The Atomic Weight of Love (39 page)

Emma and I lingered. The storm had cooled the air by a good twenty degrees, and I shivered once.

“So, talk,” she said.

“This idea I have—borne of events with Marvella and her parents.”

“All right.”

“I’ll have the check in a week.” The lawsuit was over at last, and all of the funds from Alden’s estate were soon to be deposited into a bank account that bore only my name. I would have nearly two million dollars. I stretched my legs, thinking that now I’d allow myself the luxury of a new pair of hiking boots. “I want to start a group for girls.”

“Los Alamos girls?”

“Initially. But I have bigger plans. Eventually, I’d like to open it up to girls throughout northern New Mexico.”

“What kind of group?”

“To encourage girls in their dreams, support them in pursuing their dreams. Increase their exposure to the multitude of possibilities that are opening up for women. Help them find out what their dreams are.”

“Careers in science?”

“Careers in
whatever
. But not just careers—I’m thinking of lives of independence. Strong lives. Brave lives. How can a girl who’s only lived seventeen or eighteen years fully evaluate the ramifications of her choices? I want for girls to see what they have in terms of potential, where their talents lie, and then I want to provide them with role models, support in terms of practicalities—how to go about making any given dream manifest. An actual plan for life.”

“And you think they need this in addition to parents?”

“There are girls whose families will give them all of this, although in my mind any family could use supplementation—no one knows it all, can be everything. And there are girls who just need an outsider, a sounding board.”

“Women’s lib.”

“Well, somewhat—but I’d call it quiet resistance to subterranean chauvinism.”

“Lovely—
subterranean chauvinism
. How do you anticipate presenting this, getting parents to let their daughters participate?”

“Through the high school. The Girl Scouts, 4-H Club—even the rodeo club. Churches. A youth center, if the county ever gets one going.
Home ec classes
,” I said, meaningfully.

“Ha ha!” Emma clapped. “And you’ll do this all alone? Or will you hire people?”

“I’ve talked to my attorney about forming a nonprofit corporation. I’ll do it that way. But this is the best part,” I said, sitting taller. “I want the women of Los Alamos—all of us, our generation—to be mentors to these girls. All the women you and I have known for decades, everyone I know from the pool, women from the grocery, TG&Y. Clubs, the choral society. Think about it!” I was nearly shouting. “Our women’s discussion group! Barbara Malcolm—you know she has all of that public health experience.” Emma nodded. “Judy Nielson—she’s got a Ph.D. in math. Dawn Hendricks—she volunteers at the Museum of the Palace of the Governors—her degrees are in history and anthropology, I think. Betty Van Hessel—botany.
Rebecca Bennett
—
astronomy
.” I smiled widely.

“Meridian Whetstone—biologist, artist, poetess, and more. Margo Whiting—sociology. And me—don’t forget me,” Emma grinned.

“Would you?”

“Try and stop me.”

I was so happy, so shot full of adrenaline that my hands shook.

“I want to get it up and running by the fall.”

“Give me assignments.”

“So you think it will work? You like it?”

“Meridian, it’s inspired. Two birds with one stone, I think—you help the girls, you help the women feel they can make a valuable contribution to the future.”

“I have a name for it.” I drummed my hands on my thighs for effect. “Wingspan.”

“Glorious.” Emma hugged me. “I knew 1973 would be your year. I just knew it.”

AT FIRST, I HAD
far more mentors than mentees. Talented women came out of the woodwork, eager to contribute to the future of girls.

The girls came—slowly at first. I increased my efforts to get the word out, printed brochures and left piles of them in the offices of guidance counselors. I managed to get articles about Wingspan printed in the
Santa Fe New Mexican
and both Albuquerque papers. I drove to San Ildefonso and Santa Clara pueblos, to Española and Pojoaque. I wore my nice Pendleton skirts and blazers, got my hair cut so that it fell in layers to just beneath my chin, and spoke at luncheons, conventions, and in classrooms. On my lapel I wore a silver pin in the shape of a feather—one Alden had given me for our twentieth anniversary—and I went through any door I could wedge open with my foot, anywhere people would have me. I sought out the eyes of the girls in my audiences, preached as if I’d found Jesus at last.

We had ten girls the first year. Ten girls who were able to tap into the wealth of experience and wisdom offered by the women of Los Alamos, and who thereby expanded their peripheral vision.

CLAY SENT
AN ENVELOPE
for my fifty-first birthday in 1974. It contained a copy of a letter from the University of Washington in Seattle, confirming his acceptance as a Ph.D. candidate in geology. Folded within that letter was a check for fifty dollars, made out to Wingspan.

He knew.

When I deposited the check, I drew a heart with wings beneath my signature. I hoped he would see my joy when the canceled check made its way back to him.

A Flight of Sparrows

1. Although difficult to keep alive, sparrows have been kept as pets since the time of the Romans.

2. The Wee Brown Sparrow takes flight.

Nearly eight hundred girls have taken part in Wingspan between 1973 and now, the final days of 2011. My generation has faded, although others have come to fill our places, and I’ve made sure that Wingspan is well funded, that it will continue when I’m gone. I also created the Belle Jordan Scholarship, which is awarded to one girl each year who goes into medicine. Melody Mason, a Wingspan alumnus, took over as executive director two years ago. As for me, I’m content to climb onto my pile of Albuquerque phonebooks so that I can see over the steering wheel to drive my little Subaru Forester at just over twenty miles an hour—maximum—to downtown Los Alamos to put in an appearance at Wingspan luncheons. I no longer struggle with pantyhose, and so I wear my tried-and-true Pendleton wool pantsuits and have just enough energy to participate as a member of the audience but not to take the stage.

My eighty-eighth birthday arrives shortly. I cannot fathom that number of years. I admit to seeing an old woman when I look in the mirror—the short, wispy, flyaway white hair that it is evident I cut myself, the thick population of brown spots on the backs of my hands and forearms, the still-vibrant blue eyes—and I am surprised, always, because inside, where I live, I am at most forty, still eager for change, still hungry for learning, still curious, still yearning.

LAST WEEK, I DROVE
willy-nilly around town, just to get out of the house. The Lab has added new security measures since 9-11, and after I crossed the bridge that spans my crow canyon, I ended up stuck near a check point. I started to make a U-turn, and the guards stopped me, asked for identification. I played the silly old woman so that they wouldn’t make me get out of my car and explain myself, and then I listened while they doled out a gentle lecture and wrote down my license plate number. The whole thing wore me out, made me wonder if it’s time for me to stop driving.

CLAY, MY FAITHFUL CLAY,
has not missed a single one of my birthdays in forty years. I took a moment just now, repeated that mental arithmetic, and still came up with the same number: 40. Astounding. He has sent me so many wonderful things—a partial list, a sampling:

• A copy of his Ph.D. thesis, “A Comparative Study of Archean and Post-Archean Granitic Rocks Over Time and Observations Concerning the Geochemistry of Subduction-Zone Magmas”;

• A mix cassette tape (that forced me to go buy my own cassette tape player) with songs like Tim Buckley’s “Once I Was [a Soldier]” and Donovan’s “Lalena”;

• Jewelry he made from his own rock finds (the breathtakingly intense green, fractured variscite bracelet sits steady on my wrist as I write);

• So many books to keep my mind lively—Robert Wright’s book on the new science of evolutionary psychology—
The Moral Animal
; oh, and
Banquet at Delmonico’s
, with its behind-the-scenes history of Darwinism, social Darwinism in America;

• Syllabi for each of the first courses he taught as a new professor at Northern Arizona University;

• A T-shirt for a hang-gliding club he started in Flagstaff; and

• A photograph of his family—Clay, looking less sinewy and more domesticated, his surprisingly plush wife (identified on the back as Brenda), and two girls—Elizabeth Meridian and Obsidian Solstice. There was a dog, too—a chocolate lab mix called Ujjayi. The photo lives on the bulletin board in my kitchen.

When it was time for me to let Jasper go, I whispered into the fur of his neck, thanking him for the company, for helping me to ride out my loneliness after Alden. After Clay. I sifted his ashes beneath the pines where Beacon, White Wing, and Withered Foot had fallen. I kept all of my little hearts, my never-children, in one place, where I confess I have often gone, seeking and sometimes finding solace.

MARVELLA HAS COME TO
town for the holidays, and I ask two things of her. She drives me to Socorro, the nursing home out near the old East Gate entrance to Los Alamos. I take Emma a New Year’s gift of an African violet in a pretty cream-and bronze-colored cloisonné-patterned pot. Her eyes flicker beneath translucent eyelids painted with shattered patterns of burgundy capillaries, and I set the plant on the windowsill where it can bask in the gentle morning light. Marvella moves a chair next to Emma’s bed for me, and then she goes to stand in the hallway—near enough to hear me call, but far enough away so that Emma and I can talk. It is a sensitive, diplomatic move, but unnecessary. Emma’s Alzheimer’s prevents any true discourse, and at most we have meandering exchanges that involve a frustrating level of repetition and a miasma of confusion.

I let Emma sleep, let her hover in a world I hope is better than this room that stinks of urine and shit, where I hear cries of pain and loneliness escaping from rooms down the hallway while indolent, indifferent staff watch television in a front office. I turn Emma’s hand until I can see the veins of her wrist, and I run a crooked, arthritic finger along those veins. I wish death for her. I wish it with all my heart.

Marvella can see that I am weakened by the visit, and she takes my elbow as we walk down the hallway to the exit. My walk is now habitually unsteady, although I abjure the use of a cane. I stand in the parking lot and gulp fresh air.

“How about a dish of ice cream before we head back?” she asks, and I am glad of her attempt to erase the past half hour. We sit next to a sunny window in the ice cream shop, and I let my scoops of burnt toffee ice cream melt to the consistency I like best.

“How old are you now?” I ask, taking full advantage of the leeway permitted old people—we have too little time to bother skirting around things and so are blindingly direct.

“Fifty-six,” she says, carving her vanilla ice cream with the tip of her spoon. She is drawing elaborate swirls in the surface of her single scoop.

“Impossible.”

“I know,” she says.

Marvella works as a veterinary medical officer at the U.S. Geological Society’s National Wildlife Health Center in Wisconsin. She still runs marathons, an activity that I have opined is crazy. Marvella good-naturedly ignores me.

“Will you come again next year, do a few presentations for the girls?”

“You know I will. You know I’d do just about anything for you, don’t you?” she asks, and I can see a surprising uncertainty in her eyes, as if she is afraid I don’t know that she loves me.

“I know,” I say. “That request is for the girls.”

“Is there something else? Something I can do for you?”

“When we get back to the house,” I say, prevaricating.

I am fortified by the ice cream, and once we’re in my living room I tell Marvella she should toss her coat on the couch. “In here,” I say, and she follows me to the bedroom, where I have stacked all of my crow journals on the foot of the bed.

“What are these?”

“They are everything,” I say. “Everything,” and my voice breaks. I did not think it would be this hard, but it is.

“May I?” she says, and I nod. She picks up one of the earliest journals and flips through the pages. I see my columns, my neat handwriting. Because it is an early journal, there are no drawings, and there is no poetry. It was one of the purely scientific journals. “The others, too?” she says, looking at me.

“They changed over time,” I say, trying to marshal my emotions. “They evolved as I evolved.”

“In what way?”

“Less objectivity. More subjectivity. More intimacy.”

“Your life’s story, then, is that what I’m holding?”

“Yes.”

Marvella sits on my old, worn cotton bedspread faded to a pale yellow, and she holds the journal in her lap, one hand resting on the cover, the slim fingers of her other hand tracing the bound edge. “This is incredible,” she says, taking in the number of books stacked beside her.

“I have empty boxes in the shed.” Realizing I still have on my knit cap, I pull it from my head and try to tame my hair. “I want to box these up for mailing.”

“All right.”

“I’ll give you the address and the money,” I say, heading toward where I set my purse on the table beside the front door. I hand her a twenty-dollar bill. “I don’t know what it will cost.”

“Less if we send them book rate. It will take longer, though. Is that all right?”

“They’ve waited this long,” I say.