From her seat by the window, four rows back, Elli watched her friend and fumed. Nan’s clamoring was obnoxious. Who really cared about rocks? Why did she have to show she knew everything about everything? It’d probably been obvious since the day she was born that she was going to Harvard; her family acted like they owned the place. Elli usually craved teachers’ approval as much as Nan did. But this year, when she’d found herself off balance in science class, often unable to answer the teacher’s questions, she just tried to go unnoticed. She was as tall and willowy as Nan, and, she thought, as smart. But, in a different way. She was more uncertain about everything. Still, she was secretly determined to go to Harvard too. Bad as things had been going in science, the rock study that had been dragging on since Christmas threatened to completely derail her. The junior high in her affluent suburb had been chosen for a pilot of a geology curriculum developed by MIT scientists. Instead of textbooks, they’d been given sleek brochures with highly produced photographs of the eroded stone stairs of Chartres cathedral, pebble-strewn beaches, glaciers, seismic faults and stalagmite-encrusted caves. But Elli couldn’t find anything interesting in smoothed concave steps and sea glass. She lurched back and forth between thinking she was drawing blanks in class because of what was going on with her mother and the possibility that she simply wasn’t as smart as she thought she was. There were seven minutes left in the class. Seven minutes in which she could still get called on, and answerless, be nudged a step closer to being lumped in with the “dumb” kids. Elli gazed at the forsythia and lilacs blooming outside the classroom window. It wasn’t just science that wasn’t going right. She’d just gotten a chorus part in the eighth-grade production of Camelot while Nan had been chosen as one of the ladies-in-waiting. That meant Nan would be in all the rehearsals with the leads, including the class heartthrob, who was playing Sir Lancelot. And, then there was softball, the sport all the athletic girls, like Elli, played in the spring. She could run fast, swim like a fish and play a decent game of tennis but her arm was erratic. She was just as likely to throw a ball wildly into the dirt as into the glove of one of her teammates. Remembering where she was, she looked back anxiously to see if Mrs. Mulroney had noticed her daydreaming. The teacher, whose slate-gray hair reminded Elli of the dullness her mother’s hair had taken on, was looking directly at her. Luckily, she wasn’t asking a question. “Because our rock study has taken longer than we expected, we’re not going to have time to do our animal behavior unit in class,” Mrs. Mulroney was saying. “Instead, you’re going to do independent experiments. You’ll come up with a hypothesis, then figure out how to test the hypothesis. Who knows what a hypothesis is?” Elli had a vague idea, but couldn’t really put it into words. Nan’s hand shot up. Elli took consolation from the parsimonious smile Mrs. Mulroney gave Nan, signaling, ‘Yes, she had the right answer’ but also some annoyance with Nan’s overeagerness. For ideas for projects, Mrs. Mulroney suggested the class read the first chapter in their textbooks’ animal behavior section and skim through the other chapters. Proposed topics and hypotheses were due the following week. Just the Camelot leads, not the chorus, was practicing that afternoon, so Elli went straight to softball practice. She took what was normally Nan’s position at first. She got one girl out with a throw to second and another with a throw to home plate. She went two for two – decent hits to the outfield, instead of her usual measly grounders. Then, halfway through the softball practice, their rehearsal over, Queen Guinevere and the ladies-in-waiting sashayed onto the field, cliquish and smug, and took their positions. Nan, a lefty, took over first. Elli moved over to shortstop. In the first play with the new additions, Elli managed to trap a grounder but threw beyond Nan’s reach so the runner advanced to second. “Elli, how many times do I have to tell you? Don’t throw like a girl!” the coach shouted. As the team boarded the late buses after practice, Elli, two seats behind, thought she heard Guinevere (in real life, Stacey) talking with Nan about staying overnight at her house that evening. Elli’s chest tightened. She would have liked to sleep over at Nan’s house all the time. She could have gotten away from her own home and gotten to be part of a normal family. But, Nan had always said her mother didn’t allow overnights on weekdays. Everyone had to be sharp for school. The bus left Elli off at the foot of her driveway and she shuffled toward her house, barely able to lift her legs. The deep red rhododendron blossoms filling the middle of their circular driveway, which reminded her of Alice in Wonderland and the Queen of Hearts, mocked her deprivation. Halfway up the drive, she could see that her mother’s navy-blue Ford Falcon was in the garage. Elli felt a rush of near hysteria in her throat, a dry, murderous fury. She paused before going into the house, vowing not to scream at her mother this time. She dumped her bag of books just inside the door as she passed her bedroom. Her chest, which had relaxed after Guinevere and Nan got off at separate stops, clenched again as she strode down the hallway. Since she was pretty certain of what she’d find, it occurred to her that if she really didn’t want to explode, she should turn around, go back into her room and start on homework, or veer left into the kitchen. Instead, she went straight to the living room where her mother sat, in a black chair next to the picture windows. The drapes were still drawn, blocking out the little clearing framed by two pines and more rhododendrons that made the living room, when the drapes were open, almost a part of the outdoors. An opened bag of Lorna Doones leaned on the leg of her mother’s chair. Her mother’s hair, which had once been a mane of glowing reddish-brown curls, was dark and matted, shining with grease. Her mother wore her now customary navy-blue bobby socks and Keds. Gray, synthetic pedal pushers fit closely around her stomach, which had swelled to look like a junior-sized football. Even with the curtains drawn, it was much too warm for the once pretty mottled mohair sweater it seemed her mother had been wearing every day for the last year. “What are you doing?” Elli said in a voice she hoped sounded demanding, but controlled. She had to be firm, to make her mother understand she couldn’t get away with this. “Don’t you start in,” her mother said, trying to make her voice strong. Her eyes darted about, as if watching for incoming attackers. Her effort to be forceful came out as pathetic fear and fed Elli’s fury. “Are you just going to sit here for the rest of your life?” As her voice rose, Elli felt as if her body was flying over the handlebars of her bicycle. “Why don’t you do something? Make dinner or something. Wash your hair. Anything. Here, let me help you.” Elli started toward her mother. “Don’t you touch me,” her mother said. Elli retreated, afraid of what she might do to her mother. “Bitch,” Elli said. She wouldn’t let her shame interfere with what had to be said. “Leave me alone,” her mother said. As Elli turned away, she noted the mosaic of Gandhi’s life that her mother, a half-dozen years earlier, had commissioned and hung prominently in their entrance hallway. Elli wanted the mother who did things like this back. She closed the door to her room, leaving just a crack, and sat down at her desk. She imagined Nan and Stacey having an overnight, even though she was pretty sure they hadn’t. It was possible, though, that Stacey had gone home first to get her pajamas and then gone to Nan’s. Elli wondered if they’d talk about her. She considered her stack of books. She knew that once she got started, she’d feel better. Her ability to get stuff done was consoling. But she needed something before she could tackle it. Something to fill the hollowness. A snack maybe. But, she knew the kitchen would probably be as devoid of comfort as the rest of the house. Her mother rarely went to the supermarket anymore. There’d been a day or two in the last year when there was a tantalizing sense that things had returned to normal. On those days, her mother would come home with her hair washed and cut and carrying bags of groceries, and with a hint of a smile that at any moment, Elli expected, to wink out like a candle in front of a draft. These were the days, Elli knew, that her mother had had an appointment with the psychiatrist. After one of those days, Elli had heard her mother telling Elli’s father, with a force reminiscent of when her mother was normal, that she was not going back. There was nothing wrong with her, her mother insisted. Elli took a chance on the kitchen anyway. Even when her mother was normal, there wasn’t much to snack on. No pretzels, no potato chips, no soft drinks. But, now, there were not even raisins, or apples, or saltine crackers. Just a few rubbery carrots in the vegetable bin. She retreated to her room. Much as she didn’t feel like it, she had to get to work. The only way out of this, the only way to get herself a life like Nan’s was through Harvard. And for that, she had to do her homework. Math, as usual, was easy. She relished working out an algebra proof that forced her to try a couple of different approaches before she got it, but wasn’t so difficult that only the math genius in the class, and sometimes Nan, could get it. Social studies was harder these days. She kept having to reread sections she completely missed as her mind wandered. But, she finally answered all the questions for that night’s assignment and went on to language arts. She didn’t have any trouble paying attention to the D.H. Lawrence story they’d been assigned. She did, though, have a creepy feeling that the story, the Rocking-Horse Winner, had been assigned because of her. She knew she was being paranoid, but maybe the teacher really was sending her, or the class, a message: ‘Elli, you can’t pretend, you can’t run away, this is you.’ Or, ‘Class, one of your classmates is like Paul; can you figure out who that might be?’ Despite Elli’s suspicion, she actually felt a little fortunate as she read the story. As bad as things were for her, she thought Paul had it worse. And, she certainly wasn’t going to wreck her life by becoming crazy like Paul did, rocking insanely on his horse, just because he had a fucked-up family. She was going to be just fine. Finally, she got to open to the animal behavior section in her science book. She read the first chapter, then skimmed a few paragraphs later on about Pavlovian dogs, which she’d heard about. She looked at pictures of optical illusions and checked whether they deceived her. She stopped flipping abruptly at a picture of a monkey clinging to a torso-shaped wire structure wrapped in a terry cloth towel. The caption explained that the monkey, actually a chimpanzee, had been deprived of its mother and was clinging to the nappy towel as a substitute. She examined the photos closely and read the caption over and over: “Animals that were raised apart from others of their own species had come to be known as Kasper Hauser animals because of a young man who had appeared in Germany sometime in the 19th century and claimed to have been confined to a dungeon without human contact throughout his childhood.” “Oh my god,” Elli half-whispered. The next day, after softball practice, she walked the half mile from the school playing field to the town library. Oblivious as her mother seemed to be, Elli was pretty sure she’d notice that she hadn’t come home on time. Maybe it would make her worried. Getting something out of her mother – even anger – was better than nothing. Elli went directly to the upstairs, adult section of the library, prompting the women at the checkout desk to look up. Usually, kids didn’t start using the upstairs library until high school. The section for teenagers was downstairs in the children’s library. Even though they didn’t seem to remember her name, the librarians certainly knew her, at least as the daughter of that once-upon-a-time rabble-rouser, her mother. Elli was ashamed now, imagining that the gray ladies behind the desk had gotten word that these days, her mother was home, as good as comatose, sitting in the black chair. They were probably quietly triumphant, thinking this was a fitting punishment for the woman who had marched up to the front desk one day, protested that they had refused to allow Elli to check out James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, checked it out on her own card and then nonchalantly handed it to Elli in front of them. Elli walked quickly past the ladies, directly to the card catalogues. She loved the feeling of the weighty drawers, the order of the alphabetical system, the puzzle of finding the words that led to the information she wanted and her ease in pursuing the threads. When she couldn’t find a separate section for Kasper Hauser, she pulled out the drawer labeled, “Alt-Ar,” and flipped to the cards that said, “Animals” in typed black letters in the upper left-hand corner. Under “Animals, mothers, nurture,” she found, in very fine print, the notation, “without mothers, survival.” Elli went to find the book, called simply, “Animal Behavior,” on the shelves. It had a dark, worn cover and its pages were brittle with age. She found a notation for “without mothers, survival, see Kasper Hauser” in the index. She leafed to the referenced page, sat down on the floor between the shelves and read about Kasper Hauser. When he was allowed to emerge from the chamber after 15 years, he couldn’t speak and was a social misfit. There was a picture of a gaunt, unshaven man with long, uncut hair with a hollow look in his eyes. The book said Hauser could barely talk and became a mad, unkempt beggar who was imprisoned again for most of his adult life for his unruly behavior. She couldn’t find anything about actual experiments on humans to see what happened if they were brought up without other human contact. The monkey experiments were limited to the finding that if a chimp had to choose between the comfort of a fuzzy towel and food, he’d choose the towel. Obviously, she couldn’t replicate a Kasper Hauser experiment. At least not with people, or chimpanzees, she thought. But, maybe there was something she could do. The following Wednesday, when Mrs. Mulroney called Elli up to her desk to describe her experiment, Elli was edgy. She’d been swinging back and forth between expecting her teacher to think her project was brilliant, or evidence of incipient madness. Mostly, she’d thought about how deeply impressed Mrs. Mulroney would be by the sophistication of her project. She’d been imagining the experiment would make her stand out once and for all. She imagined she could even get one of the National Science Foundation junior scientist awards. “Are you sure you want to do this?” Mrs. Mulroney asked, looking concerned, as if Elli had just told her she’d been diagnosed with cancer. Elli nodded, trying desperately not to cry. “Ok. If your parents will let you do this. But, I think you should reconsider. Let me know what you decide by next Monday. You don’t have much time so you need to decide quickly.” Elli returned to her desk, avoiding her classmates’ eyes, trying not to let anyone see her face. Mrs. Mulroney was just full of rocks, she thought as she sat back down at her desk. She was just like her stupid rocks – cold and dull. She wore dull-colored shapeless skirts and cardigan sweaters. Her glasses hung around her neck on a cord. She was hardly human. How could she know anything about human behavior and psychology? Her teacher couldn’t possibly appreciate how original and groundbreaking her experiment was. Sophisticated scientists at MIT and Harvard who judged the NSF contests would. That evening, she confronted pretty much the same supper she‘d had for the past year and a half, since her mother had mostly stopped shopping and cooking –steak, Bird’s Eye frozen peas and Minute Rice. “How’s Suzy sunshine?” her father said to Elli, trying to break the silence and prod her to drop her surliness. “I need to go to Lincoln Labs on Saturday to pick up mice for an experiment I’m doing for science,” Elli said, not allowing herself to be goaded into affability, even in the interests of getting him to make the trip. “What’s the experiment?” her father asked. Elli hesitated, braving a glance at her mother, who Elli generally had been trying not to look at. Her mother was making loud smacking sounds with her lips. When she stopped eating for a moment, she emitted a sound that was something between a grunt and a whimper. “I’m going to try to bring up mice without their mothers and see what happens.” “Why in the world would you want to do that?” her father asked. Elli wondered whether he was about to explode at her, as he often did when he caught her swearing at her mother. He didn’t this time. “Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked. “Why wouldn’t I?” she said. “I’m not going to do some stupid thing about optical illusions like everyone else. We need to get there by 11. They close at noon. And I’ve got to buy cages and feeding bottles at the pet store first.” On Saturday, her father was out early, mowing the lawn with the hand mower. When Elli approached him, the muffled clattering of the mower stopped and he looked up. “C’mon. We have to go,” she said. “You’re really determined to do this?” She stomped her foot, a gesture made ridiculously ineffectual by the grass. She couldn’t get away with swearing at her father. “Ok. I’m almost done. Then we can go. Tell mom we’re going in about ten minutes.” “She’s not coming!” “Look kiddo. I know it’s rough. But I need your help.” He stepped away from the mower and put an arm around her shoulder. “I don’t give a shit,” she said, shaking the arm off. “To hell with the stupid experiment. I’d rather flunk science.” She fled to her room and slammed her door. She sat down at her desk and put her head in her hands. Her father was going back and forth with the mower in front of her window. She peeked at her watch. Five minutes of nine. They’d have to leave within a half hour if they were going to get it all done. Nine o’clock. She’d give it five more minutes. It looked like her father was almost done with the lawn. If she was going to apologize, she didn’t want to do it in front of her mother. She quietly opened her bedroom door, tiptoed down the hall and out into the yard. “I’m sorry. Can we go now?” On the way home from the lab, Elli, as had become usual, sat crouched behind the driver’s seat, as far away from her mother as possible. She rested her arm on top of the two cages next to her, one mother in each, to keep them from tilting. Both pregnant mice barely moved, seeming to rest their loads on the newspaper-covered floors of the cages. The attendant at the lab who had sold them the mice had said the babies would be born within a day. The whole idea was beginning to make Elli nauseous. She wished they could turn around and return the mothers. When they got home, she put the four 1- by 2- by 1-foot cages on the long built-in desk counter in the spare bedroom. Besides the two cages for the mothers, there was one for each of the litters that would be separated from their mothers. Elli rigged up water bottles with pieces of wire and laid the eyedroppers for feeding on a piece of newspaper next to one of the babies’ cages. She added some feeding pellets to the moms’ cages and shut the door. That evening, she stayed in her room after dinner and tried to read The Making of the President 1960. She loved reading about the Kennedys. She sometimes imagined that one day she would be president, or at least UN ambassador. She wondered what the mother mice were doing in their cages in the next room, but didn’t want to go look. She had read that the babies would be like little red beans at birth. She hadn’t really thought through how you feed a little red bean. She figured they had to have mouths, so they could be fed. She wished her father had said she couldn’t do the experiment. Elli’s friends told her she was lucky to have parents like hers because they weren’t “strict” and didn’t say ‘no’ all the time, and sometimes she felt a little proud of it. But, in this case, she would have liked a little strictness. Sometimes, she thought what others saw as open-mindedness was just an unwillingness to take a stand, or neglect. The next morning, feeling queasy, she carefully opened the door to the spare room as if trying not to wake someone sleeping. At first glance, it looked like nothing had changed and she thought the babies hadn’t been born yet. But, then she saw little specks of red sticking out from beneath each mother. They were impossibly small and there was no way she was going to pull one of them out from under its mother. Even if she were willing to be that cruel, she couldn’t imagine how she could pick one up without crushing it. They were practically translucent. She had planned to take one baby away from each mother each day, and see whether they could survive without their mothers. The answer seemed pretty clear that they couldn’t, at least not right then. Elli also imagined there was a good chance the mothers would attack her if she tried to touch any of the babies. She hadn’t thought of this, and wondered if there was anything written about it. Too late now. The next morning, the red beans were hardly any bigger. But, they were wriggling a little more and she thought she might be able to pick one up without crushing it. And, the mothers were looking a little indifferent, perhaps with exhaustion, as if they might not notice, or at least care, if she grabbed one of the beans. When she did pick up one of the moist, wriggly creatures, she stifled a scream. She looked closely for its mouth. It was barely a slit, maybe an eighth of an inch long. The eyedropper she’d planned to use to feed them milk was wider than the baby itself. She thought to put the baby back with its mother since it seemed pretty clearly impossible to feed it. But, she’d read that if you took the babies away, and then put them back with their mothers, the mothers would eat them. To be scientific and have more than one trial – whatever happened with just one, after all, could be a fluke – she had to take one baby from the other mom too. She put each of them in their own cage. She tried to feed one, but its tiny mouth didn’t seem to open and the milk dribbled over its body. It seemed she was more likely to drown it than to get it to eat anything. When it seemed clear she couldn’t even get its mouth open, she touched it with a cloth to dry it off and left a drop of milk next to each of them. She tried to make the drops small enough so they wouldn’t drown in them but to leave enough to keep them alive if they could somehow drink the milk. The next morning, there was a tiny, shriveled up, purple thing, resembling more an insect than a mammal, in each of the baby’s cages. She wrapped each in the newspapers in the bottom of their cages. She thought fleetingly of throwing them in the incinerator, but realized that would feel even more cruel. She took the newspaper bundles out to the garage, got a shovel, and dug a hole by a big rock in the backyard, placed them side by side and covered them with dirt. She decided she’d wait another day before continuing with the experiment and removing any more babies from their mothers. In all, ten babies died over five days. Elli wrote down her results, took some snapshots of the cages and remaining mice with her Brownie camera and handed in her report, slipping it in toward the bottom of the pile in hopes that somehow Mrs. Mulroney would not get to reading it. At least maybe not until the school year was over. A week later, Elli remembered the mice. As she opened the door to the spare bedroom, before registering that there were two white lumps piled up against the wires, she saw that the water bottles were empty. Elli started to back out the door, then forced herself to stop. She had to make sure. Maybe, it was just shredded paper; maybe she wasn’t seeing right. Maybe they were sleeping. Quivering as though the temperature had suddenly dropped to 20 below in the room, she took a closer look at one of the mothers. There was no motion, no trace of its body rising and falling in the tiniest way. She put a finger out to touch it, just in case. It was rigid. “Help!” she started to scream, but stopped herself. She couldn’t let anyone think there was something wrong with her.