“Oh dear,” my father said, kneeling in front of me and wiping my face with a dirty rag. “Let’s not tell your mother how this happened.”
Injuries notwithstanding, I loved these projects my father took on and always wanted to be a part of them. One day, he brought home a pile of the parts needed to build a ham radio and asked if I wanted to help him put it together. It took us a week, and we built it at our kitchen table, which meant that for that week we ate dinner on our laps in our living room, our plates warming our legs, our water glasses on the floor. We ate with the windows open as the breeze blew in, and we watched our neighbors tending to their gardens and sitting on lawn chairs, or children riding their bikes, shouting.
After dinner, my father went straight to the kitchen table where he’d left a mess of wire and cables and vacuum tubes, and got to work. I started by helping my mother clean up, but then I went over to him, leaning over the part of the radio he was working on to study the diagrams and assembly instructions.
Once the receiver was built, we took it into the garage and built a simple transmitter. Then we studied for the radio license, quizzing each other on Morse code and electrical principles and radio wave characteristics every night. My father already knew all of it from the war. He’d been a radio operator as a soldier, and he told me how radio waves could go far, far out into space—and how a few years ago two radio operators from opposite sides of the world had sent messages to each other by bouncing them off the moon.
After we received our radio licenses, we spent many nights sitting side by side in the garage, picking up radio stations and messages from other amateur radio operators. There were so many messages floating around, waiting to be picked up: Are you lonely? How are you? What’s the weather like there? There were reports of shipwrecks, and messages from as far away as Canada—and we decoded each message as it arrived. Nowadays, when communication is so instantaneous, I cannot help remembering with nostalgia how my father and I turned the knobs to the contraption we had built as the messages came in through our complicated machine of vacuum tubing and plumbing wire. We recorded the taps as they came in—and I marveled that each tap traveled only a little bit slower than the speed of light. Tap tap tap came the pulses of radio waves into our earphones, and I transcribed the taps as fast as I could into letters, watching them gather into words and then sentences. It was the closest thing to performing magic that I could imagine: manipulating the radio waves that were all around us to talk to someone across the world.
That radio was also my first taste of anonymity: no one knew what I looked like, or how old I was, or whether I was male or female, adult or child. When these things did come up, my fellow ham radio operators were always surprised to discover I was a girl, but their manner toward me rarely changed, at least insofar as I could notice. The sense of belonging I felt because of that was freeing in a way I have never experienced since.
My father and I never told each other what we were saying over the radio, and I never decoded his messages. As far as I know, he never decoded mine. We took turns, sitting silently for hours, keeping each other company into the night. Sometimes I leaned into him, and he reached his arm around my shoulders and operated the radio one-handed. It was, I suppose, such a small and regular thing—to sit at a table in a garage next to my father every Sunday evening, taking turns transmitting messages. But in those moments I felt closer to my father than I ever had, or ever would again.
Chapter 4
THE SUMMER BEFORE I ENTERED TENTH GRADE, MY mother left my father. That’s always been the official story, as if it was primarily a marital rift, as though when she left my father, she didn’t leave me, too. She left while I was at the library—she packed up and went, taking our only car, without warning, without saying good-bye.
“Why didn’t you stop her?” I asked my father, when he told me she was gone. “What were you thinking?”
He sighed. “When someone wants to go, you can’t stop them.” Pausing, he seemed to consider what he was going to say next and continued, “She’ll come back for you. When she’s settled, she’ll come back for you and take you with her.” He looked so sad, and I imagined him alone in our house, and the thought was unbearable.
“Daddy,” I said, and I went to him. “I don’t understand.”
“It’s just the two of us now,” he said. He was trying to sound cheerful, but his voice was listless and defeated.
“We’ll be all right,” I said. I was shaken, but also sure she would return. In my mind, the three of us were alone in the world. We only had one another. It was inconceivable to me that she was really gone.
THE DAY BEFORE SHE LEFT, she’d spent the afternoon with me, looking at trees in our backyard. “Spend a minute,” she had said, “looking at the trees. Don’t talk, don’t think, just look at them. I’ll tell you when the minute is up.”
And so I’d sat in the grass, my mother beside me, looking at the trees—the way their branches reached out and swayed their leaves in the breeze, the way they shivered and bounced. I’d looked at how the light filtered down and danced through them, and listened to their soft rustling.
When the minute was up, my mother asked, “How do you feel?”
“Calm,” I said. “Happy.”
She smiled at me and touched my head. “Okay,” she said. “Now turn around and stare at our house. I’ll let you know when the time is up.”
And so I looked at our house—the grooves in the wood, the gleam of the window, the paint chipping at the corners, the gutters filled with leaves.
When my time was up, my mother asked, “Did it feel different?”
“Yes,” I said. “It felt harder, somehow, like everything I was looking at was surface, like my mind couldn’t just go in, except through the glimpses in the windows.”
“Okay,” my mother said. “Now I want you to turn around and look again at the trees, but now I want you to imagine that the house is looking at you as you watch.” I did this, and immediately felt the little hairs on the back of my neck rise. I felt the house looming over me, watching me; I felt like someone could come out of the house and do me harm while I had my back to it. I couldn’t concentrate on the trees at all.
“I don’t like this as much,” I said, though my mother hadn’t said it was time. “I feel like the house is creeping up on me, like it’s closer than it really is.”
“Interesting,” my mother said. “I want you to try just one more thing. Try imagining the trees are looking at you as well as the house, and that you are looking back at both.”
“But I don’t have eyes in the back of my head,” I said.
My mother smiled. “Just throw your awareness backward,” she said. “You know it’s there. You know what it looks like.”
And so I did. I looked at the trees—their leaves and branches, their strong, fine trunks. I looked at the way their roots reached into the ground, while their branches reached for the sky. And I felt them looking back at me. At the same time, I cast my mind backward toward my house—the surface of it, the shingles on the roof, the way the foundation dug into the ground. And I found I could cast my mind inside the house as well, our little kitchen—my mother’s armchair, my room on the second floor. I was overtaken by a revelatory feeling—of understanding, of being part of something huge. I could feel the trees, but also the horizon behind them. And I could feel the house, and the horizon behind it too. It felt like doing math—like sensing all the things I couldn’t see, but knowing they were there.
“Time’s up,” my mother said. “How did this one make you feel?”
“Like the world got larger,” I said. “No, like my mind expanded. Like my mind was holding the world, and the world was holding me.”
“Your mind beheld the mind of the world,” my mother said. “And it recognized yours in return.” She smiled. “I hope when you are older, you will think of me sometimes when you consider the trees, or when you feel them regarding you in return.” Then she reached over and did someth
ing she almost never did. She kissed me on the cheek.
I wondered afterward if that afternoon was my mother’s way of saying good-bye. But every time I thought this, I banished the thought from my mind. I refused to believe that in exchange for her absence, she made me a gift of those trees.
THIS WAS IN 1957, and my mother’s departure became the great scandal of our town. Everyone knew by the end of three days that she’d left. “Another man,” the car salesman said when we went to buy a new car. “You can’t trust foreigners. No loyalty.”
“It must be the Chinese blood,” a classmate said when we returned to school. His friend piped up, “My mom thinks your mom’s a commie spy.”
He said it confidingly, as if I wouldn’t care. But it made me aware of how uncomfortable the town had been with my mother’s presence, and how gleefully they talked about her once she was gone.
It reminded me of something she’d said once, when we were walking by a pond, which was covered by a thick net of tiny green leaves growing on the surface of its water. They were smaller than my fingernail and dotted with small, fragile white flowers.
“Where I come from,” my mother said, “we called this kind of plant duckweed. Look how thick it is, so that you can’t see anything underneath it. It comes from nowhere and takes over the pond, covering and choking everything, and then it disappears.” She took a stick from the ground and pushed it into the duckweed, which trembled but did not break apart. “Sometimes I think I am like that duckweed,” my mother said. “Floating without roots to hold me anywhere, disconnected from everything that I used to think was permanent.”
The feeling she described came over me: chaotic and rootless. “What about me?” I said. “Aren’t you connected to me?” But my mother had already stood and begun walking away.
AFTER MY MOTHER LEFT, I felt like my heart had been infested with duckweed: I felt rootless and disconnected, and my thoughts were tangled and messy. Still, as time went on we fell into a new rhythm, and while the town didn’t forget what had happened with my mother, that fall its attention turned to the news that the Soviet Union would be launching a dog into space. Almost everyone in those days in my town was invested in the space race, but the source of my obsession was the dog, Laika. She was a stray with a pointed muzzle and stand-up ears that pricked forward, and a sweet, taut body.
They had a million nicknames for her: Kudryavka, or Little Curly, Zhuchok, or Little Bug, and Limonchik, or Little Lemon. I was careful not to enthuse about Laika at school: given the suspicions my classmates continued to harbor about my mother and my own foreignness, I figured it was safest to pretend I wasn’t paying attention, in case they considered me disloyal for loving an enemy dog.
At home, I read everything I could about Laika. If I’ve ever dreamed of being a spy, it was during this time—when I harbored fantasies of entering the Soviet Union with the mission of rescuing her. I knew that scientists were gradually training her to live in a tiny space built inside the heart of the rocket they were launching her in, with only enough room to lie down. The enclosure was stocked with a special food, a gel that she could lick out of a container. A harness would monitor her vital signs. A bag strapped to her hindquarters would catch her waste. Finally, the day came, and they put her into the small dark box that was her home inside the rocket, a home without even a window, and flung her into orbit. It made me sad to think of all the endless stars around her, and no way for their light to reach her.
After the launch, I looked for her night after night in the sky, listened for the signal of her rocket on our ham radio. But none ever came.
On the sixth day into her flight, the Soviet Union reported she had died. When I read the news, I burst into tears. It came to me suddenly that it was possible my mother would never come back to us, and I cried so hard I started to hiccup. I realized I had been wrong about everything: I had thought Laika would survive, but she’d died. I’d thought my mother loved us, but she’d left. I took out a piece of paper and wrote, “The truth is crippling, it does not set us free.” I tucked the paper into the leaves of my German notebook. I stared out the window for a long, long time, thinking of my mother, and of Laika, and how it was possible to fall into the space that someone left behind, and be crushed inside, like air falling back into itself within a clap of thunder.
Chapter 5
A MATHEMATICAL PROOF IS ABSOLUTE ONCE IT HAS been written and verified: if the internal logic of a proof holds, it is considered unassailable and true. The underlying structure of my family was something I’d never questioned. It had formed the foundation of my life. When it suddenly dissolved, I was unmoored. It had never occurred to me to question my mother’s love for me, or our relationship to each other. I had believed these things were absolute.
Still, when my father introduced me to Linda, I hadn’t yet given up hope that my mother would return, and I regarded Linda with hostility. She was the opposite of my mother in every way: she was blond and busty and talked all the time. She had been born and raised in New Umbria, and her husband—her high school sweetheart—had passed away eight years earlier, and she’d been alone ever since. When she was at our house, I could hear her stomping around upstairs when I was downstairs, and when I was upstairs, I could hear her opening and closing doors downstairs with great force. When she wasn’t talking to another person, she was talking to herself, or singing. The food she cooked was always drowning in sauce, and she made my father laugh in a way my mother never had. After my father started dating her, our neighbors began inviting them to dinners and barbecues, as they hadn’t with my mother. My father always tried to persuade me to join, but I refused.
When, six months after introducing me to her, he told me that he and Linda were getting married, I retorted, “Don’t you have to get divorced first?”
My father looked away uncomfortably, then looked back at me. “Listen,” he said. “I didn’t want to tell you this, but your mother and I were never officially married.”
“What?” I was bewildered. “Why not?”
“It’s not that we didn’t want to. It’s that we weren’t allowed.”
“Who didn’t allow it?” I asked. “Your parents?”
“No, our parents were dead,” he said. “But it was illegal for us.”
“Oh,” I said. I felt the power behind the word illegal, the way it delegitimized my parents’ relationship. The way it delegitimized me. “Why was it illegal?”
“Because your mother and I met in Virginia, which didn’t allow whites to marry Orientals,” he said, using the word that, back then, was used to describe anyone of Asian descent. “And by the time we moved here, we had you. We were already a family. And we couldn’t just go to court and get married—we didn’t want people to talk.”
We looked at each other. “Legally,” I said, “am I considered Oriental?”
“Of course you’re not!” my father said. “At least I don’t think you are.” He rubbed his face. “I mean, what’s important is that you’re my daughter.” He reached out to put his hand on my shoulder, but I shook it off.
I went upstairs. In their bedroom, the things my mother had left behind were still there: the creams in front of her vanity, her hairbrush, and next to it, her wedding ring, smooth and golden. I slid it onto my finger, but it stuck halfway down. I tugged it off. I opened her dresser: the few shirts she’d left behind were still neatly folded in rows, a handful of dainty flowered handkerchiefs tucked beside them. What had she actually taken with her? I wondered.
Inside her closet were a few old dresses and a small suitcase filled with papers that turned out to be old grocery store receipts. There was also a tiny spoon bent in half, a stick of wax, and some stamps. Junk, I thought. She’d left behind junk. Some shirts, some dresses, a broken spoon, a wedding ring, my father, me. I felt worse than I had before. In the corner, caught up in the dust, were a few strands of her long black hair. I picked them up and shook them off, but they were limp and dusty and felt dead in my hand, and on
my way out of my parents’ room, I tossed them into the trash.
Linda and my father married two weeks later, just the two of them in front of a judge. She moved in that day, crowding our house with her boxes, pushing aside our things for hers with gusto. Linda’s brightly upholstered chairs were shoved between our old couch and my mother’s armchair. Her dishes were stacked upon our dishes. It cheered my father to see her things, to have them in our home. He kept saying, “Isn’t this great?” but his happiness wounded me. There was less room for me, and no longer any room for my mother to return. As for Linda, she made overtures of friendliness, but I looked away when she was near. Sometimes, I left the room. I mumbled when I spoke to her. I knew it was not her fault my mother had left, that she had nothing to do with her absence, but I resented her for filling that place in my father’s life, and I wanted to make clear that she would never fill it in mine. Without articulating it, I think I believed that if I suffered enough, if I believed in it enough, my mother would eventually return to us. So when I had to be home, I was usually in the garage, tapping out messages to strangers, asking them about telescopes.
Our local librarian, Ms. Lorain (may all the librarians of the world be blessed!) had slipped me a copy of the magazine Sky & Telescope, and I’d been obsessed ever since. I’ll never know how she knew that would be just what I needed—a magazine filled with diagrams of lenses and mirrors and instructions on how to build your own telescope as well as pictures of the glossy ones available for purchase. The only problem was that telescopes were fabulously expensive. Even the parts needed to build one myself were far beyond my reach. I satisfied myself with descriptions of what I would see through them: planets, stars, entire galaxies, invisible to the naked eye. I was a jumble of grief and longing, and I yearned to find my place in worlds beyond my own, to ground myself in science, with its fixed rules that never changed and never lied. I longed to see things on a larger scale, a cosmic scale. The Katherine scale was too close.
The Tenth Muse Page 3