They met again almost a decade later, the first week of grad school at Columbia, at a reception to welcome new students. When the head of the psych department introduced them, Lydia looked at Mendel, who looked back at her. They spoke at the same time: “I know you. You’re the one who talked all the time” (Mendel) and “I know you. You’re the one who never said a word in the whole two weeks” (Lydia). It turned out, although they came to it from very different undergraduate majors (Mendel, statistics, and Lydia, biology), that they were both interested in studying behavioral psychology. From that moment on they were inseparable.
Their choice of careers was the right decision at the perfect time. Skinner boxes, teaching machines, programmed learning, behavior modification—they were all drifting down into the public’s consciousness. The seminal paper by B. F. Skinner, “The Science of Learning and the Art of Teaching,” was assigned in three of the four classes they took their first semester of grad school. They were stunned by his insights and believed that behaviorism was the answer to every problem, from education to relationships to combating Nazism to teaching rats to run through mazes. Mendel and Lydia started publishing papers in their second year of grad school, when Skinner’s essay had sunk well and deeply into the marrow of their bones. They began with letters to the editor. Then on to op-eds in the New York Times, Washington Post, and L.A. Times, many dealing with improving teaching, others with suggestions for efficacious parenting techniques. “Efficacious” was one of their favorite words. Their first jointly written paper, “Schedules of Reinforcement and Classroom Management Strategies,” appeared in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. They were off to the races.
So it wasn’t exactly happy news that a baby was on the way. Lizzie was an accident, the result, Lydia knew, of the way the birth-control pills made her feel and how she’d too frequently, as it turned out, “forget” to take them. Once Lizzie made her unfortunate presence known, Mendel and Lydia took a morning off from working on their dissertations and were married at the city clerk’s office. They celebrated their wedding by going home to their apartment and getting back to work on their respective dissertations: Lydia’s on appetites and aversion in young female rats and Mendel’s on purposive behavior in maze-running rats. Lydia hated to take time off to see her obstetrician; she was now at the stage of analyzing her data and—finally!—writing up the results. She was forced to postpone the final revisions on her dissertation when the baby she hadn’t particularly wanted decided to be born. Mendel was less unhappy about the whole situation, Lydia believed, not only because he hadn’t been physically inconvenienced from the moment egg and sperm connected but also because his mind hadn’t been compromised during delivery, when the doctor gave her scopolamine without fully explaining to her what its effects would be. She didn’t like not being able to remember what went on while the drug played havoc with her mind.
After Lydia came home from the hospital, she realized just how tied down she’d be to this endlessly shitting, spitting-up, and crying baby. How would she ever get her work done? Mendel was fortunate in that he could go to the lab early in the morning and not come home until he’d written great sheaves of his thesis, which was often very late at night. Lydia found the whole situation unbearable. After some discussion, Mendel put signs up in all the dorms at Barnard, and they finally assembled a group of young women who’d rotate in and out of the apartment and Lizzie’s young life, feeding her, changing her, and, depending on their own personalities, rocking her, cooing or singing to her, or ignoring her.
Mendel and Lydia were the stars of their class. They were wooed by Brown, Yale, Berkeley, and the Universities of Texas and Michigan. In May 1975, when Lizzie was not quite two, they moved to Ann Arbor and began the work that would bring them fame (at least among the other behavioral psychologists of their era).
Whenever she approached the front door of the house she grew up in, Lizzie often thought that when the real estate agent first saw Lydia and Mendel, she must have chortled in glee. Those years spent getting their PhDs from Columbia? Forget it. These were two small-town kids from the underpopulated vastness of New York State who wouldn’t know a copper pipe from a plumber’s snake. Did she have a house for them? You just bet she did.
The place she sold them was a mess but presumably had, in real-estate speak, good bones. (Lizzie learned this terminology only later, when she and George were looking for their own house to buy.) It had been for sale for so long that every agent in town contributed fifty dollars every time they showed it to a potential buyer who didn’t bite at the opportunities it afforded and declined to make an offer. By now the kitty had enough money to pay for a lavish vacation for some fast-talking and persuasive agent—which were the primary characteristics of the woman who showed it to Mendel and Lydia.
It was the only wood-frame house on the block. The others were solid and substantial fraternity and sorority houses in their varying architectural styles. Directly behind it was the Kappa Kappa Gamma house. Next door on the right, if you faced the Bultmann home, were the Chi Omegas, all blondes from the better suburbs of Detroit and Cleveland. On the left was the Pi Beta Phi house, with girls smarter than the Kappas and less blond than the Chi Os, from different but equally affluent suburbs. Directly across the street the Sigma Alpha Mu brothers played endless games of HORSE, went through many kegs of beer, and threw Frisbees with abandon.