Padgett Powell
A Woman Named Drown
For Sidney
and
Amanda Dahl,
two tough girls
Six months ago a friend of mine and I left doctoral programs in chemistry under certain different circumstances. Tom, a true scientist, got a letter at Oak Ridge, where he was finishing up his degree, informing him he had a job for the taking in Alabama-a high-level, nuclear police-chaperon affair, to judge from what he gleefully told me. I, scientist by default, by process of elimination, got a letter from my girlfriend in Norway letting me know in the subtlest, happiest way imaginable that I would not be joining her there as we had planned upon completion of my degree. When you are told that your fiancée, a promising post-doc to an internationally famous crystallographer expatriated from Brooklyn, finds that sagacious mentor "a cute little guy (only five three!)" who "eats eggs on his hamburgers!" — you can read all the handwriting on the wall you ever need to read. I called her up, twice (once, as the rhyme puts it, for the money-$300; and once for the show-a considerable theater of her releasing, in a two-hour transatlantic tear burst, from the gunny sack of our entire six years off-and-on together, every crime of impassion I committed, and these transgressions I admit were endless, ranging from birthdays forgotten to old lovers not forgotten), and got a picture, as you can only on a telephone costing you a month's stipend, of her veritable sainthood for having put up for so long with the entire sham she convinced me I was, and was certain, as I reluctantly hung up the second time, that I had lost the finest, purest girl ever there would be for me. The starch in my doctorate will, which had not been much to begin with, vanished.
I trudged around the lab more bowlegged or splay-footed toward purpose than usual for about two weeks, when I got a card from Tom in Alabama. Tom is the sort of natural scientist who can learn, say, Schrodinger, while penciling Walt Disney characters in the margins and Hlling their balloons with the integrals and derivatives required on the following day's examination, and the first thing I saw on the card was a Goofyesque figure clearly representing Tom holding a Geiger counter to the rear end of an armadillo. Around the card this same figure pursued armadillos in odd attitudes and circumstances.
With a magnifying g1ass-Tom can put he claims, four thousand words on a postcard-I made out this:
Remember Elaine? (Good girl.) 1 married her. Sold tent. Sold Mustang. It was a good car. Goofytom is doing what he does. Did you know armadillo feces register most accurately low-level hot traces around reactors? Me neither. P.U. Have my own desk. Partially stuffed mouse in drawer, lower left. Story behind that. Cotton sticking from his eyes makes him look like a ghoul mouse.
A badge and some ID papers have been found belonging to a certain. . no! yes!. . Fenster Ludge. Colleagues plenty Silkwood-worried.
The ghoul mouse refers obliquely to one of our maturer pastimes together before he moved to Oak Ridge (I stayed in Knoxville). We shot rats in our apartments with his slingshot. They (the apartments) were owned by the same notorious slumlord, and we found this competitive exercise preferable to registering formal complaints about the infestation. Neither of us wanted the rents to go up, either-Tom for true want and I for false (I was, still am, for that matter, abjuring some more or less family money, of which I am supposed to lay claim to plenty, but that is a longer story). The tent he mentions is one of two army field hospitals we bought for twenty dollars apiece and wadded cumbrously into our respective rat squats, providing thereby our rats with rich, paraffiny tunnels to hide in and our firing ranges with good, solid, gratifying backstops. It was almost as good to get a loud canvas pop as it was to get a rat.
Tom created Fenster Ludge when he discovered that one carrel in a suite of eight was empty. He made out a nameplate for the empty space, provided Fenster with some of his own books and supplies, and then began to ask his six new colleagues in the suite if anyone had seen "this Fenster Ludge guy." No one had. I caught Tom unable to contain a giggle one day during a discussion of the Fenster Ludge guy, why no one had seen him, etc. Someone finally claimed to have spotted a fellow fitting the presumed description of a man who might be called Fenster Ludge. And now he has taken Fenster to the sinister zones of nuclear cover-ups.
This card brought me somehow full circle to the Norway letter of two weeks before, and without feeling too bad about that per se (I don't think), I did feel bad, wasted. I sat for a bit and then did a significant thing without needing to analyze its merits, without needing to run the customary assay upon its advisability and consequences, short term and long, and self-actualization costs. I quit chemistry. I put Tom's card down on a heavy slate table and walked into Dr. Friedeman's office and said, I quit. Doctoral resignation is not standardly done-I have seen men thrown from offices, one nearly hurled from a balcony-but Friedeman took it like the godly sufferer that he is.
"Son," he said, standing up and taking me by the shoulder, "when the fire for inorgany that is in your heart reignites, come back. There'll be a place in the sun for you." I chuckled at this, and Friedeman did, too. We shook hands.
Friedeman was a card, and probably the one good scientist in the country with sufficient crazed grace to accept for long a dilettante like me. He was, on the side, a lay Baptist preacher, all disappointment to him a designed trial from Cod, so in a way I could hardly have presumed to have disappointed him. Try as I did, I could not imagine him delivering low religion, for his science is virtually high Anglican if not Catholic in its reach and style. He was capable of saying, "We know full well in our hearts that this bond is not less than three angstroms," and this faith could well be responsible for three years of failing, dogged experimentation to prove the improbable. For proving the improbable, and for thereby discovering the unknown, he is regarded a dean of inorganic chemistry the world over, yet he walks around his lab blessing beakers known to have contained winning results, pocketing lucky magnetic stir bars.
We shook hands, and I almost doubted myself, but kept going, kept quitting, quit. I walked out into the bright afternoon feeling truly released, as if out of the army or prison, and felt this relief most oddly for not having known before it any real oppression. I do not yet know the components of the feeling, a kind of deep-breath, first-of-spring freshness.
* * *
I met two women in the Smokies one night who told me they had been elementary-school teachers and quit, secretaries and quit, and presently they were stewardesses and thinking of quitting that. I remarked that they seemed to do a bit of quitting and one of them snapped, "You have to start before you can quit."
I stood there on the bright catwalk wondering what I'd started, and why, and why I felt so very frisky. What I'd started, as near as I can tell now, is a kind of fit of starts governed by nothing except a distaste for plans. For a casual, relaxed fellow with, as I have confessed, a bit of money in the closet, I suddenly came to realize I had a network of plans about me as stifling as the web of ambition any good young law student or medical student has, and I completely did not recognize the need for it. This money: no big deal; the old man would like for his drilling-supply business to remain in the family and that is me and that is about a two-million-dollar net thing and it had not particularly appealed to me yet. I had been occupied, I suppose, with a kind of disguised rich boy's finding himself before assuming the obligation of the family fortune, and I had been doing it as correctly, I thought, as I could (that is, by not using any of the money, by doing nothing to endanger its source, by "applying" myself in some uphill and admirable endeavor the meanwhile, if science still can be said to be uphill and admirable). It must have occurred to me during the transatlantic jilt and upon discovering Tom's little predicament that I was doing not much really at all in the way of finding myself, which phrase I do not relish; and I was not doing much, anything, in the way of having fun. Rich boys ignoring their money ought to have fun.