Charmed Particles (8 page)

Together they'd thought long and hard about their decision. For Sarala, it had been difficult to argue with such persuasive data, and it pleased her to know that their decision meant they could devote themselves to Meena. She had a sense that it would be best to evade questions on the subject for as long as possible, but she had also begun to think about how she might explain their decision to the grandmothers, who would, she suspected, certainly be disappointed. She had been working on the following for when she could avoid the question no longer: that blessed with a beautiful child, healthy and of an easy temperament, Sarala and Abhijat had decided that one was enough. That one child, rather than many, meant they would be able to dedicate themselves and their resources to her, ensuring that what would march out before her would be a fine future, full of opportunity and possibility.

One afternoon, Abhijat invited Sarala and Meena to have lunch with him in the Lab's cafeteria. It was a beautiful day, sunny and warm, so Sarala loaded Meena into her stroller and walked through the neighborhood, across the busy Burlington Road, waiting first at the light, then making their way over the crosswalk and along the paths of the Lab grounds. Beside the pathways, the mowed lawn sprung up suddenly into wild prairie grasses, which blew in the warm wind like a soft brown ocean. When the trees rose up around them, they walked under the shady canopy of leaves until they emerged at the reflecting pond, the Research Tower rising up over the water and prairie grasses.

They made their way up to the entrance, Sarala negotiating the stroller and the glass doors. Inside the atrium she looked up, blinking against the sun coming in through the skylight to peer into the offices that looked out over the atrium. She found an empty table in the cafeteria, where Meena had begged to be taken out of her stroller. Sarala lifted her small body up and out and set her down in one of the plastic chairs, where Meena sat up on her knees and reached across the table for the salt and pepper shakers.

“Where's Daddy?” she asked.

“He'll be down soon,” Sarala answered, removing the salt and pepper shakers from Meena's hands and placing them out of her reach.

As she waited for Abhijat to join them, Sarala looked around the cafeteria, where clusters of physicists, engineers, and technicians in golf shirts and glasses sat together. Here and there she caught bits of their conversations.

“Well, they're still debugging the equipment,” one of them said, his tablemates shaking their heads in sympathy. “In some sense, it's reassuring. They were wrong, but wrong by five orders of magnitude.” At this the other men let out hearty, guffawing laughs.

Meena played with the table tent announcing I
NTERNATIONAL
F
OLK
D
ANCING
C
LUB—NEWCOMERS
ALWAYS
WELCOME!
and every so often, a triangle of geese cut across the windowed wall of the atrium.

Sarala had dressed Meena in a pink sundress with bows on the shoulders and tiny pink sandals, her hair cut in a short bob, bangs struck out across her forehead just above her large brown eyes. A few of the aproned and baseball-capped cafeteria ladies came over to the table to admire her, bringing Meena a small cup of ice cream and a dish of raisins from the salad bar. They smiled at Sarala. “So nice to have a child in the building,” one of them said.

Sarala could hear a scientist at a nearby table explaining to his lunch companion, “I told them, once they've got things sorted out they ought to be looking for an interaction that looks like—” and here she caught sight of Abhijat coming toward them from across the atrium, a broad smile on his face.

“Well, it won't be long before we're obsolete,” the man at the other table continued. “Before there's a bigger, faster collider to be built. Let's just hope we're able to build it here. I wouldn't like to think what will happen once we're no longer operating at the highest energy levels.”

“Now where did you get those treats, young miss?” Abhijat asked as he sat down beside Meena, tickling her under her chin. Meena smiled up at him and pointed happily at the cafeteria ladies who waved at her from behind the serving counters.

Sarala went through the cafeteria line, filling a tray for all three of them, while Abhijat sat with Meena, who tapped away at the calculator he had brought down from his office for her to play with. He cut up her chicken nuggets so they would cool and helped Meena sip milk through a straw in the small carton. Every few moments one of his colleagues came over to coo at Meena, “Such a good girl for her daddy.” At one of the nearby tables, a grandfatherly scientist made faces at her, then hid his face behind his hands.

After lunch Meena waved to her father as the elevator doors closed, lifting him up to the top of Anderson Tower where, Sarala thought, he might, were he to look out of his office window, be able to watch their slow progress home. She wondered how often he took his eyes from the equations on his wall to look out over the prairie toward the city.

Back outside, she retraced her steps, pushing the stroller before her, walking along the paths in reverse, Meena chattering away, asking, “Mommy, what does
almost
mean?” “What does
before
mean?” then slipping slowly into sleep.

At home, Sarala lifted Meena's slack, sleep-heavy body from the stroller and carried her up the stairs, loosening her sandals and letting them drop in the hallway. She laid Meena down in her small twin bed, pulling her favorite blanket up over her sundress and stopping for a moment to admire her child, her plump lips open slightly in sleep, her round cheeks, the soft spray of eyelashes that fluttered against her skin.

Downstairs in the family room, Sarala set up the ironing board and plugged in the iron, pulling Abhijat's dress shirts one by one from the laundry basket. The house was silent, the neighborhood silent. She had never imagined such quiet. Had never thought it possible. She had always imagined a life like the one she'd grown up with, aunts and uncles and grandparents all living together under one lively, boisterous roof.

She turned the television on and knelt before it, clicking up and down the channels—a game show, a painting class on the public television station, a midday newscast—but finding nothing that interested her, she turned it off.

The house was still with Meena asleep, the iron letting out a gurgle of steam as Sarala turned Abhijat's shirts this way and that, working the iron into the tiny spots around the collar and over the rounded shoulders. She looked at the clock, calculating how long until Abhijat would be home for dinner, wondered whether after the meal, after Meena's bath and putting her to bed, he would return to the Lab or work in his study off the foyer.

She wondered how long Meena might sleep. She had come to the end of the pile of dress shirts, each hung neatly on hangers along the ironing board: Tuesday—Wednesday—Thursday—Friday.
Maybe she's about to wake up
, she thought.

Sarala carried Abhijat's shirts up to the master bedroom, tucking them in among the suits on his side of the closet. She closed the closet door behind her, a little louder than she would have had she not been hoping Meena would wake soon, then walked down the hall, the beige carpeting muffling her footsteps.

Unlike the other mothers she chatted with at the park, Sarala did not look forward to nap time, such a long period of strange silence in the house. She opened Meena's door and looked in.

She was probably just about to wake up anyway
, Sarala thought as she sat down on the edge of the bed and reached out to brush the hair from Meena's face.

CHAPTER 5

New Symmetries

I
T
WAS A
POINT OF
PRIDE WITH
R
OSE,
THE
WAY
SHE AND
R
ANDOLPH
had arranged their lives outside the expected norms and traditions. Rose's upbringing had been so thoroughly and entirely conventional that she had been determined to find a different path for herself as an adult. Their family arrangement was uncommon, certainly, but it worked for them.
And yes, even for Lily
, she felt she had, always, to explain.
Lily and her father are devoted to one another and share a lively and meaningful correspondence
.

From Randolph, Rose and Lily received frequent dispatches concerning his recent adventures. In Malaysia, he'd tended water buffalo, leading them through muddy wetlands, having learned from the natives that the animal was not to be herded but rather that it would simply follow where he led.

In India, he'd stowed away on a steamship and sailed down the Brahmaputra. From his seat on the bow, he watched the ship's steady progress, palms arcing overhead. He had traveled the length of the river, from the Himalayas through Bangladesh to the Ganges delta, where he had seen tigers, crocodiles, mangroves, and slender boats skimming over water that in spring rose to flood levels as the snow melted in the mountains.

In the Kerala backwaters he'd lived in a thatched hut, and near Udaipur, he'd been delighted by the monkeys who came right up to the train as it stopped at the platform—little beggars, paws out, requesting the attentions of the passengers.

In one of his postcards to Lily, he listed his supplies for his latest trip:
We took twenty-four mules loaded with bedrolls, two yaks, tinned milk, ten bamboo tents, and four llamas (who did not get on well with the mules at all)
.

There were parts of his trip, though, that he did not share with Rose and Lily.

These were the increasingly frequent instances in which he now encountered places that were no longer isolated, no longer separated and protected from modernity. Of these experiences, Randolph kept only a mental list:

The Coca-Cola sign in front of the camel breeder's modest home.

The Tiwi elders dressed half in traditional costume, half in what looked to Randolph like secondhand university t-shirts.

And worst of all, the tent he'd been invited into, in which he'd found the tribal leader and his wizened council watching a football match on a small television powered by a noisy generator.

As he added to this growing mental list of the ways in which modernity now seemed to encroach upon these places, he had begun to wonder if he was searching for a kind of untouched culture that no longer actually existed.

Randolph sat cross-legged with Lily on the soft carpet in the master bedroom, his trunk laid open in front of the closet. He had returned from his most recent trip just that morning and now smiled up at Rose, who watched from the hallway as Lily dug happily through the open trunk on the floor between them, pulling out treasure after treasure, certain that with each one would come a new story from her father. This was their ritual each time Randolph returned home. Rose joined them only to pluck Randolph's more malodorous articles of clothing from the trunk and transfer them to a laundry basket destined for her immediate and thorough attentions.