What, you may ask, is a “normal control”? She (or he) is the person in a scientific study who represents those not the subjects of the study, those who those sujects are measured against or compared to, to try to determine what in the subject is causing the problem the scientists are studying.
Why did I want to be a normal control? As I’ve mentioned before, I felt through my teen years, and I was still 19, that I was deeply neurotic, and I had some vague sense that if I volunteered to be a normal control, the experts—the doctors and scientists at the National Institutes of Health—would either reject me, confirming my sense that I was not normal, or accept me, thus certifying that I was, really, NORMAL, after all.
I don’t remember if there was any kind of test for the job, but in the beginning of April I was on my way to Bethesda, Maryland, where for three months I would live in the Clinical Center, essentially a large hospital with many doctors’ offices. So room and board were provided, and I had some sort of small stipend. This turned out to be one of those life turning points, which I didn’t recognize at the time.
This being a hospital, each floor was divided into two wards, with 10 rooms per ward, and in the middle a large common area where we had our meals. My ward was 7West, and as the only “girl” I had a room to myself, but the men shared, two to a room. There was one other Antioch co-op, Gary, who aspired to be a doctor (which is what he ultimately became, according to the alumni directory), three or four men who were conscientious objectors and serving as normal control for their alternative service, and there were perhaps another four men who were prisoners. (These men were serving time for relatively mild offenses, and had volunteered to be normal controls so as to not be in actual prison. They all stayed at one end of the hall, along with the two guards who followed them Everywhere. One day we played a kind of pickup softball game on the NIH grounds, and the two guards stood way out in the outfield, shouldering rifles, in case any of the prisoners took it into their heads to try to escape.)
I was the only girl, but the way I made myself feel comfortable was to think of myself as “one of the boys.” I was almost 20, but I still had never had a boyfriend, though I wasn’t a virgin either. So while I had a crush on one of the conscientious objectors, I didn’t know how to flirt or otherwise show my interest. My crush was Skip, who was older, close to 30, and a CO for political reasons. He was handsome and sexy, dark hair, not much taller than me, a little burly, but he showed no romantic interest, instead he may have tried proselytizing, but seemed too intense in his theory. Virgil was a CO for religious reasons, a member of the Church of the Brethren, and from Ohio. Had he heard of Antioch College, also in Ohio, or was he from some other part of the state? We had a date, but later, after I’d left NIH and moved into D.C. for my next co-op job, but more about that later. Mostly, the group of us, along with some of the young people also living at the Clinical Center (more about them later), hung out as a group, not much pairing off.
NIH grounds. This was a fairly large complex, north of Washington, D.C., with numerous buildings for administration, laboratories, and I think animals. The laboratories were surrounded by rose bushes, which in June put out intoxicating scent. The big lawn in front of the Clinical Center was bordered by large firs, with their own competing aroma. One warm night in early June I was out for a walk and lay down on the thick lawn grass, staring up at the star-filled sky. I knew each of those tiny sparkles was a star, possibly like our Sun, and here I was on a planet looking out at eternity, feeling as much a part of the universe as each of those stars. An enormous exaltation filled me, a connection to those stars billions of miles away, just as much a part of nature as they were. Perhaps this was a spiritual experience, but coming from an atheist family, I didn’t have that language. I just knew it was a wonderful feeling.
So what did I do at the Clinical Center? I think I took part in only a couple of studies, and I remember only one of them. A dentist wondered how human saliva differed when it was provoked by different tastes—salty, sour, sweet, maybe another—and whether the saliva from the different glands was the same or also different. I spent a couple of hours on a couple of days sitting in a dental chair with tubes in my mouth to collect saliva while different substances were applied to my mouth. Not very comfortable, and I never learned what if anything was learned from what dripped out of my mouth. At least I was never told there was anything abnormal.
What did I do with the rest of my time? I was essentially free labor for any doctors who needed it, and I was assigned to a psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Friedman, who was studying how people reacted to chronic stress. His subjects? The parents of children with acute leukemia, which in the early 1960s was still incurable. Doctors at NIH were studying possible treatments, and as the largest hospital in the South working on possible treatments, most of the parents who brought their sons or daughters for treatment came from the South. Dr. Friedman or people on his team interviewed these parents at length—and my job was to transcribe those audiotaped interviews.
The job was both tedious and fascinating. Tedious because I sat at a desk all day long, headphones on, learning how to operate the recorder for playback. Fascinating because each set of parents was different, unique, unlike anyone I knew. I learned to decipher different regional accents. In some couples, the husband did most of the talking, in others it was more equal. They often talked about their child’s illness in great detail, how it started, what they first noticed, how they’d come to NIH expecting, hoping for a miracle. It was most painful to listen to those parents whose child was dying; some seemed able to accept that it could happen, but most kept hoping that yet another remission would occur. I had no regular hours, just coming to Dr. Friedman’s office a few hours a day, transcribing as much as I could. Sometimes I would finish all the tapes there were and would wait until he’d let me know there were more.
At NIH, I began reading the newspaper more regularly. The Washington Post was delivered to our ward, and I’d read over breakfast. I noticed stories about a country called Laos near Vietnam. Vietnam stuck in my memory from 1954, when the division of the country into North and South had been on the front page of “My Weekly Reader,” a student newspaper from Scholastic, along with the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education. Those 1962 news stories kept me attached to the Vietnam situation as it developed over the following years.
What else was there to do? There was that softball game. One June night there was an excursion to some local venue for music, and we hung out the porch waiting for the music and watching huge June bugs fling themselves against the ceiling light and fall, burned, to the floor.
There were quite a few young people living at the Clinical Center for various studies of mental illness. Some were part of a study of families of schizophrenics, and I learned an important lesson from one of them. Norma was about my age, Normal Norma we called her—but not to her face. When she was okay, I noticed, she was just like all the normal people I knew, not focused on herself, not anxious, not worrying what other people thought of her. But one evening I went down to her ward to see if she wanted to hang out—and the ward was locked. “Can I see Norma?” I asked a nurse through the door. “Norma is having a break,” the nurse replied. Another day, I was in Dr. Friedman’s office transcribing. The office doors had large glass windows, and when I looked up, there was Norma, on the other side of the glass, her hands up as though trying to claw through the window. She could easily have just opened the door, but that was beyond her at that moment. A nurse came along and walked her away from the door. The lesson: perhaps neurotics didn’t have psychotic breaks like Norma’s, on the other hand, being “normal” didn’t assure you would always be so.
There was another girl, Susan, a year younger than me, working at NIH. She had started dating Gary, but we also became friendly. She had been kicked out of the University of Illinois the previous year for violating what were then called “parietal rules”; for example, girls had to be in their dorms no later than 11 p.m. on weeknights and midnight on weekends, and boys could not be in a girl’s dorm room, or if it was, he had to keep both feet on the floor. Antioch College had no such rules, we could be out as long as we wanted and have boys in our room so long as it didn’t inconvenience our roommate. This state of affairs was so well known that boys from nearby colleges often came to Antioch and roamed the girls’ dorm halls on Friday and Saturday nights looking for what they assumed must be wild parties. We girls found them just boring.
Susan was living at home and wanted to get her own place, but needed a roommate. And here came the turning point. I had been wondering whether I should return to college. The previous quarter I had gotten nothing but C’s, which as far as I was concerned might as well have been F’s. What was I doing in college anyway? I knew that when I returned to Antioch in the fall, I would have to create a Five-Year Plan, declaring a major and figuring out whether the required courses would be available on the quarters I would be on campus over the next three years. I was no nearer to figuring out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, let alone what my major might be. I’d never set foot in the theater, the only English class I’d had was boring, philosophy was “sentences about sentences,” and the history professor everyone adored I hated. Maybe I should take some time off and, now that I had some experience, get a job and stay put in one place for a while.
And here was Susan, looking for a roommate. We talked, we agreed. I had another Antioch co-op job to go to in Washington for the summer, and a roommate already lined up for that, but sometime in the summer, I’d officially withdraw and move in with Susan wherever she found an apartment.
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