by Laurel Brett
“It sort of is,” I agreed, thinking of our old Boston family. My father had been the black sheep and run away to New York where he married my mother, a barmaid from a big New York Irish family.
My mother’s family worshipped the Yankees, but my dad never lost his fondness for his old team. Whenever the Red Sox played, my dad would lecture me about character and loyalty while we watched the team lose. He implied that it was vulgar to need to win, though I had never learned that lesson. I wondered what he would have made of the Yankees in defeat. I could imagine him telling me that now I had no choice but to develop character. I thought I’d wait it out until the Yanks started winning again.
Changing the subject I said, “Well, I’ve actually never met anyone named Daphne either.”
“It’s from a myth,” she said. “Ovid.”
“I’m not much of a classicist.”
Just then the busy waitress appeared to take our order.
“I haven’t finished the menu,” Daphne said, but she settled on grilled cheese with tomato on rye. Just as we’d bought the same books, I ordered the same. We were quiet as the waitress brought us our water in gold plastic glasses filled with almost more water and ice cubes than the glasses could hold. When she put the glasses in front of us, Daphne’s spilled a bit, and she quickly snatched her bag away so the book wouldn’t get wet. After the waitress’s mumbled apology, Daphne spoke again in a formal way: “Garrett, I have something to ask you.”
I caught sight of my restless self in the mirror. I got uncomfortable when things got personal. I wanted to talk about Schrödinger. She had been smart to sit against the mirror so she wouldn’t have to catch disconcerting glimpses of herself. Her eyes met mine directly.
“I want you to take me home with you.”
I was sipping my water. I immediately choked on an ice cube and endured a flurry of coughing. Other diners glanced over, worried, and I heard someone say, “Put your arms over your head.” I did and finally stopped choking. I carefully took a very small swallow of water. The sip stayed down. I was okay.
When I was myself again she said, “I’ve done that millions of times—choke, I mean. Ha ha. I’ve never seen someone coughing because someone asked him a question. It was like you were in a movie.”
I avoided her big question, but she put her hands in her lap in such a studied way that I was afraid she was going to ask again. I didn’t want to hear her ask herself home with me a second time, so I plunged in: “No. Absolutely not. No. Why would you ask me that? You’re a child. And you don’t know me. I could be a mass murderer.”
“I’ll take my chances,” she said, jutting her chin out to indicate her determination. She seemed more childlike than ever.
“I’m not taking you up on that proposition, ever,” I said, in what I hoped was a decided way. “I don’t date children. Do your parents know you’re going around offering yourself to men?”
“You can say that,” she pouted, “but I’m not a child.” Her cheeks were turning red, from irritation, I presumed. Her high coloring made her look even prettier than she had before, but she still appeared girlish. “It’s none of your business what my parents know, and promise me you’ll never speak to them.”
“You are a child under the law, and you are a child to me. How many men have you asked before me? You could get yourself in a lot of trouble. But no. I’ll respect our friendship and not approach your parents.”
“One before,” she admitted. “He was outside the Museum of Modern Art holding a huge blue plastic question mark. He said he was protesting the art mafia. I couldn’t quite come right out and say that I wanted to go home with him, but I hinted a lot, and stood around for hours until I had to go home.” Her eyes reflected her defeat. “Why did you ask me to lunch, then?” she asked.
“I told you. I wanted to find a random person to talk to about quantum physics. I wasn’t having a good day, and I wanted something unexpected to happen.”
“What hadn’t been going well?”
“The Yankees.”
“Yeah, they lost,” she said. “I just heard someone at another table say it.”
“Tell me about it. They’re going to come in last again. I can feel it.”
At that she burst out laughing so hard that now she almost choked on her water. “You just look so sad,” she explained, “that it’s funny. It’s just baseball.”
“The Yankees held me together during the war and for many seasons after that when I couldn’t take any more loss—” I stopped. The Yankees were beside the point of her outlandish proposition. “Why are you offering yourself to random men?”
“Because I hate the suburbs where I live. I hate the lawns. I hate the people. I hate being a teenager. I hate high school. I hate proms. I hate—”
“I get it,” I interrupted. “You’re ready to grow up. But that’s not the way. Have some patience. You could ruin your life.”
“I don’t care. It’s just too awful. Maybe I want to ruin my life. Do drugs. Live in the streets. Have some life instead of no life.”
There was real pathos in her face. I had forgotten how much the young suffer. We envy them, all that time they have in front of them, but their time hangs heavy. They have so many hours, so many hurdles to clear, before they can call their lives their own. No one has figured out a way to escape childhood without growing up. She wanted to skip a few hurdles and race into the future on the arm of an adult. She wanted to have freedom without ceding her imagination. I couldn’t blame her for that, though I couldn’t imagine her plan working.
It certainly wasn’t going to work with me.
The restaurant began clearing out. The waitress asked if there was anything else. I ordered coffee, and so did the Schrödinger girl. We wanted to talk some more. We had the restaurant to ourselves.
“What about your parents?” I asked.
“I’m not talking about them. I’m not talking about the suburbs. I’m not talking about bourgeois life.”
Daphne made me laugh with that comment, but since I wasn’t going to accept her proposition, it was time to think about getting her home. To my surprise, I discovered I was taking an interest in this girl; I found myself feeling protective. The idea of her throwing herself at random men in the city bothered me. I wanted to know she was safe. We agreed to walk the twenty-five blocks south to Penn Station so she could catch the train to Long Island.
The streets had been washed clean by the rain. The sidewalks hadn’t completely dried, and were still darkened by the shower, and the air smelled of damp concrete. The day had cooled so that it was almost pleasant strolling to the train. We didn’t hurry. Her schedule showed that in rush hour there were many trains she could catch. We tried to carry on a conversation, but our heights made it difficult, she being a head shorter than I.
I was straining to listen when she said, “Garrett, you are a mystery. We didn’t talk about you at all. What do you do? Do you live in the city?”
“We did talk about me. What we didn’t talk about is quantum physics. I live in New Paltz and teach at the college. I often come to the city for the day. I grew up here.”
“I’m not sure I’d want to live in New Paltz anyway,” she said peevishly, a small frown playing at the corners of her mouth, her lips the perfect rosebud shape. “I was seeking an urban abode.”
“I bet you were.”
“What do you teach? Physics?”
“No, I teach psychology. Behavioral psychology. And I do research.”
“Rats and all that? Wow. That’s kind of creepy.”
I’d heard that before. I wanted to explain behaviorism to her, to convince her that it wasn’t creepy. I had a standard lecture that I gave first-year psych students. They came into psychology thinking they would be talking about egos and complexes and serial killers, and instead they were met by mazes and rat experiments. I had patented my spiel to entice them into experimental psych. I almost launched into it on the spot.
We were nearing the station. Th
e rain hadn’t washed away the graffiti peace signs spray-painted on all the buildings near it. I was disappointed that my little self-wager—to talk about physics to the first person who picked up the Schrödinger book—hadn’t worked out, but Daphne had made our encounter engaging and improbable and very memorable. I began to have very unfamiliar feelings. I wanted to protect the girl from herself.
“Promise me you won’t throw yourself at any men before we can talk again.”
“I don’t think I want to promise that,” Daphne said, pouting.
“Promise anyway,” I insisted.
“Till when?”
“Two weeks?”
“Two weeks—two thirty p.m. at the luncheonette,” she said.
And then she ran down the stairs and disappeared into the station. She hadn’t promised, and we hadn’t talked about Schrödinger, and I hadn’t really discovered anything about her except her eagerness to grow up.
Chapter Two
* * *
All I could think about for two weeks was the Schrödinger girl standing in the bookstore in her yellow rain slicker holding aloft the book with the two cats on the cover. Would she come or not? Would I see her again? She was every student I wanted to influence, every young person I wanted to bring under the umbrella of some kind of wisdom.
Our fates had been entangled by chance.
I prepared for our meeting just as I prepared for my classes. I took my notes at a desk in my small house. I could sit at the desk and oversee the garden that was filled with very early spring blooms—snowdrops, crocuses, and the earliest daffodils. Just last week looking out the same window I had noticed that the ground was barren. Nature is always in flux, I thought. I didn’t usually make much of spring flowers, but there they were. And then I concentrated on the ideas I’d bring along to my lunch with Daphne.
My work boiled down to saving my thoughts on index cards. Inside my head I heard a voice making fun of me. What a pedant you are, I imagined my friend Jerry saying, just as he had so many times before. We’d been in graduate school together after college, and we were each other’s best man at the weddings of our short-lived marriages.
Jerry became a clinician, as he called it. He’d moved away from academic psychology and gotten training at a Freudian institute. He ran a thriving practice in New York City, psychoanalyzing the rich and getting rich himself, while I toiled away in experimental psych.
I was searching for truth, for knowledge, for something our discipline could solidly build on. Science was not just speculation. I wanted psychology to take its place along with physics, so we might talk about what we know and what we can prove. Why shouldn’t people be defined by natural laws?
The cards for my rendezvous with Daphne read as follows.
Index card one:
April 1967: Discuss Schrödinger. Important points to consider: the cat is dead/alive until we open the box and see. Cat is in a dual state that challenges the old idea of the law of the excluded middle—that something cannot be both A and not A at the same time—it can! The cat in Schrödinger’s thought experiment! Until the box is opened, that is. Then the cat is either alive or dead. Discuss relevance to quantum physics. Ask how she thinks it’s relevant to life.
Index card two:
April 1967: Discuss Heisenberg’s momentum of an electron. Explain velocity and momentum. Ask her to imagine how this idea affects our understanding of reality. Can we know anything fully? If we know the position of an electron and not the velocity, can we know anything about its trajectory? Ask her to think about all we cannot know.
Index card three:
April 1967: Talk about the observer effect—the idea that we influence the phenomena we observe. We affect things just by observing them. Invite her to discuss this concept.
Index card four:
April 1967: Behaviorism. Answer to depth psychology—to Freud.
James B. Watson—Psychology should only concern itself with observable events.
Pavlov—Conditioned reflexes. Reflexes become associated (conditioned) to new stimuli that are systematically paired with the old ones.
Skinner—All behavior is shaped by rewards and punishments.
These were the important ideas I wanted us to discuss—the ideas in the Schrödinger book, of course, but also my convictions about psychology. I wanted her to understand the concept that it’s pointless to talk about things we can’t observe, like how we feel and how other people feel and how meaningless an idea like consciousness is, though everyone talks about consciousness as if it is real. In my world of behavioral psychology we shouldn’t think about our dreams. They can’t be measured. Something was fraying for me—one minute I wanted to read Lewis Carroll and the next explain James Watson. I had always felt safe in Watson’s world, but this new malaise was threatening my complacency.
In the experimental clique in my psychology department, for example, no one would find it interesting that I imagined Daphne lying on her bed reading the science book. I conjured her waiting to have a conversation with me. I had believed that behavioral psychology was all anyone needed to save his or her life, and I was clinging to those ideas. I wanted to save her life—metaphorically speaking, of course. She seemed determined to throw it away.
* * *
She was already in the restaurant at two thirty when I walked in. She had seated herself in the same chair against the mirror. Her auburn hair surrounded her like a halo. Her head was buried in the book. I could see the familiar cover in her left hand. She didn’t know I’d come in until I was seated right in front of her. The emerald eyes peered at me with recognition and expectation.
“Hi,” I said, and laid my book on the table. I took the index cards out of my breast pocket and laid them on the table too. She regarded me quizzically.
“You brought notes?”
“It’s just a habit of mine,” I explained, as I launched into my discussion of quantum physics, behaviorism, Heisenberg, Skinner, all of them, until she interrupted.
“Whoa, I thought this was going to be a discussion, not a lecture. I loved the book. I like the idea of the world as probability—the idea that the reality we are in is just one of an infinity of possibilities and that the one we’re in exists by chance. I really want to understand what reality is. I sometimes wonder if we live parallel lives in alternate realities. Maybe the cat could be alive in one reality and dead in another that exist side by side at the same time.”
Daphne was precocious. I found that I didn’t want to talk about quantum physics after all—I wanted her to understand behaviorism. She had called my discipline creepy, and I wanted to change her mind. I couldn’t bear the thought that she might find me creepy too, an old fuddy-duddy who refused her adventurous and indecent proposal. I led the conversation away from Schrödinger and Heisenberg and toward the lecture I had prepared on the index cards. I concluded by saying, “And what about conditioned reflexes?” I glanced at myself in the mirror and saw how foolish and needy I appeared, but I couldn’t stop myself. Some random Beatles song played in the background. I was too old to follow the Beatles, but Daphne was softly singing along, “Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream, it isn’t dying . . .
“Revolver,” she informed me. “The last Beatles album to come out.”
I was probably supposed to say something about the Beatles here, but I had nothing to offer. I stared at an index card to escape the feeling that she was making fun of me. Then I put the index cards back in my pocket but still charged on: “Operant conditioning describes the way we acquire behaviors, through rewards and punishments. Skinner emphasizes the consequences of behavior. I study these. I am beginning to think that John Watson mischaracterizes science, which is often about unobservable phenomena, and measurable events are used to test hypotheses about things we can’t directly see.”
The waitress saved me from my own pedantry. Daphne ordered the same grilled cheese. I ordered ham and Swiss on rye.
Daphne asked, “How do you reconc
ile the observer effect with your ideas of behaviorism? Doesn’t the uncertainty of the quantum world challenge your tidy worldview?”
I had to think for a minute. I began to answer that we couldn’t generalize from atoms to people, but something in her countenance stopped me. I needed her approval more than she needed mine, a condition that destabilized me.
She interrupted my thoughts: “Garrett, I did keep the promise. No more men—at least not in the past two weeks. I haven’t decided whether or not I’m still looking.” Then she commanded, “Give me the index cards. They’re silly in your pocket.” The flirtatiousness in her manner suggested that she still liked me.
I handed them over, feeling suddenly naked. I didn’t know if I should admonish her for her continuing interest in me. In a manner of speaking I was old enough to be her father. I wanted to point that out to her, but I suspected my comment would do no good. She was determined to make more of our encounter than I wanted her to. I was determined to avoid any suggestion of a sexual attraction. Daphne was a child. I insisted on that in my mind. We finished our sandwiches, and I paid the bill. We didn’t linger over coffee. My discomfort prompted me to begin to tell her I needed to be somewhere else, when she said, “Let’s go for an ice cream cone. We can find a Good Humor truck near Central Park.”
Of course, I acquiesced. We wandered over to the park, which was filled with kids on roller skates, people walking dogs, au pairs escorting their little charges through the greenery, kids climbing rocks, older folks sitting on benches, and lovers intertwined in very public embraces. A long-haired kid was sitting on the grass strumming a guitar, singing, “Well, it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for? Well, I don’t give a damn, next stop is Vietnam . . .” Signs of opposition to the Vietnam War were growing.
“Country Joe and the Fish. The song, I mean. I wish spring would hurry up,” Daphne said.