! It was years before she worked out that her mother had been making jam.

  A few days later, Kate told this story to Thatch. “I was so pleased with myself,” she said. “I had discovered a piece of the mystery of the universe!”

  Thatch laughed. “You actually thought your mother was cooking blood on the stove?”

  “That’s not the point,” Kate said. She ran a hand along the blu
nt ends of her hair, which she’d had evened out at a beauty parlor in town. The hairdresser had scolded her for cutting it so short.

  “You must have been a strange child.” Thatch looked at her with an expression she couldn’t read, not quite admiring, not quite critical. “A queer little duckling.”

  Kate picked up a new piece of paper. “You’re not listening,” she said.

  “I’m listening all right,” Thatch said.

  “I’ve been reading a book Dr. Krause gave me about genetics,” she said. As Thatch had predicted, she was getting better at cutting the shapes. She liked the feeling of the excess paper being sliced away.

  “Castle? Isn’t it fascinating?”

  “It’s a whole system for understanding how things are connected under the surface!”

  “And the pictures. Those photographs of guinea pigs!” Thatch leaned toward her. “The ones where they’re upright and fluffy are okay. But then there are those plates where they’re dead on their backs.”

  “Stretched out like popsicles,” Kate said, laughing. “And the rats with their poor naked tails.” She was a little jealous Krause had given Thatch the book, too, but on the other hand, it was nice to talk about it with someone.

  “Ratsicles!” Thatch said. They were both laughing, tossing out the colors of the ratsicles that could also be flavors—cream, chestnut, chocolate, cinnamon. Then, when it was almost time to go, Thatch said, “May I buy you a soda? Seeing as it’s pay day.”

  The steadiness of his gaze made her turn away. “Where do you work?” she asked, fiddling with one of her paper fronds.

  Thatch sounded puzzled. “Here.”

  Kate stared back up at him: his big square face and the wing of sandy hair flopping over the forehead. His powerful innocent farmer’s jaw. “Dr. Krause pays you?”

  This time it was Thatch who turned away. Busily, he began to straighten up the mess on the table.

  Kate stood up so abruptly her chair clattered backwards. She dropped her scissors on the table and went to get her coat.

  “Don’t be mad,” Thatch said. “Let me treat you. After all, I can afford it.” He tried to make it into a joke.

  Kate walked out into the cold November afternoon. It had begun to snow. I couldn’t pay you, Krause had said. Not: I never pay my assistants.

  Maybe he only had enough money for one student. Or maybe Thatch had started out working for free too, only earning a wage over time.

  Large wet flakes swooped through the cold on wild gusts of wind, freezing the back of her neck. She felt wild too, something blowing through her that might have been rage.

  But what did it matter? She tried to reason with herself. It was a privilege to work for Dr. Krause! It was an opportunity to be part of something amazing, pulling back the curtain to peek at the secret gears and pulleys. The snow tumbled and plummeted. At the bell tower by the library, three crows stood, glossy against a blinding white sea. Snow filigreed the telephone lines and filled up the trees. When she was a girl, her father had taught her to see each tree as its own universe: a web of birds, bugs, squirrels, moss, bats. Had explained how—impossible though it seemed—the whole system was powered by sunlight. That weightless yellow brilliance emanating from an object ninety-three million miles away, yet pouring itself into every corner, every crevice. How proud he would have been that she was working for someone—a professor!—who was trying to learn how it worked. He wouldn’t care whether she was paid or not.

  But it bothered her.

  When she came into the hall of the boardinghouse, with its smells of damp upholstery and stewed tea, a figure with a disheveled braid, huddled in a fitchskin coat, was perched on the edge of the sitting room chesterfield. Kate’s heart began to thump as her body recognized Thea before her brain did.

  Thea jumped up, urgent yet hesitating. “There was a telephone call,” she said. “Long distance.”

  “What?” Kate said. “What?” Long distance was for illnesses, for death. The confused thought slid through her mind: Thank God her father was already dead!

  “Your mother,” Thea said, trying to explain. But she was nearly as flustered as Kate. “Your mother called. She says there’s an emergency. She says you need to come home at once, but that no one has— No one is …”

  “Everyone’s alive?”

  “Yes.”

  “But—what happened?” Kate’s mind started to tick through possibilities.

  “I don’t know,” Thea said. “She wouldn’t say. Just that you should come home.”

  “Isn’t that just like her!” Kate cried.

  Thea looked around the cramped hall. “Do you want to telephone them?” she asked. “Is there a telephone here?”

  “No.” That was the answer to either question.

  Thea paused. “Do you want to come back to Myrtle Street with me and call from there?”

  Kate’s mind fizzed and sputtered. She could not speak.

  “Sit down,” Thea said. “I’m going to make you a cup of tea.” She took Kate by the sleeve and led her carefully over to the chesterfield.

  As Thea began to move away, Kate reached up and pulled her down. “Don’t go,” she said. For a moment they sat close together on the hard horsehair seat. Under the fitchskins, inside the birdcage of bone, Thea’s heart thumped steadily—Kate could hear it, or feel it. Or maybe she just knew it. “What should I do?” she asked.

  “You have to pack a suitcase,” Thea said. “You have to find a taxi to take you to the train.”

  “I can’t!” Kate swung her head wildly. She would die if she had to go home!

  “You can,” Thea said. “I’ll help you.”

  “But if no one’s dead, why do I have to go?” Kate raised her face and looked up imploringly into Thea’s.

  Thea reached out and touched the back of Kate’s neck. She smelled of candle wax and of the sugared violets she liked to eat. “What happened to your hair?” she said.

  Thea packed Kate’s suitcase and wrote a note to the landlady. She nudged Kate to her feet and herded her out the door. The snow was coming down hard now, billowing in gusts that stung their faces and made it hard to see. They walked arm in arm because the sidewalks were so slippery.

  “It’ll be all right,” Thea said. “You’ll see. It will be fine. Didn’t you say your mother tended to be dramatic?”

  Kate nodded, full of dread: the solemn chilly house with its dark, polished woodwork. The hall table with its burden of hothouse flowers in a Chinese vase. The long velvet drapes behind which, as a child, Kate used to hide, certain that no one would ever find her there. The sounds that came from behind her mother’s door after Kate’s father died, which no one ever spoke of.

  They turned at the corner, leaning into the wind. There were no taxis, few cars on the street at all.

  “We can walk to the station if we have to,” Thea said. “It’s not so far. Here—let me take the suitcase.”

  Kate’s mind felt dull and stupid. Her face was numb and her toes tingled in her wet shoes, but she felt she could walk like this forever, the two of them alone together in a world filling up with snow.

  Far too quickly, they reached the station, a great cold empty space under a high, grimy roof. The smells of coal and damp and something singed. “Come with me,” she said.

  Thea let go, pretending not to hear. “What luck!” she said. “There’s a train boarding now.”

  CHAPTER 7

  What had been snow in Ithaca was cold rain in Brooklyn. Rain fell in fine, needle-like diagonals, penetrating Kate’s coat and her tightly wrapped scarf, stinging her ankles, gurgling all around her in gutters and in drains. It was after midnight when she arrived at the door of her parents’ house—her mother’s house—her cold clothes clinging to her, heavy as mud.

  Laura answered the bell and let out a cry, clutching her dressing gown to her throat.
“My God—your hair!” she said. “For a moment I thought you were Charlie.”

  “What’s happened?” Kate stood dripping onto the foyer floor.

  Laura pushed her toward the kitchen. “Mother’s finally sleeping,” she said. “So keep your voice down. Couldn’t you have let us know when you were arriving?”

  It was warm enough in the house, but Kate began to shiver. She sank into a chair at the round pedestal table where she had written hundreds of school essays, drunk thousands of glasses of milk, bickered with her siblings tens of thousands of times. “Is she sick?” she asked.

  “Well, of course the whole thing has made her ill!”

  “What has? What’s happened? Tell me!” Kate swiped at her tears angrily. “I got a message saying to come home, and I came home! I got the first train! I’m here!” She looked around. “Where’s Charlie?”

  Laura sat down too, across the table. Her hair gleamed in its bright artificial waves like corrugated metal. “He’s run away.” She laid her hands flat on the tabletop: perfect nails, delicate lacework of blue-green veins, the big ring sticking up.

  “Who has?” Kate asked.

  “Charlie,” Laura said.

  Kate’s heart began to pound. Thwap, thwap, thwap, as though someone were striking a tetherball with a bat. “Where has he gone?” she asked cautiously, as though the way she asked the question might have some influence on the answer.

  Laura fiddled with her ring. She turned it this way and that, making the berry-sized diamond cast sprays of light across the walls. “He left a letter saying he was joining the Merchant Marine. Mother fainted when she read it. I mean, she actually fainted! Luckily Thomas was here. Otherwise I don’t know what I would have done.” Thomas was the fiancé.

  “What could Thomas do?” Kate cried. “He’s not a doctor.”

  “Keep his head,” Laura said. “Telephone Dr. Lawrence.”

  “Surely you could have done that. You have fingers.”

  “Stop,” Laura said.