Composing a Life

assignments and then discovering the intellectual and human challenge of attending those who have not merited attention. “There are certain jobs in big-time teaching hospitals that are almost reserved for women, because in the psychiatric hierarchy they are seen as less desirable than running the inpatient or outpatient units where the psychotherapy goes on. Crisis intervention is not valued in the same way as psychotherapy. In our department, the people who had these jobs were usually women, and women never had those other jobs, the core jobs. The ER is the most dangerous and most service-oriented department in psychiatry. It’s open twenty-four hours a day, and if someone comes in you’re up, you’ve got to move fast. It’s action oriented and it’s really dangerous down there because anybody can walk in and get out of control, an acute unmedicated psychotic or someone on PCP who might have a weapon.” Ironically, the risks make such unpopular assignments harder for a woman to decline than for a man; a woman who declines may be suspected of weakness, while a man is credited with ambition.
    I found it easier to visualize Ellen meeting with private patients in the upstairs consulting room in her house, where we taped our sessions, than in the hectic environment of the emergency room. She does not evoke images of crisis, but instead projects the concern and good sense that may be exactly what is needed to defuse a volatile situation. She has the coloring of a redhead, with translucent fair skin, a few freckles, and green eyes, but her short curly hair is more nearly auburn.
    Ellen’s work involves listening, and she listens well, conveying an impression of neutrality and thoughtful integration leavened with warmth and flashes of mischief. Her presentation at the Bunting colloquium was medical and objective, peppered with statistics, moving into advocacy as we discussed it afterwards and she set out to draw on my background in anthropological fieldwork to supplement her own research training. Later I learned that even as she spoke, she was shifting her focus from homeless individuals to homeless mothers and children and restructuring her professional life to gain the flexibility to have children herself while sustaining her research. By the time we began work on this book, Ellen had a son, Danny, and she and her husband were working their way through the harrowing process of adopting a second child.
    Alice d’Entremont is an electrical engineer whose experience has ranged from the design of experimental research equipment for Skylab to being the chief executive officer of a new high-tech company struggling to establish a commercial niche. Much of her work is beyond my understanding, and yet her aesthetic pleasure in what she does, her sense that technology is the art form of the twentieth century, provides us with a bridge of intelligibility. She lives surrounded by plants that flourish and proliferate until she passes them on to friends with less nurturing hands.
    I met Alice in 1979 after she and Jack, a creative inventor and entrepreneur whom my husband and I had known since the sixties, became lovers and then colleagues. Together they struggled with elusive questions of electronics and financing until Jack’s death in 1985, spending their free time cooking together and searching out the finest ingredients in Boston’s Italian markets. When I asked Alice to work on this project, she came and stayed for a week with me in New Hampshire in the summer of 1987. She walked in the woods and together we taped long interviews about her life.
    It was the first vacation she had had after a long, turbulent time, and she used our interviews to sort through the dramas of the last two years and their earlier roots. She struggled to explain to me the technical issues in her work with computer imaging and then commandeered my kitchen to make squash-flower fritters and ratatouille and persuaded me that the time had come to paint the new kitchen cabinets.
    Alice is a woman of vivid contrasts, combining delicacy with drama and sexiness. She loves chunky silver jewelry and wears large modernistic earrings and brooches, like a habit of diffidence overcome. She is slim but broad shouldered, with the kind of nose that is said to impart character. Her short hair has turned to silver, but her eyebrows remain dark.
    Alice defies stereotypes. Back in the days of Skylab, when there were very few women engineers indeed, Alice showed