Charmed Particles

by Chrissy Kolaya

  In the mornings, NPR on the radio on the kitchen counter, Lily and her mother ate breakfast in silence, ears alert for any mention of the countries where Randolph had set off on his latest expedition. Sitting across the table from each other, they passed the crossword back and forth as they ate. Rose had taught Lily tricks like filling in the -Ss on plural clues, the -EDs on the past-tense clues, and how she might discover further clues within the clues themselves.

  For Meena, mornings were a parade of novelty breakfast foods that had caught Sarala’s eye in the supermarket—Pop Tarts, frozen waffles, frozen pancakes, frozen pancakes wrapped around a frozen sausage, sausage biscuits, biscuits and gravy in a microwaveable bowl, packets of oatmeal with colorful bits of dehydrated fruit that came to life under a stream of hot water from the teakettle.

  After dinner, their small family of three spent the evenings in the kitchen, Sarala cleaning up, Abhijat beside Meena at the table helping her as she worked through her homework.

  Meena’s schoolwork, Sarala had noticed, was one of the few things that could tear Abhijat away from his study in the evenings. As she loaded the dishwasher, she watched with pride the patient way he explained the things Meena struggled with, the way he listened carefully to each of her questions, even as, she knew, he was already beginning to craft his response. These were the moments in which Sarala loved Abhijat best, in which she best knew that he loved both her and Meena.

  Rose encouraged Lily’s intellect, enrolling her in summer enrichment courses in art, music, science, and math. By ten, Lily had a layperson’s grasp of Heidegger, an unflagging interest in Freudian psychoanalysis, and had begun compiling a list of her own criticisms of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis.

  On weekends, Lily divided her time between the public library and the YMCA, where she could be found among the aging patrons, swishing along on the rowing machine.

  On her bedroom mirror, Lily kept a photograph of her father, blue turban wound round his head, skin darkened and worn by the sun, beard closely cropped, indicating the beginning rather than the end of an expedition (which was itself distinguished by the presence of a long, tangled, and unkempt beard her mother insisted he trim immediately down to a refined Van Dyke). The photo had been taken in the Sahara, where he had joined a salt caravan and, in native dress, led his camel by a rope through the desert. Lily loved to hear again and again the story of the light-handed pickpocket Randolph had met there, who had offered to help Randolph negotiate a suitable bride price for the lady of his choice. “Oh, I’ve already got a lovely bride, thank you,” he had replied, pulling out the photo of Rose and Lily he kept on him always, brandishing it with pride.

  Randolph came home during the holidays—Christmas, Lily’s birthday, and Rose’s—but these were short trips, temporary. The house was a house of women—Lily and her mother, their nights spent together, Rose reading to Lily from the letters Randolph sent from his expeditions—North Africa, the Greek Isles, New Guinea.

  Rose kept one room on the first floor of the house, just off the foyer, as a study for Randolph, a dark-paneled room with a sidebar on which sat a bottle of whiskey and a polished silver seltzer dispenser. Here, she kept his leather-bound expedition journals arranged chronologically on the bookshelves along the wall. Above the bookshelves hung framed photographs of Randolph and Rose on safari, of their trusted porter on a trip to Nepal, and an impressive collection of rare maps. An imposing mahogany desk, which Rose kept polished to a high gloss, sat in the center of the room, and facing the desk, two leather wing chairs. The whole setup suggested an office that, in addition to being regularly occupied (which it was not), also hosted regular visitors (which it did not), who might occupy the wing chairs, admire the photos, and flip through the expedition journals. In fact, with the exception of Lily, who liked to curl up in one of the deep leather armchairs, a framed photo of a pygmy nuthatch hanging over her head as she applied herself conscientiously to her schoolwork, the room was almost always empty.

  Sarala and Abhijat had always attended Meena’s parent-teacher nights together, Abhijat asking most of the questions about Meena’s performance and making notes on the small pad of paper he kept in the breast pocket of his jacket. This year, however, he’d been scheduled to present at a conference, so Sarala had promised to take detailed notes and report back on all pertinent information when Abhijat returned.

  She dropped Meena off in the school’s library, where Meena made a beeline for the low shelf of books near the librarian’s desk, and Sarala made her way down the wide hall toward Meena’s classroom: Mrs. Hamilton, Grade 3, Room 125. The halls were filled with harried parents. “You meet with Jenny’s teacher. I’ll meet with Randy’s,” one woman, a baby on her hip, shouted down the hall to her husband, and Sarala thought of how here, again, was evidence that Abhijat had been right: that with one child, they need not spread their attentions, their resources, so thin.

  Inside, Sarala took in the bright primary colors of the posters decorating nearly every inch of wall space. She thought of the schoolhouse at Heritage Village, with its spare walls and stern signs. She took her seat at the small desk labeled with Meena’s name on a piece of construction paper in careful cursive. A teacher’s handwriting, Sarala thought, smiling at the other parents sitting uncomfortably in the too-small chairs.

  Mrs. Hamilton began by asking each of the parents to introduce themselves, and Sarala listened intently as they did so, trying to imagine something about their children, in whose company Meena spent her days.

  Once the introductions were finished, the woman next to her leaned toward Sarala, extending her hand. “We should have met long ago. I’m Rose Winchester, Lily’s mother.”

  “Oh, yes,” Sarala said, taking her hand. “I’m very pleased to meet you. Meena talks about Lily, well, nearly all the time.”

  “It’s the same at our house,” Rose said, smiling.

  There was something so perfect about Rose, in her twinset and pumps, glasses on a chain around her neck, Sarala thought, looking at her, though she wasn’t so much attractive as orderly looking, Sarala decided.

  At the front of the classroom, Mrs. Hamilton began her part of the evening’s presentation—a description of the students’ daily schedules, an introduction to the textbooks for the year—and as she began, both Sarala and Rose pulled notebooks and pens from their purses. They were the only two parents taking notes, Sarala observed.

  “For my husband,” Rose explained, gesturing at the notepad spread open on her daughter’s desk.

  At conferences, Rose always took notes to share with Randolph in her next letter, and, in the weeks following the conference, she hand-delivered a letter from Randolph to Lily’s teacher, by way of illustrating that while theirs was an unconventional family arrangement, Randolph was by no means an absentee parent.

  “For my husband, too,” Sarala said, holding up her pen. The women exchanged warm smiles, sharing this small thing between them. Sarala wondered if perhaps Lily’s father had a job as demanding as Abhijat’s.

  Despite their many differences, both the Mital and the Winchester homes shared one thing in common—a long bookshelf filled with a maroon set of World Book Encyclopedias. It had been Lily’s idea that the girls should, together, embark upon a scheme of self-improvement whereby they would both read, each night before bed, a pre-selected entry in the World Book.

  They moved through the set alphabetically, taking turns selecting the day’s reading, and at 7:30 each night, the phone in one house or the other could be heard ringing as the girls telephoned each other to announce the evening’s selection, at lunch the next day, their common reading providing them with a subject for conversation: ENLIGHTENMENT PHILOSOPHERS over peanut butter and jelly, MASTERS OF GERMAN LITERATURE over Fruit Roll-Ups, THE HALLMARKS OF FEUDAL SOCIETY over string cheese.

  KINDS OF BRIDGES

  At night, by light of campfire or oil lamp, Randolph wrote letters to Rose and Lily, which they took turns reading aloud at dinner on t
he happy days when the letters arrived bearing strange foreign stamps, his thick cream-colored writing paper marked with the signs of his travel—dirt, sweat, rainwater-smudged ink, exotic smells rising up from the paper as they unfolded it. In his letters, Randolph took them through the day’s adventures, and it was like being there with him. Almost.

  When Lily missed her father, she retreated to his study, where his collection of National Geographics dating back to the 1930s weighed down a series of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, their bright yellow spines a kind of wallpaper. Here, Lily curled up in the leather armchair, flipping through back issues of Popular Explorer, imagining her father hiking, setting up camp for the night, or traveling among a passel of goat herders, conjuring him into the pictures in his articles.

  In Portugal, Randolph had learned from the local women how to balance a basket the size of a small table, filled with chickens, on his head for carrying to market. Home for Christmas, he’d tried to teach Lily, and she’d practiced diligently, walking gingerly to the bus stop at the corner, her backpack balanced precariously on her head.

  “What are you doing?” Meena asked as Lily made her way down the narrow aisle of the bus slowly, eyes looking up, willing the backpack to stay put.

  “Get a move on!” the bus driver shouted at her.

  A HISTORY OF MAGIC DURING THE MIDDLE AGES

  The first time Lily was invited over to Meena’s house, she’d been beside herself with excitement at the idea that she would be having dinner with an actual, real, flesh-and-blood physicist. She came home with Meena on the bus, Meena calling out, “Mom, we’re home!” as they opened the door, dropping her coat and backpack in the foyer next to a pile of slippers.

  Lily removed her shoes, lined them up along the wall next to the slippers, and folded her coat in half, placing it carefully on top of her shoes.

  Sarala had made them an after-school snack of lime Jell-O with rainbow-colored marshmallows floating, suspended, in its strange not-quite-liquid, not-quite-solid state. This she served proudly, though the girls were less enthusiastic, poking at it disinterestedly with their spoons.

  They worked together on their homework, sitting side by side at the desk in Meena’s room until Sarala called them down to dinner. There, Abhijat stood at the head of the table and waited for the girls to take their seats before being seated himself.

  “We are delighted to meet the celebrated Miss Winchester,” Abhijat said, holding his glass aloft in a toast. “Meena has told us a great deal about you.”

  Lily blushed and felt as though she were dining with President Reagan himself.

  Throughout the meal, she peppered Abhijat with questions about his work, his research, his daily routine at the Lab, and the difference between an experimental and a theoretical physicist. Abhijat was delighted by her animated curiosity. (This was one of the few traits she shared with her mother, favoring Randolph in appearance and temperament.) She was a perfect companion for Meena, Abhijat thought.

  For Meena, it was—as this moment is for nearly all children who find themselves seeing a parent through the eyes of another—startling. Watching her father grow spirited and enthusiastic as he talked about his work, she felt as though she, too, had met someone new that night.

  “And your father?” Sarala asked, turning the conversation to Lily. “What does he do, if I may ask?”

  “Of course,” Lily nodded. “He’s an explorer.”

  Sarala looked at her for a moment, and decided there must be some meaning lost in the translation. She resolved to look it up in the Webster’s Unabridged in Abhijat’s study after dinner.

  CODES AND CIPHERS

  Although Lily’s status in the social hierarchy of elementary school suffered for her awkwardness (which Meena often tried to mitigate with her more nuanced grasp of elementary-age social cues), her impatience with the intellects of her classmates (which Meena privately shared but was savvy enough not to display), and her often eccentric taste in personal attire (showing up, for example, one morning, in a kitenge topped with a Hello Kitty T-shirt her mother had insisted on adding to the ensemble for reasons of both warmth—for it was winter in Illinois—and modesty), when it came to show and tell, even the students who thought Lily was a weirdo had to admit that she aced it.

  “My dad brought me this teddy bear back from a business trip. I forget where,” Abby Johnson mumbled, holding the stuffed animal aloft listlessly by the ear and sounding bored, even by herself. “He got my mom one, too.”

  Lily, however, had requested that Mrs. Hamilton make available to her a slide projector and had informed her teacher that she expected to require thirty minutes for her presentation, not including Q&A. Had Mrs. Hamilton not been so exhausted at this point in the school year, having had her fill of wiping noses and breaking up scuffles on the playground, and having been kept up the night before by her husband’s snoring, she might not have allowed it, but as it was, she chose to see it as a blessing, as thirty minutes of class time she did not have to fill.

  Lily shared with them slides of her father’s most recent expeditions. From New Guinea he had brought Lily a ceremonial drum made with lizard skin and human blood, which she had passed around the room and which the children held in their hands reverentially, equally horrified and curious, just as she’d known they would be.

  ANIMALS OF THE GRASSLANDS

  It was field trip season—spring—by which it was understood that the teachers were exhausted and the children were restless, and thus any excuse to get everyone out of the classroom was leapt upon. Mrs. Hamilton, upon learning that Meena’s father worked at the Lab, asked him to give the class a personal tour of the facility, and Abhijat had been more than pleased to oblige, consulting in advance with Meena and Lily about what their classmates would find most intriguing.

  On the appointed day, the children, jostling and chattering, spilled in an unruly crowd from the bright yellow school bus, which idled noisily in front of the Lab’s education center, a low building surrounded by prairie grasses and a reproduction Conestoga wagon. Here they were met by Abhijat and a docent, who had been dispatched by the education center to translate theoretical physicist to layperson, as needed.

  The docent introduced Abhijat to Mrs. Hamilton. “Dr. Mital.” Mrs. Hamilton took his hand in hers to shake it, beckoning the children who had begun to stray back to the fold. “We are so grateful to you for taking time out of your busy schedule to show us around the Lab.”

  “Not at all,” Abhijat said. “It is my great pleasure to have you all here as our distinguished guests.”

  “Perhaps you know our chaperone, Mrs. Winchester? Lily’s mother.”

  Abhijat took Rose’s hand in his. “Very honored to meet you, Madame Alderperson.”

  “Please. Rose,” she corrected. During all of her interactions with the Mitals, dropping off and picking up Lily and Meena from their many activities together, Rose had only ever met Sarala. She’d been curious about Meena’s father.

  “I understand our daughters have taken quite a liking to each other,” Abhijat said.

  “Yes, I’ve been so pleased to see that.” Rose smiled.

  Together they looked at the girls, who stood a bit away from the rest of the children, notebooks and pencils already in their eager hands.

  “Children, may I have your attention, please?” Mrs. Hamilton’s voice rang out over the chatter, her hand held up in the air as she spoke. “I’d like to introduce Meena’s father, Dr. Mital. Dr. Mital will be our expert guide today and will tell us all about his work here at the Lab.”

  The children gathered in a squirmy half circle around Abhijat. “Yes, yes,” he said. “Very pleased to meet you all,” Abhijat began, nodding at the children. He was astonished by the way Mrs. Hamilton had so quickly brought order and quiet to the crowd of children, who now looked up at him in anticipation. “To begin, I wonder how many of you are familiar with what it is we do here at the Lab?”

  Lily’s hand shot up into the air.

&nbs
p; “Yes, Miss Winchester, but perhaps one of your other colleagues?”

  Abhijat waited for a long moment, but no other hands rose.

  “Well, then, Miss Winchester, perhaps you will provide an explanation?”

  “At the Lab,” Lily began, “you’re studying elementary particles that are the building blocks of the universe,” sounding as though she were reading from a textbook, “as well as the forces that hold those particles together or push them apart. The particle accelerator and its detectors are like a giant microscope that helps you see these particles. Well, not really see them—they’re much too small to be seen,” she corrected herself, already beginning, Abhijat saw, to grasp the difficulty of explaining this work simply.

  “Thank you, Miss Winchester. Very informative,” Abhijat said, a smile lingering on his face, proud of how carefully she must have listened to his own description of his work. “Now, will you all please come this way?”

  He led them in a long, wriggling line toward the Research Tower, the noise of the children, who had again resumed their chattering, rivaling that of the geese that eyed them suspiciously as they made their way past the reflecting pond, up the stairs, and into the atrium.

  Rose looked up toward the ceiling of the atrium, its interior walls lined with glass, reaching up to the heavens. While on the surface the building couldn’t have been more different, it reminded her, somehow, of the great cathedrals of France.

  “The accelerator,” Abhijat continued, turning to speak to the children as they paused in the atrium, “of which I will give you an aerial view in just a moment, is, some believe, the most important instrument for physics that exists in the world today. Why?, you may be wondering. Because of speed. Because in order to answer today’s most pressing, most exciting questions in physics, one must have the fastest accelerator operating at the highest energy level. And here, at the Lab, we are fortunate to have just such an instrument.”