How to Get Along with Women (6 page)

We went into the wild to find them. Together we were a world-class team. This project, we told each other, was no different from our other field experience, studying the black rhino or the digger wasp. Our best and brightest associate professors took to the task of grant-writing, myself among them. The funding rolled in and we rolled up our sleeves.

Shifts were divided. Equipped with field glasses and collapsible chairs, we constructed blinds so as not to be noticed. Even in densely populated areas, the men lived alone. At regular intervals they emerged from their homes—caves or small holes in the ground—in order to forage. Some team members observed the men while they were awake and active. We installed tiny cameras and watched them while they slept.

After six months I said aloud what many of us had been thinking.

The men are not providing us with enough information! I banged my cup on the dining hall table. How do they grow? What do they want?

I aligned myself with another researcher. We held meetings after hours and made lists and lists of questions. In partnership, we created a new study that would follow the men from their formative, pre-man years. This was to be our life's work. My partner took charge of the Centre for Specimen Generation. It was her job to sweep the men's holes for tissue, sample the tissue for DNA, fill our test tubes with nutritive agar. We built glass enclosures, fifteen per lab, and incubated the bodies as if they were our own babies. Sturdy volunteers pushed the tiny pre-men out from between their legs.

Predictably, we divided into factions. My research team argued for an increasingly close relationship with the men. Authenticity, we said, depends on empathy. We held a naming ceremony, carried their photos in our wallets.

Some believed the intimacy of this process compromised the study as a whole. These dissenters were removed from the project.

Are we field researchers? the outgoing Chair screamed, and she watched as the Maid Brigade cleaned out her desk—their blue uniforms, their embroidered name tags. I straightened my white coat and stood firm. The lab, I told my loyal colleagues, can be whatever you want it to be. The lab can be the field.

• • •

In infancy, the pre-men were voracious. They required constant nourishment and lapped up whatever we squeezed into their open mouths. We were delighted. This greed was marvelous and worth recording. We hunched over the enclosures, sharpened our pencils, adjusted our magnifiers. When a blonde graduate student whispered, They are just like regular babies!, I took a stern tone and waited until she gathered herself.

The pre-men gurgled into the drone of the lab's fluorescent light.

All science, I said to the room, is the search for unity in hidden likeness, and the blonde student copied this into her notebook, underlining vigorously.

Next the pre-men grew mobile. They went from lying still to kicking out with all four limbs. When one was observed trying to escape by slinking backwards along the floor, using his feet and shoulders to push his body along, we applauded. I picked him up with a pair of tongs dedicated to this purpose and replaced him in the enclosure.

The success of these early observations advanced exponentially, as did our pride. Our articles were published in the most prestigious journals. Conferences were organized, awards were conferred, meals were elaborately catered.

We gave each other high fives. We were learning about the men.

As they began to stand erect, the pre-men became harder to keep track of. They flexed their tiny biceps and coalesced into groups. They enjoyed toys with wheels. In a report to the Dean of Sciences, I wrote: As a species, the men are found to be both social and aggressive. She agreed that as the pre-men grew we would isolate them in increasing degrees.

At the thirteen-year mark, the pre-men became hairy. They formed circles and pummeled each other with tiny fists, flattening each other's noses. My research partner, by this time my chief colleague in the Bureau of Pre-Man Observation, wrote paper after paper exploring the possible reasons for this behaviour. Were these circles Druidic in nature? The nose-flattening—could this be some kind of ritual marker? Did they need to bleed as they entered adolescence in an effort to align themselves with women?

We made them clothes. Their moving parts had begun to move too frequently. At times they moved close to one another. Are they lonely? my partner asked me. Sometimes they look at me with such eyes.

It was her idea that tiny women be generated. I think they like us, she said at the first board meeting of the month. I think if there were tiny women, they would fight less.

The pre-men require a physical outlet, I said. Give them some rocks to push around.

We gave them rocks and they threw them at each other.

Whoops, I said. Larger rocks. The pre-men pushed the larger rocks around and pummeled each other all the same.

The others had questions: How often were they turning to one another? What exactly had my partner seen, and at what time of day?

At a later meeting I asked how she proposed to create tiny women. She regarded me from her side of the room, but her hands only rose and fell at her sides. I pushed my chair back from the table.

They will fight less in isolation, I said.

I said, We are the only women here.

• • •

We reconstructed the small homes we had observed years before in the wild, burrows dug into the ground. The pre-men entered and exited these burrows. I was first to initiate a locality study. Do you see how each man takes his bearings upon leaving the den? I asked, and at that moment a brown-haired man poked his torso from the entrance to his cave. It was as though he could understand my language, as though he wanted for me what I wanted for myself. How unknowable my descending hand must have seemed to him! How like weather! How like his creator! We had a short and unequal struggle. I pinned his shoulders to the earth and used a bottle of nail enamel (Second-Hand Rose) to tag the back of his neck. Then I let him go.

After only two weeks of this procedural, observers reported that, at any one time, ten men, each marked by colour (Matte Mardi Gras, Purrfect Purrple, the original subject in Second-Hand Rose), were within view. We were encouraged to see that the tagged men found their way back to their own dens in a consistent fashion. The simple trick of marking the men had changed our attitude toward them. Tracking and recording their movements created in us a feeling of pride of ownership. Their lives became of invested concern. It was decided that each of us would be assigned a particular subject. I stood up first and claimed my brown-haired specimen and the others nodded their assent.

I now suggested that we alter the routes into and away from the dens. With the men held safely at an alternate facility, we relocated all distinguishing markers: twigs, pebbles, anything found lying around inside the enclosures. We used trowels to alter the landscape. The dens themselves were left intact. We waited to observe the men's return.

Their behaviour was striking. They appeared confused and wandered in circles. We repeated the test and recorded the same result every time. By moving landmarks, we could do more than disorient the men. We controlled their movements. We made them go to entirely different dens.

Observational distance allowed us to extend our research in new directions. When we covered their eyes with black paint (Goin' Jet), the men were unable to navigate and stayed in their dens, alone.

• • •

There is now little doubt that our locality studies widened the field for an entirely new generation of behavioural scientists. Despite this proven success, years later a group of scientists—led by my former partner—would begin to probe the conventions of our methods. They took issue with the subject-researcher relationship. Power-structured, they called it. Unusually manipulative. It was a rift.

What my colleague is suggesting, I wrote in an open letter to XX magazine, is insulting. Nothing less than a call for chaperones. Why, after all this time, should I submit to another scientist looking over my shoulder? Despite my protests, funds were diverted toward the formation of a Bio-Ethical Standards Caucus, a branch devoted to the study of why the outcomes of our tests delighted us so. At the next All Fields Conference, I asserted that the objectivity of these researchers was now compromised.

You are wasting our time and you are wasting our money, I said. As to the specimens, are we subjecting them to illness? What injections are you protesting? What injuries?

They lead bloody happy lives, I said. Redirect your efforts to other fields.

My former partner stood up. She needed assistance and leaned heavily on the shoulder of her post-doctoral student, a red-haired woman with shapeless, solid ankles. My partner's thin wrist shook.

This study has been the focus of my entire professional life, she said. You can't kick me out for disagreeing with your methods.

I offered incentives to the red-haired doctoral candidate, and she stood to cross the room. When her student removed the shoulder, my colleague fell.

The men, too, had grown older. Their hair had begun to gray, their movements came slower. They spent less and less time pushing the rocks. After the conference, I returned to the lab and washed my hands. I stood over my brown-haired subject's enclosure. I pushed at his stomach, his chest. He reached out suddenly and grasped my finger, pulling the whole weight of his body into my hand.

We, I said. His tiny blacked-out eyes turned toward my voice. Using a cotton swab, I removed the paint from his eyes. For the first time in years, he could see. He blinked.

I bent closer, thinking of his eye reflected in mine. My eye an enormous speckled mirror.

When my former partner died at ninety-two, we draped her stiff frame in the university flag and lowered her into the ground, into a hole that had been filled with rose petals. There was a violinist: she had admired Berlioz. A minister, not I, gave the eulogy. Afterward we had the usual coffee and sandwiches in the boardroom. Crustless, on white or rye or brown. Egg or salmon or ham and mayonnaise, with cream for the coffee in lidded pitchers.

What was left of my partner's faction returned to older studies, field work that had not drawn attention for a generation: evidence for the extinction of a Lowland Gorilla species, or of the Cape Goose. Younger researchers began studies of their own and turned up their noses at our affiliations. Those who stayed on with me demanded soft chairs.

We are brittle, they said, from years of standing over our enclosures.

At an average age of seventy-three-point-eight years, the men began to expire. We had generated so many of them all at once. They died and died.

We looked at each other.

The tiny bodies stacked up in piles.

He Ate His French Fries in
a Light-hearted Way

On my nineteenth birthday I went out for a beer with this guy Jamie Nash. I didn't want to go. I'd been getting into bars since I was fifteen, the age-of-majority hoopla was lost on me. But Jamie called up and made such a fuss. Tradition! he said. I ended up feeling like I owed him one.

We split a pitcher in a place close to where my parents live. Sports on the television. Not boxing, which I like to watch when I'm just sitting in a bar. I was home from university for Thanksgiving weekend. It was my first year. Some people get home and run around like crazy trying to see everyone they know, but all I had done so far was sleep. I slept thirteen hours a night three nights in a row, numbers that shocked me. I went to bed at a regular time and when I woke up it was afternoon. There were voices right outside my window. I opened the curtains and kids on bikes were yelling at each other. Cats were just walking up and down the street because all the cars were at work. I've always been someone who gets by on very little sleep. I'd only been away for a couple of months but I felt disconnected. It didn't surprise me to be sitting in a crummy sports bar on my birthday.

Jamie had his camera with him and he took some pictures of me across the table, the usual weird stuff: my knuckles, part of my collarbone. I leaned my head and shoulder against the steamed-up window next to my chair. When I sat up again my hair was wet. The jukebox was right behind where Jamie was sitting and every time the song changed he drummed the table, then leaned back and read off the name. This is Thelma Houston, he said. Now it's Uriah Heep. He kept switching our glasses so I wouldn't know whose was whose.

I told him about a place I liked to go when I was away at school. They make their own brew, I said. And they have half-price burgers if you order before six. All the chairs are armchairs and they're made of leather, so you bring all your reading with you and you curl up and this girl Season I'm friends with always falls asleep.

Her name is Season?

And there's a dance club called Autowerk, only the mosh pit gets totally intense, you can get hurt super easy.

I had one leg crossed over the other and the dangling foot was bouncing up and down. I looked down and watched the foot.

In September I picked up this guy by just crashing into him over and over again, I said. Then finally he decided I was pretty cute and he should take me home.

Jamie unscrewed the camera lens, zipped it into its case, and put the whole thing under his chair. He cupped his hand around my elbow, which made me spill my beer a little.

What are you doing, I said.

Jamie said, Have you heard anything about Del?

My friend Del had been pretty sick before I left in September. I'd sent him a letter via Jamie.

I don't know, I said. I wrote to him, but he never wrote me back. Did you give him the letter?

I thought maybe you'd call him, Jamie said. After the letter, I mean. I gave it to him. I mean like follow-up.

I got up to go to the bathroom and when I came back, there was another full pitcher. Are you kidding me? I said. I want to go to bed. Jamie grinned at me very wide.

Yeah, me too, he said.

There was something on the top of my shoe. It was Jamie's foot, kicking at me under the table. He was having a really good time.