Composing a Life

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    I had left western Massachusetts by the time we started, so it was a commuting collaboration, and our spouses did not even have the possibility of commiserating with each other while we worked. Most of the work was done in Amherst, while Dick’s wife, the biologist Barbara Osborne, went back and forth to her lab at U. Mass. and Barkev fended for himself in Cambridge. We would work intensely for a week and then go back to normal life for three weeks or a month, reading and talking and letting the new chapters settle until we could coordinate another week together. In the evenings, Dick and Barbara and I talked biology over the dinner table. I probably learned more and better biology because Barbara was there, for she often rejected simplifications and slipped into fully professional discussions with Dick, while I pulled them back to my level when things became excessively technical. Dick and Barbara have parallel but asynchronous careers, with common interests and techniques but over a decade’s difference in trajectory.
    Dick and I worked well together because our interests interlocked. He did not assert or defend dominance, either as a male or as a natural scientist; nor was he troubled by the fact that he had known me first as a dean. Each of us had knowledge and skills the other lacked; we had no need to prove that one set of skills was superior to the other or to conceal our areas of ignorance. Our rhythms were sufficiently different to stimulate each of us to work harder: I was often up making coffee an hour or two before Dick and Barbara, throwing myself at a new chapter with a dozen pages of draft by noon, burnt out by two or three. Dick was inclined to offer me serious books to read when I wanted to bury my nose in the oblivion of a detective story, but Barbara had a supply to draw on. As a team, Dick and I were equal but profoundly complementary. We had the genuine differences that allowed each of us to meet a need in the other, pursuing mysteries that only the other could unravel, with a delight in mutual teaching and learning. The man had things in his head I wanted to know, and my ideas fell into place when he asked critical questions. We worked toward clarity as he chided me for too much idealism and I coaxed him away from the traditional military metaphors for the immune system, drawing my own imagery from ecology rather than warfare.
    For complementarity to be truly creative, it is not sufficient for need to run in both directions; it is necessary to acknowledge that both contributions are of equal value and that both are freely given. This is fundamentally different from the way people in America thought about male-female relationships when I was growing up. Even today, the labor of women in the home, because it is unpaid, is often not acknowledged as genuinely necessary and valuable work. Because women have lacked alternatives, their work has not had the value of that which is freely chosen. The inequality established in this way and supported by the culture at large has worked as a sort of underlying premise of the male-female relationship and of other relationships as well. Such inequality depends on cultivated blindness; it is reinforced by convergent evidence and unaffected by contradiction.
    In fact, this is only one way we are limited in our thinking about the give and take of diverse relationships. For a long time, I was puzzled about how to think about my relationship with the women who worked with me on this book. This is a multiple collaboration built on both difference and similarity, but I still lack an appropriate term for it. Before and beyond this project, we are clearly friends, but the word is too rich and broad to focus the special commonality of a single project. Sometimes I refer to Joan, Ellen, Johnnetta, and Alice as “the women I have been working with”—as collaborators—and yet this belies the playfulness of many of our conversations. The words used by social scientists for those they involve in their research feel wrong to me, even though as an anthropologist I believe that the people we call “informants” are our truest colleagues. These women are not “interviewees,” not “subjects” in an experiment, not “respondents” to a questionnaire. There is symmetry in our mutual recognition but there is asymmetry in that I am the one who goes off and weaves our separate skeins of memory into a single fabric. But they weave me into their different