Chrissy Kolaya: Charmed Particles

Rose pushed Lily up and down the aisles of the grocery store. Lily, perched in her seat in the cart, offered a running commentary on what she thought they needed. A bright and precocious child, she’d begun speaking in full sentences. There had been no preliminaries, no warm-up sounds, no baby’s babbling in imitation of adult language. “Look at that dilapidated building,” she’d said abruptly one morning, pointing from her car seat in the back of her mother’s station wagon. One day she’d been silent, regarding her mother with her wise baby eyes, and the next, she was conversant. Now she chattered on as they made their way up and down the aisles.

The woman at the checkout picked up the eggplant and the mango as they traveled down the conveyor belt, eyeing them suspiciously — a not infrequent occurrence during their shopping trips. Often, the clerk would hold up some unfamiliar produce and ask Rose what it was and how on earth one cooked with such a thing. Rose was happy to to explain, and sometimes shared one of her favorites among the many recipes she’d collected on her travels, but she suspected that these women, who regarded this strange new produce with misgivings, infrequently tried her suggestions, feeling safer, she imagined, with sensible vegetables like corn and green beans.

“It’s an eggplant,” Lily chimed in from her seat in the cart, making what the clerk considered to be a disconcerting level of eye contact. “You might know it instead as an aubergine.”

Since her return to Nicolet, few of the faces in the store, the post office, or the library were familiar to Rose. No longer bound to family farms, many of Rose’s generation had moved away, so that those left behind were mainly her parents’ age.

Back at home, Lily played with her blocks on the living room floor while Rose read aloud. They were beginning Deutscher’s three-volume biography of Leon Trotsky.

“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.

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.