Kinflicks

by Lisa Alther

  By the time we had completed our circuit of the lake, he was no longer concerned about finding Marion, and I was no longer concerned about my biology lab. We lay in the grass by the edge of the lake and exchanged memories dredged up from early childhood. The spring sun beat down on our pallid faces and baked our winter-weary bodies. I felt as though a huge chunk of ice located inside my abdomen were thawing. Fluffy clouds drifted overhead, assuming all sorts of fabulous shapes. On a hill across the lake were half a dozen small children. Two flew colorful kites out over the lake. The others tumbled around in the new grass and rolled down the face of the hill like small puppies. I sighed with contentment. As I did so, I found my hand being held. Delicious sensations of warmth began creeping up my arm, and my fingers trembled in his.

  ‘Why don’t we go into Cambridge a little later?’ he suggested. ‘I could show you those buildings I was telling you about. And then we could have dinner somewhere. I know a great Spanish restaurant near the Square.’

  It required every fiber of self-restraint that I possessed to prevent my body from rolling over and snuggling companionably up against him. Thoughts of my unwritten paper were as distant and as uncompelling as memories of last winter’s ice storms.

  Just as I was about to accept, I jerked my hand away and scrambled to my feet, like Cinderella at the ball at midnight. ‘I’m sorry but I have a biology lab,’ I mumbled. ‘It’s been a nice afternoon. I hope you find Marion.’ I whirled around and raced off.

  ‘Wait!’ he yelled. What’s your name?’

  I didn’t answer.

  I was gasping for breath by the time I sprinted into the biology lab. Professor Aitken looked at me with displeasure. I mumbled apologies as I slipped on my lab coat. Half a dozen other girls were already working silently at their microscopes.

  I prepared my slides, using specimens from a Petri dish teeming with protozoa. I took them to a microscope and adjusted the eyepiece. Looking into it, I focused in on an ever-smaller segment of the slide. Finally, I had a good picture of two protozoa, surrounded by dozens more. I could see the outer membranes that enclosed their cytoplasm; and in the cytoplasm, the mitochondria where they produced energy, the nuclei which contained their genetic material.

  As I watched, waiting for nothing in particular, the two protozoa began approaching each other by extending their comical pseudopods, the tiny bulges of protoplasm that functioned for them almost like feet. When they were within a certain distance of each other, they appeared to perform some sort of dance: They moved toward each other; then they backed away; they circled each other; they rotated in place. Finally, after many tedious minutes of this coy microscopic Virginia reel, they drew up side by side. Gradually, out of the side of one of the protozoa there extended a tiny point of protoplasm. This point grew and grew. Eventually it bridged the gap to the other protozoa. I ceased to be able to see exactly what was happening, but the end result was that the bridge of protoplasm penetrated the other protozoa and merged with it, so that the interiors of the two cells were now continuous.

  ‘Professor Aitken!’ I shrieked. He came rushing over, his white coat flying behind him. ‘Something strange is going on with my protozoa!’

  He peered through my microscope. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, disappointed that I hadn’t uncovered some Nobel Prize material. ‘They’re exchanging genetic material.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It’s equivalent to what happens in human conception. Each receives a portion of the other’s genes so that when each cell divides, the four daughter cells will be combinations of the two parent cells. It’s an elaboration on simple cell division.’

  ‘But why?’ I asked, forgetting for the moment my resolution only to ask ‘how,’ never ‘why.’

  ‘So that evolution of the species can occur. If each cell merely reproduced itself, change — improvements or otherwise — couldn’t take place, except randomly through trauma-induced mutation.’

  ‘How come these two picked each other to swap genes with?’

  ‘“Picked” ? Please, Miss Babcock, try not to be so insistently anthropomorphic. We think it’s simply a question of electrical charges on the cell membranes. But of course the same thing is going on all through the Petri dish.’

  By the time I returned to my high-magnification peep show, the one protozoa was retracting its protoplasmic protuberance, and the other was swimming languidly away into the surrounding soup.

  That night at supper I saw Marion. ‘I met your brother this afternoon. Did he ever find you?’

  ‘Yes. He said he met someone from Tennessee. I figured it had to be you. He really liked you. But he said you ran off when he asked you out.’

  ‘I had a biology lab.’

  ‘I think he thought you were rejecting him.’

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘Should I tell him you weren’t?’

  Finally I said, ‘I’m really pretty busy this term. I don’t have time to go out.’

  She shook her head sadly. ‘Okay. Suit yourself.’

  I was very irritated by her solicitous attitude. Just because she spent most of her spare time on her back with her legs spread, she wanted everyone else to as well. Well, my destiny did not lie in some man’s unmade bed.

  I shut myself away in a library carrel that night and wrote a paper for my biology course. It was based on the concept that human emotions were a repertoire of behavioral patterns bred into an organism, just as anatomical features were bred into it. The patterns characteristic of any given organism, love in humans for instance, were those that had exhibited survival value for the species as a whole. But it was quite possible that what was beneficial to the species might not be beneficial to the individual organism. And in such a case, the interests of the individual were ruthlessly forfeited to those of the species. For example, the vivid feathering of some birds enhanced their mating prowess but also enhanced their vulnerability to predators. Individual survival was assigned a secondary place to species propagation by the Management.

  I, however, was a daughter of Spinoza. My talent lay in detaching myself from this scheme. I had studied sentic cycles; I knew that each person’s finger presses a sensitized key in an identical wave pattern when that person is imagining situations that elicit a given emotion. I also knew that people could be trained to reproduce the wave pattern characteristic of any given emotion without reference to internal or external stimuli. I would not serve, under the guise of sublime emotion, as a vessel for chromosome interchange with Marion’s brother or with anyone else, be it for the well-being of my species or not In short, I decided not to go out on any more dates. Not that my phone was ringing off the wall.

  I went home to Hullsport for the summer, having been dateless for two months and without sex for much longer.

  I worked at the Major’s factory as a file clerk. The Major often took time out from his duties to diagram for me the chemical composition of the explosives being synthesized there, and I admired the elegance of the formulas. All summer the Major and I were each other’s biggest admirer.

  The testing procedures at the factory had gained considerably in sophistication since the evenings of my childhood when the Major had bought us kids ice cream cones and had taken us to view his performances at the test firing range. By now all the testing for detonation speeds was done in a blast chamber and was monitored by a huge pie-shaped camera that used special lenses and whirling mirrors to snap photographs at three-microsecond intervals.

  One afternoon, the Major invited me to a meeting of himself and the technicians who conducted these tests. They had the photo series from a test for a new explosive to be used in large shells consigned to a place people were just beginning to hear of — Vietnam. There were eight pictures in this series, which from start to finish took about twenty-four microseconds. I was impressed. The fastest speed on Miss Head’s metronome was four beats per second. Joe Bob in his track meets had striven against a stopwatch that was divided into hundreds of secon
ds. Clem, even on the morning when he had nearly killed me, had been traveling only about 117 feet per second. But here in these photos, we were witnessing a blast whose waves could travel twenty thousand feet per second, a blast that was completed before Joe Bob’s stop watch could even start.

  I studied the photos with fascination as the blast pictured in them grew and grew, preceded by white shock waves. Halfway through the sequence, the explosion began puffing into fantastic shapes, like the cumulus clouds Marion’s brother and I had watched and labeled on that warm spring afternoon at Worthley. The last frame in the photo series was mostly gray and black, with gases and debris enshrouding the eye of the explosion.

  “What do you think, Major?’ asked a technician in a white lab coat.

  The Major cleared his throat and held the series up to the light in his deformed left hand with its missing finger. ‘Yes, well, I think it’s what we’ve been looking for, don’t you, Hal?’ Hal nodded. ‘I mean, the shattering effect is ideal, it seems to me. Look at the size of those shock waves!’ We all stared at the white shock waves greedily, as though they were the billowing breasts of a Playboy centerfold.

  ‘Gorgeous!’ Hal said.

  I saw Clem only once that summer. I stopped by after work one afternoon and found him in the barnyard standing on the running board of a tractor. He was wearing green work pants and a grease-smeared T-shirt. His dark hair hung in his eyes. He was using a large screwdriver to pry something out of the tractor engine. His face was drenched with sweat, and his T-shirt clung to his scrawny back in dark patches.

  He smiled when he saw me. I rested my elbows on the hood and looked down into the engine. Drawing on my knowledge of the internal combustion engine from Physics 140, and my knowledge of the human body from Physiology 110,1 described to Clem the similarities between the two: The lungs functioned as a sort of carburetor to mix with oxygen the fuel transported from the stomach via the bloodstream, just as fuel traveling down the gas line from the gas tank mixed with oxygen in the carburetor of an engine; muscle cells, drawing energy from the combustion of simple sugars, expanded and contracted like the pistons of an engine in order to drive the limbs…

  Clem frowned at me, his screwdriver at rest and his face smeared with dirt and grease. He said with concern, ‘Shoot, Ginny, you done gone plumb crazy up at Boston.’

  Fortunately, I no longer cared what Clem thought. I had studied Hegel. I knew that Clem had merely played the antithesis to Joe Bob’s thesis, and that Miss Head was the pure and elevated synthesis. That Miss Head herself might be the thesis for a yet higher synthesis, as Hegel would have insisted, was unthinkable.

  Immediately upon my return to Worthley in the fall, I went to Miss Head’s apartment to get her to sign my course selection. When she opened her door, she looked just as she had the spring day I had left her to go home for the summer — in a tweed suit and nylon blouse, her Greek cameo at her throat and her Swiss watch hanging above her heart.

  She stared out at me over the top of her horn-rim half glasses and smiled. I felt an impulse to embrace her. My arms rose slightly from my sides. I hastily suppressed the impulse, feeling that Miss Head would be startled and displeased by an expression of physical intimacy from me. Instead, we stood looking at each other awkwardly, beaming with repressed pleasure.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ she finally said, stepping aside.

  She had obviously been working on her Descartes book. Papers were stacked all over her mahogany dining table.

  ‘I hope I didn’t interrupt you?’ I knew how she loathed having her schedules upset.

  She consulted her watch and said, ‘No, indeed. It’s six thirty-five. Time for me to stop anyway. So you’re back, are you?’

  ‘Did you think I wouldn’t be?’

  ‘One never knows. Summer vacations are quite a test. I remember reluctantly going back to Oklahoma every summer. For several months I’d listen to my parents’ propaganda about how delightful it would be if I’d forget about my fancy education and settle down with some nice man and give them some grandchildren. By the end of the summer, with another grueling academic year ahead of me, they’d have me nearly won over. I’d walk out to the edge of town, where I was usually working as a waitress or a chambermaid or something. I’d watch the tumbleweed swirl by and the dust clouds sift down over everything, and I’d struggle with myself over how I wanted to spend my life. Finally, I just stopped going home. I couldn’t take it.’

  ‘It never occurred to me not to come back,’ I confessed, distressed by my lack of soul.

  ‘Good! I’m delighted to see you. You look marvelous. You must have had a pleasant summer.’

  I did. I worked at my father’s factory. It was fascinating. I’ve never properly appreciated him before.’

  ‘What kind of factory is it?’

  ‘Munitions,’ I replied offhandedly.

  She lowered her gray head and looked at me over the top of her glasses and said in a deep noncommittal voice, ‘Indeed.’

  ‘You should see the neat photo series they do of explosions in the blast chamber to check detonation speeds.’

  ‘What are these explosives for, as it were?’

  ‘Bombs and shells and stuff.’

  ‘Indeed.’ She looked at me strangely.

  ‘Well, he just makes them. He’s presented with a chemical problem: how to maximize shock waves within a given number of microseconds. It’s not his fault if his solutions are sometimes misused.’

  Miss Head said nothing.

  ‘Well, is it?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, I’m sure. I’m strictly apolitical, Miss Babcock. I happen to agree with Descartes when he says that his maxim is “to try always to conquer [himself] rather than fortune, and to alter [his] desires rather than change the order of the world, and generally accustom [himself] to believe that there is nothing entirely within [his] power but [his] own thoughts.” I’ve always felt that a person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.’

  I thought about it. I wasn’t absolutely positive that I agreed with Descartes in this case. But if Miss Head agreed, I was sure I’d come to in time.

  ‘Well, anyhow, I need your signature.’

  ‘Let me see,’ she said, taking my schedule.

  I was pleased with myself for having decided what to take without her advice — astronomy, physics, nineteenth-century philosophy, psychology. She blanched. What was wrong with it?

  ‘I had thought,’ she said, sounding somewhat miffed, ‘that you might want to do some independent study under me on Descartes or Spinoza.’

  ‘Well, I did think about it. And then I decided that I’d better cover some more ground in a rather superficial fashion before I zero in on any one specialty.’

  ‘That’s probably an excellent idea. But how about eighteenth-century music, say, or the early English novel?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know, I mean, I’d like to take them, but I can’t take everything, can I?’

  ‘No, but I really don’t think you’ll be happy with the nineteenth-century philosophers, Miss Babcock. They’re quite different from Descartes and Spinoza, you know. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, indeed!’ She snorted so forcefully that her glasses popped off and dangled on their chain. ‘And in combination with your other choices — no, I think you’re making a mistake, Miss Babcock. As your adviser, I feel I must warn you.’

  ‘But why, Miss Head? I don’t understand.’ I was truly perplexed. I had expected her to be pleased that I had made up my own mind this time.

  ‘It’s too much at once,’ she explained mysteriously.

  ‘I’m the one who has to take these courses, Miss Head, and these are the ones I want to take. I can switch at mid-term if they’re not what I want And I definitely plan to take your Descartes seminar in January.’

  She looked at me, at a loss. Never having been a mother, she was new to the battles of will that went on consta
ntly between parent and child. Finally, she signed the form and handed it to me.

  ‘Thank you, Miss Head,’ I said, standing up.

  ‘You’re welcome, I’m sure, Miss Babcock,’ she replied coolly.

  Panic seized me. I longed to rip up my schedule and fill out a new one entirely in keeping with her wishes. If I didn’t please this woman, she would withdraw her affection and support. On the other hand, if I didn’t please myself, I might end up like my mother, sacrificed to others’ whims for so long that I’d no longer know what I wanted. And what other message had I been deciphering from Miss Head’s example all these months: I wasn’t doomed to repeat my mother’s patterns of behavior. There were alternatives.

  Struggling in the grip of this paradox, I managed to say to Miss Head with equal iciness, ‘It’s very nice seeing you again.’

  She nodded her gray-bunned head slightly and offered me a pained smile. Again I wanted to embrace her, to reassure myself of her continuing affection in spite of it all. Again I stopped myself. I had to steady myself against the wall with one hand as I passed through her alcove and into the hall.

  I had the same room I’d had the previous year — a small garret on the fifth floor with a windowseat overlooking the courtyard. It smelled musty. I threw open the casement windows and looked toward the lake, past the bronze cast of Artemis on whose outstretched finger someone had hung a yo-yo.

  There was a crash and a clatter, and I heard a voice in the next room shout, ‘Oh fuck!’

  A tin can was falling through the air. Turning slowly, end over end, it spewed a red liquid onto the gray flagstones and the Flemish sundial in the courtyard below.

  There was another clatter next door, and the same coarse voice yelled, ‘Goddam it to hell!’ The can landed with a hollow crunch. As it lay there, the red liquid oozed from the holes in its top. The stones all around it and the bronze sundial were splattered with rusty red dribbles, as though some wild animal had been dismembering its prey on that very spot.