“See for yourself!” Strikey shrieked.
“But Mary, I need to talk to you!” I called out.
“Later,” she said, and grabbed Strikey’s hands, the two of them kicking and twisting. At the edge of the rug, they tripped and went down in a heap, with Strikey in Mary’s lap. Strikey grabbed for her ankle, as if it had been sprained, but she was still grinning like an idiot.
When the song ended, I said too loudly, “I went to see Washburn.”
“You didn’t,” Mary replied.
“I told her I’d withdraw if she didn’t change her mind.”
Mary turned to me, her eyes half crossed over the top of her glasses. Even though she’d unlinked hands with Strikey, she was still leaning over, shoulders slouched, waist widened by the padding of the rolled-up, hitched-up skirt, a skinny ape who has stumbled into a cache of fermented fruit.
“No need to talk to that witch on my behalf.”
“I already said I did.”
“I’d already talked to her twice. That was my battle to fight, Rosalie.”
But what kind of person didn’t want company in battle? If I wasn’t getting any thanks for the attempt, I certainly wasn’t going to get any credit for the result—which, it was occurring to me now, had not been in anyone’s favor, just as Mary would have predicted.
“You’re just convincing Washburn that I’m a moron,” Mary said, holding out her cup for Cynthia to refill. “And if she decides to drop you from Special Topics, just for pestering her when you shouldn’t, then you’re the moron.”
She wasn’t getting the point. I hadn’t risked being dropped from the class. I’d chosen to drop the class. For the sake of friendship. For her. Mary didn’t even seem to need confirmation that my attempt had been futile. And now I realized this about her: she wasn’t the best about holding her tongue, but she was always quick to accept the consequences and move on. She didn’t need special favors or even recognition. Unlike many girls, she was impervious to pressure to sign up for the glee club, for theater productions, for the yearbook committee—and we’d had that in common, the lack of interest in being joiners.
I knew the several ways in which I didn’t perfectly fit the Vassar mold. But Mary’s set-apartness was different, not preordained by race, culture, or religion. You couldn’t find her picture hardly at all in the yearbook, just as you couldn’t find mine. She didn’t need to be fawned upon by any one professor. She seemed to have an allergy to being a protégée. Whether or not she would ever need a devoted mentor or a fervent lover (I imagined she’d remain a bachelorette forever) Mary seemed to be proving at this moment that she didn’t need me. Or rather, she didn’t need any of her friends to pass a loyalty test. But I did want to pass that test. I didn’t mind a spot of trouble if it was trouble that could be shared. I didn’t need to be part of any Vassar daisy chain, but I still appreciated being attached to something or someone.
“Mary,” I said. “I need to talk to you.”
“And I,” she said, holding her cup at an angle, “need to finish this, before Jo gets back.”
Jo was the one roommate who disapproved of “dancing teas” altogether, and was likely to complain if she stumbled into the middle of a party.
“Couldn’t we just be alone for a minute?” I beseeched Mary.
She responded, “Couldn’t we not be alone for this once?”
My insides shrank, and with them, the last three years accordioned as well: a series of conversations and study sessions and lab-partner pairings that had meant too much to me, and nothing to anyone else.
“You’re a pal, Rosalie. Just maybe stop trying so hard,” Mary said in a softer voice, noting my crestfallen expression.
Oblivious, Cynthia slid a new record out of a burgundy-colored sleeve. “Everyone. You’ve gotta hear this.” The record started up, with its lyrics about a soldier who’d been shot somewhere in France, and didn’t want to get well, because he was so besotted with the woman caring for him. “Early ev’ry morning, night and noon, / The cutest little girlie comes and feeds me with a spoon . . .”
I wanted to grab Mary’s arm and roll our eyes together at the stupidity of any college girls who could believe that being wounded in the trenches, probably shell-shocked and near death from some terrible infection, could be a giddy pleasure. But Mary refused to share my contempt. She sat on the floor, her lap occupied by Strikey’s scarf-wrapped ankle, while Strikey reached out to paw at her own minor injury, drawing attention to her jangling little bracelet, from which hung a tiny magnifying glass.
I felt my stomach drop. The room was already warm, but now my face flamed with a heat so sudden and fierce it made my eyes water, while everyone else continued with their fun, singing and laughing. Mary had given her the charm, identical to mine. Strikey was terrible at science. How dare she wear it?
I was only another friend. Nothing special. And I’d judged Miss Washburn for her desire to be ordinary? I was ordinary, too. We were all sickeningly ordinary.
I could walk out, and no one would follow. Or I could stay—with a vengeance.
“Fill me a cup, Cynthia,” I said, and proceeded to drink three cups of gin in all, choking back the astringent fumes, willing to prove I was as carefree as Cynthia, as silly as Strikey, as sensible and independent as Mary—if all those things could possibly go together. As if I could be someone more interesting by being everything to everyone. Lord knows I had many more years to keep trying.
I was the one who kept restarting the phonograph. I was the one who learned the lyrics of the chorus so that I could sing alongside the stupid soldier, “Early ev’ry morning, night and noon . . .” I was the one who remembered two dirty jokes that I had been told, in confidence, by my sister Evelyn, and I told them in turn to Strikey and Cynthia, who shrieked and groaned and laughed in pleased disbelief, which only proved they’d thought me incapable of being raunchy, a misunderstanding I was only too eager to disprove.
I was the one who, when Jo came home and opened the door, appalled at the noise and the suspicious vapors in the room, took the blame for the party, as if I’d started it rather than stumbled into it, and who talked Cynthia and Strikey into prancing outside, our skirts rolled scandalously high, while Mary—tired of me, or just tired—stayed behind. I was the one who vomited into the bushes outside the library building, and beamed, lying on my side, when Strikey patted my hair and pulled me up to a feeble stand: “I didn’t know your kind drank.”
“What kind is that?”
When she didn’t answer, I filled in: “The dizzy kind. Strikey, help me. I can’t stop everything from turning.”
I was not the praying type, and perhaps I made my final spontaneous address to Adonai at that moment. Stop spinning. Please stop. Oh, God, but look at those stars. How those stars would keep spinning, all night long.
“You’re skirt’s a mess,” Strikey said, after I crumpled on the lawn a second time. “But you’re all right, Rar. You’re all right.”
Mary probably had no idea what had come between us. I had wanted a deep, passionate, risky, all-encompassing friendship. Sacrifice and loyalty—or nothing. So fine: nothing it was.
We occasionally still shared a table at the library, cramming for exams next to the soberly beautiful stained-glass windows. We even sat side-by-side once, during a winter sleigh ride when everyone else was talking about their upcoming New Year’s plans—shopping for scarves and gloves, and going ice skating with a friendly batch of New England boys. Instead we compared notes on graduate schools for psychology, but in a formal, awkward way, as if we’d only just met and had not, seven months earlier, reclined together on the campus lawn, staring up at the starry sky, trying to picture our glowing futures, as if written between the constellations.
Never would I have guessed how similar our interests would remain, and how her life for years would always be the example of what my life might have be
en, professionally but also personally, if not for certain choices and—to be plain about it—if not for certain mistakes. I would begin to feel, only later, that we had been two saplings planted in the same field, and I had grown helter-skelter, too anxious for the sun maybe, or too sporadically watered, heavy with fruit at one moment and rotted the next, and then swarming with wasps, while she had grown slowly and more judiciously in a half-sunny, half-shady spot, taking her time, focusing on what mattered, neither overtended nor entirely ignored, maturing into something true and strong. A torturous metaphor, but poetry was not my subject of choice at Vassar.
But I must give Mary the credit for telling me about the John Watson lecture at the New School, in New York, at the start of 1919. It was just like Mary to seek out a psychology lecture outside Vassar’s walls, for which she wouldn’t even be awarded credit. It was also just like her not to seek a personal introduction to Watson that evening in January when we entered the lecture hall, crowded with Columbia and New School students familiar with Watson’s 1913 Behaviorist Manifesto. Mary simply wasn’t the flirting type and he—with his dark forelock and just-beginning-to-silver temples, his rakish smile, and his European-tailored clothes—was already encircled by students of both genders seeking his attention.
It was a Friday evening, and our own Miss Washburn was there, too, on one of her occasional forays outside of Poughkeepsie. When I stopped by her seat on the way to my own, she reached for my hand and said with a smile, “The youngest president of the Psychological Association, did you know that? He’s made a name for himself. Listen well, Rosalie, but water it down by half.”
I thought of the day I’d spied into her windows, and of the pale spider plant with the knotted roots, forced into the murky water in a dirty juice glass on her desk. I thought of the evening ahead, and what would follow: the gentle chatter, the crustless sandwiches and tables of punch. I wanted more than a half glass of cheap punch. I yearned for something purer—no, something downright stronger, and not just a drink. I wanted a torrential downpour, raining onto my head. I wanted to tip back my chin, close my eyes, and open up my mouth, drops pounding and splashing, soaking my throat, my dress, my skin.
As a speaker approached the stage to introduce the special guest, I hurried away to my own seat, several places away from Mary’s. Then Dr. John B. Watson took the stage, patting his hair as he climbed the steps, smiling with faux modesty. He took off his wire-rimmed glasses to wipe them, which only drew our attention to his thick, dark eyebrows and soulful eyes, substantially deeper and larger without lenses in the way. Even from a distance, he struck me as both arrogant and vulnerable—a potent combination for a girl my age, whose romantic, inarticulate ideas were a mess of yearnings for both subordination and dutiful mothering.
I must have been distracted, my own thoughts spinning in circles or jumping from one loose association to the next, while he explained some of his main tenets—that we had no business wondering about abstract things like consciousness, that there was no such thing as a mind. If only my mind hadn’t been so overstimulated at that moment, I might have heard and digested his opening words even better. As he talked, he kept the glasses hooked for several minutes between two fingers, until suddenly, he pushed them back onto his face and reached for something hidden beneath the lectern.
“Catch,” he said, throwing a dingy softball toward the front row of seats. A girl—thick waisted, blonde head of curls—threw her hands up in alarm. The ball bounced and rolled between several rows, got kicked by someone trying in vain to retrieve it, and emerged in a row near the back, where a line of standing-room-only students had assembled.
“A negative early experience, I’m guessing,” the visiting lecturer said good-naturedly. “Let’s try that again.”
Another toss, and another girl in the front lunged forward, elbows between her skirts, and still managed to butterfinger it. When the ball was returned to him, Dr. Watson took off his glasses and puzzled over the ball as if it had betrayed him.
“I’ve given this same demonstration at colleges up and down the coast, and it’s never failed me before.” He lifted one finger off the ball to scratch at his temple. “Then again, there were more men in those audiences. We seem to have an unusual number of women present.” He pressed his lips together in a self-mocking smile. “Last time, then. Catch!”
Dr. Watson looked toward the far right corner of the room, the farthest front-row chair, where I was sitting, and in slow-moving pantomime, lobbed the gentlest possible underhand toss. I rose a few inches out of my seat, held my breath, and barely caught the ball between my wrists before scooping it inward, toward my heart. The room erupted in applause.
“What were you thinking?” he said to the first girl who had dropped the ball, and who even now couldn’t organize her words into coherence.
“Never mind,” he said, skipping the second girl and zeroing in on me. “What were you thinking?”
I was still tensed up, on the edge of my seat. “I was thinking I’d better not make a fool of myself.”
“Really? All those subverbalized words, lodging in your larynx?”
My larynx? Well it’s true, my throat felt tight. Is that where they had lodged? Wherever they’d gotten formed, and wherever they’d gotten stuck, yes—all those thoughts, and other things besides. He’d given us plenty of time to think and daydream since the moment he’d entered the room.
“I was thinking,” I said, playing along, “Don’t drop it!”
“Yes, well, we upset the demonstration, with those multiple attempts and significant delays. Usually, I do it just once, and the element of surprise is essential. I’m wagering that if the ball were coming toward you the first time, you might not have subverbalized at all, isn’t that right?”
What did it cost me to agree? “Yes, that’s probably right.”
“No need for any introspective process. Just an action,” he insisted. “Just protect yourself—if you’re the first girl, and maybe had a ball smack you in the face as a child. A conditioned response, in other words.” Everyone laughed at this, rubbernecking to see if the attention had made the girl turn red.
“And if you’d never had such a fearful incident,” Dr. Watson continued, “you’d be responding in another conditioned and more complicated way, without even realizing you were moving. You’d be preparing to—why must we call it a thought?—preparing to simply . . . catch.”
The entire room was nodding, lips ready to repeat the word: catch. As he wanted it. But most of the young women gathered were just as ready to say, “Dinner at eight? Certainly.” Or, “of course I’ll dance with you.” Or, “No, I don’t have a ride, actually.” Or any of a dozen other ready-made replies to this handsome and gregarious professor.
“No one asks a baseball player what he thinks every time a ball comes to him, as a way of understanding what follows in the game. No one posts his musings on a scoreboard, and no one should. Why should we care what you’re thinking—if you’re even thinking, whatever that means, and I propose that it means far less than you’ve been taught. I would suggest that our century’s emphasis on thought and mind is as irrelevant as previous centuries’ emphasis on the soul. We are interested in behavior. We are interested in what’s observable, what’s measurable, what’s malleable. We are interested in what can be predicted, and what can be controlled. That’s where our focus needs to be, if we intend to live in a saner world.”
A saner world! So he was offering both the excitement of revolution and redemption from chaos, both change and security, upheaval and peace. Potent concepts, just a month after the armistice.
A college boy in a too-tight argyle sweater stood up from a seat in the back and called out a question. “But Dr. Watson, what are your positions on the structuralism of Wundt and Titchener versus the functionalism of James? And what about psychoanalysis?”
In one breathless expulsion, the student had managed to name
three pioneers and three theories. The college boy glanced left and right, clearly proud of his performance, and sat down to receive his answer.
His seat was still squeaking when Dr. Watson replied, “Did you hear anything I’ve said so far? Are you a student of psychology, young man, or a student of philosophy? Every method you’ve just named is focused on one thing: introspection.”
“But Wundt was an experimentalist,” the student had the audacity to call back, although in a less certain voice.
Dr. Watson shook his head. His knowing smirk seemed to take in all the rest of us, granting us the benefit of the doubt. We weren’t stupid enough to defend Wundt. (Until an hour ago, I’d considered Wundt brilliant, but I would never admit as much now.)
“You can’t perform experiments involving introspection. You can only perform experiments involving behavior. Mental processes, whether the what and the where of structuralism or the how and the why of functionalism, do not concern us. What concerns us, and moreover, what we can study, is what the human animal actually does.”
Dr. Watson gripped the podium more tightly, voice rising as he railed at us for our own benefit.
“The human animal retracts a finger from the fire. He lashes out in a rage. If he is a lazy medicine man intent on enslaving the rest of his tribe with superstition, he dances around the fire and tells tales about a frightening God. Whatever his views on religion, he eats and sleeps and copulates. He draws architectural plans and builds skyscrapers. From simple to complex, yet all structured of observable actions. Are these not interesting enough behaviors for you?”
No answer, now, from the college boy in the tight sweater.
“Let’s forget about our game of catch, then, and forget with even less regret about the last thirty to forty years of introspective dead-ends,” Dr. Watson continued to our roomful of fresh faces. “Let’s talk about a range of unconditioned responses, and then we’ll address the subject of conditioned ones.” And Dr. Watson began to review for us the story of Pavlov, the bell, and the salivating dog, and why, again, these things would make no sense at all unless we dismissed nearly all other approaches as outright hokum—Listen well, Washburn had said, and water it down by half—and we’d have to start all over and look only to what could be observed directly, and experimented upon, and thereby proven.
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