A Million Years with You (32 page)

I went to the lab to see what I could do. A group of scientists and their assistants were gathered around a desk on which was an apparatus containing the smallest monkey I had ever seen, a newborn rhesus macaque who the day before had been delivered by C-section. The apparatus engulfed his body entirely. Only his tiny head was showing because the idea was that he should never see his hands.

Eyes wide, jaws clenched, lips pulled back in a horrified grin, he was looking up at the scientists, trembling with fear and also with cold, as he, like all macaques, was born naked. I gently stroked his forehead with my thumb. His eyes closed with relief and he slumped in his apparatus. The scientists murmured their approval. They could have done that themselves, I thought, but I took the part-time job they offered me. And yes, moments later I got the little guy to drink milk. In fact, all I had to do was to gently stroke his forehead, smile at him, and quietly tell him he was a sweet little, dear little monkey. He watched me with an alert, relaxed expression.

I don't know what those scientists eventually discovered about this infant, but when I smiled at him, I made a discovery of my own. He was only a day old, but he understood what a human smile meant. Just think. Naked, cold, straight from the womb, and alone in an apparatus surrounded by towering strangers, he understood what a human smile meant. He himself was grinning when I first saw him, but when a macaque grins, it's a threat.

If I draped him with a special cloth so that only his head was showing, I could hold him. And of course he liked that. The bad part was when I'd have to leave. He'd then be completely alone for sixteen hours, and when he saw me leaving, he'd be frantic. His wide eyes would follow my every move and he'd make little screams. It tore my heart. I couldn't stand it. I couldn't take him with me, of course, so I'd go home, get drunk, and cry.

The entire lab was joyless. The worst thing I saw was a cat strapped down on an operating table, alone in the room, lying on her back with her belly cut open for a C-section. The idea was to remove her unborn kittens and blind them, thus preventing them from seeing their front paws. Maybe the kittens had been removed already. I looked in the room because I heard the cat crying. She was coming out of anesthesia. I then noticed the female scientist who was supposed to be doing the operation chatting with someone in the hall.

The hierarchy in that lab was rigid, with the scientists at the top, their assistants next, and the lowly animal attendants like myself just inches above the animals in the cages. I pointed to the cat and said she was reviving. The scientist gave me a hostile stare and resumed her conversation. The cat kept crying, and I am as much to blame for that as was the scientist. I should have gone to the authorities. I should have called the ASPCA. I'd guess that after the kittens were removed, the cat would be killed and thus spared further agony—assuming that the scientist got around to it and didn't just let her die of pain. But I don't like to think about it, much less talk about it, and I've been racked with guilt ever since.

Another joyless sight was that of a male scientist trying to get an adolescent macaque out of a cage and transported to another kind of apparatus where his brain would be studied, or something like that. The macaque had electrodes implanted in his skull, so his brain had been studied before and he knew what was about to happen. For the longest time he successfully avoided getting caught. This amused the scientist. He laughed at the macaque's efforts and repeatedly called him “stupid.” Finally he caught him, and off they went to the apparatus. No doubt the scientist made some kind of discovery, because later I saw a photo of that monkey, electrodes and all, on the cover of
Scientific American
. God knows what happened to him.

 

For a long time scientists questioned whether animals had thoughts, emotions, self-awareness, and the like, often assuming that they didn't. Thus it was amazing to be in that laboratory, where in every cage on every wall, the evidence that they did was overwhelming. The other animal attendants knew it—one of them showed me a female macaque who was cradling the corpse of her infant. The infant had died several days earlier, said the attendant, and the mother had been cradling it ever since. Her head was low and her shoulders sagged as she slowly groomed it.

The young attendant was an interesting person, a macho African American guy who talked street talk but beneath his tough exterior was deeply compassionate. He told me he would not remove the little corpse while the mother still had hope. He was waiting for her to give up.

The attendant thought she felt emotion. I thought she felt emotion. Darwin himself believed that animals think and feel emotion. But the scientists in that lab seemed to believe otherwise, including the scientist who, in saying that his macaque was stupid, seemed to know less about animals than an ordinary pet owner. Because scientists were just about the only people who doubted or denied that animals could think and feel emotion, and that to believe otherwise was sentimental anthropomorphization, they must have been misinformed in graduate school. (Today scientists are exploring these questions with fascinating, positive results. I learned of an octopus, for instance, who instantly found his way through a maze on the first try with no mistakes, because from his tank high on the wall he could look down at the maze and had seen how other octopuses, by trial and error, solved the problem. I doubt that most people could do that.)

As for the scientists in the monkey lab, their misinformation made me wonder about the results of their experiments. One question they addressed, and the reason for all the C-sections, was how the brain connects to the hands if the eyes can't see them. Were the scientists sure that the brain of an orphaned infant, alone, cold, and traumatized from the moment of birth, would develop in a normal manner?

Later, I'm glad to say, the laboratory went out of existence. I don't know what new form it took, but it didn't raise macaques. This wasn't because of compassion, however. Monkeys carry hepatitis B, and the scientists were afraid of catching it.

Aside from the monkey lab, which did not fit Freud's definition of the right work and which I left as soon as I could, I had little hope of doing anything with animals or any other fieldwork, if only because my children were no longer small and portable and they had to go to school. But one evening as I was sitting on our living room couch, my eyes fell upon a husky. He wasn't ours—he belonged to friends who were in Europe on sabbatical, but we were keeping him until they returned. And there he was in front of me, looking at me because he wanted me to let him out. I did. He came back a day later. I wondered where he'd been. I also vaguely wondered why he traveled so often—there were no leash laws then—and wondered if anyone had answered this question. I couldn't think of anything, though. All the books about dogs that I'd ever seen were about breeds, training, and so forth. And then it struck me. I wanted to study animals. Right in front of me was a wonderful animal. I could study him.

So I did. As I followed his travels on a bicycle, a world I hadn't dreamed of opened before me—the world of free-ranging city dogs, of whom at the time there were many. I didn't need to travel and I didn't need finances or equipment. I needed only a dog, a notebook, and a pencil. During the next few years I observed this husky and also my other dogs, and when I wasn't observing them, I'd hitch those who were huskies to a dogsled and go whizzing around in the woods in New Hampshire. It was paradise, even more for them than for me. If snow was falling, they'd rejoice and jump up to catch the snowflakes. Then they'd look at me.
Are we going?

I took pages of notes but put them aside because I couldn't figure out how to handle the information. I'd figure it out later, I'd tell myself. And meanwhile, I just kept watching my dogs and enjoying them. I'm including this project in a discussion of work because I got a book out of it,
The Hidden Life of Dogs
, but in fact it was nothing but pleasure.

 

Soon enough, because Steve worked in Washington, we moved to Virginia, dogs and all, and then came Stephanie's accident. While she was in the rehab unit in Boston, I got an apartment in Cambridge to be near her. I took four dogs with me and lent three others to a friend who raced sled dogs. As I recall, it was illegal to have four dogs without a kennel license, but since one was a dingo and two of them were half dingo, and since dingoes are not the same species as dogs, I felt I actually had three dogs (the third was a husky) and thus didn't need a kennel license. The apartment was on the ground floor and had a little yard, but just to be safe, I never let all of them out at the same time, and I never let the dogs who looked like dingoes out together. Most people don't really see what they are looking at, so no one noticed that the apparent dingo was actually three creatures. I thought of starting to write about my dogs at that point, but I wasn't ready and decided to write another book I'd been thinking about that sprang from a story I had told my children. It had wowed them.

I scratched away at it for a while but couldn't concentrate. Then I thought a change of venue might be helpful. My apartment was just a few blocks from the Radcliffe Institute, which had been formed, I had heard, because many women who were scientists, artists, and the like were forced out of their careers by domestic issues. In other words, their educations were being squandered, and the institute wanted to help them. My education, such as it was, was certainly being squandered, and I was certainly subdued by a domestic issue, so seeing myself as the perfect candidate, I applied. The institute turned me down. I forget just why, but I think it was because they took only illustrious applicants.

Oh well. I had also applied for a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and I got it. A few days later I got a flowery letter from the Radcliffe Institute inviting me to join. They had not reconsidered—they didn't realize I was the same person they had turned down. I had morphed into a woman with an NEH grant, thus bore no resemblance to that obscure earlier applicant with that daughter in the rehab hospital. I was tempted to scornfully refuse, but after thinking it over, I swallowed my pride and accepted.

They gave me an office, which was a better place to work than a crowded apartment, but I couldn't stop obsessing about my daughter. Every day I'd visit her in the rehab unit, where I would fuss over her constantly, hoping to get her to drink milk, which she hated. And try as I would, I couldn't write. Nor did I want to. I just thought I should. Nothing seemed to be working, so as soon as my daughter left the rehab unit and started college, I got three teaching jobs all at the same time, to keep myself too busy to think about my problems.

I taught freshman English at UMass Boston, also creative writing at the Harvard Extension, which is night school, and also a course that, if I remember rightly, was called “Communication” at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Walpole, better known as MCI Walpole
⁸
or just Walpole, a maximum-security prison where the bad guys go. After I went back to Virginia, I taught at George Washington University for a while, then worked for the embassy of the State of Kuwait.

 

One day while I was teaching at GWU, the head of the English Department came to my office. Perhaps because so many students seemed hopeless, or perhaps because of threats from their litigious parents because they got bad marks, she questioned the ability of their teachers and asked each of us to write something to prove that we knew how. So I wrote a truthful if somewhat emotional account of a dog who was shot by his owner for coming to my parents' house day after day, begging us to adopt him. Soon after that my boss came back to my office with my story in her hand, quite excited. “If you can write like this,” she asked, “why are you teaching?”

I'd been wondering that myself. I'd been thinking about the book I did not write while at the Radcliffe Institute. By then I'd been offered the job at the Kuwait embassy, and because it provided health insurance that would have paid for some projected surgery for my daughter, something Blue Cross Blue Shield wouldn't cover, I took it. During the long commutes to and from the embassy, I'd think about the book I was planning. One day I discussed it with a friend named Nancy Jay. To her, it seemed important. “If you don't write it,” she said, “it will never be written.”

That did it. I was wasting the only life I'd ever have. The story was no more than a kaleidoscope of thoughts, as vague as mist. Unless it was written, the images in all their detail would evaporate. Earlier in this book I've spoken of unrecognized desire. After talking with Nancy, I knew that I very much wanted to return to writing but had buried the desire. I suddenly felt like a different person. I suddenly knew what to do.

 

Tom and Kirsti had died. My dad had died. My mom inherited the house in Cambridge, my brother inherited half the land in New Hampshire along with the barn and the farmhouse, and I inherited the rest of the land and the house my dad built. By then my kids were in college. I still had the money from the NEH grant. My daughter wasn't going to have the surgery after all—we no longer needed the special insurance. I quit my job at the embassy and told Steve I was going to live in New Hampshire to start writing. If he wanted to come, I'd be overjoyed. But if he didn't, I was going anyway.

Steve had left the Council for a Livable World and was consulting. He could do that from afar, so he approved of my plan. We sold our house in Virginia, he got an apartment in D.C., and I went to New Hampshire to write my novel about the Upper Paleolithic. For a while Steve came on weekends, but soon enough he moved there with me. I made an office for myself in an old barn where John Leathers, the son of the Civil War soldier, had been living when he sold the land to my father. The barn had a space where I could work and an attic where bats and barn swallows slept in the summer and where millions of flies and ladybugs spent the winter. Once there, I wrote without stopping.