Wasson

Notes on the Standard Model

By Veronica Wasson

Instead of writing, I find myself watching videos about the Standard Model of particle physics.

At the start of time, the entire mass of the universe was contained in a single point.

The “quark epoch” lasted for 10^-6 seconds. Quarks and antiquarks blossomed in great profusion. Try to imagine them all, bouncing around in a quark-gluon plasma.

It took another 400,000 years for the universe to cool down enough to form the atoms that eventually became stars and planets, rocks and rivers, vegetation green and lush, and ourselves.

My own life began as a single point, a zygote. Presumably that zygote contained within it the weight of my entire life. It’s amazing my mother could carry it around.

From zygote to human took about 280 days. From there my life gradually expanded and cooled.

My mother also started as a point, and her mother before that. We came from these singularities. But what happened before the point? Is that even knowable?

My mother rode the crosstown bus to work. The passengers swayed gently as the bus accelerated or braked. The bus made a soft ticking sound. It sighed. My mother looked straight ahead, gaze resting lightly on a spot just above the heads of the passengers seated opposite. The bus drove through Central Park and emerged onto Fifth Avenue. The trees of Manhattan glistened with a green that doesn’t seem quite real against the stony gray.

At home she washed the dishes plunging her hands into the soapy water.

In college, my mother majored in art history. She crossed the grassy quad on precocious spring days toting library books in a satchel.

Growing up I would gaze on the spines of the rows of books on my mother’s shelves, wondering at their titles, somber of arcane knowledge, and occasionally on a sleepy weekend take one down to leaf through pages with mysterious phrases such as To produce important art it is necessary as a rule to ⸺ ,

and how this is like flying on the surface of reality because the bright green of the leaves can become intolerable to the eye.

In many ways the universe before I was born resembled the universe of today, with similar dynamics and characteristics. How it has unfolded is very interesting to me.

My grandmother was a teacher in a girls’ school, teaching French conjugation, preparing her pupils for a petit bourgeois existence, for marriage and housekeeping, for hosting a dinner party, for pot roasts and bustling the children off to school, a destiny my grandmother herself did not avoid, but nonetheless she imparted to my mother other hopes.

A speck of time 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang, my mother sipping black coffee. In the courtyard the pigeons coo. My mother gets ready for work. The bus sighs softly with the delicacy of a large beast. It lumbers forward, snorting. My mother grips the strap in her strong slender workmanlike hand.

Commuting is a sleepy time of day. The newspaper. The stubbed-out cigarette. But already the bike messengers float by.

My grandmother sent me cards written in her careful spindly handwriting, an archaic script in which she enquired about my school, hobbies, growth, and health.

When I think of my grandmother, I think of the soft white mints that reminded me of moth balls. And the smoothness of the tin, running my finger along the ridge where the lid met the canister.

I can write a balanced sentence in which every word is weighted, as if placed on the brass arms of an apothecary scale. But the thought itself is off-kilter and sends the whole thing askew.

Quantum entanglement implies that two particles separated by an arbitrary distance maintain a causal link. And the state of one particle instantaneously seals the fate of its pair. As if I could still affect you with a word or thought. But a corollary of this phenomenon is that no information can be transmitted. I can call, I can text, I can email, but it won’t help. You aren’t there.

On weekends she took me to MoMA or the Guggenheim. I made careful note, saw the paintings my mother pointed out, felt adolescent sparks of burgeoning knowledge and love, the world burned with art, I became her daughter unfolding.

I have emotions that are like strands of hot glass stretched across the studio floor. As they cool they are prone to shatter. The shards glitter, raw edged. The artist tries again.

We understand the past by extrapolating backwards from the present. In this way our life has two vectors of time.

Sometimes I feel myself to be the thinnest of membranes.

When I take a day off in the middle of the week, I don’t know what to do with myself. Time is suddenly quite blank. I feel like a character in a Clarice Lispector novel. And so I drink coffee and stare at this sentence.

I try to understand if my mother had similar moments.

When I was still a point, my mother rode the bus across town. She was married then to my father and it sometimes happened that he noticed a certain expression cross her face when she wasn’t observing herself. When she was absorbed, say, in chopping a zucchini on the cutting board, or reading a monograph about Mary Cassatt, or folding laundry. As the sunlight dappled the bus, this same expression would have been observable in my mother’s thoughtful gaze out the window toward the passing streets, and something came between her gaze and the window like a scrim obscuring the world, and this my father would have recognized and this I later came to know often as a girl seeing my mother’s obscured thoughts.

I’m older now than my mother was during my formative memories of her.

At that particular historical juncture, the critics touted the masculine aesthetics of the minimalist sculptors—plain spoken, unadorned, unsentimental, blunt. And yet those same adjectives could equally describe my mother, who was nothing if not plain spoken, unadorned, unsentimental, and blunt.

To be the daughter of such a woman was always to feel the gap between myself and my conception of myself, especially as I entered adolescence and felt the hard long swoop of my life truly beginning and wanted the same hawklike precision of mind as my mother, only later to discover her other side, the woman for whom life was a broken promise.

What I’m trying to write about is the way I’m embodied at once in the now and in the past, not through bonds but through ripples, and how my view of the present interferes with my view of the past and vice versa. How I see myself. How I see my mother. As if these could ever be disentangled. And how my mother saw herself, and herself in relation to me.

Coming into my room. Demanding that I look at her when she’s speaking. Vibrating with anger. But also fixing me toast with butter and strawberry jam after one of our blow-out arguments, cut diagonally and placed on the plate with the blue glaze, the heavy ceramic plate that didn’t match any of our other dinnerware, its cool solidity somehow comforting, my thoughts still hot as plasma.

I have the urge to delete this document. The fact that you’re reading it now means I didn’t. But of course when I write this, I address an imagined reader, so it is still possible that I will. And if the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum physics is correct, there is a world in which I delete the file, and another world in which I keep it. Perhaps in the deletion world, the ghost of the text still hovers. And in the non-deletion world, the world where you are reading this, perhaps the words retain a residue of my own regret.

When my mother was a child, she loved to paint. This was very pure. She painted watercolors of ordinary things, usually from nature. A seagull. A shell. The dogwood tree in the front yard. A papaya, sliced in half, the flesh obscene in its pinkness, the black seeds like ants.

They were simple paintings, somewhat graceless, carefully mounted on gray mat board. Some of them have survived and I wonder if their emotional power comes from the muteness of time in the way that silence can slowly accumulate in a room until it fills up the space and the furniture becomes immovable under its weight. In other words these paintings collected pathos. But they capture something of my mother’s childhood self, her keen eye and her directness.

I could never compete with this directness of hers, her plain-spoken Midwest manner. I was always missing the mark, either too blunt or too obscure, I spoke either in riddles or insults.

But really how else is a teenage girl supposed to be. Alone in my room I wrote furiously of my disillusionment, filling journals with my looping handwriting, putting directly onto the page the storm of emotions that my mother subsumed in a watercolor sketch of a rock or a gnarled tree.

I’m not sure my writing has gotten better, it’s just added corrugations.

When I picture my mother, I see two incompatible images.

There is the woman who packed my lunch for school, the woman whose jowls and frown lines I have inherited, who sat at the kitchen table snapping the ends off string beans and tossing them into a bowl, who wrote out the shopping list on Saturday mornings, who worked out the crossword puzzle with a ballpoint pen, peering at the grid through reading glasses like an accountant summing figures, and I could feel her quiet satisfaction when the last square was filled.

Then there is the young woman with long hair and squarish glasses who moved to New York City and lived in a fifth floor walkup lacking reliable hot water, who read Valley of the Dolls and The Group and later Fear of Flying, who got fitted for a diaphragm, who ate lunch in Washington Square Park where the sunlight prismed through the spray of the fountain, who strolled the galleries of the Met holding a sketchbook but absentmindedly forgot to make any sketches, captured by beauty, the woman whom I never met because she preceded my existence in time, and in fact I was the cause of her annihilation.

Particles are ripples in fields that permeate space. I picture a green field where grass ripples in a breeze, the blades of grass remain in place rooted into the soil and the breeze plays through them creating patterns that are not discernable up close, invisible to the ladybug that clings to the serrated edge of the blade, the vole that nestles in its burrow, the funnel spider in its meticulous web that glistens white like spun sugar, as the breeze strokes each strand, but from the air one can see the patterns, the soft undulations, and in a quantum field these form the stuff of the universe, supposedly.

From the distance of time I can see the patterns that ripple from my mother to myself, unconsciously, without volition, her exasperation an echo of my grandmother, and my own automatic reaching for the sarcastic reply, the way I am patient until suddenly I’m not, the way my mother would throw up her hands and stalk from the room, mid-argument, or wipe her hands on a dish towel with a certain violence, but also our flow of talk over meals, all the times when my father couldn’t follow our quick back-and-forth, our hot-headed opinions about art and life, or maybe he found our passion silly, as my mother flicked her fingernail against the pages of the New York Times to emphasize her point, my father wiped the coffee from his lips dampening his mustache, and I agreed righteously with my mother, picturing myself as a young Gloria Steinem in tinted aviator glasses, and how these currents of solidarity created the peaks and troughs in which we swam.

On days when I go into a depressive spiral, I think of my grandmother and her gimlet eye. Her rare vague allusions to her own childhood, absent of detail like a lost text. In high school she met my grandfather and he was a good dancer. A fact hard to reconcile with the old man I knew, briefly, before his death, his tremors and his brusque gestures of dismissal.

My grandmother knew how to can fruit, I’m sure, but she also told a story of dancing on a table, and being ejected from the establishment, which gives me the notion that at one point in her life she was ‘fast,’ and she would tell this story with a hint of mischievous pride, and I wish I could have known her then … I picture her dancing to Artie Shaw, the sexual heat rising from her modest skirt and sweater-blouse.

At 18 she eloped, moved to another state, cut off all contact with her family. What trauma occurred to propel this flight? Her thin tight lips held decades of silence and this was the source of her strength. My grandmother was not a very warm person but she stocked a box of my favorite cereal for when I came to visit.

Some expressions handed down to my mother from my grandmother:

“Bite your tongue.” “Hold your horses.” “Tall drink of water.” “Like herding cats.” “A bird in the hand.” “Knock wood.” “Don’t count your chickens.” “Mind your Ps and Qs.” “Look before you leap.” “Let sleeping dogs lie.” “Better safe than sorry.” “Like the cat that got the cream.”

In conversation I find myself uttering these phrases as if my tongue were not my own.

Like a broody hen I sit alone with my thoughts hoping that something will hatch out, but it’s largely an automatic process, I could just as well be kneading dough or folding clothes. I think of my grandmother’s hands, grown arthritic, but how many buttons did she sew, how many chicken breasts did she sauté, how many apples did she pare, how often did she sit for a minute to watch Phil Donahue, in her slacks and house slippers, what thoughts did she brood then, and when I finish a piece of writing—it’s there on the page, like taking a casserole from the oven, and has the same sense of futility and loss, of the tuna casserole that has baked a brown orange.

Sometimes I can feel the slow current of life pulsing in me. I don’t mean just my individual life but the impersonal life, the way magma oozes under the rocks, each breath a million years long. Yesterday I drove over the bridge to the city. The gray clouds looked like an ink wash, the lake was choppy, sending spray over the concrete barrier, my car was swallowed by the mouth of the tunnel, fluorescent bulbs lit the grimed tiles and the giant spray-painted graffiti, it all passed around me as if to engulf me, not just the tunnel but the stale air and the wan light, until the tunnel opened again and the traffic emerged into the stately drizzle amid seagulls, hawks, falcons, eagles, flocks of them, wheeling and diving, at long last.

The intuition that the universe is a single long exhalation.

Do I breathe out, finally, my mother. As if I’ve held her inside myself, holding my breath, unable to release.

When I write a first draft, I am creating a problem for my future self to sort out.

A coherent account of my mother seems beyond me, because inevitably it leads to this present moment, to me, stretched out on the couch, laptop open, thoughts tangled up in myself. All biography is autobiography.

(I’ll delete the last few paragraphs, worried that I’ve written myself into a cul-de-sac.)

Tactile memories. My small hand in my mother’s gloved hand, on a winter evening in Manhattan, how the cold stung my cheeks while my arms sweated in my puffy coat and my knit wool cap itched. Traces of snow swirled in the air. A poet could unlock my girlhood heart and let in the snow, let it swirl inside my rib cage, until the sharp pain of the cold air wakened my slumbering head. I’ve lost my childhood but I remember the smell of fir needles in the weeks before Christmas and walking with my mother past bright stores and how the shadows moved across the sidewalk with the footsteps of pedestrians and how it felt to be buoyed up by that bustle of motion in the early nights of winter, how the afternoon waned into dusk so soon after school let out. A poet could place this rising and falling of the day into its proper context, but now I have nothing, or almost nothing, just these echoes, this nostalgia.

Did my mother feel a preemptive nostalgia as she led her daughter by the hand through crowded sidewalks in winter, the swirling snowflakes catching the light, her daughter’s incessant eagerness to arrive places, any place, but they stopped for hot cocoa, and her daughter held the styrofoam cup in both hands like a chalice, wide eyed, leaving traces of foam on her lip.

This memoir is perhaps a failure qua memoir.

Like a minimalist sculptor, I assemble memories, as if stacking wooden boxes, and leave it to the reader’s discretion whether the resulting composition “resembles.”

I can begin again.

My mother was born in 19— in a small house with a piano room in the back. The piano room had bay windows and looked onto a patch of yard bounded by a hedge. Walnut bookshelves held sheet music and French primers. A narrow staircase led to the second floor. At night my mother was afraid to go upstairs onto the dark landing unless my grandmother went with her. She changed into a nightgown and brushed her teeth at the porcelain sink.

The town where she grew up had a grocery store, a school, a public swimming pool, and a bank, like in a children’s book.

She was a bookish child and teased by the other girls at school. In high school she had a boyfriend. She missed her period in a panic. Years later was the swelling growth in her uterus a welcome development? The unasked, unanswered question between mother and daughter.

My mother instilled in me the idea that I would grow up to do brilliant things, accomplish in academia or the arts what she had not—but also to self-deprecate, not think too highly of myself, not get “too big for my britches” as my grandmother would say, an attitude handed down to my mother from her parents, their Midwestern salt-of-the-earth hard-headedness, dating back no doubt to my great-grandfather’s hardscrabble farm where the milking cows lowed plaintively in the ice blue predawn light, you milk cows or sell aluminum siding, you shoot rats in the dirt-floor basement with a shotgun, drive six hours to Chicago, save plastic bags and rubber bands in a drawer, scold the children, and I can see that for my mother the university was an escape into a milieu where it was OK to breathe in and to exhale the breaths of all the words in all the books she had ever read and ever would read, with nobody telling her to get off her high horse, but even so she was quick to remind me that I had to know my own mind in all things, and now I tell myself this, standing alone in the kitchen with a glass of water, listening to the soft tick of the clock and the uncertain hum of the refrigerator, I tell myself to know my own mind in all things.

Picture the universe in 10^100 years. The stars have burned out, leaving as remnants neutron stars and white dwarfs that fall one by one into massive black holes.

Unimaginable eons pass. The black holes evaporate due to Hawking radiation. All that’s left are photons wandering alone forever as spacetime expands and the universe cools asymptotically toward 0° Kelvin.

This story is just one possibility. The universe might contract again, to a single point, to be reborn.

I would tell my mother so many things. She would hear them. I would become, once again, a daughter.

A life ends in silence, like information falling into a black hole, and an essay must end, finally, on a final period: .

Beyond that there is nothing, but the world.

Veronica Wasson (she/her) is a trans author living in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has appeared in smoke + mold, en*gendered, Apogee, Your Impossible Voice, Spectrum, and elsewhere. You can find her writing at veronica-wasson.com.