Charmed Particles

by Chrissy Kolaya

  Lily hoped that Meena was right, that she’d do well at the Academy without her. For so long, she’d counted on having Meena at her side to help smooth the interactions with peers she sometimes found so genuinely baffling. But perhaps the students at the Academy would be different. Perhaps they’d be like her.

  As she emptied the drawers of her desk, sifting through stacks of paper and old schoolwork, she found the report she and Meena had done years ago for Mrs. Webster: “Lady Florence Baker: The Journey from Slavery to Exploration.” She leafed through the not-insubstantial text tucked into a glossy report binder. On the cover was the map of their subject’s travels that Meena had drawn, a meandering line snaking from Cairo along the Nile, all the way to Lake Albert. Lily traced it with her finger. Perhaps the Academy would feel the way things used to feel between her and Meena. Familiar, comforting, like home.

  Sarala had planned her conversation with Abhijat carefully. Cautiously, watching for just the right moment, having given Abhijat time to adjust first to the news of the collider, then to the news of the defunding, Sarala made her announcement.

  The passage from the Mary Kay biography that rang most true to Sarala was this: “The first sale a married woman needs to make is to ‘sell’ her husband on her new job opportunity.”

  It wouldn’t really be a job so much as a hobby. For she knew that much of Abhijat’s pride was tied up in the knowledge that he could provide his wife with a life in which she need not pursue employment. Just a few nights out a week, once she established her client base, she explained.

  Abhijat had not been as surprised by Sarala’s announcement as she had imagined he would be, and indeed, watching her present the opportunity to him, he had been struck by her confidence, her poise. She would be good at this, he realized, feeling proud of her. “If this is where your interest and passion lead you, then you must follow that,” he told her. And so it was settled.

  On the first page of her notebook, in her careful printing, Sarala wrote out “Client Histories.” She looked at the lined page, imagining it full, soon, of useful and valuable information.

  Sarala had been nervous before her first party, had prepared for hours, practicing with her flip chart and her case, enlisting Meena as her guinea pig, setting out the trays of makeup with their Styrofoam inserts, Carol looking on to critique her performance.

  “Sarala,” Carol pronounced when she had finished, “you are just a natural at this. I’m half afraid you’re going to put me out of business,” she added, smiling at her friend.

  For Meena, the first day of school without Lily there beside her had been both strange and exciting. She found herself wondering how Lily was settling in at the Academy. The night before, on the phone, Lily had described her room in the Academy’s dormitory, her impressions of some of the other students, the academic expectations. As Meena had expected, Lily sounded entirely at home there. Already she’d begun to leaf through some of her textbooks, Lily confided, wanting to get a head start. Many were college-level texts, she told Meena, excited.

  The girls exchanged plans for the upcoming weekend: Meena cheering at her first soccer game of the season, Lily attending the Academy’s annual Kurosawa retrospective.

  “You should come to visit,” Lily said before they hung up. “You’d fit right in.”

  With Sarala often busy in the evenings, Abhijat had taken over preparation of the meals, a task he enjoyed and an arrangement the whole family found they preferred.

  He planned the meals carefully, retrieving Sarala’s mother’s box of recipes from behind the Tupperware, working his way through each one and interspersing his offerings with experiments—new dishes he discovered, reading carefully each week through “Phyllis’s Fixin’s,” the Nicolet Herald-Gleaner’s cooking column.

  These days, in his office in the Research Tower and at home, evenings, Abhijat found that he now read more than he wrote, that he now listened more than he spoke, and each night, he set out on a walk—a stroll through the neighborhood, hands clasped behind his back, his pace slow and measured, taking in the world that had lived and breathed around him for years. Always, he walked at dusk, leaving the house as the sun dropped behind the elementary school. Always, he walked alone, for now it was Sarala who was otherwise occupied, her evenings filled with meetings and parties over which he imagined her officiating with poise and confidence.

  He enjoyed these walks, the neighborhood silent, the glimpses of the lives of his neighbors he could snatch as he walked home, their houses lit up from inside; overhead, planes making their way through the dark night sky.

  At the Winchester home, Rose otherwise occupied with her campaign work and Lily now off at the Academy, Randolph, too, had begun to take an evening constitutional. It was after a week of these slow, contemplative walks that Randolph noticed another figure engaging in the same evening routine.

  “Ah, Mr. Mital,” Randolph said, extending his hand as he recognized Abhijat. “I see we have gotten into the same habit.” The men shook hands. “I wonder,” Randolph suggested, “if we might not take our constitutional together this evening.”

  “Yes, why not?” Abhijat answered, pleased to have the company.

  The night of the election, Rose, Randolph, and her campaign team gathered at one of the new restaurants on Nicolet’s Main Street to watch the results coming in via the local cable channel. From her seat beside Randolph, Rose sipped a glass of white wine and kept one eye on the television.

  Early indications showed Mayor Callahan in the lead, but Rose was confident.

  She was certain the electorate realized that Mayor Callahan’s era had come to an end and that it was time for a new type of leadership in Nicolet.

  But perhaps because she had so wanted it, had so entirely expected it, Mayor Callahan’s win that night—“another term for Mayor Callahan, our mayor and friend,” the television announcer said, his voice carrying out into the noise of the room—took Rose completely by surprise. The restaurant had grown quiet at the announcement.

  Randolph turned to watch her as she took in the news, his arm around her shoulders. He found himself searching her face, her voice, for a sign of what stirred beneath. But she was, as always, composed, unreadable.

  Later, after the news had sunk in, after she’d graciously received visitors to their table sharing their condolences, their assurances that their votes had gone to Rose, she’d decided that what she wanted to do was to collect her signs, and to do it alone.

  She’d dropped Randolph off at the house and now circled slowly through the neighborhoods of Nicolet. At the height of the town’s division over the collider, Rose’s campaign signs and those of Mayor Callahan had begun to spring up in front yards, sprinkled among the pro- and anti-collider signs, so that each yard was a mingled cacophony of political opinions.

  Now Rose just wanted the signs to disappear. She couldn’t bear the thought of her supporters waking in the morning to such a visual reminder that they’d bet on the wrong horse. She wanted no such public reminder of her failure.

  The streets of Nicolet’s neighborhoods were quiet and dark. At the first house—not far from their own, where she’d left a concerned Randolph, assuring him that yes, she wanted to do this now, and that yes, she preferred to do it alone—she’d stopped, the car idling on the smooth, dark pavement. The sign caught the light from her headlights. WINCHESTER FOR MAYOR: A NEW ERA FOR NICOLET. She pulled the thin metal frame from the soft earth of the yard, opened the car’s back door, and carefully laid the sign down on the backseat. She returned to the driver’s seat, put the car in gear, and drove on.

  It took two hours. She drove through all the neighborhoods of Nicolet she remembered from her girlhood, through those that had sprung up in her absence, and through some newer still even than that. There was something oddly heartbreaking about the number of signs, a physical presence growing behind her as she drove on, of the votes she’d won, of how close she’d come to the thing she’d worked toward and planned for and count
ed on.

  On their first walk together through the neighborhood, Randolph and Abhijat had found themselves mutually delighted by one another, Randolph fascinated by the latest theory Abhijat was puzzling his way through, and Abhijat by Randolph’s thrilling stories of adventure.

  Soon, their evening constitutionals were, by habit, taken together, Randolph opening Abhijat’s eyes to the larger world, and Abhijat opening Randolph’s to the smaller.

  “I was sorry, for Mrs. Winchester, to hear the results of the election,” Abhijat said as the sun began to set in the damp evening heat.

  “Yes,” Randolph nodded as he walked, hands clasped behind his back. “It’s been quite a disappointment to her. Quite a shock, as well, I think.”

  “And what goal will she now pursue?” Abhijat asked.

  Randolph looked up into the sky, where the light of the day was fading. “Do you know,” he said, looking back at Abhijat, “I haven’t got any idea. And I’m not sure she has either.”

  They walked for a while in companionable quiet.

  Abhijat felt, sometimes, as though he were awakening to his own life. He’d begun to notice the details of their home. The decorations Sarala had accumulated and arranged so carefully suddenly struck him with their beauty, all the more acute knowing that for years he had failed to notice their presence.

  “It can be liberating,” Randolph noted, when Abhijat shared these thoughts with his new friend, “to let go of hopes that chain one to unhappiness, dissatisfaction.”

  “And you?” Abhijat asked. “How go your memoirs, my friend?”

  “Quite well, thank you,” Randolph said. “Now, at any rate. As a book for adults, I wasn’t able to find my way, but this—” He was writing now for the kind of curious child he had been, the kind both of their daughters had been. “This way feels, I think, like the right path to take.”

  They made their way past the small man-made lake around which some of the more sought-after homes of the Eagle’s Crest subdivision had been constructed, pausing in their conversation to listen to the low gurgle of frogs.

  “Today I revisited the Nile Delta, a place of much beauty and intrigue,” Randolph continued.

  “Should you need another set of eyes on the manuscript as you work,” Abhijat ventured, “I would be honored to read it.”

  Randolph smiled at him, clapping him on the back. “Just the thing, my friend. I’d be honored to have you.”

  Their walk coming to an end at the Winchester house, Randolph took his leave of Abhijat, who continued on the few blocks to his own home.

  The sun had set, and as Abhijat walked, he looked up into the lit-up windows of the houses he passed, as he had done in the early days of his marriage, just before Sarala had arrived in the States, searching those lit-up rooms for a hint of the lives that might stretch out before them.

  Now, with Lily away at school, the Winchester house felt less lively. Rose missed coming in to find Lily and Meena at the kitchen table, heads bent over their schoolwork, chattering back and forth.

  Randolph and Rose adjusted to the new quiet of their lives, of their home. On the happy days when letters from Lily arrived, they opened and read them together, Rose thinking of the many evenings she and Lily had sat together over dinner reading aloud from Randolph’s letters the latest news of his adventures.

  How like her own parents, too, Rose imagined, picturing them together at the kitchen table poring over one of her own letters describing her and her new husband’s strange adventures.

  “She’s liking her roommate a bit more than she did initially,” Randolph reported, skimming the page as Rose set the table for their evening meal. “Though she’s still cautious. I confess to not being terribly surprised about that,” he added, smiling at Rose. “And here, darling, listen to this.”

  Rose could hear Lily’s voice tangling with Randolph’s as he read.

  I know, Mom, that we didn’t agree on many of the issues, but I’m sorry that you didn’t win the election. I really am. I know how hard you worked and how important this was to you. I hope you’ll be able to find something else to work toward.

  The truth was, Rose had so expected to win that she had in no way prepared herself for the possibility that she wouldn’t. Once the collider had been defeated, it had seemed so certain that she would take Mayor Callahan’s place. That this would be the beginning of a new era in Nicolet.

  Now what? she’d found herself wondering the day after the results. It was the first time in her adult life that she’d been without a plan.

  Before, Rose would have wondered whether she and Randolph might not again take up their adventures together—Lily off at school and there being nothing to tie them to Nicolet. But just now Randolph seemed so happy there at home, content in a way she had never seen when he was not traveling. No, she realized, those days were in the past.

  She wondered, though, her thoughts drifting back to her political ambitions, if she had perhaps not set her sights too low. If her loss was in fact best seen as a nudge toward something larger, as an opportunity.

  She called a meeting of her campaign team.

  Abhijat, who had never permitted himself much time for pleasure reading, had allowed himself to sink happily into Randolph’s drafts, finding himself captivated by the world Randolph had conjured. Often, Abhijat would sit down in one of the comfortable living room chairs to read and would find, upon looking up at the end of a section, that hours had crept by and that it was now long since past time for him to begin preparing dinner.

  He had begun assembling his own box of recipes—something he planned to give Meena one day. He’d bought a new wooden box, this one decorated with a wreath of hand-painted flowers, and a set of cream-colored index cards on which he kept track of the meals that became their favorites:

  For when you have forgotten to see the loveliness around you, he wrote. And here his recipe for a simple dal.

  For when one must be reminded of one’s own good fortune. Then Meena’s favorite—chicken prepared on their new barbecue.

  For when you wish to thank the world for your happiness. And here, Sarala’s favorites—Kraft Dinner, Rice-A-Roni, green bean casserole.

  Sarala made her way home from the evening’s party. She’d done well that night. Indeed, she’d been surprised by how easy it seemed, how effortless, how fun. She wondered if this was how Abhijat had felt among his theories and equations. At home. Where he belonged.

  Now, she often passed her neighbors, returning from work just as she was setting out. She thought of this as her reverse commute, and she waved to those she recognized. Her first night, she’d felt as though she were setting off on a great adventure.

  It was almost always dark when she returned home, and Sarala loved peeking into the houses with the curtains left open as she drove, loved catching glimpses of families in the midst of their evening rituals.

  In front of the elementary school, she slowed for the stop sign. There on the corner was her home, light glowing out from the kitchen windows where she could make out her own family inside, Abhijat preparing a late dinner so they might all share their meal together, Meena at the table, bent over her schoolwork.

  Postscript

  The Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) was a real project. Those readers who remember the SSC will recall that, unlike in this novel, it was not a matter of whether it would be built, but of where. For the purposes of this story I have simplified this, making Nicolet the only site under consideration, but the conflict illustrated in this novel played out in many locations around the country. The Department of Energy conducted studies of a number of potential sites, finally settling on Waxahachie, Texas. There, construction of the super collider began, but the project was canceled before it was ever completed, the site abandoned for years.

  Notes

  The idea for Abhijat’s chart in chapter one comes from The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom by Graham Farmelo.

  For the sections on Ra
ndolph’s expeditions, I’m indebted to the following books for inspiration: I Married Adventure by Osa Johnson, The Remarkable Life of William Beebe: Explorer and Naturalist by Carol Grant Gould, and Safari: A Chronicle of Adventure by Bartle Bull.

  The quote from the farmer’s letter in chapter two comes from Fermilab: Physics, the Frontier, and Megascience by Lillian Hoddeson, Adrienne W. Kolb, and Catherine Westfall.

  The captions and quotes from The Secret Museum of Mankind in chapters two and ten come from The Secret Album of Oceana and The Secret Album of Africa.

  The blessing in chapter three comes from The Hindu Woman by Margaret Cormack.

  The mosquito analogy in chapter four is paraphrased from To the Heart of Matter: The Superconducting Super Collider, 1987, Universities Research Association.

  The title of chapter seven comes from a quote by Francesca Nessi-Tedaldi in an article titled “Crystal Gazing,” hosted on the CERN website.

  For the details of Lily and Meena’s report and presentation in chapter eight, I’m indebted to Pat Shipman’s To the Heart of the Nile: Lady Florence Baker and the Exploration of Central Africa.

  The quote Sarala remembers from her schoolbook in chapter nine comes from Women and Society in India by Neera Desai and Maithreyi Krishnaraj. The quote in chapter nine about turning coffee into papers comes from a personal interview with Adrienne Kolb, Fermilab, 2010. The list of questions Sarala finds on Abhijat’s desk in chapter nine comes from Fermilab: Physics, the Frontier, and Megascience by Lillian Hoddeson, Adrienne Kolb, and Catherine Westfall.