Lab Girl Read online

  By the time my father and I had crossed Fourth Street (or “Kenwood Avenue,” as he called it; he had learned the streets as a child in the 1920s, long before they were numbered, and never adopted the new system), we could see the front door of our big brick house. It was the house that my mother had dreamed of living in as a child, and after my parents were married they had saved for eighteen years in order to buy it. Despite my having walked briskly—it was always an effort to keep up with my father—my fingers were chilled such that I knew it would be painful when they warmed up. Once it gets to a certain point below zero, the thickest mittens in the world won’t keep your hands warm, and I was glad that the walk was almost over. My father turned the heavy iron handle, pushed with his shoulder, and opened our oaken front door. We went inside the house, into a different kind of cold.

  In the foyer, I sat down and wrestled off my boots, then began to molt coats and sweaters. My father hung our clothes in the heated closet, and I knew that they would be waiting for me, warm and dry, when it was time to walk to school the following morning. I could hear my mother in the kitchen unloading the dishwasher, the butter knives clanging together as she dropped them into the silverware drawer and then slammed it shut. She was always angry and I could never piece together why. With the self-focus peculiar to children, I convinced myself that it must be because of something that I had said or done. In the future, I vowed to myself, I would guard my words better.

  I went upstairs, changed into my flannel pajamas, and put myself to bed. My bedroom faced south toward the frozen pond where I would spend all day Saturday ice-skating—if it had warmed up enough by then. The wool carpet was dusky-blue and the walls had been papered in complementary damask. The room had originally been designed for twin girls, with two built-in desks, two built-in vanities, and so on. On the nights when I couldn’t sleep, I would sit at my window seat and trace the feathery ice crystals across the glass with my finger, trying not to look at the vacant seat in front of the other window where a sister should have been.

  The fact that I remember so much cold and darkness from my childhood isn’t surprising, given the fact that I grew up in a place where there was snow on the ground for nine months out of each year. Descending into and then surfacing from winter formed the driving rhythm of our lives, and as a child I assumed that people everywhere watched as their summer world died, confident in its eventual resurrection, having been tested so often within a crucible of ice.

  Every year I saw the first stuttering flakes of September crescendo into the spilling white heaps of December, then petrify into the deep, icy emptiness of late February, eventually to be varnished as a grand, frictionless expanse by the stinging April sleet. Our Halloween costumes as well as our Easter dresses were sewn such that they could be worn inside our snowsuits, and Christmastime wrapped us in wool, velvet, and more wool. The one summertime activity that I remember vividly is working in the garden with my mother.

  In Minnesota, the spring thaw happens all at once when the frozen ground yields to the sun in one day, wetting the spongy soil from within. On the first day of spring, you can reach into the ground and easily pull up great, loose clumps of dirt as if they were handfuls of too-fresh devil’s food cake and watch the fat pink earthworms come writhing out and fling themselves joyfully back into the hole. There is not even a hint of clay within the soils of southern Minnesota; they have lain like a rich black blanket over the limestone of the region for a hundred thousand years, periodically chased off by glaciers. They are richer than any prefertilized potting soil that you can buy at the hardware store; anything will grow in a Minnesota garden, and there’s no need to water or fertilize—the rain and the worms will supply everything that is needed—but the growing season is short, so there’s no time to be wasted.

  My mother wanted two things from her garden: efficiency and productivity. She favored sturdy, independent vegetables like Swiss chard and rhubarb, the ones that could be relied upon to yield in abundance and seemed only to thrive in response to frequent harvesting. She had neither the time nor the sympathy required to nurse lettuce or prune tomatoes; instead she preferred the radishes and carrots that could tend to their own needs quietly underground. Even the flowers that she grew were selected for their toughness: the golf ball–sized buds of peonies that spilled out petals as they swelled into pink blossoms the size of cabbages, the leathery tiger lilies, and the fat, bearded irises that barged out of their bulbs without fail, spring after spring after spring.

  Each May Day, my mother and I poked individual seeds into the ground, and then a week later we plucked out the ones that hadn’t grown, replacing them and immediately starting over. By the end of June the whole crop was well on its way and the world around us was so green that it seemed impossible that it could ever have been otherwise. By July, the sweating leaves of all of these plants had pumped the air so full of moisture that the humidity caused the electrical lines to buzz and crackle overhead.

  My strongest memory of our garden is not how it smelled, or even looked, but how it sounded. It might strike you as fantastic, but you really can hear plants growing in the Midwest. At its peak, sweet corn grows a whole inch every single day and as the layers of husk shift slightly to accommodate this expansion, you can hear it as a low continuous rustle if you stand inside the rows of a cornfield on a perfectly still August day. As we dug in our garden, I listened to the lazy buzzing of bees as they staggered drunkenly from flower to flower, the petty, sniping chirps of the cardinals remarking upon our bird feeder, the scraping of our trowels through the dirt, and the authoritative whistle of the factory, blown each day at noon.

  My mother believed that there was a right way and a wrong way to do everything, and that doing it wrong meant doing it over, preferably a few times. She knew how to stitch a different tension into each of the buttons on a shirt, based on how often it would be called into use. She knew the best way to pick elderberries on a Monday such that their stems wouldn’t clog the old tin colander on Wednesday, when we strained them after stewing them all day Tuesday. Thinking two steps ahead in every conceivable direction, she never doubted herself, and I figured that there was nothing in the world she didn’t know how to do.

  In fact, my mother did know how to do—and had kept doing—a lot of things that weren’t strictly necessary now that the Great Depression was done and war shortages weren’t in effect and President Ford had assured us that all of our nightmares were over. She saw her own rags-to-relative-riches life story as a hard-fought victory over something evil, decided that her children should keep fighting in order to deserve its legacy, and proceeded to toughen us for a struggle that never came.

  Whenever I looked at my mother, it was difficult for me to believe that the well-spoken and smartly dressed woman before me could ever have been a dirty, hungry, and scared child. Only her hands gave her away: they were far too durable for the life she now led, and I sensed that she could have grabbed the rabbit that plagued our garden and wrung its neck without thinking, had it been stupid enough to get too close to her.

  When you grow up around people who don’t speak very much, what they do say to you is indelible. As a child, my mother had been both the poorest and the smartest girl in Mower County. During her senior year of high school, she was awarded an honorable mention in the ninth annual nationwide Westinghouse Science Talent Search. This was an unusual recognition for a female growing up in a rural area, and although it counted only as a near miss for the real prize, it put her in good company. Other 1950 also-rans included Sheldon Glashow, who went on to win a Nobel Prize in Physics, and Paul Cohen, who won the Fields Medal in 1966—the highest honor given in the field of mathematics.

  Unfortunately for my mother, scoring an honorable mention carried with it a one-year honorary junior membership to the Minnesota Academy of Science, not the college scholarship that she had been hoping for. Undeterred, she moved to Minneapolis anyway and tried to support herself while studying chemistry at the University of
Minnesota, but soon came to the realization that she couldn’t attend the long afternoon laboratory sections and still put in enough babysitting hours to pay her tuition. In 1951, the university experience was designed for men, usually men with money, or at the very least men who had job options outside of being some family’s live-in nanny. She moved back to our hometown, married my father, gave birth to four children, and threw herself into twenty years of raising them. Determined to earn her bachelor’s degree once the last of her children was at least in preschool, she re-enrolled in the University of Minnesota. Her options were limited to correspondence courses, so she chose English literature. Because I spent my days mostly in her care, it became natural for her to include me in her studies.

  We plowed through Chaucer, and I learned to assist her using the Middle English dictionary. One year we spent the winter painstakingly noting each instance of symbolism within Pilgrim’s Progress on separate recipe cards, and I was delighted to see our pile grow to be thicker than the book itself. She set her hair in curlers while listening to records of Carl Sandburg’s poems over and over, and instructed me on how to hear the words differently each time. After discovering Susan Sontag, she explained to me that even meaning itself is a constructed concept, and I learned how to nod and pretend to understand.

  My mother taught me that reading is a kind of work, and that every paragraph merits exertion, and in this way, I learned how to absorb difficult books. Soon after I went to kindergarten, however, I learned that reading difficult books also brings trouble. I was punished for reading ahead of the class, for being unwilling to speak and act “nicely.” I didn’t know why I simultaneously feared and adored my female teachers, but I did know that I needed their attention, positive or negative, at all times. Tiny but determined, I navigated the confusing and unstable path of being what you are while knowing that it’s more than people want to see.

  Back at home, while my mother and I gardened and read together, I vaguely sensed that there was something we weren’t doing, something affectionate that normal mothers and daughters naturally do, but I couldn’t figure out what it was, and I suppose she couldn’t either. We probably do love each other, each in our own stubborn way, but I’m not entirely sure, probably because we have never openly talked about it. Being mother and daughter has always felt like an experiment that we just can’t get right.

  When I was five I came to understand that I was not a boy. I still wasn’t sure what I was, but it became clear that whatever I was, it was less than a boy. I saw that my brothers, who were five, ten, and fifteen years older than I, could do all of our laboratory play in the outside world. In Cub Scouts they raced model cars and built and set off rockets. In shop class they used tools big and powerful enough to be mounted on the wall or suspended from the ceiling. When we watched Carl Sagan and Mr. Spock and Doctor Who and the Professor, we never even commented on Nurse Chapel or Mary Ann in the background. I retreated further into my father’s laboratory, as the place where I could most freely explore the mechanical world.

  It made sense, in a way. I was the one who was like our father, or at least I thought so. The differences between us were purely cosmetic: my father looked just like a scientist was supposed to. He was tall and pale and clean-shaven, thin-almost-gaunt in his khakis and white shirt and horn-rimmed glasses, complete with a pronounced Adam’s apple. When I was five I also decided that the real me looked exactly like that, even though on the outside I was disguised as a girl.

  While pretending to be a girl I spent my time deftly grooming myself and gossiping with my girlfriends about who liked whom and what if they didn’t. I could jump rope for hours and sew my own clothes and make anything anybody wanted to eat from scratch in three different ways. But in the late evenings I would accompany my dad to his laboratory, when the building was empty but well lit. There I transformed from a girl into a scientist, just like Peter Parker becoming Spider-Man, only kind of backward.

  As much as I desperately wanted to be like my father, I knew that I was meant to be an extension of my indestructible mother: a do-over to make real the life that she deserved and should have had. I left high school a year early to take a scholarship at the University of Minnesota—the same school that my mother, my father, and all of my brothers had attended.

  I started out studying literature, but soon discovered that science was where I actually belonged. The contrast made it all the clearer: in science classes we did things instead of just sitting around talking about things. We worked with our hands and there were concrete and almost daily payoffs. Our laboratory experiments were predesigned to work perfectly and elegantly every time, and the more of them that you did, the bigger the machines and the more exotic were the chemicals that they let you use.

  Science lectures dealt with social problems that still could be solved, not defunct political systems for which both the proponents and the opponents had died before my birth. Science didn’t talk about books that had been written to analyze other books that had originally been written as retellings of ancient books; it talked about what was happening now and of a future that might yet be. The very attributes that rendered me a nuisance to all of my previous teachers—my inability to let things go coupled with my tendency to overdo everything—were exactly what my science professors liked to see. They accepted me despite the fact that I was just a girl, and assured me of what I already suspected: that my true potential had more to do with my willingness to struggle than with my past and present circumstances. Once again I was safe in my father’s laboratory, allowed to play with all of the toys for as long as I wanted.

  People are like plants: they grow toward the light. I chose science because science gave me what I needed—a home as defined in the most literal sense: a safe place to be.

  Growing up is a long and painful process for everyone, and the only thing I ever knew for certain was that someday I would have my own laboratory because my father had one. In our tiny town, my father wasn’t a scientist, he was the scientist, and being a scientist wasn’t his job, it was his identity. My desire to become a scientist was founded upon a deep instinct and nothing more; I never heard a single story about a living female scientist, never met one or even saw one on television.

  As a female scientist I am still unusual, but in my heart I was never anything else. Over the years I have built three laboratories from scratch, given warmth and life to three empty rooms, each one bigger and better than the last. My current laboratory is almost perfect—located in balmy Honolulu and housed within a magnificent building that is frequently crowned by rainbows and surrounded by hibiscus flowers in constant bloom—but somehow I know that I will never stop building and wanting more. My laboratory is not “room T309,” as stated on my university’s blueprints; it is “the Jahren Laboratory” and it always will be, no matter where it is located. It bears my name because it is my home.

  My laboratory is a place where the lights are always on. My laboratory has no windows, but it needs none. It is self-contained. It is its own world. My lab is both private and familiar, populated by a small number of people who know one another well. My lab is the place where I put my brain out on my fingers and I do things. My lab is a place where I move. I stand, walk, sit, fetch, carry, climb, and crawl. My lab is a place where it’s just as well that I can’t sleep, because there are so many things to do in the world besides that. My lab is a place where it matters if I get hurt. There are warnings and rules designed to protect me. I wear gloves, glasses, and closed-toed shoes to shield myself against disastrous mistakes. In my lab, whatever I need is greatly outbalanced by what I have. The drawers are packed full with items that might come in handy. Every object in my lab—no matter how small or misshapen—exists for a reason, even if its purpose has not yet been found.

  My lab is a place where my guilt over what I haven’t done is supplanted by all of the things that I am getting done. My uncalled parents, unpaid credit cards, unwashed dishes, and unshaved legs pale in comparison to the noble br
eakthrough under pursuit. My lab is a place where I can be the child that I still am. It is the place where I play with my best friend. I can laugh in my lab and be ridiculous. I can work all night to analyze a rock that’s a hundred million years old, because I need to know what it’s made of before morning. All the baffling things that arrived unwelcome with adulthood—tax returns and car insurance and Pap smears—none of them matter when I am in the lab. There is no phone and so it doesn’t hurt when someone doesn’t call me. The door is locked and I know everyone who has a key. Because the outside world cannot come into the lab, the lab has become the place where I can be the real me.

  My laboratory is like a church because it is where I figure out what I believe. The machines drone a gathering hymn as I enter. I know whom I’ll probably see, and I know how they’ll probably act. I know there’ll be silence; I know there’ll be music, a time to greet my friends, and a time to leave others to their contemplation. There are rituals that I follow, some I understand and some I don’t. Elevated to my best self, I strive to do each task correctly. My lab is a place to go on sacred days, as is a church. On holidays, when the rest of the world is closed, my lab is open. My lab is a refuge and an asylum. It is my retreat from the professional battlefield; it is the place where I coolly examine my wounds and repair my armor. And, just like church, because I grew up in it, it is not something from which I can ever really walk away.

  My laboratory is a place where I write. I have become proficient at producing a rare species of prose capable of distilling ten years of work by five people into six published pages, written in a language that very few people can read and that no one ever speaks. This writing relates the details of my work with the precision of a laser scalpel, but its streamlined beauty is a type of artifice, a size-zero mannequin designed to showcase the glory of a dress that would be much less perfect on any real person. My papers do not display the footnotes that they have earned, the table of data that required painstaking months to redo when a graduate student quit, sneering on her way out that she didn’t want a life like mine. The paragraph that took five hours to write while riding on a plane, stunned with grief, flying to a funeral that I couldn’t believe was happening. The early draft that my toddler covered in crayon and applesauce while it was still warm from the printer.