The Biologist's Daughter

In the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of the South Pacific, we sat at a seafood restaurant in Suva on a hill above the harbor. The fans on the ceiling churned the humid air above the table while I sat stiffly in my chair, immobilized by a rapidly heightening sunburn and the unpleasant feeling of my jeans sticking to my skin in a layer of dried sweat and seawater. I was so hungry I wanted to chew on the white tablecloth. To distract myself I kept pouring the steaming green tea into a little white cup and drinking it quickly to scald the wound on the inside of my lip.
My mother sat across the table with Dr. Narayan, surrounded by a large semi-circle of his graduate students who were all talking at once. Dr. Narayan was a professor at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji. He was a slim dark man with a mustache and glasses, slightly younger than my mother. Originally he was from Sri Lanka, he had told me, but the graduate students were mostly Americans. They all looked alike to me, tanned, wearing shorts and handkerchiefs tied in various fashions around their heads and necks. I could see the reflection of my still face surrounded by their animated faces in the glass of a large fish tank directly behind my mother. The glass tank was empty except for a lone lionfish floating motionlessly, bound by the predatory instinct of its species to wait patiently for the chance to suddenly attack the unsuspecting prey that would never swim by. The brilliant red stripes along the body of the lionfish contrasted sharply with the vacant blue of the water.
My mother once grew a crown-of-thorns in a glass tank. She called it her Killer Starfish and kept it in her laboratory at UCSD for three years on a diet of encrusting algae. The Killer Starfish grew to the size of a man’s hand and then its arms rotted off and it died. Apparently this type of infection is common among captive starfish. In their natural habitat, however, a crown-of-thorns feeding on coral can grow up to twenty times larger than my mother’s. Dr. Narayan was the person who had initially contacted my mother with evidence of a group of juvenile crown-of-thorns in Fiji suffering from the same disease the Killer Starfish had. He wished for my mother to come to Fiji and work together on trying to isolate the organism responsible in the hopes that it could be used in controlling future outbreaks of starfish. My mother was very excited because until then, there had been no reported incidents of disease causing the demise of a population of crown-of-thorns.
Textbooks describe the crown-of-thorns starfish as somewhat sinister in its appearance, as its arms are covered with long, very sharp spines around four to five centimeters in length. The spines contain a poisonous toxin that can inflict a painful wound on a human, usually occurring on the hands or feet. Like most echinoderms, they are efficient reproducers. It does not take much to upset the delicate balance of life on the reef; by the time anyone starts using words like “over-fishing” or “pollution run-off” or “decrease in predation” the outbreak has already begun. The coral reefs of the South Pacific are being eaten alive by these starfish, my mother says, like a vast green meadow swarming with locusts. But really it is much quieter and slower and stickier than that, there is no sound of the busy humming of wings or chewing of jaws when you actually float above the reef and see one under the water, creeping silently up the dead white coral like huge fleshy spider.
My mother often makes the joke that I was a test tube baby, because I was practically raised in a laboratory. Most summers I remember were all spent abroad on her research trips and sabbatical leaves. We had been several times to Bermuda, Bonaire, and the coast of Queensland by the time I started junior high. As a child I enjoyed a rare freedom on these trips, learned about and saw many new places and people as my mother hoped I would. In the fall we’d return to San Diego and I went back to school, where I mostly sat alone at lunch and read, because I was afraid of the other children on the playground and I learned not to talk about the things I had done and seen. My mother invited her various scientist friends and professors over to our house on winter evenings, and I used to sit with the cat curled up in my lap inside the dark hall closet, the door cracked open slightly, breathing in the scent of the old raincoats we never wore and listening to them talk science and politics in the living room.
Before I was old enough to stay home by myself, I went with my mother to the night classes she sometimes taught, and watched the students watch her lecture. I liked the female students who asked a lot of questions and took notes during the slide presentations, but the male students, I thought, were just trying to show-off when they raised their hands to speak. My mother never noticed that the male students were not really learning; they were trying to steal her knowledge from her and keep it for themselves. I did not trust any of them. From my vantage point at the desk in the back corner of the classroom I saw the things she never saw.
My father, as my mother explained curtly to anyone who ever asked, was out of the picture. I thought about him a little on the plane to Fiji, but I could barely remember his face. This was comforting to me. Ever since I was small, I had often felt the sensation that someone, a man, maybe my father, watched me while I was alone. Maybe he even looked right through my head and knew what I was thinking. At night it was especially bad, when I was alone in the dark in bed. When I got really scared I made myself get up and find some paper and write my father’s name or a word describing what I was thinking about, and I looked at the word and waited to be punished for writing it. Nothing ever happened, and by doing this I proved to myself that no one was really watching me or knew what I was doing and thinking when I was alone. And so as time went by I thought about my father less and less, and soon I no longer associated him with the feeling of being watched as I sometimes had still had when alone.
Across the table, Dr. Narayan turned to my mother and said in his lilting accent, “I am feeling so confident that we will be able to accomplish some serious research together regarding the crown-of-thorns situation. Your work is very well known here at the U.S.P. as I have said. But I must confess, I did not know that you were a woman professor until I spoke to you on the phone for the first time. I too have a daughter, but she is younger than Ruby. You will meet her and my wife soon.”
“Ruby just turned fifteen,” said my mother. She fluffed her short gray hair and smiled at me. “But she’s been my scientific assistant for a long time now, haven’t you, honey?”
“I hope the accommodations at the university are adequate?” asked Dr. Narayan. “You are quite comfortable?”
“Oh, we’re used to roughing it a little,” my mother explained, “Compared to the dingy little room we had in Cairns two summers ago, the bungalows here are four-star.” She took out her guidebook of Fiji and opened it. “By the way, I’ve been wondering,” she said, “I was under the impression that there are some spectacular sections of the barrier reef off the other islands, but my book doesn’t say much about commercial dive trips outside of Viti Levu.”
“There’s a number of operators that launch from the harbor here and go to other sites,” said Jesse. Jesse was Dr. Narayan’s teaching assistant. He had a blond beard and blue eyes and all the female students stared at him a lot.
“--Another site in the early stages of an outbreak,” he was now saying to my mother, “along the shelf edge of Vanua Levu. I think we were actually planning take you there next week to… collect samples.”
He glanced at me across the table over the rim of his beer glass and I felt my sunburn flaming on my neck and face. Just then the waiter came over carrying the plates of food and the stopped chattering to watch him put the food on the table.
There was rice, flat bread and a large salad composed of unfamiliar leaves and toppings, and dishes of shrimp, squid and shellfish glistened palely in their sauces. The main course was an enormous fish lying on a brilliantly white oval ceramic plate. It had been cooked whole and the skin of the fish had peeled away from the meat, but the eyeballs had not been removed. Double rows of tiny sharp teeth poked out of its slightly open mouth. The fish lay on its side and stared up at the ceiling through one cloudy eye as Dr. Narayan picked up the knife with the calm air of an experienced dissector, removed the slightly crispy side fin, and cut in behind the gills. Everyone around the table was nodding and readying their forks and knives in anticipation, but I felt my own appetite swiftly fading. The bright white ceramic dish caught and reflected the lamplight, stabbing into my eyes like a stake. As Jesse passed the rice to me I stood up quickly, avoiding his gaze, and excused myself from the table.
It was cool inside the bathroom and I took my time washing my hands. I stood in front of the mirror, gingerly lifted up my shirt and examined the white tan lines criss-crossing my sunburn. My shoulders were the color of raw salmon meat. They would almost certainly peel, like the skin of the roasted fish my mother’s group was eating back at the table. When I emerged from the bathroom I was both relieved and repulsed to see that most of the fish and even the greens it lay on had already been eaten. The brilliant white of the dish it lay on was now dingy with bits of brownish-gray skin and gristle littered across it. All that remained of the fish was a spindly skeleton, the head and tail still attached at either end. Someone had saved a piece of the meat for me on my own plate, but I covered it up with some rice and ate around it.
I rode back to the university with Dr. Narayan and Jesse and my mother. They were all discussing the next diving site but had to stop talking when a noisy, battered pink bus came up from behind and passed Dr. Narayan’s chugging little Jeep. There was no door on the bus or glass in the windows, just open frames, and the crowd of people inside dangled their bare arms out of the empty windows, laughed and shouted as the bus careened by us, blaring thumping electronic dance music at top volume. Through the open doorway of the bus I glimpsed the mustached driver, hunched over the steering wheel, pressing on the gas pedal with dogged determination to reach the highest speed possible as he approached the tight turn ahead on the bumpy two-lane road. The road wound up a leafy, forested hill and past a school where flocks of teenaged boys played soccer in a field. They all wore matching loose uniforms that showed perfectly white against their dark skin and the green grass. Beyond the school I could see the bright blue of the ocean, and even farther out, the thin white line of water breaking over the reef.
It had been cloudy earlier when we were out on the boat, and I’d forgotten to put on sunscreen. Dr. Narayan was acting as dive master. I watched as he and my mother and the students lined up in a row and tipped over the side of the boat backwards with their scuba gear on. I looked over the side and saw them, a dark mass of bodies sinking deeper slowly and exhaling up big bubbles of air. The air was still cool but the water was warm, so I put on my mask and snorkel and followed them from the surface until I saw the thick towers of coral ahead. The water was slightly hazy and a lot of the coral was dead. It was obvious that this had been the hunting grounds for packs of crown-of-thorns. The tiny creatures that had built and lived inside the coral had been eaten. All that was left was an empty skeleton, bleached unnaturally white by the sun filtering through the water but only partially visible under heavy patches of brownish algae that had grown over the coral in places. Yet there was life; a school of silvery fish paused under my shadow and then darted away as one. I stopped for a while and watched two tiny clownfish guard a translucent white anemone while a hermit crab puttered nearby. I continued along the outside edge of the reef and reached a chasm in the coral. As I swam over it I looked down and felt the water touching my skin suddenly turn icy.
A hugely obese crown-of-thorns was crouched in the space between the towers of coral. Its body was pinkish-gray, and its spines were red-tipped and matted together in places. It was obviously sick. Two ulcerations of roughly the same size were bulging out of the central body of the starfish, and as I stared down at the grayish tumors, they appeared to resemble two big cloudy eyes looking back up at me.
I felt a rising irrational panic and shook my limbs into motion, swimming away as fast as I could until my body was warm again. I lifted my head up out of the water, breathing hard from my frantic swim, and saw that the clouds had drifted, the sun was now blazing high in the sky, and I was further away from the boat than I had thought. I was also uncomfortably close to the breakers, where the reef had grown high and thick so that it was only inches from the surface, and the coral was sharp and jagged.
I treaded water for a minute until my heartbeat slowed, and then I began the long swim back, sticking my head up every few minutes to check for the boat. I was very thirsty and tired and the hot sun had dried my hair stiff with seawater. It was then that something smooth touched me underwater, something soft, moving over my chest down my torso. It startled me so much that I bit down hard on my lip.
In the bright hot air I ripped my mask and snorkel off and through a mixture of anger, confusion, and sudden pain in my mouth I saw Jesse, Dr. Narayan’s assistant, treading water beside me. He pulled off his mask and smiled. I did not smile back.
“Sorry, I didn’t realize you were right there,” he said.
He was too close to me and I stared at him. We were both panting a little. The boat was not far away now. I saw figures standing on the deck and wondered vaguely if they could see us in the water.
“You’ve been gone for a long time and your mom wanted to look for you,” he said. “Hey, your lip is bleeding.” He reached over as if to touch my face but I drew back.
“I haven’t been gone for that long. I’m on my way back,” I said shortly. I did not like the way he was smiling at me.
I moved as if to put my mask back on but he said, “Check this out.” He pulled a large clear plastic bag out of the water and held it up, dripping. Crammed inside it were several juvenile crown-of-thorns starfish with red-tipped spines.
“Get that away from me!” I said angrily, surprised by my own vehemence.
“Have you ever touched one before?” he asked, lowering the bag but still grinning.
I glared back, unafraid of him now that I was presented with something familiar, something I knew. “You can’t touch them, they’re poisonous,” I said coldly.
He laughed and started to say something else, but I ignored him, put my face back in the water and started swimming. I kicked fiercely at the water, trying to drive the memory of his touch out of my head. I got to the boat and threw my mask and snorkel on the deck and pulled myself over the side. Wetsuits and scuba gear were piled on the deck and students were milling around. On the other side of the boat, Jesse was hoisting himself into the boat one-handed with the collection bag in his other hand. A cluster of female students stood nearby, their eyes glued to his tanned form. I saw my mother waiting for me. Her eyes were narrowed.
“What were you thinking, swimming that far from the boat,” she hissed, grabbing my wrist and pulling me close to her. I could see Jesse and some of the students watching us. “No one gave you permission to do that. You made everyone stop and wait for you to come back.”
“Mom, I wasn’t—”
She released my wrist. “We’ll be discussing this later,” she said, looking over at Dr. Narayan who was gesturing at her, and walked over to where he stood by the collecting tanks. I wrapped myself in a big towel and sat and stared far out to sea while the boat flew over the water on its way back to the harbor. Even after we arrived and I changed and helped carry equipment off the dock, I could still feel my skin crawling where Jesse touched me. Now, as I sat in the back of the Jeep next to my mother, I saw Jesse’s eyes upon me in the rearview mirror and I looked away.
The sun was getting low and the trees were full of chattering birds as Dr. Narayan pulled into the lot behind the rows of faculty housing. I followed my mother in silence along the path between the bungalows.
We came inside our room and my mother closed the door and said, “I haven’t forgotten your behavior earlier.”
“Well, what was I supposed to do, just sit on the boat and be bored?” I threw myself face-down on my bed and closed my eyes.
“You need to understand that I am here with you in a professional capacity and I cannot have you interfering with my research time with these people,” she said. “I am here as a guest of Dr. Narayan, and so are you. It’s hard enough being one of only a few women in this field. Do you want them to think I’m incapable of controlling my own daughter?”
I sat up and punched my pillow. “Just leave me alone!” I shouted. “I’m so sick of you always around me.”
She slapped me across the face. In silence we stared at each other and waited. Then I went banging out the door and cut through the garden outside. I could hear her yelling at me to get back in there, but I kept going. I wove through the university bungalows, found a path and followed it up a grassy hill until I reached the campus grounds. The sun was setting and the university buildings and courtyards were all lit up with pink and orange light. It was very quiet on the campus except for the calls and whistles of the birds in the trees. I walked past rows of empty classrooms and saw a girl through the window, her head bent over the books in front of her. I found the library, which was the largest of the modestly-sized university buildings and stood in the entrance passage for a while, looking at the posters of famous scientists and reading the bulletins. On the other side of the entrance the glass cases were filled with class photos of every class since 1971. I looked at all of the tiny faces in their alphabetized rows, and a reluctant memory crept into my mind of a yearbook from a summer school class my mother had once taught back home in San Diego. It was part of an enrichment program for inner-city high school students. The high school kids lived on campus at UCSD and attended special science and English classes for six weeks. They did not like my mother or her science class and disrupted it as often as they could. I understood why they didn’t like her; she had never been a high school teacher and didn’t have patience for what she considered ungratefulness in a learning environment.
She brought me with her to class sometimes, and on the days she showed videos, she sat me in the back of the classroom with a notebook to write down the names of anyone who fell asleep or misbehaved. Then she would leave to get a coffee and I was alone in the dark classroom with all of them. I remember one particular guy named James who always called out, “Hey, little white girl, are you writing my name?” and everyone would snort and laugh. One day he got out of his seat and grabbed the notebook out of my hands and threw it across the room, where one of his friends caught it and threw it to another guy, who threw it back to James. My mother came back in then and threw on the lights; James ignored her and raised his arm to throw the notebook across the room again. She snatched it from his hands and looked at him, her face livid. I knew that look. She pointed at him and said, “Get out.” And so he picked up his backpack, walked out, and never came back to class again. Most of the class appeared to follow his example; at the next classroom session less than half of the students showed up for their final and my mother was forced to fail the rest. “I’ll never teach this damned summer school program again,” she vowed to me later. But she never had a chance to refuse; the administration did not ask her to come back.
After the disastrous summer school class ended, I went with my mother to a lunch with the woman who had taught the English class. Her name was Anna and from the way she talked about the class, I gathered that the high school kids had actually liked her. She said that at the end of every summer, she had the students make a yearbook for themselves, and she gave my mother a copy. On the way home I sat in the car and flipped through the yearbook. There were rows of photos of all the students, along with essays on literature and sections of rough, adolescent poetry with lots of swear words. There were pictures of Anna smiling with her students and only a small one of my mother standing at the blackboard with a piece of chalk in her hand. At the back of the yearbook I found a page that was titled “Class Wills,” in which the students had written short paragraphs willing their dearest possessions to each other. I saw James’s will right away and read it. Besides the usual items like his dog and his video games, it included a long list of his various talents, such as, “My skill with the ladies,” that he meant to pass on to all his guy friends in the summer school class. By this point I hated James more than anyone I had ever met; I was only about eleven or twelve at the time, but old enough to be annoyed at discovering that his writing was fairly engaging and humorous. At the end of it all, he had written, “To my ex-girlfried Elena, I wouldn’t give you a dog I liked and so instead I leave you the biology teacher. And to my other ex-girlfriend Keisha, you were worse, so what can I leave you but the biology teacher’s daughter.”
It all came back to me, the boy James and the sly gibes he made at me and my mother as I stood there with my eyes burning in front of the library at the University of the South Pacific. Then I heard a small voice humming tunelessly behind me. I looked around the corner of the building and saw a small girl picking orange flowers off a bush in the courtyard. She looked up and saw me watching her and stopped humming.
“Hi,” she said. She had dark skin and hair and wore thin gold bangles on her slim little wrists. She dropped the flowers, danced away from the bushes and came over and stood in front of me. She looked about the same age as my little cousin Alba in San Diego, maybe six or seven years old.
“Are you that girl from California?” she continued in a clear, high-pitched voice.
“Yes, how did you know?” I said, surprised.
“My dad works with your mom in the lab. They’re doing a project,” she said.
“Is your dad Dr. Narayan?” I asked, and she nodded. We both stood and looked at each other and in her small face and dark eyes I felt a strange kinship with this other biologist’s daughter.
“Do you want to see something kind of funny?” she asked me rapidly.
I considered this. “Okay.”
I followed her to a grove of tall wispy green trees with thin, delicate-looking trunks in the middle of the courtyard around the library. The sun had dropped behind the buildings and it was very quiet.
“Now we shake the trees,” she said, in a stage whisper. “Ready, set, go!”
I followed her example and seized as many of the thin tree trunks as I could and shook them, hard. I immediately had to duck as a feathery mass of squawking, shrieking birds flew out of the branches above us, more and more of them rising into the sky in the low evening light. Little yellow fruits that I hadn’t noticed before were falling all around us in the grass. The little girl clapped her hands gleefully and blew a loud raspberry up at the confused birds still screeching and flapping frantically around us. I began to laugh. We stood together and watched the birds circle and caw until the whole flock abruptly swooped around and descended together onto the grass, pecking the ground and ruffling their feathers. In wordless agreement, we both ran at them together, mercilessly chasing them all back in the air, shrieking and chattering in their confusion. One of the birds flew up from the ground in front of me as I ran, right into my outstretched hands.
For one drawn-out moment of horrified pleasure, I held the bird, felt the brush of its flapping wings and the furiously pumping little heart under the warm feathers, until I realized what I was doing and jerked my hands away. In my mind’s eye, I saw an image of myself from earlier in the day, jerking away from Jesse’s touch while we treaded water together above the dead reef. I watched the bird fly up to join the rest of its flapping, cawing brethren and eventually the flock settled back down in the trees again. The little girl was bent over the grass, picking up the little yellow fruits and brushing them off. She brought me one.
I took it. “What is it?”
She shrugged and put it in her mouth and bit. “It’s good,” she said through the mouthful, giggling as juice dribbled out the corners of her mouth. I took a bite of the fruit. It was juicy but not overly sweet. It reminded me simultaneously of a pear and a mango.
I chewed it slowly. “It tastes… familiar,” I said. I closed my eyes and saw the view of the reef from the boat. It seemed a very long time ago now, when I had been swimming in the ocean. The grey staring eyes of the crown-of-thorns would become just another dim memory, pushed away in the back of my mind, like James and the yearbook, and my father.
“It’s dark now. I need to go home now,” she said, breaking the silence.
“I need to go home, too,” I said, thinking of my mother, still waiting for me. We walked back slowly together in the cool grass and the growing darkness to the path to the bungalows of university housing. Then she said goodbye and darted around a corner. I watched her run past several doorways and go into one with a light on above it. Our bungalow was dark inside when I found it. I went in and saw a note on my bed from my mother. It said, “I went to the lab to meet Dr. Narayan. I’ll be back later. Please put your things away before you go to bed instead of leaving them all over the floor.”
I went in the bathroom and took a long shower. My back and shoulders stung under the hot spray. Slowly I put my clothes away in the drawers next to my bed. A noise outside startled me and I went over to the window and looked out. The garden was dark and empty. I closed the curtains and made sure the door was locked. Then I picked up a book and read for a while on the bed and eventually drifted off to sleep. That night I dreamt that two strong hands were gripping me tightly around the middle, and I was struggling desperately to get my arms free and my heart was pounding, but the hands just squeezed tighter and tighter and I could not fly away or cry out for help.