His mother finished the sentence. “Why horticulture, dear?”
“I think it’s an honorable field of study. Studying the soil, plant propagation and breeding, cultivation and environmental factors. The world needs people who understand this.”
His father got up to leave.
“Where are you going, Henry?”
“Out for a walk.”
“Don’t worry about him, Mother,” Lee said when he heard the front door close. “He has never believed in me or supported any of my decisions up to this point. Don’t expect him to change now.”
Lee left the parlor for the dining room and stood in the shadow of the massive antique breakfront, one of his several safe havens for eavesdropping on his parents. He had learned over the years that this was sometimes the only way to find out what they were thinking.
Twenty minutes later, his father returned.
“Did you have to walk out on him at this pivotal moment in his life, when he’s talking to us about his future?”
“What future? Where can a sword-swinging, leg-kicking kid who has taken a few gardening classes from a community college go? What is that boy thinking?”
“Henry, don’t you see it’s a start? We know he’s not like Bennett and Nelson, but Lee will succeed in life. It may take him a little longer than the others, but he will eventually get there.”
“First of all, I never mentioned Nelson or Bennett.”
“You didn’t have to—I know what you’re thinking. Can’t you recognize the merit in his furthering his education when he’s struggled his whole life with his schoolwork? Could you give him just a little credit for that?”
“I don’t get it, Abbey. I will never get it. The boy has an IQ of 132, for god’s sake,” he mumbled under his breath.
When Lee was a sophomore in high school, his mother had asked Dr. Jerry to arrange for an IQ test. To everyone’s surprise, he had tested very high.
“Don’t forget what we were told, Henry, about children in the genius range.”
“What hogwash are you referring to this time?”
“I don’t understand why you’re so hard on him when we know he has what often accompanies a high IQ—a difficult time with social relationships, frequent bouts of feeling inadequate, and an obsession with being different.”
“Those are just excuses. Face it, Abbey, he is different. Just excuses.”
* * *
Lee entered the community college in Des Plaines, about ten miles away, and continued to live at home. He joined the karate team the first semester. But while he managed to maintain decent grades in all of his classes, he still had made no friends after two months and feared he would always fail miserably when it came to relationships with his peers. One of the problems was that he avoided talking to people—afraid he would say the wrong thing, afraid of what they might think of him, afraid they would immediately see his flaws and judge him. And girls were the scariest.
One day during his second semester, after sitting through a long, monotonous biology class, Lee walked down the hall behind one of his classmates, Trevor. He was close enough to overhear him ask the pretty blonde by his side out on a date, obviously for the first time. The boy made it look easy, so normal. Lee remembered something Dr. Jerry had told him many years earlier: “To not try new things guarantees you’ll never be able to do them.”
The next day, as Lee strolled across the campus on his way to the library, he spotted a girl named Catherine Tynes a hundred feet or so in front of him. Catherine was in the same horticulture program, a year behind Lee but in many of the same classes. With honey-colored hair, sleepy brown eyes, and a nice figure, she may not have been the prettiest or hippest girl in school, but she was a good student.
“Hey Catherine,” he called to her. “Wait up.”
She turned around and smiled. “Hey, Lee. What’s up?”
“Nothing much. That was some exam we had in botany yesterday. How do you think you did?”
“I’m pretty sure I aced it. And you?”
“I think I did okay.”
They walked side-by-side for several minutes without saying anything.
“Would you like to go out with me sometime?” he blurted out, forgetting everything he had learned from observing Trevor the day before.
“Sure,” she said without turning her head.
“Would you be free for dinner this Saturday?”
“Mm-hm.”
One of the few things Lee did know about asking a girl out was not to assume too much. “Do you want me to pick you up, or would you prefer we meet somewhere?”
“You can pick me up.”
They exchanged phone numbers, and once he had her address and they had agreed on a time, they parted ways.
Damn. That wasn’t hard at all.
As he drove home from school the following Thursday, Lee started having second thoughts about his date with Catherine. It didn’t feel right, and he was afraid the only reason he had asked her out was because he wanted to feel more normal, more like Trevor, more like just about every other young male on the face of the earth.
He pulled into a gas station to use the payphone. He hadn’t told his parents or anyone else about the date and didn’t want to take a chance of getting caught cancelling it from their home phone. After picking up and then putting down the receiver for the third time, he got into his car and drove off. Cancelling the date didn’t seem right either, especially since it would have to involve making up a phony excuse. He resolved to go through with it.
On Saturday, Lee coated his stomach with Pepto-Bismol before he said goodbye to his mother, who believed him to be meeting with some other students for a study group, and drove to the nearest gas station to change into the clothes he had stashed in the trunk of his car earlier. As he was changing in the tight quarters of the bathroom stall, he worried that Catherine might think him dorky in a sports jacket and tie. Too late now—that’s all he had with him.
Catherine lived in Des Plaines in a neighborhood comprised mostly of small bungalows on tiny lots. He located her address, loosened his tie a bit to look more casual, and walked to her front door.
Before he could ring the bell, Catherine flung open the door to greet him. She wore a short red skirt and what Lee thought may have been a t-shirt at one time—an outfit much less conservative than she typically wore to school. He was glad he had at least loosened his tie.
“You didn’t say to dress up. Sorry.”
“No problem,” he told her. “You look nice. Ready to go?”
“Sure.”
On the way to the restaurant, he asked her how long her family had lived in Des Plaines.
“They don’t. Well, not anymore, anyway. My dad bought me that house after he divorced my mom. Guilt trip I think.”
“Guilt trip?”
“Yeah, long story.”
“So where do they live now?”
“My mother moved to Miami, as far away from him as she could get. He lives in downtown Chicago with the girl who used to be my best friend.”
“Ouch. That must have been hard to accept.”
“That’s where the house story comes in. Do you mind if I turn on the radio?”
“No, go right ahead.”
The radio had been tuned to WFMT, a classical music station. As soon as the music came on, she laughed.
“Tell me you don’t listen to that.”
“Well, actually, I do.”
She twirled the tuner until she found a station to her liking. What emanated from the car’s dashboard sounded more like noise than music.
“I love Def Leppard,” she told him.
“Is that right? Look, I made reservations at Bluewater Grill, but if you’d like to go somewhere else...”
“No. That’s fine. Sounds fancy.”
“Good. We’re here.”
He opened the restaurant door for her and followed her inside, hoping he hadn’t made a big mistake by not cancelling the date, but fearing he had.
D
inner conversation was difficult. Lee had come prepared with an arsenal of questions to keep the conversation flowing, but all he got from Catherine were one-word answers.
“So, did you grow up in Des Plaines?”
“Yes.”
“Nice place to grow up?”
“So-so.”
“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
“No.”
“What did you think about Whittiker’s ‘sermon’ last week on the threatened seed diversity in third world countries? I thought at one point the man was going to break down in tears.”
“He had some good points.”
“He went a little overboard, don’t you think?”
“Mmm...maybe.”
“And Osborne talking about the Dutch scientists who added the firefly enzyme to tobacco plants and made them glow. Pretty amazing stuff.”
“Mm-hm.
By the time the main course was served, Catherine had said very few words but managed to slurp down two alcohol-laced Long Island iced teas and was looking around for the waiter.
“Another iced tea?” he asked her.
“Is that okay?”
“I didn’t think to ask you if you were twenty-one.”
“Just turned.” She twisted around in her chair in order to see behind her. “Waiter!”
Lee ate faster than he usually did, wanting the date to end as soon as possible. Catherine was clearly not his type, and he suspected she felt the same way about him. He drank two cups of coffee while she ate a generous portion of chocolate cake and polished off her third drink. Sixty-five minutes after they had walked in the front door, he paid the bill, and they left.
He didn’t know what to say on the drive back. If it had gone well, he had been prepared to ask her if she wanted to see a movie the following weekend, but now that was out of the question. She broke the silence when they were a few blocks from her house.
“I had a nice time.”
Lee figured she was just being polite. He followed suit. “Me too.”
He pulled up in front of her house.
“Wanna come in?”
“Come in?” I can’t believe she wants to continue this.
She reached over to touch the side of his face. “You know. For a nightcap.” She leaned in for a kiss. Lee instinctively backed away.
“I think maybe you’ve had too much to drink, Catherine.”
“So you’re not coming in?” The pained look on her face caused him to panic. She looked as though she was about to cry.
Lee went for the door handle. “C’mon. I’ll walk you to your door.”
“Don’t bother,” she said through a whimper.
“I’m sorry. I’m not sure what to—”
“Go to hell,” she muttered as she opened the car door.
Lee opened his door and walked around to her side of the car, but by then she was out of the car and halfway down her front walk, the middle finger of her right hand high in the air.
Lee stood beside his car staring at Catherine’s front door for a long moment, dumbfounded by her behavior. He tried to make sense of what had just happened and how he could have handled it any differently. Was intimacy really expected after a first date? Was she hurt? Insulted? Was she drunk? Did she seduce all her dates like that, or was this the one time she had mustered enough courage to be the pursuer, only to have him dismiss her advances? He didn’t know.
A woman wearing a bathrobe and a turban on her head emerged from the house next door. She stood on her porch with her arms crossed staring at him, compelling Lee to slip back into his car and drive off.
By the time he arrived home, Lee knew three things for sure: His first date had been a disaster. He would never again go on a date for the wrong reason. And before he asked a girl out again, he would get to know her.
“To not try new things guarantees you’ll never be able to do them.”
Well, I tried something new, Dr. Jerry. What does that guarantee?
The following Monday, he and Catherine arrived at exactly the same time to an ecology class and were forced to take the only two remaining vacant chairs, next to each other. At the end of class, before the teacher had even finished giving them their homework assignment, Catherine scooted out of the classroom. Lee never saw her after that.
He felt terrible about everything having to do with Catherine— their lousy date followed by his rebuff to her advances, the pain he saw in her face afterwards, the story about her guilt-ridden father buying her off, her mother’s departure, and now her absence from classes. He felt guilty for the part he had played in all of it and wavered between calling her, in an effort to make amends, and letting it go. In the end, not wanting to risk making the situation worse, he let it go.
* * *
After two years of community college, Lee applied to Cornell University, and although his grades were mediocre at best and not all his community college credits were transferrable, he was accepted into their horticultural program. Lee suspected his karate skills had played a decisive role, as Cornell had one of the highest-ranking karate teams in the country, and Lee’s solid skills made him a good candidate for the team. That, coupled with the school’s declining enrollment for the previous two years, had definitely worked in his favor.
He moved into a private dorm room and quickly settled into a busy schedule of horticulture and karate classes. Lee had to admit it was a strange combination of interests and understood that no matter what direction he took with either of them, he would remain his father’s biggest disappointment.
4 | Friends of Dorothy
Lee’s first year at Cornell flew by. Officially, because not all his credits transferred, he was enrolled as a sophomore, but by cramming in extra courses, he caught up to being a junior within two quarters. Why he did this, he wasn’t sure—now he was that much closer to having to decide what he was going to do after college.
Lee managed to do reasonably well academically, and perhaps even more importantly, he was able to establish a rapport with some of his professors, especially those who were invested in medical research through the genetic modification of plants, which Lee found fascinating.
One professor who took an interest in Lee was Carl Engstrom. He taught genetics, and during one of their after-class discussions about how genetically modified organisms could potentially change the environment, he told Lee about an East Indian researcher named Phoolendu Radhakrishnananan. His groundbreaking work in the genetic modification of plants was controversial among other researchers, but that didn’t seem to deter him from continuing his endeavors. Lee was so captivated by what the professor had to say about him and his research, he promptly called him at his University of Illinois research facility outside of Springfield.
Dr. Radhakrishnananan was generous with his time and talked at length about his cancer research projects, especially his most recent endeavors involving crown gall disease. Genetic modification related to medical cures was unchartered territory, making his research exciting but, as Lee’s college professor had pointed out, debatable.
When the doctor heard that Lee lived in Evanston, he offered him an internship over the summer. While he was unable to pay Lee, he did offer him a place to stay in the back of the lab.
When Lee told his parents of his plan for the summer, he was not surprised at their reaction.
“Are you kidding?” his father asked. “You’re going to spend the summer working for some Punjab for nothing, living in the back of his laboratory? Have you lost all your senses, boy?”
“Henry, you don’t have to be—”
“There’s nothing wrong with an internship...as long as you get paid for it, and you’re not camping out in some remote area of southern Illinois. It’s not practical, and it’s not safe.” He turned away and headed out of the room. “End of discussion.”
“I’m over eighteen,” Lee said to his mother once his father had left.
“I know. What do you plan to do?”
“I’m go
ing to spend the summer with a brilliant research scientist from whom I expect to learn more about genetic modification in plants than I could ever learn at any college.”
“You have my blessing, son.”
A month later, Lee packed a bag and drove to Springfield, feeling nervous but very excited. Hoping to make a good impression on the doctor, Lee spent the four-hour drive rehearsing some opening lines. He also practiced pronouncing the doctor’s unwieldy name.
The research facility included four greenhouses, two laboratories, and five acres of land, well outside of the city. The doctor stood in front of the larger of the two buildings as Lee drove up. The sweet smell of strawberries wafted through the air, making Lee think he was off to a very pleasant start.
“Hello, Dr. Radhakrishnananan,” he said as he extended his hand. Slightly shorter than Lee, with thick, wavy black hair and a dark complexion, the man greeted Lee with a faint smile and a strong handshake.
“Call me Dr. Rad. Everyone does.”
“Okay, Dr. Rad it is.” Lee tried not to show his disappointment after four hours of practicing his name.
It turned out that Lee was one of two assistants. The other was a blond sophomore from the University of Illinois named Robin who immediately put Lee at ease with her sweet smile and easy-going manner. She was wearing an outfit he knew would horrify his mother—stonewashed jeans, a t-shirt with an advertisement on it, and high-top tennis shoes. They talked about Dr. Rad the first day.
“Twice today he told me to do something, and then questioned me about it later, as if he had never told me to do it,” Lee told her.
“This is my second summer,” she said. “Get used to it. He does that to me all the time. It’s just one of his many quirks. Wait until you’re here a month and he asks you what your name is. He still does that to me every once in a while.” She laughed. “Just go along with it. It’s easier.”
“Has it been a good experience?” Lee asked.
“My dad is the dean of students at U of I, and he thinks Dr. Rad’s a genius...a bit eccentric, but a genius. That’s why I’m here. My dad says you can’t get this kind of training anywhere else in this country.”
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