Sea
Change
Adrienne swam before she walked, snorkeled at six.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” the grown-ups asked.
“A deep sea diver.”
In high school her family called her an amphibious creature crossed with a book worm, more interested in fish and reading than in boys. Not altogether true - she dated the captain of the high school swim team (skinny, hairless tadpole, all shoulders and legs) until out-swimming and humiliating him. She discovered you can’t cry underwater, swam solitary healing laps, and lay in the sun, reading Jacques Cousteau and Jules Verne.
At New College, Adrienne spent more time in the Sarasota Bay than class. Researching her senior honors thesis - echolocation in dolphins – she met a schooner bum and after graduation sailed the Caribbean with him. In Surinam, returning with groceries from the market, she found him in their bunk with a woman from a cruise ship. Adrienne flew back to the States and graduate school at Berkeley where, in the Department’s submersible vessel, she studied clouds of fluffy green phytodetritus, finding even the waste from phytoplankton beautiful. She wrote her dissertation on the Yolidia clam’s use of a small, mysterious appendage to detect the chemical state of its environment.
Friends married – on beaches and ship decks, in vineyards and redwood circles. She felt wistful but despite a few brief affairs, nothing stuck; she found no one as seductive as the secret world beneath the surface of the water, no late-night assignation satisfying as the midnight lab illuminated by the iridescent green of her aquariums. By the time she received her hood and doctorate, some friends (already on a second child or second marriage) had dropped out of the game to teach high school science, work for pharmaceuticals. Adrienne’s clams, plankton, and algae required her full complement of nurture. “My significant other is named Yolidia,” she said, refusing fix-up dates and introductions.
She turned down a tenure track professorship at San Diego State for the Oceanographic Institute at Woods Hole. The position offered field work on mollusks in situ, and housing on the beach. Adrienne bought a sailboat and practically lived in her wetsuit, swimming even in rough winter surf.
The marine snail Aplysia captured her attention. Its response to threat - increased heart rate and jets of ink - convinced Adrienne that the primitive mollusk experienced something like fear. The lab chief, Polly, encouraged her to write up the findings and submit a paper for publication.
Shop talk in the lab and the canteen sufficed for company. She skipped lab parties, avoided informal potlucks and the occasional communal “culture runs” to Boston. Evenings, after checking the temperature of her tanks, she wandered through the public display rooms over-run with tourist families and field-tripping children by day. Alone in the aqueous light, she peered in at ancient lobsters and horse-shoe crabs, pitying them, living out their days there instead of on the ocean floor. She felt kin to the captive specimens; even working and living so close to the water, she yearned. Adrienne envied astronauts’ lengthy sojourns on space stations in the heavens.
On winter Sundays she made pots of soup big and deep enough to last the week, and read Thoreau’s journal of his visit to the cape in 1857, Henry Beston’s Outermost House. Beston understood: “The world today is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things.”
One snowy January evening, snug before the fire, catching up on professional journals, a classified ad in The Review of Experimental Biology caught her eye. “Seeking adventurous scientist for underwater exploration. Willingness to relocate a prerequisite.”
Awakening in the middle of the night, she called the number. “You have reached Dr. Jonah Larsen at Massachusetts General Hospital,” said the tape. Jonah Larsen, a familiar name, one of the pioneers in work with hormones and sex change surgery. What was he up to now?
The next morning she reached his secretary.
“Would you like a Prospective Subjects Questionnaire?”
“I’d like to know about the project first.”
“Due to the highly sensitive nature of the research, Dr. Larsen will only be able to provide a study description to accepted applicants.”
“Well, I’m certainly not applying if I don’t know what I’m applying for,” Adrienne said, crumpling the ad and tossing it in the wastebasket.
But she retrieved the scrap of paper before leaving for work, and tucked it inside the leather cover of her day planner. On her coffee break, she stepped outside. Shivering in the damp cold air, watching a ferry plough through the white caps toward Martha’s Vineyard, she flipped open her phone....
Published in Main Street Rag 2011
