The Psychologists’ Daughter
by Silvia E. Hines
part 1
Setting fire to the animal lab at her parents’ university was the only wild and violent act of Hillary’s life, and she shoved it out of consciousness until she started college, when it floated to the surface like flotsam from a forgotten ship. Of course she’d had to go to a different college, away from home; her parents gave up free tuition or even admission at the school where they worked as part of the deal back then. There would be no charges pressed, no juvenile record, and she would be treated as an emotionally ill girl.
To major in Anthropology at Hillary’s college, she’d had to take Introduction to Psychology, and that meant time spent in the building where the school’s small Animal Behavior lab was housed. When she passed by the sign for the lab — right out in the open as if they were proud of its existence — she’d feel a twinge of the stomach tightness that plagued her when she first became aware of the wrongness of her parents’ work.
And when she sat in her Psych 1 class, drawing ill-defined furry creatures on the borders of her notebook paper, she remembered how it felt being caught in the aftermath of her act, trapped like a miserable and scared white rat, all escape routes closed, subjected to a pain akin to electric shock, and observed as though she were a phenomenon different from her observers. And only twelve years old.
* * *
She’d been a thin, intense girl who wore her light brown hair in long braids in an era of short, angular cuts and blowy shoulder-length styles. She wore eyeglasses with large, round tortoiseshell frames, having turned down the contact lenses her mother offered to get her when she was ten.
Her liberal parents treated her as friend and cohort in many ways, including her in their dinner table talk about their work, discussing their experiments in ways they thought a young girl would understand. Appreciating the value of early exposure, they explained their own and their colleagues’ work carefully, as literature professors might read the great works as bedtime stories, or as language professors might speak French or German to their young children.
They took her to the lab with them from the time she was a toddler, not noticing her tendency to gravitate to individual animals and talk to them, and not thinking much of her questions about the fate of the ones that turned up missing. While her parents talked to graduate students about the progress of their experiments, Hillary eyed the cages, lined up and stacked on fiberboard shelves, and figured out ways to recognize individual rats in case their cages were moved.
She gave them names: Mark had a faint mark on his hind leg; Star had a spot with pointy sides around his eye; Lucy was smaller than the others and appeared to Hillary to look directly at her. It seemed as though they were people temporarily in the form of white rats. When she was older, Hillary sometimes tried to find out which were going to be involved in an experiment the next day so she could warn them of what was coming.
One morning at home, when she was about ten, Hillary told her parents that the mother rats missed their babies when they were separated from them. She said it was as if she, Hillary, had been stolen, plucked from the antique cherrywood cradle she lay in, as seen in the large framed photo in the den.
Her mother had told her about those sweetest of days after her birth when they took her home to the tiny frame house in the New England university town where they lived; how her father had returned each day from his new position as instructor in experimental psychology to gaze at her in awe; and how in the evenings they would go out walking on the campus, she plump and happily plopped in the carrier on her father’s back.
“They are not plucked from anyplace,” her mother said, wiping her hands on a flowered dishtowel. “They’re born in the lab, and their only purpose is to provide us with important information about life... so we can help children suffering from disorders that cripple their lives.”
Her mother had completed her doctorate after Hillary was born and, with the nepotism rules long rescinded, had landed a research position working with her husband, whom she’d met while a student in one of his courses.
“Have they given consent to being guinea pigs, these rats?” Hillary asked.
Her mother was serving Hillary her breakfast of eggs and plant-based bacon. Hillary would not knowingly eat animal products, but she had agreed to eat eggs if they came from free-ranging hens. She planned to research the fate of these hens after they had produced all their eggs, if there was such a time.
“They can’t give their consent,” her mother said, “so we have to decide what’s right for them. Well, it’s as if they have given their consent.” She stopped, unsatisfied with her answer or any other she could think of.
Hillary’s father joined the table and chimed in. “We have given a lot of thought to the ethical treatment of experimental animals,” he said. “Perhaps now you are old enough to read the paper I contributed on this topic?”
Hillary ignored his offer. “It’s like they’re your slaves,” she said. “Did you know that Thomas Jefferson believed slaves were a necessary part of life?”
“You’re being ridiculous,” her father said. Her mother opened her mouth to speak but said nothing, reverting to her mouthful of imitation meat. Her parents had been happy to go along with Hillary’s vegetarian phase, thinking it might be a healthy way for all of them to eat.
At about this time there was an incident at the college involving students — not Psychology students — who had protested angrily in front of the building that housed the animal labs, holding picket signs. The local newspapers headlined the story, and Hillary’s father appeared on television, looking handsome in his brown V-neck sweater and dark, trimmed beard.
Hillary had tried to piece together what this was about. She thought she remembered seeing a girl with a ponytail holding a placard that read “Rats Are People, Too,” which made her chuckle, but later she thought she may have remembered it wrong. On television, her father said that the best minds had come together to discuss the subject and arrive at principles for the treatment of lab animals. She was impressed with her father, who had such a sweet yet authoritative voice, but she was not so sure that the best minds he talked about were good enough.
The Psychology graduate students who ran the experiments weren’t like those student protestors at all. When they came to her parents’ annual backyard picnic, they joked about the rats and, sometimes after a few beers, made gross comments about body parts. One stocky, grinning student talked about the difficulties in removing organs, glancing now and then at Hillary, who was sitting near the adults on the floor of the back porch.
Hillary had only a vague idea then of what an organ was, but she occasionally had dreams about rats’ hearts beating in space, hovering like satellites above their cavernous bodies. During the period between sleep and waking, a time her parents had suggested to her could reveal images important for her life, she saw plaintive, confused expressions on the sad faces of white rats.
* * *
A few years later, when Hillary was almost twelve, she began to talk about the animals with her two best friends. They tried to understand her growing anguish, but they vacillated in their positions. “They’re just rats!” her buddy Jason said. “They don’t think.”
“Please,” Jenny said, faking a gag, “don’t talk about rats! They’re disgusting.” She enjoyed making herself gag so much that Hillary had to laugh, tempted to try it herself but resisting.
“Okay, then what about the birds?” Hillary asked, hands on hips and one foot scraping the leg of the pool table in Jason’s basement.
“Oh, do they experiment with birds?” Jenny asked. “That could be going a lit-tle bit too far. I love birds. And fish, too.”
“There’s a lab where they keep birds in cages to study their songs,” Hillary informed her friends.
“Birds aren’t higher than rats,” Jason offered. “In fact, rats are mammals like us, but birds are just... birds.”
“Nevertheless, rats are disgusting, and birds are beautiful and remarkable,” Jenny said. She went over to the small basement window and looked upward, but she could see nothing but the next-door neighbor’s sidewalk.
“Birds are a symbol of freedom,” she went on. “If we take away a bird’s freedom, it’s like taking away our own!” She shook her head from side to side, her wavy red hair shimmering in the dim light.
Jenny was beaming, and Hillary saw her long-time friend becoming beautiful as she spoke. Hillary sensed that Jason had noticed this, too, and she felt that these two might make a transition to another kind of relationship that would leave her behind. Perhaps they already had. She felt lonely and told herself to focus on the animals; her animals, as she had come to think of them.
Trying not to be one-tracked, Hillary attempted to conform to the teenage culture. She took herself shopping at the mall for the proper fashionable clothes; she listened to trendy music on her phone. However, there was an urgency about her she couldn’t quiet. She wished she could forget about the animals and grow up quietly, or at least in a normal and ordinary frenzy.
In five or six years she would go to college, she told herself, where she would spend balmy spring nights talking until dawn about the meaning of life with her peers. She would fall in love with someone, perhaps by a lake; she would have to check which colleges have lakes nearby. Then she would go off to law school or graduate school to study philosophy or sociology — not medical school as her parents quietly hoped — where she would decide on her own contribution to a flawed society.
But inside her there was a drive, that basic biological motivating factor common to rats and humans, like the one in Felix, the rat who made a furious run for the cage door when a graduate student removed its mother. She had to do something about this.
First, she tried a hunger strike, announcing it was in honor of Lucy and the other rats who starved themselves to death in an experiment a few years ago when they couldn’t adjust to their new, experimental feeding schedule. She ate only tiny morsels of food, mouse-sized portions. It was then that her parents realized she had been told too much about their work. They tried to undo the damage by expressing sympathy, alternating with sternness, but she held onto her hunger strike for three weeks before she decided she was not cut out to be anorexic, and she ate normally again.
Once Hillary regained her strength, she saw the benefit of a fire in the lab. She’d first open all the cages to give the animals a fair chance to escape. She was certain that any who didn’t get away would rather die than be caged. She was overcome by the idea and came up with a plan.
She was such a familiar figure in the lab that nobody would think it unusual that she was there rather late one evening, her red “Animal Rights” backpack on her shoulders, carrying within it the crumpled newspaper, cigarettes, and matches. No one was likely to notice that her parents, who thought Hillary was at a friend’s house that evening, weren’t in the lab. Nobody was in the large animal room when she quietly opened each cage and left the smoldering cigarette she had lit on top of a bunch of papers in a wicker basket used for work scheduling for the graduate students.
When she had walked about a block away, however, she remembered that a graduate student was probably on duty in the office next door and that sometimes the students fell asleep there in the evening. Once she woke one of them to tell him snidely he was snoring. She rushed to call 911 on a drugstore phone, thinking it better not to use the new cell phone that was tucked in her purse, and soon heard sirens in the distance, cutting the quiet of the evening.
* * *
Copyright © 2022 by Silvia E. Hines
