by Megan Abbott
And he smiled that sad Serge smile.
Despite his warning, I can’t help but stop at the door of the feed room, propped open by a biohazard bin.
Coffee cup against my chest, hand over my mouth, I see it, the slick pile of rotting mice on the floor, tumors splitting their violet skin, loose and massing.
There must be a dozen of them.
Serge arrives behind me, the only sound the slight squeak of the lab gloves he’s putting on.
“Watch your head,” Serge says, pointing one long gloved finger to a browning ceiling panel. “There may be more.”
I step back quickly, lifting my eyes to the ceiling tiles, swollen with age, heat, air.
“I don’t think I’ve ever looked up before,” I say. And it’s true. At least, not in a long time.
We walk together, Serge carrying the mice in one of the red biohazard bags.
“At least it wasn’t the ferrets,” I say. We had a pack of them for the gonadal study. All the techs hated them, their heavy musk and screeching.
“These are not our mice,” Serge says. “Ours are secure. And much more refined. These are mutts. Maybe visitors from Panda Garden across the street.”
“Do they really think our feed is better than theirs?” I say, smiling, but inside I’m thinking about the bits and pieces still on the floor. Serge will have to go back with a mop.
“So I guess you heard about the big grant?” I say.
“Oh, yes,” he says. “I can smell it.”
“What?” I pause. “The adrenaline?”
But he merely smiles in that way he has. “Have a good day,” he says, heading toward the animal-waste dock, waving the bag slightly, like a bullfighter’s cape.
When I step inside G-21, Alex is already there, Styrofoam cups in hand, a pouchy-eyed wink.
Alex.
Alex always brings me a milky second coffee from the Snack Hut. Just like he always has gum in his pocket for me and will join me in my takeout order from the egg-sandwich place. And when Zell makes one of his Mother, you be trypsin puns, or Maxim unpacks his fastidious, girlfriend-prepared bento boxes for lunch, or that time one of Dr. Irwin’s postdocs was spotted walking the old man’s sheepdogs, we share knowing glances.
Alex doesn’t usually come in early, but he often stays late. A few times we’ve found ourselves in the lab alone together close to midnight, both working under the fume hoods, our faces close. We are the only ones who don’t seem to have anyone waiting at home.
“Thanks,” I say now, taking the cup, “early bird.”
A few gulps and I start working, checking my cell cultures under the microscope, then carefully returning every flask to the incubator.
He’s watching, glancing at the newspaper, sipping.
“You are so damn precise,” he says. “The way your hands move. In ascending order, I like to watch you cutting, scraping, tweezing, pipetting.”
“And with my dainty girl hands,” I say. “How could I possibly get them to do such complicated things?”
He leans down closer, his elbow to my elbow alongside our gray coffee. “Don’t take this personally, Kit, but your hands are really big. Did you rassle steer?”
“No steer,” I say. “Only small-handed men.”
“I figured you for one of those 4-H champs on some Kansas prairie. Five brothers and you. Hands like wooden paddles.”
“It’s amazing I can even button my own shirt,” I say, splaying my fingers.
“Sometimes you miss a button,” he replies. “But don’t worry. No one ever notices.”
He’s like that, the strangest kind of flirt, and I love it, used to so much worse, the shoulder-squeezing predations of the older researchers. The fumbles and porn-slicked joking of the postdocs, never sure what to do with females around. When you meet the women in their lives—Maxim’s multilingual, opera-singing girlfriend, Juwon’s dazzling mathematician wife—it becomes more confusing.
Moments later, when Alex has turned back to his coffee, which slaps all over his lab bench when he sets it down, I sneak a look at my hands, palms up. I can’t tell if they’re small or large; they’re just hands, blue-gloved and functioning. But it makes me think about touching him, or him touching me, or something.
Which, I’m sure, was the idea.
In my secret thoughts, I imagine Dr. Severin will pick Alex and me for two of the three slots on the PMDD grant. Together, we’ll devote ourselves to the potentially groundbreaking work that she and her colleagues over in Neuropsych will produce. Together, we’ll toil, head to head, for two years or more. It will fill our days and evenings and inspire and frustrate and impel us. It will be a thing we share. And it is, as Maxim once admitted, the kind of study that can make your career. Make your name.
I think about it a lot because the nights are long and lonely and I’ve always been partial to men like Alex. The ones whose eyes dance when I appear, who so clearly like me but also never bother me about it. Never demand too much from women, least of all from a woman who works sixty hours a week and has the lab hands—rough, scrubbed raw-red—to prove it.
If I didn’t know better, had I never heard the Ivy League ease in his voice—the voice of someone who’d always been listened to, whatever he said, his whole life—I’d think Alex was nearer to one of the boys from back home, the Golden Fry, the speedway, a million years ago. Because he’s easy. Carefree. Or is it careless?
He’s the only one in the lab without a coal-miner cast to his skin, all of us sealed up in there, seldom seeing high noon, our bodies like the skin under an old Band-Aid, puckered and tender.
But not Alex, with his golden skin, a look of striking health.
Give him time, Zell insisted when Alex first started a few months ago. He’s still got blood in his veins.
I always know I like a man if I can’t remember what he looks like when he’s not around. When Alex isn’t here, all I can picture is how tall he is, and how he’s always smiling at me.
There’s the sound of swooping wings in the air just before ten a.m.
It’s Dr. Severin arriving, her coat open, billowing behind her.
“I heard Irwin’s postdocs conspiring in the men’s room,” Juwon says. “They’re angling hard for the PMDD slots. When do we find out?”
“It might be today,” Maxim says, feigning nonchalance. “But it might be next week.”
“It better be soon,” Juwon says, shaking his head. “I’ve been at labs where the longer the wait, the more people start to go crazy.”
“Crazy?” I ask.
Juwon nodded. Maxim did too. I didn’t like the looks in their eyes. I’d heard their tales from other labs, postdocs contaminating each other’s reagents, mislabeling bottles, swapping lids on cell cultures. Labotage.
“There will be blood,” Zell says, grinning widely, nearly swirling his tongue, never tiring of menstruation jokes as long as Dr. Severin isn’t around. But the excessive delicacy and squirminess of the other men, except Alex, is even worse.
The truth is, we all know PMDD’s hot stuff. Rumor is Dr. Severin is closing in on something, maybe even approaching something that approaches a cure. A cure, that is, other than having your uterus and ovaries yanked out. A cure for a condition only marginally treatable, if it even exists at all, which not everyone believes it does. Dr. Severin believes it does. I do.
At its worst, it’s led women to self-destructive acts. Or destructive ones. In the lab, we’ve all heard the horror stories: Women in its grip hitting their boyfriends over the head with frying pans, rear-ending their children’s teachers’ cars in the school parking lot. Road rage, baby shaking, worse.
What woman can’t imagine it? Dr. Severin asked me once, one of the few conversations I ever had with her alone.
Imagine what? I asked. We were standing at the dented tampon machine in the ladies’ room, no less.
That, one month, the usual cramps and moodiness might suddenly spiral up into something larger, something you can’t control.
We take our seats around the battered conference table, waiting.
“‘PMDD is a disorder that affects three to eight percent of women,’” reads Zell from the research précis, adding, with a faint jeer, “and I know them all.”
“Dr. Severin thinks it might be closer to ten percent,” says Maxim. “That it’s underdiagnosed among the women better at controlling it. Or hiding it.”
They all look at me, as they do whenever anything related to the female body comes up.
“Well”—Alex jumps in, thankfully—“if men could get PMDD, we’d have all these answers already.”
I can’t help but smile even as Zell rolls his eyes and makes a jacking-off gesture with his hand.
In front of me is a packet of the case studies that have been circulating. I can’t stop reading them, like the old Police Blotter magazines my grandfather used to keep in the basement. The British woman who stabbed a fellow barmaid to death. Another who fatally pinned her boyfriend to a telephone pole with her car. The teen who set fire to homes all around her drowsy suburb. The woman in Texas who attacked her sleeping mother, beating her with a hammer until she was dead. All of these laid at the feet of PMDD by canny lawyers, enthralling the tabloids, titillating the public.
Those are the extreme cases, but they’re the ones we discuss in the lab. They’re easier to talk about than the average PMDD patient suffering her slow burn of monthly anguish, crying jags, bad thoughts whirring, boomeranging all day, the crushing thunk of insomnia, lying in bed, sweat-soaked, waiting for the blood to come.
So, Owens, Zell once asked me, reading from one of the studies, have you ever sobbed for six hours straight because your cat looked at you funny?
Do you find yourself consuming entire pound cakes before that time of the month?
Have you destroyed all your relationships because you can’t manage your emotions?
What relationships? I wanted to say with a laugh. My head down over my work for the past decade (a doctorate by age thirty doesn’t happen any other way, I told my mom), I haven’t had any time. And I’ve never even suffered from cramps, but since I’m the only woman other than Dr. Severin (and we never talk about it in front of her), I’m supposed to know more, know differently, know something about the purple marrow of female rage. The fear all men have that there’s something inside us that shifts, and turns. A living thing, once dormant, stirring now, and filled with rage.
“Yes, yes,” she is saying into her slender blue phone as she strides into the room.
Dr. Severin doesn’t waste time on anything, including greetings, pleasantries. When she does, they are delivered with mild contempt.
“Can you see what her folder says?” whispers Zell, but I won’t look at him, at the moisture blistering on his pimpled prodigy forehead. “Is it the grant budget?”
But none of us want to be caught looking and instead we ponder the long conference table, its old wood clouded with coffee rings.
Occasionally, I sneak a glance at Dr. Severin. That face so long and severe, her mouth always brightly colored—today’s lipstick I would call placenta red—and teeth white as a shark’s. She moves with the brisk efficiency of a general and no one has ever seen her eat, drink a cup of coffee, or hold an umbrella.
Sometimes, as I squeeze coffee from my shirt cuff or chew through a full pack of gum in a single hour or dig into the burn gouge on the toe of my low-top from that time Zell spilled sulfuric acid, I wonder how it is that I’m here at all.
But it was no accident. Dr. Severin plucked me from the masses of pedigreed doctoral students, the only one who’s ever come from her undergrad scholarship pool, the only one with a bachelor’s from a state school at all. The only one with a laptop that wheezes like a wind through an accordion when you turn it on. The only one with a second job (cater waiter), much less a third (tutoring), until she got me more fellowship money.
At the original interview, Severin claimed she remembered me from that scholarship ceremony years ago when she handed me the check in a cloud of perfume, the click of her heels on the spit-shined stage.
You were the only one with a serious face, she said.
Once, I spotted an age-browned photo on her desk, a girl with slack black pigtails who might have been a young Dr. Severin, cowboy hat and cutoffs and hooded eyes, biting into a piece of fried rattlesnake.
Somehow it fits with her python boots, her zebra-streaked hair.
She rarely speaks to me but occasionally winks in a way that might be a facial tic, but I’ll take it for something else.
I’ve been around strong women my whole life, and I know their ways.
“Yes. Got it,” she says.
We all watch as Dr. Severin finishes her call (no Good-bye, no We’ll talk later), slides the phone into the smooth leather folio. Sitting down, she trains her eyes on us, settling in her chair, neck gliding back like a satisfied snake, its gullet thick with warm mice.
“I have some more news,” she says, then her eyes drift to a paper in her hand, and we all wait again.
Finally, I blurt out, “What is it?”
Everyone looks at me, and Severin does that twitch that just might be a smile.
“We’re going to have a new addition to the lab starting tomorrow,” Severin says.
All our eyes blink in unison. What does this mean about the slots—
“Don’t overthink it,” she tells us. But in that instant, we already have.
No one says anything. We know we’ll confer in hushed asides under the fume hoods later, over honey buns at the rust-pocked vending machine.
“And she’s a catch,” Severin adds, setting her paper down, looking over, I swear, at me, her eyes with those strange vertical-slit pupils, like a cat’s.
A she, I think. Worse still. It’s a she.
I swear, this is true: The second before Severin says her name, I feel it. I feel it under my fingernails, feel it buzzing in my ears.
How can I know? I can’t. I haven’t heard or uttered the name since high school. But I know.
“Her name is Diane Fleming. Harvard. I poached her, snatched her right out of Walter Freudlinger’s wrinkly old hands.”
THEN
Later, too late, I would understand how important my first encounter with Diane Fleming was. How everything was right there, if I chose to look.
It was more than a dozen years ago, at cross-country camp, the summer after my sophomore year. She was running next to me, and you don’t forget a gait like hers. Legs that went on for miles; she seemed to float. No matter the temperature, she never had more than a fine arc of beads at her hairline, like a halo.
I sweat all the time, wildly, like a sorrel mare in heat. The first day, I sweat so much I ended up tearing off my T-shirt and tucking it through the racer back of my bra and got detention, which I didn’t even think you could get in camp.
She was fast, but I soon figured out she was not as fast as the promise of those long legs. Sometimes I’d think if she let herself sweat, she’d be unstoppable. Her jaw so tight, her brow furrowed like our bull mastiff’s. I wanted to try that hard.
“You’re a sprinter at heart,” Coach Holmby had told me. “Fast-twitch all the way.”
Fast-twitch. I looked it up after and found a picture of a cut-up chicken, just like we served up at the Golden Fry. The dark meat is where the slow-twitch muscles are, the legs. The white meat was fast-twitch, for flying. When, I wondered, would a chicken have to fly? I guess when it needed to the most.
I know I wanted to beat her. In part because she didn’t seem to be competing with any of us. She never even looked at other runners, only the shimmery aerosol haze on the horizon.
But neither Diane nor I was ranked top tier. I always had to duck out for my afternoon shift and if I left early, I could get a ride with Malcolm, the good-looking fry cook. And Diane spent most of her time off studying under the awning by the Y’s snack shop or talking on her phone, her hand over her mouth. She was one of the overnight campers even though she lived over in the Foothills, only twenty miles away. Mornings, I’d see her walking, head down, from the bunkhouse showers with her little toiletries bucket, rubber flip-flops inexplicably silent on the concrete. Someone told me she had trouble at home.
I kept my eyes on her. She was always reading, and sometimes I’d write down the book titles and get them at the library. One was about Marie Curie, and though Marie wasn’t nearly as pretty, something in her photo on the cover reminded me of Diane, that same determined expression she wore while facing down the camp’s dust-cracked trails. I never knew anyone before her who read books no one had ever heard of. It seemed like she might have some kind of secret knowledge.
“Is that good?” I asked her once, pointing to the Curie book.
“Listen to this,” she said. “My head is so full of plans that it seems aflame.”
I paused, turning the words over in my head. “Marie said that?”
“Yes,” Diane replied, looking down into her book again.
My head is so full of plans that it seems aflame.
“Jesus, it’s great,” I said, even though I didn’t know what it meant, yet.
The last week of camp, Diane’s mom visited for the first time. She’d missed all our meets, but now I spotted her huddled with Diane at one of the picnic tables, sharing a tin of mini cupcakes and whispering conspiratorially, their gazelle legs twisted under the wooden benches. She was as lithe and long as her daughter, both of them model-tall, and she kept playing with Diane’s hair, pushing it into up-dos and side knots.