Petri dish

I was in the lab again, and it smelled like pig skin. Two benches over from me, a boy was cutting thin strips of pink flesh, weighing each on a balance. I could smell them from here, something a little earthy mixed with formaldehyde. From what I knew, he was studying the adhesive properties of chalk and salt. Pig skin is much like human skin, he said. I didn’t ask any further questions, just plugged my nose. 

This was the strange glory of a shared lab. Even though I understood that our close quarters meant I had to deal with chemical byproducts and the high probability of another student spilling rubbing alcohol on my hands, it also meant that the room was a temple of ideas. People of science are hardly devout worshippers, but this space was holy for each of us. 

I was in the lab again and to my left, a small girl wearing cookie monster pajama pants was looking through a microscope at a dish of flatworms. Like me, she wanted to know about the properties of essential oils. She treated the worms with chamomile, then cut them clean in half. The plant’s oil was supposed to speed up the process of regeneration. I understand the idea that flowers might be healing; I’ve held a lily to my cheek and felt reborn.

In front of her, a spiky-haired boy— whose smile was equally as artificially sharp— was working with a computer. He took unwanted parts from the school’s recycling and made a Frankencomputer. It was hard on the eyes, but an interesting addition to our little lab. Once, he jerked back from his computer monster with a start; I saw a few blue sparks fly. Later, with that  same smile, the boy confessed he could’ve killed us all. We laughed, loud and light. 

Sometimes I wonder if scientists ever die. Not that we were real scientists.

I was in the lab, where I shuffled around petri dishes and tested colloidal silver on bacteria strains. Where I cradled colonies into existence and obliterated them three days later, for research. Where my hands knew exactly what to do. Where the rhythm takes over, and I dance around the other students to our one microwave and prepare my plates. 

In the lab, I think a lot about my grandmother, wondering if science is as hereditary as our blond hair and shy smiles. 

Her story, the one that I keep learning about, begins in a German port city. During the war she worked, hair pulled back into a clean knot with a little poof at the front. In sepia photographs, her smile lifts into her round cheeks. She looks like me. 

The war hit her like it hit everybody: fast and unflinching. When Bolsheviks stormed her city along the sea, she tucked herself into a boat set for Austria, with no room for even an exhale. When she came back there was nothing but rubble and the crooked grin of an American soldier— a D-day survivor. So, with time, she came to America for the second chance she deserved, German accent still thick in her throat. 

Even when I was a child, her words held notes from the Europe she loved. Though she died before I understood the concept of accents and before I could place Germany on a map, I can almost hear it now. On one of our last visits to her New Jersey mountain home, we shared an ice cream: chocolate with toasted almonds. The c in her chocolate was soft, though the one that followed was rougher. Maybe she was thinking of old days, or of shokolade. 

In the lab again, I tie my hair up in a knot and remember the small piece of her story I’ve recently discovered: she was a phlebotomist. Every morning, before even the sun opened up her eyes, my Oma entered a lab not unlike mine, with stacks of petri dishes, microscopes and all of the silver lab tools that seem to fit in my hands effortlessly. Every morning, she greeted patients and laid a steady hand on their forearms as she took their blood. Then, with vials of warm blood weaved in between her fingers, she entered her lab, made slides for the microscope and manually counted the number of hemoglobins, red blood cells, and white blood cells. The job doesn’t exist like that anymore. Nobody can simply rely on the eyes of a scientist. There are machines for that, and results come on paper instead of being carried by mouth. 

But in the days of my grandmother’s work, she was of the utmost importance. She was the person in between the test and the diagnosis. She was the right hand man of the doctor, the woman behind the curtain. When I hear of this, I start to see her take shape as a three dimensional woman instead of a photograph in our family albums. I look at pictures where she holds my small body and I recognize the glow behind her eyes, like the flame of my lab burner. 

The next time I’m due for a test, I can’t look away from my arm as blood shoots from my veins, filling up tube after tube. I can’t stop thinking about how, if I were years older, it might have been Oma’s soft hand steadying my forearm instead of a stranger whose smile seeps with honey. Phlebotomists have rare, genial smiles, I’ve noticed, to calm all the people who fear needles. 

Another morning, when it is warm enough to sit on my back porch, my father and I drink coffee as he lets me talk about my bacteria. When I’m finished, he begins to talk about his mother. This is an uncommon occurrence, so I listen carefully. He speaks of the mysterious fridge they had at home, for microbes only. He explained the tools, how she had something she would get so hot it glowed, to make it sterile, I guess.

Yes, I reply absentmindedly, because I know that part, that tool. I know that part because I’ve done it; I know that part because it is my favorite. The orange glow that comes off the inoculating loop is something sunsets only dream of. It is brighter, even, than the fire itself, which burns cornflower blue. I love that moment, when the metal begins to glow, like I love ice cream. And as she loved ice cream too, she must have seen this step the way I did. This small piece of evidence is enough to convince me that my Oma and I are made of the same stuff. We are parts from the same machine, even though so much separates us. 

Weeks later in the lab, I’m thinking so hard about this strange heritability that I’m not careful enough when opening the microbio cabinet. Before I can stop it, a container of test tubes tumbles to the ground in a hurricane of glass and strange liquid. My windows weren’t boarded up and I wasn’t even wearing proper lab shoes, but I was spared, not even a scrape on my exposed skin. Despite the lack of injury, I was ready to have a nuclear meltdown as I swept up rounded pieces of broken glass. Breaths hitching, I tried to remind myself over and over that everybody screws up, even in science. My first broken test tube was probably something of a baptism. Better that it happened in a lab that already knew chaos, rather than a highly controlled facility. 

The dark-skinned boy who stood to my left at the time of the accident still had his mouth open. You almost killed me, he says dazedly. Regaining my composure at last, I reply calmly: no, I didn't. But I pack up my tools for the day and wash my hands eight times, to be sure. 

Maybe science isn’t a heritable trait after all, like our shared sweet tooth. If it is, if science is in fact tucked into my genome, maybe it’s recessive, skipping generations as it pleases. 

For a while, I thought of myself as a detective, picking up pieces of my grandmother’s story where they were offered and trying to fit them together to make a whole case, a whole picture and a whole woman. After that, I thought of myself as a linguist, trying to reach her through German, trying to cut apart the syllables and trying to form I miss you in her language without using my tongue as a butcher’s knife. After hearing about her work, I thought the only way to get to my Oma was through science, through the rigidness of the scientific method and a micropipette. 

That said, I’m starting to think that I got it wrong; it doesn’t matter whether my hand is skilled in research or how comfortably the safety goggles fit me. There is always another way to connect, so I’m trying to find it. Even if I’m just chasing spirits.

Here’s what I know: she was a good storyteller, like so many that survived the war. Like me. Though conflict is as much a stranger to me as my grandmother feels, I know how to hold the attention of an audience, how to speak. If that’s the only thing we ever have in common, I think I can live with that. And when I’m in the lab again, I’ll slip into her skin for just a moment and my hands will fall into familiarity, measuring areas of bacterial resistance on each of my Petri dishes.