Charmed Particles

by Chrissy Kolaya

  “How very brave of you to venture out among those savages.” Mrs. Reginald Larson held her hand to her throat as she spoke, the skin along her forearm thin, seeming to only barely cover her bones and the network of blue veins beneath it. “Why, at any moment, I suppose, you must be in danger of being assaulted by headhunters or wild animals or goodness knows what.”

  “Oh, I assure you it’s not as dangerous as all that,” Randolph insisted.

  How, wondered Mrs. Ronald Carlson out loud, did the natives respond to his arrival? Why, he must so often be their first emissary from civilization, the first white man they had encountered save, she imagined, for a few intrepid missionaries.

  “And what about you, dear?” Mrs. Norman Amundson asked, turning to Rose. “Might you join your husband on his next expedition?”

  “Oh, I’m afraid not,” Rose protested. “My exploring days are long over.”

  “You must be very proud of your husband,” Sarala said.

  “Yes, of course,” Rose said absently, and Sarala thought she caught a shadow of unhappiness passing over her face. But in an instant it was gone. “We are so glad you and Meena could join us today,” Rose added.

  “We are honored to be your guests,” Sarala said.

  Beside them, Meena listened as Randolph responded to the Ladies’ Auxiliary’s questions and thought back to what he’d said about the perils of inauthenticity. Couldn’t it be the case—and she wondered if this occurred to Randolph—that these natives he photographed might be putting on a kind of show for Randolph and his photographers? That his subjects, having gotten a sense of what was expected of them, might oblige by performing just that, without his knowing or understanding, carefully staging and posing the photographs for Randolph just as he had hoped to avoid?

  If only, Meena thought, the photos could be taken by someone invisible, whose own presence wouldn’t change the moment. How did he know with certainty, she wondered, that what he captured was authentic and not some sort of performance of authenticity?

  She wanted to ask, but she couldn’t think of a way to do so that wouldn’t seem impolite. And among the other questions from the Ladies’ Auxiliary, hers seemed wildly out of place.

  “Very informative.” Mrs. Eugene Vogt took Randolph’s hand in her strong, formidable grip. “Now, though, what about the children? We must think of the children.”

  “Their children are, in general, very happy, it seems to me,” Randolph answered with a benevolent smile.

  “Well, you must write a book.” Mrs. Norman Amundson took his hand in hers, patting it as she spoke. “About your adventures.”

  “Yes,” Randolph nodded at her. “Many kind friends, including my lovely wife, have made that suggestion. I do a short article now and then, but a book would mean being trapped in my study, writing about my adventures rather than going on them. Perhaps one day, when I am an older man and my exploring days are well and truly over,” he conceded.

  “And where might your next adventure take you?” Mrs. Ronald Carlson asked.

  “Well,” Randolph smiled. “I believe there is magic and mystery to be found everywhere, even right here in Nicolet.” At this the women laughed, as though the very idea was outrageous.

  Mrs. Albert Steege swooped in. “Ladies, I think we must let Mr. and Mrs. Winchester and their guests take their leave.”

  On the ride home, Lily asked her father whether he didn’t sometimes find himself exasperated by the questions he received after his lectures.

  “Ah, but it is all born of curiosity,” he explained, “and that is an important quality to indulge.”

  Rose hardly listened to them, floating back to the photos, to her memories of the years when they had explored together, a happy, carefree time. She thought of the sound of oxen wearing wooden bells meant to frighten off evil spirits, of the night train from Siliguri, the tea plantations of Darjeeling, the small house where they had spent monsoon season.

  But now there was Lily, and it wouldn’t have done to have raised her on a caravan—no home to call her own, no friends her own age, let alone reliable, consistent schooling. It was better this way, Rose thought, agreeing with herself yet again, or convincing herself, she was never sure.

  Rose thought of how Randolph had looked the day of his return, unpacking his trunk with Lily, unearthing treasures for her, regaling her with stories. Always, at the beginning of his trips to Nicolet, he was happy, this period between the end of one expedition and the beginning of another. It was only later that the itch to pack returned. This she had learned to recognize in him, the way he began to move from room to room, fingering the mementos from his previous trips she had so carefully arranged in his study. Then she knew he was once more ready to make his escape from civilization.

  And it was true, she reminded herself, that she loved their women’s home—hers and Lily’s—filled with dispatches from exotic locales. That she relished her and Randolph’s separation for the sweet atten-tiveness it brought to their reunions. She missed him, yes, but it was the kind of pain one sometimes liked to feel if only as a reminder of its presence. The kind of pain that also gave one a bit of pleasure.

  Perhaps it was part of her farmer’s upbringing—her sense that the harder something was to do, the more valuable it was.

  CHAPTER 15

  School of Navigation

  FOR LILY AND MEENA, THE TRANSITION TO HIGH SCHOOL HAD been difficult. No longer were they cloistered in the Free Learning Zone. There were AP classes, where they spent the majority of their school day with their classmates from the old Free Learning Zone days, but there were also moments when they found themselves in class—for there was no AP gym, health, or lunch, though many of them had come to wish there was—with kids they had hardly seen since elementary school.

  Meena found herself enjoying these opportunities to interact with her other classmates, but Lily found it agonizing (a feeling, Meena noticed, that was shared on both ends of the conversation). The few times Lily and Meena were invited to social events—birthday parties, a football game here and there—it became increasingly obvious that, whereas Lily seemed to find these interactions excruciating, Meena had a gift for them, moving easily among her peers, meeting new people, able to slip into and out of conversations with ease. She enjoyed these events, though she wondered if she might enjoy them even more without Lily to attend to.

  Lily on the other hand, could usually be found with her voice teetering on the edge of exasperation, involved in some conversation it was clear her partners wanted nothing more than to escape from, and here Meena would often step in, extricating all parties from the social tangle they’d found themselves helplessly caught in, Lily relieved to be back by Meena’s side, her partners grateful to be free to join less unpleasant conversations. Meena had begun growing concerned, though, noting that even at social events that included only their AP classmates, Lily still managed to behave as though she felt out of place.

  As Rose and her team prepared their campaign strategy, they took advantage of each of the city council meetings, over which Mayor Callahan presided, to size up the competition.

  Well-liked but not a political heavyweight, was Rose’s assessment. The mayor was a former crop insurance salesman who, like many in Nicolet, had had career change thrust upon him as the area farms transformed, seemingly overnight, into subdivisions. He had, Rose noticed, a habit of using the expression “like I said” indiscriminately, on matters on which he had not previously offered comment, leaving her wondering whether he perhaps carried on in his mind a more substantive commentary in which he believed himself to have weighed in on these issues both sensibly and eloquently.

  His campaign slogan, each time he ran, had been the same: “Larry Callahan: Your Mayor and Friend.” This was not, in Rose’s opinion, likely to cut the mustard in the current political climate.

  But Rose had her own area of concern, for in each of her public appearances, there was, from the electorate, the whispered question: What about this husb
and of hers? What kind of a marriage is this? As though Rose and Randolph’s arrangement might be a harbinger of poor judgment on Rose’s part. How were they to know, some wondered, that she wouldn’t take it into her head to go traipsing off after this husband of hers on one of his expeditions, leaving them high and dry?

  Lily spent her school days immersed in her classes, attempting to avoid thinking about her mother’s campaign, dreading the moment she felt sure would come, in which one of her classmates would corner her, demanding an explanation of her mother’s stance on the issue. It hadn’t occurred to her that, even among her AP classmates, with the exception of Meena there were few other students as focused on the issue as she was, and that this scenario was unlikely to arise. For Lily, her mother’s position on the issue left her feeling publicly freakish, as if she’d been born with a second head.

  At the end of the school day, Lily and Meena made their way through the halls to their lockers. From overhead, above the racket of the crowded hallway, came the disembodied voice of the principal, making his end-of-the-day announcements. “As a reminder, next month Nicolet Public High School will host the public hearing on the matter of the proposed Superconducting Super Collider. We expect you to help make all of our visitors welcome.”

  Lily and Meena loaded their backpacks with books. “Congrats, Meena!” a blond girl with a high ponytail called out as she passed. “So excited to have you on the squad!” echoed another girl, whom Lily didn’t recognize. Meena waved to them and continued loading books and folders into her backpack.

  “Who’s that?” Lily asked.

  Meena pretended not to have heard her.

  “What does she mean, ‘on the squad’?” Lily asked, hefting her backpack over one shoulder. “What squad?”

  Tom Hebert leaned in between Lily and Meena’s lockers. “Oh, didn’t you hear, Lily?” He shoved a copy of the school newspaper into her hands. “Meena’s one of the new soccer cheerleaders.”

  Meena glared at Tom as she made her way through the jostling crowd.

  Lily looked down at the newspaper, then up, elbowing her way through the teeming hallway to catch up to her friend. “Is this a joke?” she asked, rifling through the pages of the newspaper as they made their way to the bus.

  “No,” Meena said, sliding into their usual seat just behind the driver.

  Lily sat down beside her. Freshmen soccer cheer squad: Meena Mital, Carrie Praeger, Jill… She looked up at Meena. “But you never said anything about this.”

  Indeed, Meena had not, knowing precisely how Lily might respond on the off chance that she made the squad. “I just wanted to try something new,” Meena said.

  Lily was confused. “But,” she began, “you don’t just take up a new hobby, just like that, out of the blue.” Her brow furrowed as though working through some difficult equation.

  Meena looked at Lily, exasperated. “Of course you do. We’re teenagers. That’s exactly what we’re supposed to be doing.”

  When Lily arrived home after school, Rose could tell by the faraway look in her daughter’s eyes, by the frown line on her forehead, that something was amiss.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked.

  “I’m fine,” Lily insisted. She sank into a chair in the living room and hid herself behind one of her schoolbooks. Rose watched her, curious, but did not press. She was herself preoccupied by a new wrinkle in her political ambitions.

  It had become clear to Rose that if she were to stand any chance of unseating Mayor Callahan it would require an overhaul of her family’s unconventional living arrangement. And so she had resolved to ask Randolph something she had promised herself she never would.

  Earlier that day, she’d sat at Randolph’s desk to write a letter, looking out over his curios as she began. It is not, of course, necessary to cancel what you’ve already planned, she wrote. But I wonder if, perhaps, by the summer you could arrange to be—Here she paused, wanting to say home, but realizing, as though for the first time, that the house in Nicolet had never felt like Randolph’s home, even to her.

  This draft, like each of her previous attempts, she had crumpled into a ball and swept into the wire wastebasket beside the desk.

  After an awkward dinner, during which Lily had been nearly silent, Rose managing only to extract from her that her day had been “fine” and that she’d done “fine” on her history exam, Rose told Lily that she would be out for the evening for a campaign meeting. “I’ll be home at nine, all right?” to which Lily, having returned to the living room and again hiding behind her book, replied only, “Fine.” What was worse, Rose wondered—a vocal, disapproving Lily or this quiet, sullen version?

  Lily liked having the house to herself. She listened to the sound of the garage door closing, of her mother’s car backing down the driveway. The sump pump in the basement hummed, the dishwasher, loaded with dinner dishes, sloshed away, and it felt peaceful to be there alone.

  She wandered into her father’s study, ran her fingers along the shelves of mementos from his trips: pottery, antiques, figurines, vases—a collection by which he hoped to acquire a full and complete knowledge of the world. At the window, a telescope stood at the ready. Open on the big leather chair in the corner was a book filled with drawings of mythical creatures. Next to it sat an old steamer trunk, on top of which rested the shell of a tortoise. She felt close to him there, among his collections. She sat down at his desk, pulled a sheet of writing paper from the drawer, and began a letter.

  I feel like I don’t understand anyone anymore, or like they don’t understand me.

  As she wrote, she noticed in the waste bin beside the desk a collection of crumpled pieces of paper much like the one on which her pen now rested. Here and there, peeking from among the wrinkled folds, she caught glimpses of her mother’s handwriting. Home, difficult, she could make out.

  She reached into the bin, smoothing the first page out over her own letter, and began to read.

  When Rose returned home that evening, she closed the door of the garage behind her, hung her coat on the hook along the laundry room wall, and slipped her feet out of her pumps.

  Lily was waiting for her in the kitchen holding one of the discarded letters, now smoothed flat on the table before her.

  “Oh, Lily, you startled me,” Rose said, coming into the kitchen. She looked at what her daughter had spread out on the table before her. She could make out the arcs and swirls of her own handwriting in among the spots where the paper had been crumpled, then smoothed flat.

  “You always told me to be proud of our family,” Lily said, her face stern.

  Rose took a deep breath.

  “You’re caving,” Lily continued. “You’re caving to social pressures that you should be smart enough to ignore.”

  Rose pressed her hands to the counter, remembering Lily’s face as a child, turned up to hers, worry marking the corners of her eyes—something she’d picked up on the playground. Is it true, she’d asked? She’d sniffled when Rose had finally coaxed it out of her—that a mother and father living apart no longer loved each other? “Oh my goodness, no,” Rose had said, taking Lily on her lap. How patiently she had explained to Lily that their family was different, but that they loved one another just as much as any of the families who lived together all the time.

  “Lily,” Rose began. “Like many things in this world, this is not as simple as you’re making it out to be.”

  “I’m so sick of people always saying that,” Lily said. “It’s like the thing adults tell kids when they don’t want to admit that they’re selling out.”

  There was a long moment of silence between them, the quiet sounds of the house continuing on in the background.

  “I haven’t sent it,” Rose said finally. “I didn’t send any of those letters.” She wondered now if she ever would. If she could ever find the right words to ask this of Randolph.

  The following morning, Lily trekked grimly to the bus. Unlike every other day, she walked past the empty seat besi
de Meena and instead selected the empty seat beside Anderson Small, a junior band member (clarinet) who was very much perplexed (and, truth be told, a little alarmed at what this abrupt change in seatmates would mean for his admittedly already quite tenuous position in the social strata of Nicolet Public High School). Meena kept her eyes forward, studying the back of the bus driver’s head as they made their way to school.

  On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the school employed a program whereby the students progressed through the daily schedule in reverse, so as the day began the girls found themselves in pre-calc. Before the class began, though, Mr. Boden called Lily and Meena to his desk and informed them that they were both expected in the guidance counselor’s office.

  “Busted,” Tom Hebert whispered under his breath.

  Lily glared at him, but she and Meena were both wondering what had prompted so unprecedented a summons. They made their way without speaking through the empty halls to the Guidance Office, where they were instructed to take a seat until called by the secretary. “What do you think this is about?” Lily asked Meena, whispering quietly, finally breaking the silence between them.

  “No idea,” Meena answered, reluctant to slip so easily back to normal. She tucked her legs under the chair and watched the secretary, who peered at the girls from over the rim of a pair of reading glasses that had slid precariously close to the tip of her nose.

  Sarala sat across from Carol at the kitchen table, her hands around the mug of coffee she’d learned to enjoy, though she preferred it with a small amount of milk and a large amount of sugar. She’d been telling Carol how absent Abhijat seemed lately, how entirely occupied he was by the matter of the collider and how it might impact his career.