Free The Air We Breathe by Andrea Barrett

stones. It was practice, she said, that she could have gotten in no other way.
    In the glow of the darkroom’s ruby light, taking notes as Irene mixed the chemicals and floated the film in one solution and then another, Eudora had listened intently and tried to remember everything. Once or twice, when she’d had to ask a question, the hint of irritation she saw on Irene’s face reminded her of how patient she’d been so far. “Sometimes,” Irene had said a few days ago, “the best way to learn is just to experiment on ourselves.”
    Which was how Eudora had reached this evening, finally about to see the inside of her own chest. She’d unlaced and stepped out of her shoes, removed her blue apron so the buttons wouldn’t interfere, and slipped off her blouse. Dressed only in her skirt and stockings and camisole, she stood motionless in the darkened room between the two upright poles of the tube holder. Irene adjusted the height of the crossbar. Inside the suspended wooden box, hidden except for the rounded surface gleaming through the glass port, the powerful new tube—a high-vacuum Coolidge tube with a tungsten target that Irene had recently acquired—warmed up.
    Irene, who’d been peering at the coated cardboard of the fluoroscopic screen, moved behind Eudora and opened the port so she could replace one lead diaphragm with another. “That should work better,” she said.
    Returning to the screen, she lowered her goggles and peered through the dark red glass. “Lift your arms. When I tell you to, take a deep breath and then hold it. Ready?”
    â€œReady,” Eudora said.
    â€œLovely,” said Irene, before falling silent for half a minute. “Release it—good. Now just breathe normally for a bit.”
    What, Eudora wondered, was she seeing?
    â€œExcellent lungs,” Irene said approvingly. “If you give me another few minutes I’ll take a radiograph.”
    In the darkroom, earlier, she’d shown Eudora how to load the metal holders with the floppy sheets of nitrocellulose film. The glass plates she’d used before weren’t available anymore, she said; they were made in Belgium. But the film had its own advantages, which now, as she moved Eudora away from the tube holder, took some measurements, and positioned another stand, Eudora began to see. The film holder slipped weightlessly, easily, into the frame on the stand.
    â€œHold your breath again,” Irene directed. Something whirred and she looked intently at her timer. “I like this tube, it’s so much easier to use. The exposure time is far shorter, too—but it almost makes me unnecessary. The old gas tubes were so idiosyncratic that it took a real knack to get good images using them, but these—I could train you to use this in a couple of months. You can step away, now.”
    The red goggles lay on the table; Eudora picked them up and peered through them but could see nothing. As she handed the goggles back, Irene said, shyly but also with a note of pride, that in her early days she’d done so many experiments that she’d been asked to meetings, and published papers, and consulted for doctors all over the country. “I made a reputation in Colorado,” she confided, “almost by accident. But it was enough that, when the doctors here decided they wanted someone to set up and run an X-ray facility, they contacted me despite my lack of medical training.”
    â€œThey didn’t mind that you…?”
    â€œThat I’m a woman?” Irene curled her lip. “They probably did mind. But not enough to keep them from hiring the best person they could for the pitiful salary they offered.”
    Interesting, Eudora thought. Those little spurts of anger, so seldom released. “Is that when you hurt your hands?” she asked. “When you were setting up the equipment here?”
    Irene tucked her gloved left