Grasping Mysteries Read online

  when tourists looked over moccasins

  that mean one thing to people who stitch them

  and another to those who buy them.

  Some Indians learned to hide what they loved

  so it wouldn’t be taken.

  Some hesitate to say even their names.

  I’ll write new questions. Edna understands

  that tucking stories behind silence or slanting sentences

  has given census workers the wrong numbers,

  kept families like hers from their fair share

  of help for building schools, hospitals, and roads.

  Words and numbers may be gifts or tools for theft,

  used to bring together or push apart.

  True and False

  Edna sets a blue clay mug and a cheese sandwich

  on her desk, examines old questions.

  Some pierce. Others are walls.

  Are you an American Indian?

  has more complicated answers than Yes or No.

  Census workers used to decide someone’s race

  or ancestry based on how they looked or where they lived.

  Now they ask, What do you call yourself?

  and make room for more than one choice.

  The coming 1980 census will be the first time

  no one will be asked to name the head of the family.

  As if just one person should be in charge.

  Edna writes questions she wants asked by people

  who are more like those whose homes they may enter,

  who see and hear differently than outsiders

  shaped by old tales of tepees, arrows, and feathers.

  She needs numbers that more truly reflect people living

  in or outside reservations, in small towns or cities.

  Families are more like cloth than furniture,

  their boundaries not as solid as wood.

  Homes

  Edna runs her hand over her straight black hair,

  which smells faintly of chlorine from the pool.

  She tries to ignore the pain in her knees

  as she puts a pot of blue flowers on her desk,

  though none are the shade of the sky on a day

  so fine the river catches color from above.

  Learning of her grandmother’s death, she holds

  the deerskin dress to her face, breathes the scent

  of home. She bakes potatoes and carrots,

  but nothing matches the sweet and smoky taste

  of camas bulbs pulled from a stone-lined pit.

  She misses the sound of horses galloping past canyons,

  the scent of wild roses under a sky unsplit by monuments.

  Taking Measure

  Edna studies people and where they live

  within borders that change as much as rivers,

  mountain ridges, and their names.

  County lines, state lines, and power lines

  can duck in and out of sight.

  Old maps noted the numbers of footsteps

  between markers of rocks or twisted trees.

  But the boundaries of reservations

  show how history is written with division.

  The calculations of how much land should be left

  to those who first lived there didn’t factor in much fairness.

  Edna’s numbers break the world into parts

  she patches back together.

  Her columns are straight as the spine of a book

  before covers open to spill stories.

  Over years of work, she opens paths

  through layers of data

  from hundreds of tribes, each

  with its own way of keeping triumphs and sorrows.

  Her charts and graphs are not meant for a queen,

  but to convince busy people who work

  with the president

  of the need for reform.

  The government often underestimated the numbers

  of the peoples who first lived on this land rich

  with possibilities before being forced onto reservations.

  Edna’s tallies show the Nez Perce population

  in many Idaho towns is more than twice

  what was shown in the last census.

  Much of the American Indian population

  looks larger than it was ten years ago. Some changes

  are due to healthier babies and people living longer,

  but new statistics reflect more truth.

  Edna Lee Paisano’s work means some schools

  will get more books. More children will eat breakfast,

  more homes will be built, so bedrooms won’t be crowded.

  She’s proud. Some joys are impossible to count.

  Still, math breaks open new views,

  shows a spiraling way toward home.

  Blue Again

  Silver-gray runs through strands of Edna’s hair.

  She leans on a cane, watching children run

  through fields blue with star-shaped flowers.

  She brings home charts the way others carry cakes

  or handmade clothing. Good gifts change shapes,

  make a circle. She left here thinking she couldn’t return

  as a mathematician. She returns to tell children

  how math can help them find jobs with computers

  or in business or places no one can yet see.

  Edna’s knees ache, but she slowly kneels

  to dig up camas bulbs that she roasts in a pit,

  tastes sweetness she never forgot.

  She takes off her shoes to wade in the river

  that rolls around rocks. The river remembers her shape.

  LOOKING BEYOND

  VERA RUBIN

  (1928–2016)

  Still Awake

  WASHINGTON, DC, 1938

  Vera opens the bedroom window, wonders

  how long stars have been shining,

  if her sister, sleeping across the invisible line

  they set in their bed, is dreaming. She wonders

  if anyone else in the neighborhood is still awake,

  why night makes her thirsty,

  and where questions come from.

  At last she shuts her eyes,

  tucks her black-speckled notebook under her pillow,

  which smells of backyard air and grass.

  She dozes on the spinning earth, wakes,

  finds familiar stars in new parts of the sky.

  Darkness makes much disappear, but also reveals.

  The Library Book

  The cover shows a silhouette of a girl in a long dress

  and bonnet peering through a telescope.

  Vera reads about the Quaker girl who lived on an island

  where her father recorded the movement of stars

  to help sailors find their way. Maria Mitchell

  became the first American to discover a comet,

  made of dust, rock, and ice that heats up near the sun,

  and streaks the sky with brief shine. As Vera reads,

  her breath rises, falls, opens with a parachute’s grace.

  Table Manners

  In sixth-grade math class, Vera becomes friends with a girl

  whose light hair is as straight as her own dark hair is curly.

  Jane’s right front tooth was chipped

  when she fell from a tree.

  After Vera shows her the star maps

  in her speckled notebook,

  Jane searches for graph paper in her father’s desk.

  She finds a protractor and slide rule that they experiment

  with when Jane’s mother invites Vera to stay for supper.

  In the middle of the meal, she asks,

  How was school? Vera, what’s your favorite subject?

  Math, she replies.

  I was terrible at math. Jane’s mother laughs lightly,

  unembarrassed, almost proud.

  Jane’s brother wrinkles his nose. Yuck. I hate a
rithmetic.

  No one scolds or urges the boy to give numbers a chance,

  the way his father praises vegetables

  as the little boy hides peas under mashed potatoes.

  Vera doesn’t suppose anyone means to be unkind.

  But she’s stung by how they suggest what she loves

  is odd, unworthy, inexplicable.

  She glances at Jane, who looks down at her plate.

  Doesn’t anyone in her family know

  math is Jane’s favorite subject too?

  Questions

  Vera and Jane are fourteen when they measure poles

  and blankets to put up a tent in the backyard.

  They stash number puzzles, flashlights, books,

  and grape jelly sandwiches her mother packed

  in case they get hungry in the middle of the night.

  A gust of wind collapses the tent.

  The girls crawl out and lie on their backs,

  listening to crickets and traffic, fanning out their fingers

  to measure distances between stars.

  Vera asks, Do you think we could make a telescope?

  We had a big tube that held the linoleum

  my dad put on the kitchen floor, Jane says.

  Their voices sound louder in the dark.

  They can’t find that tube, but they ride the bus

  downtown to a flooring store and get one for free.

  Vera’s father helps her build a telescope

  with pipes and plumbing fittings,

  lenses, an old bottle cap, and a bit of paint.

  As they wield tools, he tells her about when he was a boy

  called Pesach Kobchefski, before coming to this country

  where his name was changed to Philip Cooper.

  These memories seem as precious and faraway as stars.

  The telescope doesn’t work as well as Vera hoped.

  But night holds questions as beautiful

  as those in math class. She likes the sprawling uncertainty

  as well as the ends of complicated equations.

  Laws of Gravity

  Vera’s algebra teacher finds mistakes as intriguing

  as right answers. Mr. Gilbert’s curiosity

  makes Vera eager to take physics in a room with cabinets

  filled with scales and parts of old radios and generators.

  There, she and Jane are the only girls among boys

  who often seem giddy, as if after years of sharing

  about half the classroom with girls, they landed

  in a special league. They laugh at the teacher’s jokes

  about explosions, Bunsen burner tragedies,

  and mysteries under the hoods of cars.

  Vera listens as Mr. Himes tosses an apple,

  watches it fall, and talks about how the sun’s gravity

  holds together the solar system.

  Mercury, the planet closest to the sun, moves fastest.

  The farther a planet is from the sun, the slower its orbit.

  Mr. Himes praises more of Newton’s discoveries,

  Pythagoras’s theory, the way Galileo showed

  the earth revolves around the sun, and Einstein’s ideas

  about time and space. Mr. Himes says, Lesser insights

  come from sheer hard work. Madame Curie stirred

  pitchblende for years to reduce it to radium.

  It’s the first time he’s mentioned a woman scientist. If

  she hadn’t discovered that element, someone else would have.

  But how did Mare Curie suspect something wild

  was in the ore? Vera raises her hand as a boy blurts out,

  Didn’t her husband do most of the thinking?

  As other boys laugh, Vera lowers her hand.

  She won’t point out the genius it took to discover

  that stone dug from the earth holds secrets of star shine.

  Will the boys snicker or think she’s showing off

  if she says that after Pierre died, Marie became

  the first person to receive two Nobel Prizes,

  the second for her work alone?

  In the Cafeteria

  As Vera opens her brown paper bag,

  Jane says, I got a C minus on the precalculus test.

  That’s almost a D. Maybe

  I shouldn’t study math in college after all.

  But you love it, Vera says. That was a terrible test.

  One boy near me got mad at his bad grade.

  Another got paler than usual and swallowed hard.

  But I didn’t hear them give up their dreams.

  Jane shrugs, nods toward a girl who’s popular, pretty, rich.

  I wish I were her. Who would you be if you could be anyone?

  Vera is shocked, silent. She looks down

  at the dress she sewed from cloth

  printed with cherries that looked good rolled up

  in the store but seems silly on a person.

  The stitches in the hem are too wide.

  She makes mistakes but wouldn’t swap who she is:

  the girl who built a rough telescope with her father,

  who helped a friend make a tent,

  even if it toppled in the wind.

  She wouldn’t want to lose even the girl

  who was silent when boys laughed about Marie Curie.

  Someday she might be more brave.

  Listening

  An adviser visiting Vera’s high school talks with her

  about college. I don’t believe any girls major in astronomy.

  She glances at Vera’s record. I see you do well

  in French, sing in the glee club, and enjoy art.

  Perhaps you could paint astronomical scenes.

  Vera remembers the library book about Maria Mitchell,

  the first woman to teach astronomy at Vassar College.

  Vera applies there. After learning she was accepted,

  she spots her physics teacher in the hall.

  Her words tumble: I got a scholarship to Vassar College!

  Stay away from science and you should do okay.

  Mr. Himes smiles.

  Vera catches her breath. Has he forgotten

  she earns all As? Just two girls take the class.

  Does he even know which one she is?

  Starting Out

  POUGHKEEPSIE, NEW YORK, 1944

  In the all-women’s college, girls who were quiet

  among boys in high school now wave their hands

  to ask questions, interrupt, argue about ideas.

  Professor Maud Makemson teaches the secrets

  of differential equations, which break long problems,

  and integral equations, which put the pieces back together.

  Calculus mirrors the swift changes of stars.

  Vera uses chalk on black paper to draw the orbital

  patterns of asteroids, some discovered by her professor.

  Science unfolds new stories, while math helps

  turn the pages, touches the past, reaches

  for the future, makes room for uncertainty.

  The Motion of Stars

  Home for the summer, Vera agrees to meet

  the son of a couple her parents know at the synagogue.

  No one told her how handsome he is.

  Bob Rubin is dark-haired, a little taller than her.

  As they stroll after a concert, they talk

  about music and gravity. Vera looks up at stars

  that are born and die in clouds of dust.

  She says, It’s amazing that all the stars

  we see belong to our Milky Way.

  It’s good to meet someone who recognizes

  what’s in the sky as more than names for candy bars,

  cereal, and cars. Bob tells her a bit

  about his war work, doing research for the navy,

  while studying physics in graduate school at Cornell.

  I want to follow the bigge
st questions I can think up.

  When I was growing up, I leaned on the windowsill,

  slept, then woke up to find the stars in new places,

  she says. I’m still curious about those movements of stars

  and the earth. Old questions matter too.

  Autumn

  Dipping graham crackers in milk or munching on apples,

  Vera works on math that reflects forces on paper

  and sometimes suggests other powers that cannot be seen.

  She helps a friend with homework.

  Alice puts down her pencil and complains,

  I thought astronomy would be easier

  than other sciences, but there’s so much math.

  And Professor Makemson is weird. What are those charms

  and stone carvings doing in the observatory?

  She researched astronomy and religion in China and Egypt,

  Vera says. And won a Guggenheim fellowship

  to study Mayan astronomy.

  Whatever that is. Tell me more about the boy

  who takes the trolley to visit you here on weekends.

  I hope you’ll invite me to the wedding.

  He doesn’t visit every weekend. Vera blushes. And I don’t know

  about marriage. I want to keep studying astronomy.

  You can’t do both, Alice says. You can be like Miss Mitchell,

  who never married, or be a wife and mother.

  Professor Makemson has children,

  but she got divorced. A woman has to choose.

  The Old Globe

  Her last year in college, Vera is the only astronomy major.

  She has a job in the observatory as clock winder,

  telescope keeper, and paper grader. Under the dome,

  arced as the sky seems to be, she likes

  using the telescopes almost whenever she pleases.

  But it’s odd to be the only person in some classes

  that Professor Makemson says were filled

  back when Maria Mitchell taught.

  In 1869, right after graduation, six majors took a train

  to Ohio to observe the total eclipse of the sun.

  The professor’s voice echoes under the dome.

  It may have been the first all-woman scientific expedition.

  That’s history. I care about what no one knows.