Artifact

By Arlene Heyman

From the author of Scary Old Sex, the story of a gifted young biologist's fight for the life, and the love, that she wants--a novel of sex, drive, and motherhood that crackles with female reality and desire.

"An homage to the body's capacity to impart amazement." - Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

"An artifact of so many women's lives." - Lynn Steger Strong, New York Times Book Review

From practicing psychiatrist and critically acclaimed author of Scary Old Sex (“the kind of bliss that lifts right off the page” -Dwight Garner, NYT), Artifact is the dazzling, half-century-spanning story of biologist Lottie Kristin. Born in Michigan in the early 1940s to a taciturn mother and embittered father, Lottie is independent from the start, fascinated with the mysteries of nature and the human body. By age sixteen, she and her sweetheart, cheerful high school sports hero Charlie Hart, have been through a devastatingly traumatic pregnancy. When an injury ends Charlie's football career four years later, the two move to Texas hoping for a fresh start.

There, torn between the vitality of the antiwar movement and her family's traditional values, Lottie discovers the joys of motherhood, and reconnects with her interest in biology and experimentation, taking a job as a lab technician. While Charlie's depression pervades their home, Lottie's instinct is toward life; though every step is a struggle, she opts for single motherhood, graduate school, a career, and eventually, a marriage that makes space for all that she is.

Bravely and wisely written, Artifact is an intimate and propulsive portrait of a whole woman, a celebration of her refusal to be defined by others' imaginations, and a meditation on the glorious chaos of biological life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jul 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781635574722

Arlene Heyman

Arlene Heyman is the author of Scary Old Sex, and a recipient of Woodrow Wilson, Fulbright, Rockefeller, and Robert Wood Johnson fellowships. She has been published in the New American Review and other journals, won Epoch magazine's novella contest, and has been listed twice in the honor rolls of The Best American Short Stories. Heyman is a psychiatrist/psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. This is her first novel.

Book preview

Part One

1984a

She did not want to disturb the rats. Breathing Lullaby and Good Night, trying to keep the wire cage in her arms steady, she walked down the dimly lit hall. The lab equipment was turned off for the weekend and there was no sound except for the soft, slapping noise of her slippers and her low song. Occasionally a rat lifted its head and sniffed the air.

Lottie worked in a pair of cutoff dungarees and a T-shirt her Gross Anatomy class had given her, which showed the muscles of the chest and back labeled in Latin. Her dark blonde hair was twisted and piled up on top of her head with a test-tube clamp.

The radio said it was the hottest August night since 1945. On the highways to Long Island and the Jersey shore the traffic had been bumper-to-bumper all day, the cars bulging with sun umbrellas, baby carriages, bicycles tied to roofs. After dinner when she had walked toward Central Park in search of a breeze, the close streets seemed to her vacant and forlorn. The charged life of the city dimmed in August. Most of her colleagues were on vacation; during the day a few technicians came in, the department secretary, occasionally a worried graduate student.

She liked being alone in her lab in the hushed city, undisturbed by the rhythms of others, a pleasure she didn’t experience often now that she had small children again. Davy was two and Simon was five and they were wild, bucking things. Her eighteen-year-old, Evelyn, usually had friends over who sat in Lottie’s study working on her home computer or making clothes for college on her sewing machine. Her husband, Jake, had private music students weekday afternoons and on Saturdays. And in August his fourteen-year-old daughter, Ruth, blew in from L.A. like a small low-pressure front that brings a storm. She danced for and cooked with her dad, pointedly ignored the boys, and took pokes and jabs at her stepmother. Lottie tried not to poke or jab back, and she certainly never said what she often thought: Fly away, little girl. Go home. Disappear. She tried to schedule a major experiment every August.

On the counter the caged rats shifted restlessly in the moonlight.

She switched on the tensor lamp at the dissecting table and the light above the sink, tied herself into a faded green surgical gown, drew on a workman’s glove, and ran the cold water. She slid open the lid of the cage, gripped the nearest quivering animal, and lifted it out. She raised the paper cutter blade and positioned the animal’s head on the platform, his squirming body just off the edge. His pink feet kicked the air. He began defecating black pellets, urinating in spasms on her glove. She brought the blade down crunching through the bottom of his neck. The head lay on the platform. Lottie held tight to the body, which continued to struggle, spraying blood through the open neck. Her cheek was suddenly wet. Thrusting the body under the cold water, she held on until it quieted and stopped. Then she dumped it into a plastic bag, and laid the head on the dissecting table. She shook the glove off and, taking up the scalpel and forceps, dissected out the sublingual and submandibular salivary glands, easing them into a beaker of fixative. She washed her face, barely seeing its wavy dim features in the tarnished paper-towel dispenser, and reached into the cage for the next rat.

She liked to set a rhythm, do what had to be done steadily and speedily.

The smell of blood was in the room now and the rats knew. They squawked in their cage even before she touched them and no matter how firmly she held on they wouldn’t lie still. In the air-conditioned room she was sweating.

Lottie had been intermittently irritable the last few months, ever since a microscopy journal that had solicited a paper from her had sent it back for extensive revisions. She had developed new techniques for spotlighting each organelle of a particular cell in the salivary gland, the function of which no one understood, although it was implicated in several diseases, one of them fatal.

The journal’s referees had savaged her paper, from the typing to the heart of the work: she was not describing the actual cell at all, nor the real components of the mucus, but only the distortions created by the very techniques she was advocating. One critic finished up:

This paper is not acceptable for publication since it is replete with accidental and random findings. It is no more than a collection of artifacts.

She had read the lines twice, then crushed the critiques into a ball and stuffed it into the bottom drawer of her desk.

A month later a small grant proposal of hers was rejected; she’d heard from a colleague in Washington that if only she’d cited a few papers by committee members or invited one of them to give a seminar at her place …

The following week her chairman phoned. He had heard about the grant and thought it was unjust. She was one of the most productive people in the department with a bibliography second in length and quality only to his own. The graduate students stood on line for her seminars. She was innovative, she was creative. Unfortunately, he had bad news for her himself.

No promotion, Lottie said.

He was terribly sorry. She must be aware she was on a frozen budget line. Actually they were all small animals caught in a glacier, if he could speak for a moment from the paleontological point of view. The state was cutting back funding, NIH was tightening its belt, there was nothing he could do. Next year it would be a different ball game; she could rest assured he’d go to bat for her then.

It was the third year he’d handed her that wilted bunch of metaphors and her husband told her to sue. It’s discrimination against women and you’re just sitting back and taking it. He cited a microbiologist, a woman well known in her field, who’d said in a recent New York Times article: Women scientists have two choices: bitterness or foolishness.

Lottie said she wasn’t famous enough to make resounding judgments, and if she let herself get involved with lawyers, she wouldn’t get her work done.

Jake said, At least go to the grievance committee. There must be a grievance committee. What do they call it—human resources. We need the money.

I’m not licking ass.

"Who asked you to lick ass? Go in and yell. You’re not yelling. You only yell at me."

Her paper was never far from her mind. The editor had heard her deliver it at the cell biology meetings in Cincinnati six months before. The referees were independent of him; still there shouldn’t be such a disparity in their opinions. Could her oral presentation have been so much better than her written one?

Her papers were almost always published, but they were invariably sent back for rewriting. Meticulous in conceptualizing problems and running experiments, she was impatient when it came to presenting results, as if to linger over the final draft made her a cosmetician or an interior decorator. In her diagrams she rarely labeled everything that needed labeling; she expected her typists to correct her misspellings and not add any of their own; and she wrote up her conclusions in a matter-of-fact way. Colleagues would take some obvious point and polish it up, surround it with five or six true but tried ideas, in the public domain, then pass off this rearrangement as dazzling new stuff. She came with the real thing in a crumpled brown wrapper. And she did it emphatically, as if there were virtue in such a presentation.

There are quite a number of typing errors, etc., which I have marked in pencil.

… A significant problem with this paper is that the description of the author’s methodologies is far too skimpy. We are not told the source of the glutaraldehyde; the osmolality of the individual fixatives; the length of time these were applied …

Many of the objections to her paper were of this order, but there was also at least one major substantive disagreement. Her point had been that different fixatives and buffers preserved different aspects of the cell, just as various epochs in history brought out various aspects of human beings. One should choose a fixative and buffer according to those aspects one hoped to illuminate. The referee wanted her to use other fixatives and buffers, claiming that hers damaged the cell contents while the ones he suggested would preserve them correctly. She knew they would just do different damage.

Another referee objected to her manner of sacrificing rats. She had killed them first and then dissected out the salivary glands and placed them in fixative. This referee thought that in the few minutes between death and the fixative, the glands underwent permanent distorting changes and hence what she had reported was mere artifact. He wanted her to inject the fixative into the living animals. Early on, before deciding on her current method, she had in fact killed a few rats by fixing them alive. The results were no more natural, and the technique took more time and was more unpleasant.

To get the paper published, at least in this journal, she would have to run the whole experiment through again, probably several times, killing rats in a variety of ways, using a number of unnecessary fixatives. It would be tedious. She was working on another project. Rats didn’t grow on trees, nor technician time. Her chest tightened as she thought of going to the department business manager, that cheery bureaucrat, justifying the cost of each rat to him, putting her crumpled referees’ reports in his hands. She felt like punching someone.

In the end she phoned her chair and cajoled and shamed him into giving her the money out of the department slush fund.

Then she typed each of the referees’ objections on a separate sheet of paper and taped them to her lab walls. As the results came in, she posted them on the sheets, in black ballpoint if the referees were right, in red magic marker if she was right. Her handwriting was large and flowery, full of bold swirls and curlicues, and she often had to add several pages to the original one in order to fit everything in. By the end of that hot July the walls were festooned with poinsettias and bright clusters of holly berries; the place looked like Christmas. She had two colleagues check her work, although she intended to run it through once more in August. Lottie cheered up.

Running a bath for her sons (she was wearing shorts, had her foot in the tub water, testing it), she imagined bits of letters to that editor who had twice urged her to revise and resubmit.

I regret not answering earlier but I have been immersed in an important experiment.

The boys, covered with washable finger paints and standing by with gunboats and water pistols, jumped in and sent the water level over the top.

I have not answered sooner because I have been flooded with requests for this particular paper and am considering sending it to the International Journal of Cell Research instead.

As she bathed her boisterous blue and yellow sons, she refuted each objection the anonymous referees had made. She scrubbed and rubbed and rinsed them back to flesh color. She toweled them dry, handed them off to Jake, then sat down at the computer and typed out a letter to that editor:

Beyond all the verification and justification of my techniques are two issues that are fundamental. The first is the whole point of the paper, which the reviewers seem to have missed: namely, that there is no correct morphology of the granules in this gland, but rather that the fixative, buffer, and additive combination will determine which constituents will be preserved, which destroyed.

The other issue is philosophical and has to do with the concept of artifact. It should be clear to anyone with experience in this business that all one ever deals with is artifact, and that one’s skills in creating and interpreting artifact are largely the measure of one’s abilities as a morphologist/scientist. From my perspective the issue is not, is a given structure artifact? But rather, can the conditions under which a given artifact is produced provide information about the actual nature of a particular organelle that cannot be analyzed in its natural form? We are dealing with a biological equivalent of the uncertainty principle, and all fine-structural morphologists and cytochemists should be aware of that.

Jake brought her a cold glass of seltzer with a piece of lime.

Everyone asleep? she said.

You kidding? He kissed his wife’s damp forehead. Tell me when you’re done, he said. All the stars are out.

The night watchman had come and gone. Lottie took off her gown and put it in a shopping bag along with a dirty lab coat and a pair of thick socks she’d had around since the winter; she would run them through the washing machine at home. She usually did the lab wash late at night or early in the morning when the kids were asleep; she didn’t like them getting a look or a whiff. Although she’d sponged down the countertops twice, the room smelled of blood and urine and fixative. She washed them again. Not cautious by nature, in the lab she was painstaking, and unforgiving of those who were not. A graduate student had once left a highly corrosive solution in an open beaker and the janitor had knocked it over and then mopped it up with paper towels; he needed skin grafting on his fingers. Lottie wouldn’t work with the student anymore and he had to get a new thesis topic and adviser. Someone had written on the wall near where the accident occurred: ONLY STARFISH REGENERATE LOST LIMBS. Lottie let it stand.

She carried the plastic garbage bag of rat parts into the cold room. Except for a few cats and a rare monkey, most of the black bags here contained rat corpses—rats who’d had tumors implanted in their heads, who’d breathed in cigarette smoke every hour of their short lives, who’d eaten their weight in saccharin and sodium nitrates, who’d had their fetuses androgenized and estrogenized in utero. She thought what unimaginable, un-ratlike destinies these animals had had. We should build a monument to them in every city.

Strands of hair escaped from her makeshift upsweep. She tried to blow them away, not wanting to touch her face. She locked her lab and showered.

The clean hot water pounding away at her, she looked at her body with some curiosity and no great sense of familiarity, as if she were a cadaver for the medical students—which she one day, far in the future, planned to be. They’d be luckier if they got her now: a forty-two-year-old woman only a few pounds overweight, five at most—Jake said a woman ought to have some hills and valleys (but fat was the enemy of the anatomist, making the field slippery, infiltrating the organs). Yes, now was the best time to dissect her, the muscles of her long Bjornstad legs well delineated (her mother’s were still strong and shapely at seventy), with all the main structures in place, nothing worse than a few burns and discolorations on her hands, some gleaming stretch marks on her still fairly taut breasts and belly, one long white caesarean scar from her last-born, Davy, who had gone into fetal distress and had to be scooped out in a hurry. The trouble had been a tangled, knotted umbilical cord.

Had Davy been doing somersaults or some intrauterine exploration? Two years later, she still worried about him. He was a lively child, lean and rangy, always in motion. Around the house he acted like a born investigator. Lottie had to screw plastic boxes over the electric outlets and tie the refrigerator door shut. She had installed a wooden gate around the TV set after the VCR repair shop called to say someone had inserted coins deep into the slot for tapes.

Her daughter, Evelyn, who sometimes babysat Davy at the town playground, called him a jumping bean; one afternoon he fell off the monkey bars and broke an arm. At the Whitney Museum with Jake and Simon, he ran into an exhibition of mesh houses; wires sliced through his cheek as if it were a peeled hard-boiled egg. Jake had had the wits to take him immediately to a plastic surgeon.

She worried less about Simon, her heavyset, muscular, more sedentary five-year-old. He was inquisitive and disputatious and exasperating, but he was on a longer tether than Davy; Simon roamed in his imagination.

On afternoons when Jake stayed late at school to conduct orchestra rehearsals or give private music lessons, Simon watched for him at the living room window. Before Jake could cut the ignition, Simon was beside the driver’s door waiting for his father to hand over his flute or piccolo or violin. Slowly and erectly and carefully, as if he were balancing the instrument on his head, Simon carried it in its case around the front of the car across the lawn and up the steps. If Jake had several instruments, Simon would make several trips, and Jake would let him have that pleasure.

Afterward, Simon would bring a bottle of celery tonic with two straws to the living room, and a peanut butter and marshmallow sandwich that he had made and cut in half.

What would happen to these children of hers? Evelyn was nearly grown up, but these little ones … When you had children in your twenties, it could cross your mind that you might not stay with your husband, but you took for granted that you’d both be on earth for all time. Lottie was forty-two. Jake was forty-one. His father had died of cancer at forty-one.

Outside the night was hot and airless, as if someone had sucked the atmosphere out of the city with a pump. She carried her laundry bag past the sleeping attendant, Abe Bazile, a Haitian man in his fifties whose child had died of leukemia a few months before. He sat slack in a folding chair on the sidewalk, all bones and dark hollows, like a reamed-out, abandoned mine. As she tried to ease the old station wagon out of the lot without disturbing him, it backfired sharply—an ominous sound in the city night; and she cursed Jake, who’d promised to get it fixed, then cursed their finances. Abe sprang to embarrassed attention and called out, Night, Doc, after her disappearing car.

She drove up Amsterdam Avenue, past the hulking buildings of Columbia University, then crossed west on 125th Street. It was two thirty in the morning and the stores were lit but gated. A thin fellow in a red iridescent shirt weaved down the sidewalk alone, a huge radio propped on his shoulder blaring out the news: Polls show Reagan over the top! The man disappeared into a doorway as a police car moved slowly beside the curb. She passed the A-OK Pawn Shop, yellow-lit and locked, three liquor stores, a Colonel Sanders franchise, a night spot called This Bitter Earth. Hot, sad sounds of a saxophone wailed out the open door. A statuesque hooker in a silver-sequined dress and Lucite high heels stood negotiating with a john a head shorter than she. Her thickly powdered skin gleamed with sweat. Lottie wondered if the woman was ill. Lottie wondered if the woman was a man.

In the lit city where even the dark rivers sometimes seemed ruddy or pale or gray, thinned with the shadows of artificial light, she never felt easy after nightfall. It was not the crime rate that unsettled her most, not even the pitiful stretches of poverty, nor the sudden explosions of sound: it was the intrusive unfamiliarity of massive buildings, hard edges, a vertical landscape.

Lottie waited at the light, then turned with relief onto the West Side Highway. She increased her speed, the dense city receding and thinning out, the Hudson River interposing itself between her and the Palisades, giving her a sudden sense of space and view. In the approaching distance the bridge was two blue-studded mountain peaks that sloped to form a valley between them. Wet warm air was forced in through the open windows as she continued to accelerate, an automobile-made breeze; her air conditioner had died a month earlier. Few cars passed. In the steamy night, alone on the empty highway, she drove a car cluttered with wrappers from M&M’s, a tube of Ev’s candy-pink lipstick, crumpled sheets of music, crumbs of animal crackers, and two pacifiers—one with the soft plastic bitten through and hardened—on the backseat.

Besides her own sizeable family, she was accountable for technicians and doctoral candidates who were writing theses under her. A colleague had died a few months earlier and she had inherited his doctoral candidate, a student from Sri Lanka, that tormented country. He had been eight years in the department without bringing his thesis and defense of it to a satisfactory conclusion. Once Lottie had had dinner at his dingy flat in East Harlem. All evening his pregnant wife and six children had tried desperately to please her. Lottie attempted to engage one boy in a game of pick-up sticks but his hands trembled so that they had to quit.

Less troubling but equally binding were her obligations to teach the medical students, to sit on various committees, and to publish. In hopes of making some extra money (at least Lottie had hopes of making some money), she and her friend Olivia had begun planning a high school biology text aimed not only at young men but also at young women, which they hoped might get adopted in a few forward-looking parts of the country. New York City? Chicago? California? It would be their second book together.

When all of this had come upon her she didn’t know—slowly, imperceptibly, like a pound or two gained every year but overlooked, until one day in passing an interior mirror she saw with surprise a very substantial figure, responsible, solid, a matron. Who, me, Lottie?

It wasn’t all ballast, was it? Or the weights they drowned kittens with?

No, she told herself, she was full and anchored to the wharf of the world.

And her work fit her, almost as if it had been genetically determined. She was right from the beginning an observant, passionately curious child who lay for hours in summer fields watching the doings of lizards and bugs and worms. Staring through binoculars for a glimpse of a sparrow’s eggs hatching, she stayed all day in a tree one time when she was twelve, straining her eyes.

Yet she’d also ended up where she was because of a series of random events. She’d married days after she got her undergraduate diploma, and then during the long hiatus between college and graduate school she’d had Evelyn, worked as a lab technician, and separated from her husband, falling out of synchrony with the academic calendar. Lottie’d started graduate school in January, an awkward month; and the internationally renowned professor, an expert on the new technique of electron microscopy, already had a full complement of graduate students. In February a coup occurred in a small central African country she had never heard of before, and one of the professor’s graduate students on a government grant packed up and left despite the university’s attempts to dissuade him. She still remembered the photo of him in the campus newspaper: smiling and waving, a bulky figure bundled up in a thick black parka against the Wisconsin winter.

She’d gone uneasily to see the professor again, but he said he was holding the man’s place until his return. When weeks later the African was hanged, she went again. The professor sullenly accepted her on the condition she finish the student’s project: he was working on rat salivary glands.

Ignace Sezibera had been his name. Many students mourned him and she felt vaguely guilty and also grateful to him—odd feelings, both of them. And she never completely forgot him. But his project became her project and she finished it, then found a way to go further, her own way, the work exciting to her.

It took her too long to realize that what excited her bored most people; they were impressed she was a scientist but no one wanted to hear the lyrics.

"I’m very interested, a dean’s wife told her at a cocktail party in Charleston, where Lottie’d given a lecture, I don’t meet that many women scientists."

You do us all proud, declared a middle-aged woman in a red sweater dress, who identified herself as a former president of a D.C. chapter of NOW.

"So what do you actually do?" urged a broad-chested man who wore a large ruby ring. Another guest had told her the man was a solo tenor.

Well, Lottie said uneasily. This may sound odd to you but I study rat salivary glands. They’re more important than people think.

Ah, the dean’s wife said.

You’re sure you want to hear about this?

Everyone nodded emphatically.

Well, the work I’m starting now is intriguing. You see, the male has a cell that secretes some enzymes that aren’t present in females. Now, if male glands are different from female glands, then maybe the difference has something to do with reproduction. And in fact one of my hypotheses is that it’s related to copulation. Lottie looked at her listeners intently: You wonder why it’s in the mouth, huh?

Mmmmm, the tenor practically hummed.

"You may or may not know that one of the things that go on rather extensively in animals before they copulate is licking. The male specifically licks—"

"Ah, licking," said the tenor.

Licking, Lottie said.

"At first I thought you said looking," said the former NOW president.

She said ‘licking,’ said the tenor. "Licking. I get it."

"Yes, well, the male licks the vaginal area, actually the perineum, of the female. And one of the enzymes that’s present in the male salivary glands is an enzyme called kallikrein that makes kinins—When you get a wound or an infection, you know how it gets all red and swollen? Kinins are generated, which cause blood vessels to leak and swelling to occur. I’ve just written a grant application about this: my hypothesis is that the kallikrein from the male generates kinins from the female secretions in and around the perineum. And these would stimulate swelling and

Reviews for Artifact

[brangwinn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a strongly written story about a woman who is determined to fight for satisfaction in her life. She’s happily married to her second husband. Despite the nay-sayers she fought to become a medical lab tech. It is the 1950 and she became pregnant at 16, the father of her child is one of the biggest obstacles in her quest for self-confidence and self-worth. It’s a no-hold barred account and includes a lot about her carnal desires. If you are put off by this, it’s not your book. If you want to root for a woman who is out to get what she wants, you’ll cheer for Lottie.

[charl08-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A Netgalley ARC copy of the book (Published in the UK July 2020) This is a timely novel centred on the life of a woman who wants to work in science. This is in the face of much of her family: Lottie's grandmother is highly supportive but her father and mother are not interested (in different ways): her mother has absented herself in books, her father is convinced shouting will solve his family problems. Her first husband takes persuading that she can work at all (like Olive Kitteridge, the novel jumps around between time periods, so her marital history is not a spoiler). The grind and poverty of doc and postdoc work is well captured. I admired the way the writer was unafraid to write in detail about the grim reality of scientific experimentation, from human anatomy to rats (but as a result, this is a book unlikely to appeal if you find these details hard to read). I come back to the Strout comparison - Lottie is not particularly likeable, but she feels like a real person, with real struggles. "... name one female composer. It was harder than name one female scientist. It amazed Lottie how much it continued to amaze her that social strictures had crushed women throughout the centuries; some dark part of her assumed that women were inferior, that she was inferior, so her grandmother must have been inferior! And Evelyn! Evelyn inferior! Consciously Lottie never felt inferior, but now and again she wanted to punch the nearest man."