by Karen Piper
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For my mom, there were only two stages in my dad’s life: pre-Christian dad and post-Christian dad. We were not allowed to talk about pre-Christian dad. “Your dad did some bad things before he found God,” she said. “But he was forgiven.” I pictured him torturing people in some dark, gangster-filled room out of The Godfather. Only later did I realize she meant he had sex and drank. Luckily for my mom, Christianity erased all that, at least almost. I think she was still bothered by what she said was gone. Since he had been washed anew by Jesus, it made sense that she would wince when he brought up the war with a wistful smile as if he wanted to go back to pre-Christian dad.
Since my dad was half Norwegian, on Esther’s side, their marriage was an unlikely alliance. Swedes and Norwegians have been archrivals since the Swedes invaded everyone within reach ages ago. For the rest of their lives together, my mom would be the brunt of my dad’s Swedish jokes, and he her Norwegian ones. “Ten thousand Swedes ran through the weeds at the battle of Copenhagen,” we all learned to sing. “Ten thousand Swedes ran through the weeds a-chasin’ one Norwegian.” Christine and I, though mostly Swedish, usually sided with the underdog Norway, leaving my mom out in the cold.
From our house in Newport Hills, my dad took a bridge to the south in the morning to get to Boeing and another to the north at night to finish his master’s degree in aerospace engineering. My mom, who had a degree in medical technology, started “drawing blood and mixing stool samples,” as she described her job at Swedish Hospital. While my dad made the space shuttle and the 747, my mom became an expert on parasites. They were happy, the opposite of star-crossed. My dad reveled in the miracle of having non-orphaned children, and my mom quit her job after my sister was born, thinking she was safe at last with this shy man who brought her flowers. They must have thought it a marvel that they were two adults who could survive on their own. In short, we were living the American dream until, quite simply, we were not.
Our problems began with the men on the moon. I was four and my sister was six at the time of the first moon landing. We were both too little to understand how it could ruin us. The problem was that after that “one small step for man,” there was really nowhere else for them to go. Mars was too far away, and the moon, unfortunately, did not have much to offer. So no more spaceships for Boeing. In beating the Soviet Union to the moon, America’s main goal had been accomplished. After that, we had to beat them in Vietnam, which was even more expensive. We could not have it both ways. Space walks or wars, not both. So the Apollo program gradually shut down, which hit Boeing hard, and my dad was fired along with thirty percent of their workforce. Boeing really should have planned a few misfires first, shooting people right past the moon just to keep the money rolling in.
After twenty years at Boeing, my dad was left with no job and two little girls who had burst onto the scene with no clue about what had gone on before. After six months of unemployment, he would have taken anything when he got the job at China Lake. My mom would sometimes blame my dad for the way things turned out. “He was too shy,” she would say. “He wouldn’t assert himself.” And this was true.
The notes from his first interview at China Lake, which he kept in a box under his bed, described him as “shy to nervous” and said he was “a good candidate, except for his age: forty-nine.” I thought of my dad as reserved, but to me that meant he was wise. The notes did not say that. In fact, it seemed a bit cruel that they gave those notes to him. He could not get younger, after all.
“He was never much of a go-getter,” my mom used to say. He clearly preferred to be alone with his family, listening to his kids sing “Thumbelina” in the back seat of our Plymouth Valiant. We were little songbirds, full of life, like the astronauts from Apollo 17 who had skipped across the moon singing, “I was strolling on the moon one day, / In the merry, merry month of May . . . do do do be do.” It was the last time anyone walked on the moon. Those men had looked really silly and could not harmonize like Christine and me. But they were having such fun. “Isn’t this a neat way to travel?” astronaut Harrison Schmitt had said. I sometimes wondered about them. Would they have wanted to stay up there floating above the world if they had known the time for Apollo missions, for singing and dancing, was over back on Earth?
Or would they have wanted to come down and build weapons too?
Chapter Four
Weapons Bride
My mom, born Mary Dahlstrom, became a weapons developer because she believed a wife should follow her husband. Her mother, Hannah Dahlstrom, was from a long line of poor Baptist Swedes, which in terms of status ranks below Lutherans but above Pentecostals. Hannah had huge brown eyes and perfectly crimped dark brown hair that seemed determined to distract from her burlap-quality clothes. In 1920, she left Sweden at the age of twenty along with a million other Swedes fleeing famine. Even though the worst had been over for decades, the momentum of famine kept going, stuck in people’s feet like a motor reflex. Letters kept coming from once famine-stricken relatives raving about the good soil in America. The Homestead Act was still offering free land to anyone who settled in Minnesota—except, of course, to women. Hannah went anyway. My mom said she threw up all the way across the Atlantic.
The options available to Hannah in Sweden were not too desirable. Her parents were both dead, as was her brother, who had succumbed to tuberculosis at twenty-three. She had been offered lodging in a remote goat herder’s hut on a distant relative’s farm, which was a spinster’s job. An isolated log structure in the Dalarna hills, the cabin was about five by eight feet with a wooden plank for a bed. Instead, Hannah boarded a ship in Gothenburg bound for New York City.
At the time, post–Civil War blacks were moving north, running from the South as fast as they could, while post-famine Swedes were moving west. My mom said that when Hannah went to look for work, she kept seeing signs that read “No Blacks or Swedes” in the store windows. Ultimately, she had to settle on “piecework,” or sewing at home for a pittance, while the cousin she moved in with probably wished that she would leave.
I can only imagine what meeting Victor must have meant for her. Hannah told my mom she was “swept off her feet,” though my mom always added, “Duped, more like it. He was a good-looking man.” I think my mom was afraid the same fate would befall me. “Why do you keep saying you want someone ‘cute’?” she would ask. “He’ll be old and ugly someday. Remember that.”
Hannah was Victor’s second wife, sandwiched between three. Her job was to take care of his five kids, ten acres, cow, and chickens while he worked at the Brown & Bigelow factory making calendars, greeting cards, and other paper goods. Before long, Hannah had two children of her own, a boy and then my mother. After that, my mom’s and Hannah’s hearts beat in circles around each other, but the Dahlstrom boys were the kings. “David always stole the show,” my mom said of her brother.
My mom was not allowed to speak Swedish with her parents, since they thought even a hint of an accent would hold her back. So Swedish became the language of secrets that she could not enter, a language that carried all the suffering of the generations before.
When my mom was twenty and in college, Hannah had her first stroke. She was fifty, worn out, and with no insurance or doctors or expectation of help. The first stroke only made her a little forgetful, but then they came in clusters over the course of two years with no one to sit by Hannah’s side but my mom. As the daughter, my mom’s assigned role was watching Hannah die. Her brother David had by then enlisted, while my mom’s heart kept swimming with Hannah’s heart in the sickroom upstairs. No one was there to help her, a girl in her twenties who could not stop the suffering.
Even Victor relegated them both to the attic.
The first stroke only made Hannah limp a little. The next one, a few months later, made her mouth droop on the right side. Each stroke made my mom move a little closer to Hannah. She leaned in to interpret H
annah’s slurred words or stood beside her to provide a crutch as she walked. Their bodies slowly merged into one as they tried to climb the stairs, up and down.
“It’s only this far to the stove,” my mom would say as Victor sat in his recliner and watched TV.
“Thanks,” Hannah would whisper, and try to lift her foot. Hannah had stopped going to Sunday school long ago, because she was afraid they would make her read the Bible in English. She was too embarrassed by her accent then. Now that she was losing her voice altogether, my mom must have realized that what language you spoke hardly mattered in comparison to whether you could speak at all.
Hannah was finally confined to her bed. “I can do nothing,” she said in Swedish one day, and though my mom could not speak Swedish, she knew what this meant. Hannah still thought she should be working.
“She was such a patient hard worker,” my mom explained to me.
Since they could not afford a doctor, my mom had to improvise. She learned how to feed her mom after her tongue stopped moving. She simply moved it out of the way and forced the food down her throat while she choked and protested. There are millions of decisions like this made every day by those who tend to the dying. “There was no way to stop my mother’s pain,” my mother said. “The biggest problem was that there was no one to tell me what to do.” So Hannah wasted away in that attic with no way to explain what she needed while my mother absorbed her pain and decided for her.
“I never felt so helpless in my life,” my mom said. As she sat in that old wooden chair beside the attic bed, she began to calculate how to get insurance, and decided that she needed a job. Every day, she and her mom decided the same thing: it should not be like this. In their hearts, together.
Somehow, during those hard years, my mom worked toward a medical technology degree at the University of Minnesota. “It was one of the only degrees open to women,” she explained. “And I liked science.”
My mom was twenty-eight when Hannah’s body finally, quietly, separated from hers forever. The freedom of living in one body was a shock my mother could not bear. It catapulted her to what came next.
Meanwhile, Victor began to worry about finding a third wife, saying he’d need someone to cook. Swedes were dreaming the dream of the West at the time, like so many people. There were thick, rich woods out there, which translated into easy cash. So when Victor decided to pack up the farm and move to Seattle, my mom went too. They sold the farm and bought a small house on the outskirts of town.
Victor, who lived by his looks, soon had another wife.
Maybe only then did my mom feel free. She had a degree and no one to keep alive.
When my dad approached my mom in that Swedish Baptist church, I wonder what she felt. Did she feel the same relief that Hannah had when she met Victor? Or was it something else? “There was no other way for a woman to buy a house back then,” my mom explained. “We did not get raises, and our job opportunities were very limited. So we had to get married.” She took the best marriage proposal she had, the one that came with insurance. My dad had a good job at Boeing as an aerospace engineer, and he brought her flowers, which no one had ever done before.
“He won me over with flowers,” she said. Is that love?
My mom and dad were married in the St. Paul church she had grown up attending, with lilacs and bridesmaid dresses paid for out of the $1,200 they had saved for their new life. My mom had insisted it be $600 each, to start fair and square. She did let my dad buy the white roses for the altar and her bouquet. His sister sewed the wedding dress. My mom was a stunning, beaming bride, with perfectly curled short black hair, red lipstick, cat’s-eye glasses, and a white veil with a train. Everything was as it should be. My dad gave her pearls and the same Chanel No. 5 she would receive on every anniversary after that.
But by the time of their wedding, my dad had run out of money to fix their blue Rambler. “We had to park the car on a hill and let it roll down, hoping it would start.” And so lives began together, rickety and imperfect, blessed by hope. By getting married, my mom could own a house, though she was well aware that she was contributing too. “Although he got no money from my family,” she explained, “he got a wife with no school debt and a marketable degree. My dad did help with school expenses. That’s worth something.” I suppose this is how marriages are decided and negotiated, cast and recast through time. Of course, I knew by then that marriages have secrets, things that are never quite equal, never “fair and square.” These are the things that are scarcely revealed to oneself, let alone to each other.
My own marriage taught me that.
Chapter Five
Missile Aerodynamics
Soon, pitch and roll took over my dad’s life. “Pitch” is when a missile veers up or down, sometimes turning right around and hitting the pilot who fired the shot. This happened more than once at China Lake. Once, a missile veered straight up, stalled, and headed for a group of visiting dignitaries in the bleachers. Luckily, it missed them. “Roll,” on the other hand, is when a missile starts to spin on its nose-to-tail axis like a top. It is not as dangerous for the pilot as pitch, but it is dangerous for civilians on the ground. The worst thing that can happen is when a missile starts to pitch and roll at the same time, which is called “dynamic instability.” More often, people will say the missile “went crazy.”
My dad went to China Lake to stop all that. He worked diligently at pitch and roll late into the evenings during our first summer there. He would sit and draw symmetrical circles and curves on blue graph paper, with long equations beneath and around them. Though I loved the artistic nature of the wind, how its angles and curves were so perfect, I wanted him to be drawing with crayons with me instead. I quickly became jealous of pitch and roll.
One evening, as I inched closer to my dad’s feet at the dining room table, he pulled me up onto his lap. “So, Karen,” he said, tickling me, “do you want to know what I’m working on?” The green-and-yellow glass interrogation light hung above the dining room table, swaying slightly with the fan, but did not bother me.
“Yes!” I said through giggles, happy that my pestering had finally worked.
“Okay,” he said, picking up his pen. “Watch this.” He started to draw his squiggly lines on the blue graph paper. An equation.
I watched it come into being, until I could read:
“That’s the roll moment equation,” he explained. “This equation tells you when a missile is going to roll. The first half of the equation is here,” he said, pointing at the part before the first plus sign. “This is the part that makes a missile roll. Remember I told you about roll?”
I obediently nodded my head.
“Okay, and this part,” he said, pointing his black pen stamped “U.S. Government” to the part after the first plus sign. “This part is what stops the roll.”
His pen hovered, shaking in the light of the dining room lamp.
“So I have to keep it balanced right there,” he said, pointing at the first plus sign again. His pen stayed there for quite a while. “Then the missile won’t roll. Every missile wants to roll, but you have to stop it before it gets there. You have to push it back.” All I cared about was that my dad’s lap was warm and his leg was bouncing up and down, which meant he loved me.
But I tried to concentrate. The missile wants to roll, and you have to stop it. So my dad’s job was stopping time. “If you drop a quarter from a building faceup,” he went on, “what keeps that quarter from landing faceup?”
“It spins!” I said, waving my arms about my head and twisting them behind me.
“Yes, but why does it spin?” He wanted more.
“Um, I don’t know.”
“Because of the wind. The wind flips it around, like it does to a missile.”
From this, I learned my dad’s job was like dropping a quarter from a building and getting it to land faceup. He had to find a mom
ent in time, the roll moment, which is when the quarter starts to flip. He had to eliminate that moment.
“But how do you stop the wind?” I innocently asked.
“You can’t, of course. But if you drop something heavy and pointy, it won’t spin like a quarter. You have to find the right shape for the missile so it doesn’t spin.”
I understood a little, though I was only seven.
“Or this can stop it,” he said, grabbing the purple-and-silver gyroscope he’d given me. It spun in circles on the inside while standing upright and still on the outside. I wanted to throw up my hands and spin in circles then, to dance like the gyroscope to the rhythm of his voice.
“If we put this on a missile’s tail, it will slow the roll down, because it generates inertia. Like if you are on the merry-go-round, you can’t jump off when you are going really fast, right?”
“I don’t know!” But I determined to find out when school started.
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Later I would discover that all organisms—from amoebas to humans—have an innate spinning tendency. A blindfolded person will walk, drive, or fly in circles. As a neuroscientist explained, “We get lost because we are unable to orient using our senses—such as vision—and an innate mechanism for spiraling then is revealed.” No one really knows why, but people will walk in circles in the woods if they get lost. People will swim in circles with no visual cues. “People tend to walk in a spiral, not a straight line, with eyes closed,” the neuroscientist discovered. “When vision becomes blocked, memory of the landscape provides sufficient guidance for eight seconds; and though the Earth is a giant magnet, humans do not, unfortunately, possess a magnetic ‘sixth sense’ to complement it.” The Earth starts spinning inside our heads after eight seconds. Maybe this is why the Sufi mystics spin in circles when they dance. Maybe we all want to spin in circles. In a blizzard or whiteout, your memory of the landscape stays with you for only eight seconds. After that, you will not know where you are. After that, you will naturally veer away from your tent. You will naturally die.