Behave

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  Even as I was finishing the article I was reading, trying to improve my own mind and efficiency, I was beginning to let my thoughts wander, thinking of Watson and how he worked so hard and so long, seemingly informed and connected to not only academic research, but government work, military work, and private business as well. We all aspired to his tirelessness and sense of mission.

  “I’m not interrupting?” Curt asked as I was finishing up my sandwich. “John left a present in my office. I was hoping you’d come take a look and give me a little advice.”

  First Watson and now John—the younger men in the lab were quicker to adopt informalities. And what would I know that a Harvard graduate wouldn’t?

  I walked a half step behind, suspecting Curt’s hangdog expression was part of some act or, worse, a joke at my expense. I hoped he didn’t need me to tell him how to decorate a room or water a plant. But when we entered his small office, and Curt shut the door and gestured to the oak cabinet against the far wall, his somber expression remained.

  “There they are. A perfect dozen.”

  From the back of the metal cage came the shuffling sounds of wood shavings being rearranged.

  “I suppose I start by feeding them,” Curt said, sounding glum. “Do they eat bread?”

  “And just about everything else.”

  I stepped closer, pressing my fingers against the cage. The shuffling ceased. I unhooked the cage-door latch, pushed a hand inside, and drew out the nearest animal, holding it by the rough base of its naked pink tail.

  When Curt flinched, I said, sounding a bit like Watson with our human subjects, “They’re not that vulnerable, as long as you grab by the base, not the tip. This one’s a juvenile. Someone has done a good job with regular handling, or it would be more aggressive. When you’re not sure, wear gloves.”

  “I guess a big old male could deliver a serious bite.”

  “Actually, I’ve only been bit by a nursing mother with very young babies. They’re protective that way.”

  When I held out the white rat, nose twitching and front paws pedaling in the air, Curt gestured back to the cage. “You can put it back. I’ve got all day to get to know them. Make that all year.”

  John had dropped off the cage with no instructions other than that this was something, at last, for Curt to do. Take care of them. Study them. Come up with a testable research question. Develop whatever apparatus would be necessary to gather solid data. And, by the way, John had told Curt, stop coming to the baby room except when summoned. Evidently, he had the only graduate assistant he needed to fulfill that role.

  “You’ve really never worked with white rats?” I asked Curt, letting this one settle down into the crook of my arm for a minute before I put it back.

  “Never worked with a white rat?” Curt said. “I’ve never even seen one.”

  It wasn’t a fair question. Rat laboratories were far from ubiquitous in those days. It just happened that Miss Washburn had been an animal behavior specialist, so that nearly every small creature commonly used by scientists had passed through our Vassar labs. She’d once been offended when a friend’s dog hadn’t taken a liking to her; she expected all animals to respond to her as she responded to them, with genuine interest and affection. As for Watson, he had worked with rats extensively, even operating on them to isolate their sensory abilities (a newspaper reporter had caught wind of this and gotten a skeptical, anti-science column out of it), but he was a pioneer in that regard. It didn’t seem to occur to Watson that any laboratory animals should like him.

  I asked, “Does Watson know you’re unfamiliar with rats?”

  “Fortunately, he didn’t ask.”

  But Curt was grateful to me for sharing everything I knew, about handling and feeding, life stages, reproductive cycles, and general behavior. And I was grateful to him for giving me the opportunity to demonstrate my expertise in one area at least, to prove to him and to myself that my own psych-lab preparation hadn’t been too shabby, even if I’d still always wonder why Watson had chosen me instead of Curt as his right-hand helper. “They’ll need hard foods, too, or their teeth will grow too long, up into their own skulls.”

  “They’ll be old enough to mate when?”

  “I’d say now or soon, even though they’re only half grown. Don’t wait until they’re fully grown.”

  “The unstoppable drive to reproduce,” he shook his head, grinning. “Powerful, isn’t it?”

  There it was, the decisive moment, an attempt at flirting, and I could see from Curt’s embarrassed expression that he knew he’d bungled it. I flashed a quick smile—enough to show I could be joked with, but not so encouraging that he’d press the point further. “Yes, in simpler animals. Get them sorted and separated right away.”

  “And you say they’re quick learners?”

  “Exceptionally quick.”

  “Why are they scrambling about so much? Do they want out?”

  “I have no idea. They just move around, that’s all.”

  His glumness eased. Within minutes, he was pacing again, hands out of his pockets, talking animatedly about the free reign we were given, the excitement he’d felt on his first day when Watson had said, “You’re on your own here. It’s all up to you.” Research, prolific and publishable research, was the thing with John Watson. Everything else was a distraction.

  “Rosalie?” Curt asked when I was on my way out the door.

  “Yes?”

  “Never mind,” he said.

  I started to leave again.

  “Actually . . .” he tried again, mustering his nerve.

  But I cut him off. “If it’s about rat care, ask any time. I’ve got to get back to my own work now.” I needed to find my own thesis subject, in fact, if I ever got a break from helping Watson with the babies. I had at least a little sense in those early days, enough to know I must carve out my own area of distinction.

  “All right,” Curt said. And that was that.

  In later months, I’d be too busy, but all the rest of that week, I checked in several more times with Curt and his rats, chatting with him as he built new cages, and letting one of the most docile young females curl into the pocket of my cardigan, where she would immediately fall asleep. But I knew not to get too fond of them, that depending on what Curt ultimately studied, they might end up in surgery or be made to do endurance swim tests or some other trial they might not survive. One couldn’t be softhearted in this business, I told myself, again and again—and I was finally starting, by dint of sheer effort, to believe it. One had to have faith that the lessons learned were more than equal to any pain imposed. And even if the rats aged in relative peace, the effects of maturity alone—as well as having multiple litters of babies, or going without food and sleep, or suffering some normal hardship for any length of time—would change their personalities, making them irritable and untrustworthy.

  I might have learned more about the travails of being a mother from watching those rats, if I’d been less narrowly scientific and willing to indulge some cross-species empathy. Easy for me to see the irony now: that “lesser” animals knew enough to protect their young and did not let a world of experts tell them how to live or raise their families.

  It must have been on a day at the end of that same week when I found myself standing alone in my bedroom, taking off my sweater and lifting it toward my face, breathing in its various smells: sour milk, and Borax, from cleaning a lab table after a long series of tests. And also, at the edge of the cardigan’s front pocket, the faint smell of wood shavings and that inescapable ratty smell—not dirty, just mammalian—even stronger deep inside the pocket, where I’d let the female take a nap.

  I turned the cardigan over and held it even closer to my nose: a trace of Watson’s cologne, perhaps from that moment he’d casually put his arm over my shoulder, guiding me toward the stairwell at the end of an extra-long day.
(I’d missed dinner; he was hopping out to buy something but then planned to go back to the lab—perhaps for the rest of the weekend, for all I knew.) He’d leaned in close at that moment, and perhaps this is why I was thinking so much of scent, thinking of my own scent too, or the lack of it, because he’d said, “You don’t wear makeup, from what I can tell. And you don’t wear perfume, like some of the nurses do.”

  “Should I?”

  He’d paused, weighing the question. “No. I think your freshness is your charm, Rosalie. You smell like a girl who has nothing to hide.”

  Later that day, alone in my room, I disrobed layer by layer: under the sweater, my white blouse with Navy-style lapels, neither dowdy nor fashionable, and under that, a camisole of the simplest type, only one ribbon of lace along the bottom edge. Seated at the edge of my bed, I rubbed my hands along my bare arms and held my hands to my face, breathing in deeply: nothing. Nothing to hide, or to show.

  How could I explain? In one week, I felt like such a different person already, not just Rosalie of Girls’ Latin School and Vassar and Eutaw Place anymore. But there was no evidence, nothing that would remain if in another week, another month, the work suddenly stopped. From the inside, I felt the claustrophobic tension, the sharp confinement of a carapace just at the point of bursting. From the outside, I looked no different. Only my thoughts marked me. But what were thoughts?

  Who was I, seated there—bare feet long and narrow, bare arms, white slip, camisole, thin, plain, dark haired, blue eyed, a young woman of no clear heritage who could have come from any place or any time—who was I, beyond whatever latent reactions were poised for expression in my muscles and my larynx, beyond what could be easily and objectively observed? I was nothing. I was, still, unexceptional. I was unmarked and unspoiled—or so John Watson might have thought. At that age, I presumed that women attracted with some special, intoxicating trait they had. I did not understand that young women also attracted by what they did not have, for their very blankness and unthreatening malleability.

  I was glad to have helped Curt get comfortable with his animal subjects and to feel that any envy had been resolved in favor of a new interest. Did I feel any attraction toward a man like Curt or any of the men close to my age working at the lab? Not particularly. I was too busy working and learning, most of the time, and I was determined not to let gender or any kind of sexual misunderstanding disrupt this job that was slowly beginning to feel rightly mine.

  Curt’s abilities only reinforced my own pride in being part of a larger body that was bound to be productive in multiple, innovative areas. Whenever I felt the temptation to question how I could have been so lucky to get the inside track, the choicest research, the most minutes of each day with Watson when there were always two or three other people wanting his time, I pushed it away in favor of working harder, learning more, proving myself worthy of the access I’d been given.

  Taking care not to suggest that infant research was not my primary interest (for Watson, the simple availability of compliant subjects meant the world), I pressed him for ideas on how I might study learning in adults. In retrospect, I think I had a visceral reaction to the crying and distress of our infant subjects, but I can’t claim that my concerns extended beyond that yet, in that middle period after my first anxious days and before my final ambivalent ones. After you’ve pinned down the arms and feet of your hundredth infant, pinched its nose to inspire rage, or plunged it into ice water to check whether it can swim, only to see the same infant contentedly cooing or snoozing a half hour later, you start to believe there is no harm. Maybe after you do something—anything—a hundred times you believe there is no harm in doing it. That’s a form of conditioning, too, isn’t it? Until a new stimulus comes along to change the experience for you: the cry of a baby who is your own, for example. Or even the cry of a baby you test more than once or twice, who demonstrates some evidence that one’s unsentimental experimentation is producing an effect—a purposeful and convenient effect, but an effect all the same. But I’m getting well ahead of myself.

  We did not have a large supply of animals, but that was just as well: people interested me more. As always, my inclination led me toward the abstract and the intangible, or the grandiose, while Watson was always more consistent and practical. If I wondered how society produced a Mozart, he wondered how a man or rat—made no difference—learned to turn right or left, and how various methods of “distributing” practice (more or fewer sessions per day) affected what was learned. These were the things one could possibly observe, Watson told me. Until the day when we could contain a full squad of subjects, completely controlling their environments—what they eat, how often they have sex—we would never understand the limits of learning. Ideal lab conditions always began to resemble some sort of prison or Utopia.

  But Watson was right, and one had to concede that there was an art in turning a question into something focused and observable. If I’d had to muddle alone, I might have been back to those outmoded tools—written tests, mere observation—in no time. It was one thing to believe in Watson’s behaviorism and another to emulate it consistently, objectively, affordably.

  As a way to study learning, Watson finally recommended that I conduct dart tests. Darts, as in tavern darts—with targets. There could be nothing simpler. It might even be fun. Curt, with his rats, was finding interesting patterns in daily activity, disproving notions about randomness of rat movements, and I might investigate patterns of improvement or fatigue in people aiming for bull’s-eyes. I drew up a plan, posted notices seeking in-house volunteers, and felt on my way to becoming a real and independent psychological researcher at last.

  Infant studies and adult learning experiments aside, I tried to continue to better myself. If I had a free moment, I pulled out typed transcripts from Watson’s speech files, or I read from the new scientific journals delivered to the third floor daily by our mailroom boy. Proceedings from a conference had just been dropped off one day during our third or fourth week, and I noticed it was something Watson had been looking for, because it was supposed to contain a rebuttal from another psychologist, questioning some of Watson’s behaviorist tenets. He never let such a thing stand without firing off an immediate typed response. It was getting close to noon, I’d finished my morning tests, the nurses would be too busy with lunchtime infirmary duties to bring up any more infant subjects, and I hadn’t seen Watson for the last hour but assumed he was still nearby, or if not, perhaps meeting some professors for lunch over on the Homewood Campus. I poked my head into one lab room and then another. I knocked—perhaps not loudly enough—on his resting-room door, merely out of habit. This wasn’t even his late-afternoon resting time.

  When I pushed the door open, I heard the answering sound of a drawer slamming, or a stuttering sort of rattle and slam, of something closed and then opened slightly and then closed again. And I spotted, first, nurse Essie’s reddened face, turned over her shoulder, eyes wide, one blonde curl free of its pins and falling over one side of her cheek. I sensed more than saw what Watson was doing, standing behind her. Essie’s arms were on either side of a tall oak filing cabinet, palms pressed against the sides and pushing, the way one pushes the handles of an accordion—a strange image, just one of many, as my eyes like a mindless camera recorded only one plate or picture at a time, refusing to put the images together, refusing to admit what I was actually witnessing—something I’d never seen in my life up to that point. Imagined, yes, with equal parts curiosity and anxiety, but never actually seen.

  Then Essie was stepping back from the cabinet. Pretty, blonde Essie was dropping her arms to her side, and pulling down the back of her skirt, tugging at the fabric that had doubled up, exposing her legs well above the knees, garters and the thick ivory edge of a girdle showing, the skirt was so high. While at the same time, like a train-car decoupling, Watson was likewise stepping back and turning away, away from Essie and from me, toward the back wall, and fumbling,
his hands busy in front of his trousers.

  I hadn’t seen his face—thank goodness I hadn’t seen his face. I heard him say in a low, clotted sort of voice, “That drawer always gets stuck. Glad to help.” And I saw, in the narrowing gap of the closing door, his hand go up to his hair and rake through it.

  From behind the closed door came next a guttural laugh—his first, then hers—softer, followed by her gleeful, relieved whispering: words I couldn’t make out, though I listened for another moment, as long as I dared. Then I heard him again: laughing, coming toward the door, clearing his throat. All of which got me quickly moving.

  I couldn’t go back to my own desk in the main room now, or anywhere I’d be found, not at this minute anyway. I couldn’t go down the stairs, the same stairs Essie would use, en route to the pediatric ward in the adjacent building. So I walked toward the psychiatric clinic, the other side of the third floor, and then paused in the hallway, not wanting to arrive there, either, not wanting to see anyone, least of all Watson’s own supervisor, Dr. Meyer, who I felt would see in my expression everything I’d just seen, just as clearly as if he were watching a nickelodeon flicker. Nor did I want to see any of the adult psychiatric clients, with their stony expressions and gaping mouths, mirroring back to me my own dim-witted expression.

  I stopped in the hallway, breathing fast, confused not about the details of what I’d seen but how I felt about them, and why, and how it involved me or didn’t, and how one could feel hurt and intrigued and somehow jilted but possibly violated all at the same time, if those were the right words, and most likely they were not. How could one possibly find the right words, or a friend in whom one could safely confide them? I struggled not to feel as young as I’d often felt at Vassar—young and excluded, always walking in on parties already started, wishing to be directly in the fray or well above it, but not this—hovering at the edges of adult secrets. I could not muster any feeling that Watson and Essie should be in trouble for doing what they’d been doing—where was my moral outrage?—only that I was somehow lacking something, for seeing and for not knowing how to respond to what I had seen, for being so easily mortified when I had done nothing wrong. Silly, stupid child.