Charmed Particles

by Chrissy Kolaya

  “The reign of Tsar Alexander II was drawing to its gloomy end,” Rose began. Lily listened as she stacked her blocks, arranging them into neat configurations. “The ruler whose accession and early reforms had stirred the most sanguine hopes in Russian society, and even among émigré revolutionaries, the ruler who had, in fact, freed the Russian peasant from serfdom and had earned the title of the Emancipator, was spending his last years in a cave of despair—hunted like an animal.” Lily smiled up at her mother as she read aloud.

  In a strange way, Rose’s return to Nicolet felt liberating. She had returned not as the Rose Webster they had all known, but instead as Rose Winchester, wife of a renowned explorer, mother of an exceptional child. There, flanked on one side by the Lab and on the other by the pioneer reenactors of Heritage Village, Rose settled down to raise their daughter.

  She and Randolph were devoted, besotted, if unconventional parents. In his letters home, Randolph sent stories he’d invented and illustrated for Lily, which Rose read to her at night, mother and daughter together marking out the path of Randolph’s latest expedition on the globe beside Lily’s bed, her chubby toddler fingers tracing her father’s travels all over the word.

  Rose had been Randolph’s constant and steady companion through years of travel together. And then, just like that, as though something had come over her as surely as it had when she had met and run away with Randolph, she knew that she would be happiest home in Nicolet with Lily. That Randolph would be happiest out in the world. And thus they had arranged their peculiar little family, Randolph visiting every few months, a situation much commented upon by the—especially older—ladies of Nicolet (friends of her parents, who were by then long dead, for life on a farm is hard labor, tiring on a man and a woman), who were never sure whether they should think of Rose as an abandoned woman left with a child to raise, or as one of the new feminists out to remake what they had always thought of as a perfectly functional world.

  Her exploring days over, Rose packed away her good, sturdy boots, allowed her membership in the Explorers Club to lapse, and set about making a life in Nicolet.

  Some had wondered—Rose’s father in particular, who, before his death, had found it impossible to understand why Randolph didn’t settle down with a good job at the bank or the hardware store—what point there was in Randolph’s exploration, given that the world had already been well and thoroughly explored in his opinion. But Randolph rejected this idea as lacking imagination. Can you imagine, he said to Rose, de Gama or Cortés listening to those who insisted that the known world had already been mapped and charted? Surely, he believed, there was always more to know.

  But Rose wasn’t thinking at all about what Randolph had asked. Instead she was thinking about the ways in which their unconventional arrangement was certain to ensure that their marriage would never fade into the kind of relationships she had seen all around her growing up—all of those hardworking farmers and their wives, her own parents, who sometimes sat beside each other for entire evenings without exchanging a single word.

  Hers and Randolph’s, Rose felt certain, would be one of the world’s grand love stories.

  CHAPTER 3

  The New World

  1973

  IT HAD TAKEN SARALA TIME TO ADJUST TO THE MIDWESTERN climate. Her first winter, she could be found in a sari and sandals, and over the ensemble the puffy down coat—purple—which Abhijat had helped her order from the Sears catalog shortly after her arrival. In addition to being insufficient protection against the icy Chicagoland winter, especially where feet were concerned, the ensemble brought looks from her fellow shoppers at the grocery store, which suggested to Sarala that it was not quite the thing.

  During her first trip to the grocery store, she’d spent hours rolling the cart up and down the aisles, stopping to look at every foreign possibility. She’d found herself frozen, mesmerized, taking in the images of meals before her on the boxes that lined the supermarket shelves. Photographed on plates garnished with parsley, the food—all of it new and unfamiliar—looked enticing and delicious.

  “You need a hand, honey?” A woman in a blue vest, her gray hair tightly curled, approached. VERA, her nametag read.

  Sarala smiled. “What is the most traditional American dish?” For the first meal in their new home, she wanted to prepare something in honor of their adopted country.

  “Well, that’s a good question.” Vera thought for a moment. “You’ve got your hot dogs and hamburgers,” she said. “Pizza. No—” she corrected herself, “that’s I-talian.”

  Finally, deciding on turkey dinner with stuffing and mashed potatoes—because that was what had been served at the first Thanksgiving, after all—she commandeered Sarala’s cart, wheeling it to the frozen entrée section, and helped Sarala select the Hungry-Man Deluxe Turkey Dinner because the Stouffers were too skimpy in Vera’s opinion, and, she confided, your husband will leave the table still hungry. In any household, she intimated, that was nothing if not a recipe for trouble.

  Although they now lived close enough that, in good weather, he could have walked, Abhijat preferred to drive to the Lab, the radio tuned to the classical music station. Each morning he joined the slow-moving traffic of neighborhood husbands inching their way toward their places of work, a nod now and then in greeting, though this was the extent of Abhijat’s interaction with his neighbors.

  The sound of geese each morning meant he had arrived. They congregated in the reflecting pond just outside the Research Tower, honking loudly at the arrival of each scientist. In the parking lot, Abhijat threaded his way through rows of old cars, Volvos and Subarus in need of a wash, university bumper stickers announcing their academic pedigree. On his first day he had parked next to a car with a personalized license plate reading QUARK, and as he made his way into the building, his heart swelled with a sense of being, finally, at long last, at home in the world.

  One of the proudest moments of Abhijat’s life had been the day he had announced to his colleagues at the university that he would be taking a position at the Lab. For his family, even for Sarala, some degree of explanation had been necessary to help them understand the importance of such a position, but his academic colleagues understood immediately and responded just as Abhijat might have hoped: mouths agape, eyes wide, hearty handshakes and pats on his back. Among physicists, the Lab was a place they dreamed of visiting, perhaps conducting research there for a summer. They had understood what it meant to be offered such a position.

  In the lobby, over the bank of elevators, two clocks displayed the time at the Lab and the time at CERN, their greatest competitor. Among the Lab’s physicists, the consensus was that it was wise to begin the day imagining what those rascals in Geneva might be up to.

  The theory group’s offices were on the nineteenth floor, near the library, where many of the theorists spent the mornings poring over the latest journals. Abhijat had been given his choice of offices—one that looked out into the Research Tower’s atrium, or one that looked out across the eastern arc of the accelerator, over which the land had been returned to its original prairie grasses. Abhijat hadn’t liked the sense in those atrium offices of being on display, great floor-to-ceiling windows through which anyone in the lobby or cafeteria might watch you working, so he had selected an office looking out over the campus of the Lab toward Chicago. On clear days, as he puzzled over an equation or the proofs of his latest paper, he could make out the skyline of the city and watch planes rising and descending from the airports.

  Sarala spent her days carefully unpacking and arranging their new lives in the house on Patriot Place, room by room—first the kitchen, then the master bedroom, then the living room, family room, and a study for Abhijat just off the foyer.

  In the hallway, she hung the framed blessing her mother had sent as a housewarming gift:

  Here may delight be thine

  through wealth and progeny.

  Give this house thy watchful care.

  May man and beast inc
rease and prosper.

  Free from the evil eye,

  not lacking wedded love,

  bring good luck even to the four-footed beasts.

  Live with thy husband and in old age

  mayest thou still rule thy household.

  Be glad of heart within thy home.

  Remain here, do not depart from it,

  but pass your lives together,

  happy in your home,

  playing with your children and grandchildren.

  O generous Indra, make her fortunate!

  May she have a beautiful family;

  may she give her husband ten children!

  May he himself be like the eleventh!

  Here in the States, people always and only wanted to know if she and Abhijat had an arranged marriage. But Sarala didn’t like to think of it like that. Rather, she thought of it as a thoughtful introduction made by their parents, and who better to know the best possible mate for their child? She kept a contented tally of the ways in which she and Abhijat had begun to love one another, Sarala marveling at Abhijat’s dedication to his work, Abhijat admiring Sarala’s social ease.

  “Everyone likes to talk to you,” he said to her one night, and Sarala furrowed her brow, bemused.

  “But that is nothing difficult, nothing to be proud of,” she said.

  Sarala sat at the kitchen table to write a letter to her mother, the house silent as it always was in the afternoon, the clock over the sink ticking quietly. You asked how I find it here, she wrote. There are, of course, many things that I miss, many things that feel strange and unfamiliar, but this is my home now, and it is of no use to dwell on a thing that might make one unhappy. Rather, I have determined to do everything I can to help us both make the best of our new home. She’d sealed the letter and mailed it off the next morning.

  In response, a few weeks later, she’d received an envelope full of the same small blue pieces of paper as in the recipe box, her mother’s same feathery hand in delicate pencil strokes.

  For when you miss the warmth and joy of your home, and here a recipe for vada pav.

  For when newness feels no longer thrilling, but instead fatiguing, and here her recipe for suji ka halwa.

  No, Sarala thought, reminding herself that one must not dwell in sadness or longing. She tucked the pieces of paper into the recipe box and pushed it to the back of the cupboard above the oven.

  One weekend afternoon, Abhijat proposed that he give Sarala a tour of the Lab’s campus. She had been delighted to accept, curious to see the place where he spent his days. As they neared the security booth, she watched Abhijat stiffen with pride as the guard recognized him and waved him through the gate. Together they drove along the curving, tree-lined drive, and when they emerged, as though from a tunnel, the twenty-story Research Tower rose up before them, mirrored in a reflecting pool dotted with geese.

  Winding, smoothly paved roads cut through the tall prairie grasses growing all around the grounds. Abhijat drove around the circumference of the accelerator, first in the direction of the protons, then of the antiprotons, the sunlight reflected in the cooling pond which, Abhijat explained, had once been necessary to maintain the temperature of the first generation of magnets used in the accelerator, but was now mainly aesthetic, and, as if to illustrate this, a family of ducks made their way home across the water.

  He drove along the path of the old fixed-target experiment, squat blue buildings punctuating the berm that had once housed the linear accelerator, a now nearly obsolete technology whose facilities, rusting with disuse, had been abandoned or used for storage. Abhijat pointed out the power lines stretching off into the prairie along the path of the fixed-target accelerator. “Energy in and protons out,” he explained as he traced their path with his finger to the horizon line and back. The future, he explained, was in the circular accelerators, and the Lab was home to the largest, highest-energy accelerator in the world. It was what made the Lab such an important place for his work, he explained. Here, they were working on the very frontier of high-energy particle physics.

  But what Sarala noticed was the herd of buffalo in the distance. “That, I’m afraid, I cannot explain,” Abhijat said. “A quirk of the Lab’s first director,” he offered, and Sarala laughed at the idea of these enormous animals living among the scientists and their tiny, hypothetical fragments of the universe. Abhijat, smiling, began to laugh with her.

  Like much of Nicolet, Abhijat explained, the Lab had been built on land that had once been farmland. In recent years, though, the Lab director had begun a project to return the land under which the tunnels ran from its geometrically arranged agricultural fields to the wild chaos of native prairie grasses. The addition of the herd of buffalo had been part of the prairie restoration project. There was speculation, though, among some local residents, that the buffalo were there less for aesthetic reasons and more as canaries in a coal mine—that their demise would be the first warning sign of something amiss at the Lab, of some nefarious plot afoot in the tunnels of the accelerator. Abhijat had only recently begun to apprehend the uncertainties many of his new neighbors harbored about what went on at the Lab.

  As Abhijat and Sarala drove, he pointed out the places where the land’s original farmhouses and barns had been left standing. When the Lab had acquired the land, the houses had been repurposed as offices, the barns for storage. A gambrel roof peeked out over the berm of the old fixed-target beam path. A silo stood at attention beside a red barn, silver tanks labeled liquid nitrogen and argon lined up against its outer walls.

  Across the road from the detector, Abhijat showed Sarala the untouched pioneer cemetery where local settlers had been buried, including a general from the War of 1812 who had come west with his family to explore America’s frontier. Sarala thought of how even the Lab—red barns against green fields against blue sky—was America as she had always pictured it.

  As the sun began to set, they made their way to the Research Tower. A flock of geese waddled slowly across the road in front of the car, trumpeting their indignation.

  Inside, Sarala and Abhijat rode the elevator up to the theory group’s offices on the nineteenth floor. A hand-lettered sign outside the conference room read THE CONJECTORIUM. In the hallway outside Abhijat’s office, Sarala admired a framed image of a collision event in which the subatomic particles created by the collision were shown spiraling off in all directions, each path delineated in a different color so that the image looked, to her, like a strange blooming flower.

  Abhijat’s office was a small room with floor-to-ceiling chalkboard walls covered in equations. Sarala didn’t know what the constellations of numbers and symbols meant, but they filled her with a sense of awe. She thought of the advice her mother-in-law had given her about helping Abhijat find happiness in the world. How, she wondered, could she compete with the importance of this work? Perhaps his mother was mistaken, and it would be his work that would bring him happiness and contentment.

  Across the hall, Abhijat pointed out the office of Dr. Gerald Cardiff, his closest friend at the Lab (by which he meant not that they shared personal troubles or the details of their lives outside of the Lab, but that they regularly shared a table in the cafeteria at lunch, and that it was understood that Abhijat, when stranded by a difficult idea, was welcome to wander into Gerald’s office where, together, they might hash the issue out).

  When she first arrived in Nicolet, Sarala had imagined that she and Abhijat would, together, join one of the Lab’s many clubs, a good way to get to know one another and meet others, but she had soon found that Abhijat, as well as his other colleagues, made little time for such diversions. The clubs were well advertised but sparsely attended. A good idea, if only in theory.

  As Sarala came to more thoroughly know and understand Abhijat, she saw how he had created for himself a disciplined life. For Abhijat, it was a discipline born of constant reaching, whereby each time he achieved one of the many goals he set for himself, he responded not with celebration
and satisfaction at his own accomplishment, but by thinking, Yes, but there is more to be done. A place in the top graduate program in his field—yes, but still the matter of prestigious fellowships. A teaching position at a well-regarded university—yes, but even better would be a place at the National Accelerator Research Lab. And having accomplished that? Yes, but there were always papers to be written, prizes to be won, a career to attend to, a legacy to build. Deep within him was the fear that if he allowed himself a moment to enjoy the successes he’d worked for, it would mean the end of them. That he might find the resting on his laurels so comfortable, so seductive, that he would never again accomplish anything of note. And then where would that leave him? No, he had decided—that was the sure road to an unremarkable career. Not what he imagined and planned for himself.

  Knowing so little about what it took to make a career as a successful theoretical particle physicist, Sarala was unsure whether she should regard Abhijat’s constant striving as something to be concerned about, as his mother had suggested, or as something to be proud of, as was Sarala’s inclination. Though she didn’t apply the same set of standards to herself, she resolved to do her best to help Abhijat accomplish his ever-shifting goals.

  Abhijat had been surprised and impressed by the easy way with which Sarala embraced the challenges and differences of their new home, but he wondered if underneath her enthusiasm there might lie some of the homesickness he had himself experienced.

  “It’s thoughtful of you to think of this,” Sarala said when he asked, “but I am adaptable. There is no reason you should worry about me. There is plenty for me to discover here. Plenty of ways to occupy my time. And you have enough with which to occupy your mind.”

  “Yes,” he responded, taking her hand, “but I have chosen—and chosen well, I think—to occupy my mind with your happiness, too.”