when tourists looked over moccasins
that mean one thing to people who stitch them
and another to those who buy them.
Some Indians learned to hide what they loved
so it wouldn’t be taken.
Some hesitate to say even their names.
I’ll write new questions. Edna understands
that tucking stories behind silence or slanting sentences
has given census workers the wrong numbers,
kept families like hers from their fair share
of help for building schools, hospitals, and roads.
Words and numbers may be gifts or tools for theft,
used to bring together or push apart.
True and False
Edna sets a blue clay mug and a cheese sandwich
on her desk, examines old questions.
Some pierce. Others are walls.
Are you an American Indian?
has more complicated answers than Yes or No.
Census workers used to decide someone’s race
or ancestry based on how they looked or where they lived.
Now they ask, What do you call yourself?
and make room for more than one choice.
The coming 1980 census will be the first time
no one will be asked to name the head of the family.
As if just one person should be in charge.
Edna writes questions she wants asked by people
who are more like those whose homes they may enter,
who see and hear differently than outsiders
shaped by old tales of tepees, arrows, and feathers.
She needs numbers that more truly reflect people living
in or outside reservations, in small towns or cities.
Families are more like cloth than furniture,
their boundaries not as solid as wood.
Homes
Edna runs her hand over her straight black hair,
which smells faintly of chlorine from the pool.
She tries to ignore the pain in her knees
as she puts a pot of blue flowers on her desk,
though none are the shade of the sky on a day
so fine the river catches color from above.
Learning of her grandmother’s death, she holds
the deerskin dress to her face, breathes the scent
of home. She bakes potatoes and carrots,
but nothing matches the sweet and smoky taste
of camas bulbs pulled from a stone-lined pit.
She misses the sound of horses galloping past canyons,
the scent of wild roses under a sky unsplit by monuments.
Taking Measure
Edna studies people and where they live
within borders that change as much as rivers,
mountain ridges, and their names.
County lines, state lines, and power lines
can duck in and out of sight.
Old maps noted the numbers of footsteps
between markers of rocks or twisted trees.
But the boundaries of reservations
show how history is written with division.
The calculations of how much land should be left
to those who first lived there didn’t factor in much fairness.
Edna’s numbers break the world into parts
she patches back together.
Her columns are straight as the spine of a book
before covers open to spill stories.
Over years of work, she opens paths
through layers of data
from hundreds of tribes, each
with its own way of keeping triumphs and sorrows.
Her charts and graphs are not meant for a queen,
but to convince busy people who work
with the president
of the need for reform.
The government often underestimated the numbers
of the peoples who first lived on this land rich
with possibilities before being forced onto reservations.
Edna’s tallies show the Nez Perce population
in many Idaho towns is more than twice
what was shown in the last census.
Much of the American Indian population
looks larger than it was ten years ago. Some changes
are due to healthier babies and people living longer,
but new statistics reflect more truth.
Edna Lee Paisano’s work means some schools
will get more books. More children will eat breakfast,
more homes will be built, so bedrooms won’t be crowded.
She’s proud. Some joys are impossible to count.
Still, math breaks open new views,
shows a spiraling way toward home.
Blue Again
Silver-gray runs through strands of Edna’s hair.
She leans on a cane, watching children run
through fields blue with star-shaped flowers.
She brings home charts the way others carry cakes
or handmade clothing. Good gifts change shapes,
make a circle. She left here thinking she couldn’t return
as a mathematician. She returns to tell children
how math can help them find jobs with computers
or in business or places no one can yet see.
Edna’s knees ache, but she slowly kneels
to dig up camas bulbs that she roasts in a pit,
tastes sweetness she never forgot.
She takes off her shoes to wade in the river
that rolls around rocks. The river remembers her shape.
LOOKING BEYOND
VERA RUBIN
(1928–2016)
Still Awake
WASHINGTON, DC, 1938
Vera opens the bedroom window, wonders
how long stars have been shining,
if her sister, sleeping across the invisible line
they set in their bed, is dreaming. She wonders
if anyone else in the neighborhood is still awake,
why night makes her thirsty,
and where questions come from.
At last she shuts her eyes,
tucks her black-speckled notebook under her pillow,
which smells of backyard air and grass.
She dozes on the spinning earth, wakes,
finds familiar stars in new parts of the sky.
Darkness makes much disappear, but also reveals.
The Library Book
The cover shows a silhouette of a girl in a long dress
and bonnet peering through a telescope.
Vera reads about the Quaker girl who lived on an island
where her father recorded the movement of stars
to help sailors find their way. Maria Mitchell
became the first American to discover a comet,
made of dust, rock, and ice that heats up near the sun,
and streaks the sky with brief shine. As Vera reads,
her breath rises, falls, opens with a parachute’s grace.
Table Manners
In sixth-grade math class, Vera becomes friends with a girl
whose light hair is as straight as her own dark hair is curly.
Jane’s right front tooth was chipped
when she fell from a tree.
After Vera shows her the star maps
in her speckled notebook,
Jane searches for graph paper in her father’s desk.
She finds a protractor and slide rule that they experiment
with when Jane’s mother invites Vera to stay for supper.
In the middle of the meal, she asks,
How was school? Vera, what’s your favorite subject?
Math, she replies.
I was terrible at math. Jane’s mother laughs lightly,
unembarrassed, almost proud.
Jane’s brother wrinkles his nose. Yuck. I hate a
rithmetic.
No one scolds or urges the boy to give numbers a chance,
the way his father praises vegetables
as the little boy hides peas under mashed potatoes.
Vera doesn’t suppose anyone means to be unkind.
But she’s stung by how they suggest what she loves
is odd, unworthy, inexplicable.
She glances at Jane, who looks down at her plate.
Doesn’t anyone in her family know
math is Jane’s favorite subject too?
Questions
Vera and Jane are fourteen when they measure poles
and blankets to put up a tent in the backyard.
They stash number puzzles, flashlights, books,
and grape jelly sandwiches her mother packed
in case they get hungry in the middle of the night.
A gust of wind collapses the tent.
The girls crawl out and lie on their backs,
listening to crickets and traffic, fanning out their fingers
to measure distances between stars.
Vera asks, Do you think we could make a telescope?
We had a big tube that held the linoleum
my dad put on the kitchen floor, Jane says.
Their voices sound louder in the dark.
They can’t find that tube, but they ride the bus
downtown to a flooring store and get one for free.
Vera’s father helps her build a telescope
with pipes and plumbing fittings,
lenses, an old bottle cap, and a bit of paint.
As they wield tools, he tells her about when he was a boy
called Pesach Kobchefski, before coming to this country
where his name was changed to Philip Cooper.
These memories seem as precious and faraway as stars.
The telescope doesn’t work as well as Vera hoped.
But night holds questions as beautiful
as those in math class. She likes the sprawling uncertainty
as well as the ends of complicated equations.
Laws of Gravity
Vera’s algebra teacher finds mistakes as intriguing
as right answers. Mr. Gilbert’s curiosity
makes Vera eager to take physics in a room with cabinets
filled with scales and parts of old radios and generators.
There, she and Jane are the only girls among boys
who often seem giddy, as if after years of sharing
about half the classroom with girls, they landed
in a special league. They laugh at the teacher’s jokes
about explosions, Bunsen burner tragedies,
and mysteries under the hoods of cars.
Vera listens as Mr. Himes tosses an apple,
watches it fall, and talks about how the sun’s gravity
holds together the solar system.
Mercury, the planet closest to the sun, moves fastest.
The farther a planet is from the sun, the slower its orbit.
Mr. Himes praises more of Newton’s discoveries,
Pythagoras’s theory, the way Galileo showed
the earth revolves around the sun, and Einstein’s ideas
about time and space. Mr. Himes says, Lesser insights
come from sheer hard work. Madame Curie stirred
pitchblende for years to reduce it to radium.
It’s the first time he’s mentioned a woman scientist. If
she hadn’t discovered that element, someone else would have.
But how did Mare Curie suspect something wild
was in the ore? Vera raises her hand as a boy blurts out,
Didn’t her husband do most of the thinking?
As other boys laugh, Vera lowers her hand.
She won’t point out the genius it took to discover
that stone dug from the earth holds secrets of star shine.
Will the boys snicker or think she’s showing off
if she says that after Pierre died, Marie became
the first person to receive two Nobel Prizes,
the second for her work alone?
In the Cafeteria
As Vera opens her brown paper bag,
Jane says, I got a C minus on the precalculus test.
That’s almost a D. Maybe
I shouldn’t study math in college after all.
But you love it, Vera says. That was a terrible test.
One boy near me got mad at his bad grade.
Another got paler than usual and swallowed hard.
But I didn’t hear them give up their dreams.
Jane shrugs, nods toward a girl who’s popular, pretty, rich.
I wish I were her. Who would you be if you could be anyone?
Vera is shocked, silent. She looks down
at the dress she sewed from cloth
printed with cherries that looked good rolled up
in the store but seems silly on a person.
The stitches in the hem are too wide.
She makes mistakes but wouldn’t swap who she is:
the girl who built a rough telescope with her father,
who helped a friend make a tent,
even if it toppled in the wind.
She wouldn’t want to lose even the girl
who was silent when boys laughed about Marie Curie.
Someday she might be more brave.
Listening
An adviser visiting Vera’s high school talks with her
about college. I don’t believe any girls major in astronomy.
She glances at Vera’s record. I see you do well
in French, sing in the glee club, and enjoy art.
Perhaps you could paint astronomical scenes.
Vera remembers the library book about Maria Mitchell,
the first woman to teach astronomy at Vassar College.
Vera applies there. After learning she was accepted,
she spots her physics teacher in the hall.
Her words tumble: I got a scholarship to Vassar College!
Stay away from science and you should do okay.
Mr. Himes smiles.
Vera catches her breath. Has he forgotten
she earns all As? Just two girls take the class.
Does he even know which one she is?
Starting Out
POUGHKEEPSIE, NEW YORK, 1944
In the all-women’s college, girls who were quiet
among boys in high school now wave their hands
to ask questions, interrupt, argue about ideas.
Professor Maud Makemson teaches the secrets
of differential equations, which break long problems,
and integral equations, which put the pieces back together.
Calculus mirrors the swift changes of stars.
Vera uses chalk on black paper to draw the orbital
patterns of asteroids, some discovered by her professor.
Science unfolds new stories, while math helps
turn the pages, touches the past, reaches
for the future, makes room for uncertainty.
The Motion of Stars
Home for the summer, Vera agrees to meet
the son of a couple her parents know at the synagogue.
No one told her how handsome he is.
Bob Rubin is dark-haired, a little taller than her.
As they stroll after a concert, they talk
about music and gravity. Vera looks up at stars
that are born and die in clouds of dust.
She says, It’s amazing that all the stars
we see belong to our Milky Way.
It’s good to meet someone who recognizes
what’s in the sky as more than names for candy bars,
cereal, and cars. Bob tells her a bit
about his war work, doing research for the navy,
while studying physics in graduate school at Cornell.
I want to follow the bigge
st questions I can think up.
When I was growing up, I leaned on the windowsill,
slept, then woke up to find the stars in new places,
she says. I’m still curious about those movements of stars
and the earth. Old questions matter too.
Autumn
Dipping graham crackers in milk or munching on apples,
Vera works on math that reflects forces on paper
and sometimes suggests other powers that cannot be seen.
She helps a friend with homework.
Alice puts down her pencil and complains,
I thought astronomy would be easier
than other sciences, but there’s so much math.
And Professor Makemson is weird. What are those charms
and stone carvings doing in the observatory?
She researched astronomy and religion in China and Egypt,
Vera says. And won a Guggenheim fellowship
to study Mayan astronomy.
Whatever that is. Tell me more about the boy
who takes the trolley to visit you here on weekends.
I hope you’ll invite me to the wedding.
He doesn’t visit every weekend. Vera blushes. And I don’t know
about marriage. I want to keep studying astronomy.
You can’t do both, Alice says. You can be like Miss Mitchell,
who never married, or be a wife and mother.
Professor Makemson has children,
but she got divorced. A woman has to choose.
The Old Globe
Her last year in college, Vera is the only astronomy major.
She has a job in the observatory as clock winder,
telescope keeper, and paper grader. Under the dome,
arced as the sky seems to be, she likes
using the telescopes almost whenever she pleases.
But it’s odd to be the only person in some classes
that Professor Makemson says were filled
back when Maria Mitchell taught.
In 1869, right after graduation, six majors took a train
to Ohio to observe the total eclipse of the sun.
The professor’s voice echoes under the dome.
It may have been the first all-woman scientific expedition.
That’s history. I care about what no one knows.
Grasping Mysteries Page 11