Charmed Particles

by Chrissy Kolaya

  “Well, they’re still debugging the equipment,” one of them said, his tablemates shaking their heads in sympathy. “In some sense, it’s reassuring. They were wrong, but wrong by five orders of magnitude.” At this the other men let out hearty, guffawing laughs.

  Meena played with the table tent announcing INTERNATIONAL FOLK DANCING CLUB—NEWCOMERS ALWAYS WELCOME! and every so often, a triangle of geese cut across the windowed wall of the atrium.

  Sarala had dressed Meena in a pink sundress with bows on the shoulders and tiny pink sandals, her hair cut in a short bob, bangs struck out across her forehead just above her large brown eyes. A few of the aproned and baseball-capped cafeteria ladies came over to the table to admire her, bringing Meena a small cup of ice cream and a dish of raisins from the salad bar. They smiled at Sarala. “So nice to have a child in the building,” one of them said.

  Sarala could hear a scientist at a nearby table explaining to his lunch companion, “I told them, once they’ve got things sorted out they ought to be looking for an interaction that looks like—” and here she caught sight of Abhijat coming toward them from across the atrium, a broad smile on his face.

  “Well, it won’t be long before we’re obsolete,” the man at the other table continued. “Before there’s a bigger, faster collider to be built. Let’s just hope we’re able to build it here. I wouldn’t like to think what will happen once we’re no longer operating at the highest energy levels.”

  “Now where did you get those treats, young miss?” Abhijat asked as he sat down beside Meena, tickling her under her chin. Meena smiled up at him and pointed happily at the cafeteria ladies who waved at her from behind the serving counters.

  Sarala went through the cafeteria line, filling a tray for all three of them, while Abhijat sat with Meena, who tapped away at the calculator he had brought down from his office for her to play with. He cut up her chicken nuggets so they would cool and helped Meena sip milk through a straw in the small carton. Every few moments one of his colleagues came over to coo at Meena, “Such a good girl for her daddy.” At one of the nearby tables, a grandfatherly scientist made faces at her, then hid his face behind his hands.

  After lunch Meena waved to her father as the elevator doors closed, lifting him up to the top of Anderson Tower where, Sarala thought, he might, were he to look out of his office window, be able to watch their slow progress home. She wondered how often he took his eyes from the equations on his wall to look out over the prairie toward the city.

  Back outside, she retraced her steps, pushing the stroller before her, walking along the paths in reverse, Meena chattering away, asking, “Mommy, what does almost mean?” “What does before mean?” then slipping slowly into sleep.

  At home, Sarala lifted Meena’s slack, sleep-heavy body from the stroller and carried her up the stairs, loosening her sandals and letting them drop in the hallway. She laid Meena down in her small twin bed, pulling her favorite blanket up over her sundress and stopping for a moment to admire her child, her plump lips open slightly in sleep, her round cheeks, the soft spray of eyelashes that fluttered against her skin.

  Downstairs in the family room, Sarala set up the ironing board and plugged in the iron, pulling Abhijat’s dress shirts one by one from the laundry basket. The house was silent, the neighborhood silent. She had never imagined such quiet. Had never thought it possible. She had always imagined a life like the one she’d grown up with, aunts and uncles and grandparents all living together under one lively, boisterous roof.

  She turned the television on and knelt before it, clicking up and down the channels—a game show, a painting class on the public television station, a midday newscast—but finding nothing that interested her, she turned it off.

  The house was still with Meena asleep, the iron letting out a gurgle of steam as Sarala turned Abhijat’s shirts this way and that, working the iron into the tiny spots around the collar and over the rounded shoulders. She looked at the clock, calculating how long until Abhijat would be home for dinner, wondered whether after the meal, after Meena’s bath and putting her to bed, he would return to the Lab or work in his study off the foyer.

  She wondered how long Meena might sleep. She had come to the end of the pile of dress shirts, each hung neatly on hangers along the ironing board: Tuesday—Wednesday—Thursday—Friday. Maybe she’s about to wake up, she thought.

  Sarala carried Abhijat’s shirts up to the master bedroom, tucking them in among the suits on his side of the closet. She closed the closet door behind her, a little louder than she would have had she not been hoping Meena would wake soon, then walked down the hall, the beige carpeting muffling her footsteps.

  Unlike the other mothers she chatted with at the park, Sarala did not look forward to nap time, such a long period of strange silence in the house. She opened Meena’s door and looked in.

  She was probably just about to wake up anyway, Sarala thought as she sat down on the edge of the bed and reached out to brush the hair from Meena’s face.

  CHAPTER 5

  New Symmetries

  IT WAS A POINT OF PRIDE WITH ROSE, THE WAY SHE AND RANDOLPH had arranged their lives outside the expected norms and traditions. Rose’s upbringing had been so thoroughly and entirely conventional that she had been determined to find a different path for herself as an adult. Their family arrangement was uncommon, certainly, but it worked for them. And yes, even for Lily, she felt she had, always, to explain. Lily and her father are devoted to one another and share a lively and meaningful correspondence.

  From Randolph, Rose and Lily received frequent dispatches concerning his recent adventures. In Malaysia, he’d tended water buffalo, leading them through muddy wetlands, having learned from the natives that the animal was not to be herded but rather that it would simply follow where he led.

  In India, he’d stowed away on a steamship and sailed down the Brahmaputra. From his seat on the bow, he watched the ship’s steady progress, palms arcing overhead. He had traveled the length of the river, from the Himalayas through Bangladesh to the Ganges delta, where he had seen tigers, crocodiles, mangroves, and slender boats skimming over water that in spring rose to flood levels as the snow melted in the mountains.

  In the Kerala backwaters he’d lived in a thatched hut, and near Udaipur, he’d been delighted by the monkeys who came right up to the train as it stopped at the platform—little beggars, paws out, requesting the attentions of the passengers.

  In one of his postcards to Lily, he listed his supplies for his latest trip: We took twenty-four mules loaded with bedrolls, two yaks, tinned milk, ten bamboo tents, and four llamas (who did not get on well with the mules at all).

  There were parts of his trip, though, that he did not share with Rose and Lily.

  These were the increasingly frequent instances in which he now encountered places that were no longer isolated, no longer separated and protected from modernity. Of these experiences, Randolph kept only a mental list:

  The Coca-Cola sign in front of the camel breeder’s modest home.

  The Tiwi elders dressed half in traditional costume, half in what looked to Randolph like secondhand university t-shirts.

  And worst of all, the tent he’d been invited into, in which he’d found the tribal leader and his wizened council watching a football match on a small television powered by a noisy generator.

  As he added to this growing mental list of the ways in which modernity now seemed to encroach upon these places, he had begun to wonder if he was searching for a kind of untouched culture that no longer actually existed.

  Randolph sat cross-legged with Lily on the soft carpet in the master bedroom, his trunk laid open in front of the closet. He had returned from his most recent trip just that morning and now smiled up at Rose, who watched from the hallway as Lily dug happily through the open trunk on the floor between them, pulling out treasure after treasure, certain that with each one would come a new story from her father. This was their ritual each time Randolph returned home.
Rose joined them only to pluck Randolph’s more malodorous articles of clothing from the trunk and transfer them to a laundry basket destined for her immediate and thorough attentions.

  Each time he returned from an expedition, Rose labeled his travel journal with the dates and destinations of his trip, adding it to the long row of journals that lined the mahogany bookshelves in his study. There, among his record of daily activities could be found sketches of native art, notes on travel routes and supplies, lists of objects acquired and of animals observed, handwritten receipts, well-worn maps gone soft at the folds and threatening to tear, official-looking permits bearing indecipherable stamps, foreign banknotes, customs forms issued by stern and harried clerks, now folded into small squares—all of these tucked, like bookmarks, into his journals. The mementos she catalogued and arranged in the display cases in his study, tucking a tribal mask in next to a clay sculpture or a tiny hand-woven basket, closing the case carefully and stepping back to admire each new addition.

  In a small tin box on the bookshelf, Rose saved all of their letters. Sorting through his trunk after Lily had unearthed all of the treasures with which he’d returned, what delighted Rose most was to come upon the letters she had sent him, bound and bundled together, and which he had carried with him throughout his travels. These she added to the collection each time he returned, so that the tin box contained within it both the original correspondence and the response, a record of their extraordinary marriage, of what Rose thought of, always, as their great love story.

  When it was again time for Randolph to pack, it was Randolph and Lily’s ritual to do that together also, Lily sometimes slipping in a drawing, a note, or some small treasure. These, Randolph discovered well into his trip, smiling to think of Lily doing this on the sly as he tucked his belongings into the trunk.

  Lily prided herself on maintaining a stiff upper lip when it was time for her father to depart. She had never cried, not once. She felt it would have been disloyal. Her mother had taught her to be proud of their unconventional life—that there were many different ways to be a family, and that though it was different from what most people chose, this was the way of being a family that worked best for them. This was what she reminded herself firmly, emphatically, on the days when her father left.

  In kindergarten, Lily came home from school one day distressed to have learned from a classmate that parents who didn’t live together no longer loved each other. Rose had gently corrected her. Certainly sometimes parents stopped loving one another, she explained, but that would never be the case with Lily’s mother and father, who loved each other so strongly that even Lily had to admit to never having seen her parents argue.

  “Our family is different, yes,” Rose said, taking her daughter’s small hands in hers, “but that is something we should be proud of. It makes us unique.”

  Rose had read all of the great political biographies—Churchill, Kennedy, Truman, Roosevelt. As a girl growing up in a small farm town in the shadow of the great city of the Midwest, she had cried with her classmates over Kennedy’s death, but unlike her girlfriends, she was crying not because their handsome young president was dead, leaving behind a widow and small children who, even in mourning, looked like they had just stepped out of a catalog, but because she had had such great hopes for his political career.

  As a teenager, she had not imagined herself in any role other than that of a diligent helpmate to a spouse with his own promising political future. “Politics is men’s work, like plowing, or fixing a tractor,” her father, a stout farmer, said when Rose revealed her interest in the subject. Her mother, more sympathetic, pointed out the many ways in which Rose might fulfill her interests from behind the scenes, cutting out for her daughter photos from magazines and newspapers of a perfectly groomed Jackie Kennedy meeting Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru or being presented to the president and first lady of Mexico.

  But when Rose surprised everyone, including herself, by eloping with Randolph at eighteen, she had come to realize that he would be an unlikely political candidate for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the infrequency with which he stayed put in a given location. And so, after Lily’s birth, Rose signed up for a correspondence course in political science at the state university, and, excelling in that class, had continued on until she had graduated with honors, with a deep sense of personal pride and accomplishment, and with a new plan for her life.

  When Lily began school, Rose began her political career in earnest, first campaigning for and winning a seat on the local school board. At her first election, Randolph had been full of pride. Rose, uncertain about her chances, had worried that she might not win. But who better to represent the citizenry, Randolph encouraged her, than a daughter of Nicolet, now returned?

  It was, perhaps, the frequency and unapologetic nosiness of the questions Rose received about the whereabouts of her husband (or, more often, of “Lily’s father,” as they tended to refer to him, unable to imagine that a man so infrequently present might still be a spouse, a partner, a helpmate) that had steeled Rose for a career in local politics. She’d been elected Alderman of Nicolet’s twelfth ward and had thrown herself into the work with zeal and dedication. Already she had overseen the installation of speed bumps in the Lost Colony neighborhood, spearheaded an ordinance fining citizens who failed to clear snow from their sidewalks, and initiated the implementation of a hotline for residents to report suspected rabid wildlife (mainly squirrels).

  In this new role, Rose discovered her passion, and though she still thought fondly of her exploring days with Randolph, lately, her dreams were of an entirely different sort of adventure—climbing the political ladder, perhaps one day becoming mayor.

  One of the things Rose liked best about this new Nicolet were the cultural activities at the Lab. She and Lily were frequent patrons, taking advantage of the opportunity to enjoy visiting musicians, theatre troupes, and lecturers. Lily had displayed an early and intense curiosity about all things scientific, and her favorite events at the Lab were the lectures by visiting scholars on popular issues of science.

  On their first visit, Rose drove past the gate and along the winding drive toward the towering building that had sprung up during her time away. The Research Tower it was called, and she marveled at the way it loomed over this land she remembered as orderly rows of corn and soybeans. They parked in the Research Tower lot and made their way, Lily’s hand in hers, toward the outdoor amphitheater that had been constructed where the Heggestadt farmhouse once stood.

  As they took their seats, Lily diligently studying the program open on her lap, Rose counted more empty seats than full. A shame, she thought, not to take advantage of the chance to see a first-rate production right here in Nicolet. Still, she couldn’t imagine the Heggestadts, or her own parents for that matter, in attendance. Most of the audience, she thought, looking around, were new citizens of Nicolet.

  After the performance, Rose decided to take the opportunity to explore the vast grounds of the Lab campus. As they drove along the roads that cut through the prairie grasses, she pointed out to Lily the farmhouses now relocated, the barns, the new buildings that had been constructed around them. Rose had never been to one of the Lab’s open houses for displaced families, but she had heard about them from those who had: how strange it was to find their former homes, farmhouses that had once stood so far from one another on such wide expanses of land, now arranged in a neat cul-de-sac, side by side like the houses in a subdivision. And how strange, too, to find their childhood bedrooms turned into offices or temporary housing for visiting scientists.

  When she’d returned to Nicolet, it had, in many ways, felt to Rose like she’d moved to an entirely new town. Now, as she drove past the cemetery full of familiar last names, past landmarks she remembered, and through the Lab’s expansive campus, she felt like she was showing Lily the ghost of a part of Nicolet that had once existed.

  CHAPTER 6

  Elementary Particles

&nb
sp; The urge to travel and explore probably originated in my childhood. Certainly it was an unusual childhood.

  —WILFRED THESIGER, THE LAST NOMAD

  MEENA AND LILY MET IN THE THIRD GRADE. THEY’D SPENT THE year racing to see who could finish their weekly math test first. Every Wednesday morning at 9:35 it was a draw as Lily arrived at the right side of the teacher’s desk and Meena at the left. And every Wednesday at 9:36 they exchanged polite smiles and began the long, disappointing walks back to their own desks. But they’d bonded over the sly looks they exchanged as they waited for the rest of the class to shuffle forward at the bell with their half-completed tests.

  Meena had noticed that Lily always brought the best things for show and tell—a shrunken head from Bali, a dried and stuffed piranha from the Amazon, which she passed around the classroom proudly, the fish’s desiccated body mounted on a small wooden pedestal.

  One day, finding no other available seats on the bus ride home, they’d been forced to sit together and had begrudgingly begun a conversation. Soon they were spending every Saturday afternoon together in the Nicolet Public Library, a large brick building that overlooked the town’s scenic river walkway.

  Lily preferred the quiet study room, spending her weekends working ahead in their textbook, Steps toward Science, shushing adults who whispered or folded their newspapers too loudly. Meena liked to browse the shelves, returning with armloads of obscure books from the reference section that caught her eye: Noteworthy Weather Events: 1680-1981, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, coffee table art books, mystery novels, and field guides, which she pored over beside Lily.