the habit of being

This girl in blue has pantyhose in both bare and buff, and what could be called a talent, a collection of transparent ribbons from gift boxes, tags, old letters, sentiments. Today she wants to be a man, to have a straight line for a rhythm, be up, up, up. What would that do for concentration? And why, if science is portrayed as a beautiful woman men lust after until death, are there so many more male scientists in the world than females? If science is that which can be refuted, as well as the taunting vixen, is there a conflict of interests here? Given that understanding is the main goal of any scientific work, one must quickly admit that while a beautiful woman can be appreciated and even worshipped by a man, she can only be understood by another woman. And who better to refute everything on sight than a bitch with PMS. Therefore, there should be more woman scientists, I rest my case. And this girl in blue applauds with a run in her hose and Midol in her bag.

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92 test tubes, 45 forceps, 10 scalpels, 27 250mL beakers, 1 2000 mL Erlenmeyer flask, 1 flower press, 32 microscopes, 3 alcohol lamps, 29 goggles, 2 ancient centrifuges, 1 climatarium… inventory for Anne’s lab, pages and pages, counting and looking up prices. 2 10cc glass syringes that are no longer carried by ANY science supply house, not Ward’s, not Fisher, not Carolina Biological, not anywhere. I sat in D’s classroom looking these things up as he helped a girl with a test. We’d worked on the inventory for days; I stayed after school the week of final exams, when school ended at noon. Everything had to be taken out of the huge supply cabinets and placed on the lab benches. Consumables were not to be inventoried, so they were separated out. All the items listed on last year’s inventory were checked off, some numbers were changed, some things were scratched off. Those things were moved to the tables at the back of the room. The items left at the front had to be added to inventory. I’d do these things, according to the system, and everything had to be counted and recounted before it was put back in the appropriate cabinet. When we finally finished it, three days later, he told me we had done a damn good job, and that no one would ever notice or appreciate it, but that he would know.

He isn’t my teacher anymore, and no one’s calling me an “AP Biology maggot” now, though I still have the perspicacity award he gave me, and the silver star I got for knowing about Fibonacci sequences, and I still have the text from the course (I wouldn’t turn it back in, so I paid for it), and I still have my big grey notebook with black and white photographs on the cover, and my Science Olympiad pin, and a conviction that I will major in biology and not be swayed by humanities whores.

Davis Ranch is this big beautiful place with so much space and air. Marlon and I drove out there one day to make sure he was okay; we’d heard he got into a car accident that morning. He was fine, though his red Miata looked like a dead cartoon, one eye open and one eye closed. There was a telescope on his porch, and his brother was there, and his motorcycle was out in the yard, and his dog was covered with gnats. He was a person, short and fat and bald as ever, with a little white house on his parents’ farm.

He’s leaving this year, going to teach stuck up snobs in Atlanta. He said he told the principal at his new school that he would call his students maggots and that they would love it. It’s true. He’ll give them insane amounts of work and they will love it. He’ll pick on them relentlessly and make them feel like absolute idiots and they will love it. He’ll have so much fun teaching his class that you’d think teaching high school was the kind of job people actually want. And all his students will make 5’s on the AP exam, and some of them will want to major in biology.

I gave him a new Scrabble dictionary for his birthday.

He called me Kate.

I’m saying it because it’s May and someday I will want to remember this month, the month I turned eighteen and graduated from high school. I threw my cap in the air and the tears started going everywhere, almost like all these people I was methodically hugging (tightly, and really meaning it too), mattered in my life, that my never seeing them again would make some sort of difference. James says it’s good to cry at graduations. Marlon said I looked pretty when I cried. I’m not sure which comment has the most substance, and I don’t care.

A scene:

In a house I’d never been to, full of drunk college students playing video games, beer bottles covering tables, Oriental things, paintings and books written in Chinese, I lay exhausted on a foreign sofa in crumpled clothes and wild hair and pimples on my chin.

I’d been swimming before, in a freezing cold pool surrounded by ghosts of people who were once my classmates. Some were smoking and some were drinking, most were talking, and I was the only one still in the pool, floating on my back in the middle while some guy sat on the edge watching me. I thought about how James told me he could still remember how I looked floating in the Atlantic Ocean last June, in my leopard-print bra. This guy is not James, and he will probably not remember me floating, or anything else from that night. I get out of the pool, dry off on Marlon’s already-damp towel, and put my clothes back on. They were crumpled, because they’d just been sitting on the ground all that time, and my hair got in such a mad state from getting wet in the pool and getting brutally harassed by Marlon for a good fifteen minutes afterwards. He scratched my head as if I were some favorite dog, as I sat huddled in an uncomfortable chair, but what did I care, with people constantly asking if I were okay, just because I was tired and didn’t feel like grinning. It was midnight after all. And then the cops showed up and we left.

So I’m lying on this guy’s couch, tired, and Marlon and Ellen are there with me. Ellen’s wearing a pink fairy dress, and she’s sitting in the hole left my wrinkly partial fetal position, between my head and my knees. She’s warm and I want to sleep. She’s warm and she strokes my hair, like she doesn’t have enough problems of her own to take a second to make me feel safe in a strange Oriental drunken house where I shouldn’t be, and Marlon is unhappy and uncomfortable and I don’t even care because Ellen’s close to me and playing with my hair and I’m almost asleep. The boy who belongs to the house, Ellen’s friend, also tipsy and Chinese, sits on the other couch and he’s mumbling about how he should take pictures of us and sell them on the internet, it’s so erotic our being close like that. And Ellen says “Katharine has a boyfriend.”

(And that’s how I spent graduation night, just in case I ever need to remember.)