—

The first experiment I can remember performing was the Naked Egg experiment. It was for my middle school’s physical science class, and I remember it, in part, because I’d had to ask my mother to put corn syrup on the grocery list, and she’d grumbled about it endlessly all week long. “Why doesn’t your teacher buy you the corn syrup if she wants you to do this nonsense?” she said. I told my teacher that I didn’t think my mother would buy the corn syrup, and, with a little wink, my teacher gifted me a bottle from the back of her storage closet. I thought this would please my mother. After all, it’s what she had been asking for, but instead it only mortified her. “She’ll think we can’t afford corn syrup,” she said. Those were the hardest years, the beginnings of the just-the-two-of-us years. We couldn’t afford corn syrup. My teacher went to our church; she knew about Nana, about my father. She knew my mother worked twelve-hour shifts every day but Sunday.

    We started the Naked Egg experiment at the beginning of the week by putting our eggs in vinegar. The vinegar dissolved the shell, slowly, so that by Wednesday’s class we had a naked egg, urine-yellow and larger than a regular egg. We put the naked egg into a new glass and poured corn syrup over it. The egg we saw the next day was shriveled, flattened. We put the deflated egg in colored water and watched the blue expand, color pushing through the egg, making it larger and larger and larger.

The experiment was a way to teach us the principles of osmosis, but I was too distracted to appreciate the science behind it. As I watched the egg absorb that blue water, all I could think about was my mother shaking the bottle of corn syrup at me, her face almost purple with rage. “Take it back, take it back, TAKE IT BACK,” she said, before flinging herself onto the ground and kicking her legs up and down in a tantrum.

The two of us back then, mother and daughter, we were ourselves an experiment. The question was, and has remained: Are we going to be okay?

* * *

—

Some days when I got home from the lab I would go into my room, my mother’s room, and tell her all the things I’d done that day, except I wouldn’t say them aloud, I’d just think them. Today, I watched a mouse brain flash green, I’d think, and if she stirred that meant she’d heard me. It made me feel like a silly child, but I did it all the same.

Han invited me to a party at his place, I thought toward my mother one night. Move if you think I should go. When her hand lifted to scratch her nose, I grabbed my jacket and left.

Han lived in one of those apartment complexes, uniform and labyrinthine, that feels like a prison or a military barracks in its sameness. I found myself going to 3H instead of 5H. Every turn led to another group of Spanish mission-style apartments with those signature clay tile roofs that were everywhere in the Southwest and California.

    When I finally got to 5H, the door was ajar. Han welcomed me with an uncharacteristic hug. “Giftyyyyy,” he said, lifting me up a little.

He was drunk, another rarity for him, and though I’d never noticed it before, I noticed it then—the tips of his ears were red, just like the day he’d found me crying in the lab.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in shorts before, Han,” I said.

“Check out my bare feet too,” he said, wiggling his toes. “Lab regulations have really deprived you from seeing me in all my natural beauty.”

I laughed, and he flushed even deeper. “Make yourself at home,” he said, waving me in.

I moved through the living room, chatting with my cohort. We ranged in age from twenty-two to forty-seven. Our backgrounds were similarly all over the place—robotics, molecular biology, music, psychology, literature. All roads had led to the brain.

I was bad at most parties but good at these. It’s remarkable how cool you can seem when you are the only black person in a room, even when you’ve done nothing cool at all. I wasn’t close to anyone at the party, certainly not close enough to tell them about my mother, but by the end of the night, the alcohol had loosened my lips and I started to get comfortable, to talk around the subject I most wanted to talk about.

“Do you think you’ll ever go back to practicing psychiatry?” I asked Katherine. She was one of the more senior members of my lab, a postdoc who’d done her undergraduate studies at Oxford and a medical degree at UCSF before starting her PhD here. We had a tentative friendship, predicated mostly on the fact that we had both been raised in immigrant families and that we were two of the only women in the department. I always got the sense that Katherine wanted to get to know me better. She was friendly and open, too open for my comfort. Once, in the lounge, Katherine had confided in me that she had snooped through her husband’s things and found little “o’s” written in his calendar on the days when she was ovulating, and she thought that maybe he was trying to trick her into having a baby sooner than the time frame they’d planned on. She’d been so free with that information, like she was telling me about a cough she couldn’t kick, but I was enraged, self-righteous. “Leave him,” I said, but she didn’t, and as I talked to her, Steve, her husband, was on the other side of Han’s living room, sipping sangria, his head tilted back just slightly so that I could see his Adam’s apple bob as the drink moved down. Knowing what I knew about Steve, I couldn’t look at him, his Adam’s apple, and not see a kind of menace, but there he was talking, drinking, ordinary.

    “I think about going back to my practice all the time,” Katherine said. “With medicine, I could see that I was helping people. A patient would come in, so wracked with anxiety that they were scratching their arms raw, and months later, no scratches. That’s gratifying. But with research? Who knows.”

My mother had hated therapy. She went in arms raw, came out arms raw. She was distrustful of psychiatrists and she didn’t believe in mental illness. That’s how she put it. “I don’t believe in mental illness.” She claimed that it, along with everything else she disapproved of, was an invention of the West. I told her about Ama Ata Aidoo’s book Changes, in which the character Esi says, “you cannot go around claiming that an idea or an item was imported into a given society unless you could also conclude that to the best of your knowledge, there is not, and never was any word or phrase in that society’s indigenous language which describes that idea or item.”

    Abodamfo. Bodam nii. That was the word for “crazy person,” the word I’d heard my aunt use that day in Kejetia to describe the dreadlocked man. My mother refused this logic. After my brother died, she refused to name her illness depression. “Americans get depressed on TV and they cry,” she said. My mother rarely cried. She fought the feeling for a while, but then one day, not long after the Naked Egg experiment, she got into her bed, got under the covers, and wouldn’t get back up. I was eleven. I was shaking her arm as she lay there in bed, I was bringing her food before walking to school, I was cleaning the house so that when she finally woke up she wouldn’t be upset with me for letting the place turn to filth. I was doing okay, I thought, so when I found her, sinking in the bathtub, the faucet running, the floor flooded, the first thing I felt was betrayed. We were doing okay.

I looked at Katherine’s stomach. Still flat, all of these months later. Was Steve still making little “o’s” in his calendar? Had she told him that she knew about his betrayal or did she keep it to herself, hold it in the clenched fist of her heart to open only when something between them was truly broken?