I think she likes people better than I do, but then I’ve never been very out-going. “A shy guy,” Rachel calls me. We’re lab partners in Animal Cognition class, and we agree that our classmates are a lot less interesting than the lab rats. That’s how we met--me and Rachel, I mean, not me and the rats. Everyone was pairing up, and she caught my eye where I was sitting at the back of the room and gave me a little “come-on-up” toss of her head, so I went up and wrote my name--“Sam”--in small, neat, lower case letters by her name on the sign-up sheet. Then Dr. Troutman, our professor, handed each of us a rat and said “Get to know each other.” I wasn’t sure if he meant get to know your lab partner or get to know your rat.
Anyway, I felt shy about talking to Rachel, and I guess she knew it, because she started talking to her rat, holding him by the base of his tail the way the lab assistant had shown us. The rat immediately urinated all over her, which Dr. Troutman had said is a rat’s way of marking you as someone he knows. What I liked right away about Rachel was that she didn’t scream or drop the rat like some people would; she just held him close to her chest and stroked his little pointy head and kept talking to him, saying things like, “That’s okay, boy,” and “You’re a handsome little guy.”
Her rat was Number 15, and mine was Number 16, but Rachel said we should give them real names. She called hers Oly because he’s spotted black and white like a cow she once knew by the same name. Number 16 seemed like an okay name to me, so that’s what I call my rat; he’s spotted like Rachel’s, but his tail is about three inches shorter than usual and ends abruptly, not tapered, as if it’s been cut off. Number 16 has never peed on me, but he does like to bite, and I have to wear leather gloves when I handle him.
For the first eight weeks of lab we trained our rats to do different tasks. First they had to learn the right way to go through a maze to get a reward--we started using Froot Loops, because Rachel said that Oly liked the different colors--and then we had to time them with a stopwatch to see how quickly they could go through the maze. Number 16 turned out to be smarter than Oly; he always learned the task at least three trials sooner, and when we put both rats in the maze at the same time--which, technically, we weren’t supposed to do--Number 16 would beat Oly to the reward and eat Oly's Froot Loop, too.
After we got to know our rats and each other that first week in lab, I started going by Pegasus to visit Rachel while she worked. Her boss never seems to be there, and if she's busy with a customer, I just poke around in the "Antique" side of the store. There are shelves of the usual stuff you see in such places: old glass bottles and fancy picture frames and faded, nicked dishes, but there's also a whole wall of pitchforks with rusted, evil tines that curve out of gulch-dry wooden handles.
Her rat was Number 15, and mine was Number 16, but Rachel said we should give them real names. She called hers Oly because he’s spotted black and white like a cow she once knew by the same name. Number 16 seemed like an okay name to me, so that’s what I call my rat; he’s spotted like Rachel’s, but his tail is about three inches shorter than usual and ends abruptly, not tapered, as if it’s been cut off. Number 16 has never peed on me, but he does like to bite, and I have to wear leather gloves when I handle him.
For the first eight weeks of lab we trained our rats to do different tasks. First they had to learn the right way to go through a maze to get a reward--we started using Froot Loops, because Rachel said that Oly liked the different colors--and then we had to time them with a stopwatch to see how quickly they could go through the maze. Number 16 turned out to be smarter than Oly; he always learned the task at least three trials sooner, and when we put both rats in the maze at the same time--which, technically, we weren’t supposed to do--Number 16 would beat Oly to the reward and eat Oly's Froot Loop, too.
After we got to know our rats and each other that first week in lab, I started going by Pegasus to visit Rachel while she worked. Her boss never seems to be there, and if she's busy with a customer, I just poke around in the "Antique" side of the store. There are shelves of the usual stuff you see in such places: old glass bottles and fancy picture frames and faded, nicked dishes, but there's also a whole wall of pitchforks with rusted, evil tines that curve out of gulch-dry wooden handles. On a high, narrow ledge that runs across the back of the store are a half-dozen old kitchen chairs, some plain or with cane seats and others of delicately-carved oak or yellowy pine. They sit up there like maiden aunts at a wedding: lined up but going nowhere, their unwelcoming, uncushioned bottoms and straight, spindly legs luring no one.
In the middle of the floor, below the ledge of chairs, is a big, claw-footed bathtub, the kind I remember from my grandmother’s house. This tub is wide enough for a fat man and six feet long. I know because I got in it one day when there was no one in the shop except Rachel and me, and I could lie down flat without bending my knees, and my feet just reached the drain. The back has a perfect angle for sitting--not uncomfortably straight like cheap, modern tubs--and I can imagine how pleasant it would be to spend an evening reading and soaking in it.
On the wall above the tub is an old lithograph by one of those early 20th Century artists--Maxfield Parrish, Rachel says. It’s a picture of a young woman sitting under a tree in a lonely landscape, gazing into middle distance. Her skin glows with reflected sunlight, just like Rachel’s hair did that day I sat in the empty bathtub and she stood under the picture with the light coming through the front window of the store. Everything around her was misty and slightly out of focus, just like it is around the woman in the picture. There’s a winged horse--also the color of sunlight--grazing nonchalantly behind the woman, and they seem ultra-aware of each other, as if at any moment the woman is going to swing herself up on the horse’s broad back, and together they will spring into the air and fly off somewhere beyond the picture’s frame.
To tell you the truth, I had a dream about me and Rachel and that bathtub. It was full of bubbles and we were in it, and she was scrubbing my back with one of those loofah things, and I wanted to turn around, but she wouldn’t let me. And then it wasn’t Rachel in the dream, but the woman in the picture, or maybe they were the same. I never told Rachel about the dream, but after that first time, I’ve tried to dream it again.
To tell you the truth, I had a dream about me and Rachel and that bathtub. It was full of bubbles and we were in it, and she was scrubbing my back with one of those loofah things, and I wanted to turn around, but she wouldn’t let me. And then it wasn’t Rachel in the dream, but the woman in the picture, or maybe they were the same. I never told Rachel about the dream, but after that first time, I’ve tried to dream it again.
