Flux, chapter 7
Chapter 7: Magnetic Flux
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July 2009
Grace passes on the reconditioned mass spectrometer and orders a new one instead, because why not? She logs the shopping list on a spreadsheet, which she and Barbara add to daily. So far, they’ve ordered a portable methane analyzer, a bench isotope analyzer, six tower-based sensors with heavy-duty stands, four diode-laser concentration sensors, and two flame ionizing detectors. She can’t find a drone heavy-duty enough to mount sampling equipment, but maybe she can retrofit a surplus military model.
They’re working flat-out to spend money before Barbara leaves for two weeks on Block Island with her fiancé’s family. They scroll website catalogues for VWR, Fisher Scientific, and Sigma Aldrich. Every day, Barbara says, “We’re spending money like drunken sailors.” She’s been pushing for Picarro’s Cavity Ring-Down Spectroscope, but Grace isn’t convinced they need it.
“Think we should get new benches?” Barbara looks up from Fisher’s website. “They have adjustable height ones. And these sweet rolling swivel chairs.”
“How much for the 60-inch benches?”
Barbara quotes the price.
“Fine. Get four benches and four chairs. No, five chairs.” She does feel a bit drunk. And so far, no hangovers.
“Well, Dr. Evans, that is most unusual.” The dean leans back in his big leather chair.
“It’s all fully transparent,” Grace says. She needs a list of incoming grad students to interview new lab assistants, so she’s told him the truth about her funding. Vagueness or lying would imply shame that she doesn’t feel. Her integrity is intact.
“I have complete autonomy, it’s in our agreement.”
He steeples his fingers, taps them together, and peers over his glasses. “That you have an ‘agreement’ at all with the very industry you’re studying . . . well, it’s . . . unseemly.”
He leans into unseemly as if describing a scene from “Eyes Wide Shut,” but agrees to email the list. If Grace takes a few grad students off his hands, so much the better. With tuition so high, the school dangles assistantships to lure students in, paying them as little as they can get away with. Some years, there are more students than positions.
Grace is relieved that most of her colleagues aren’t around to ask about her windfall. It’s none of their business.
Her old carriage house in Charles Village sits behind a once grand rowhouse and was never meant for human habitation. The heat brings out the smell of old oil stains on concrete and the tang of mold at the top of the walls. What she imagines as the animal funk of horses from days gone by is more likely rats decomposing in the alley behind the crumbling wood doors. The soundest structural element is the net of ivy ranging over three walls and part of the roof, trying to escape what was once called the garden.
It’s early Saturday morning, already near ninety degrees, forecast to reach a record-breaking 101 for the fourth day in a row. The air is obese with humidity. To clear her head after another sweltering night, Grace bikes to the Waverly Farmer’s Market in flip flops, cutoffs, and a t-shirt with her university’s logo that she fished out of a dumpster behind the freshman dorms after move-out. She’s also scored a desk lamp, hotplate, new Nikes still in the box, Patagonia fleece, four novels (wishful thinking), a sweet pair of ripped jeans, and a black hoodie. She passed on the mini fridges. She snagged one from the last move-out to cool her beer and yogurt.
Ever since her mother’s kooky confession, Grace has had fitful dreams of Dr. Margherita Hack. She’s in an observatory like the one in Trieste that she headed for twenty-three years. Waiting for Grace to, what? notice her? Or maybe summon her. Waiting with other women of science like Eunice Newton Foote, Claire Cameron Patterson, Rachel Carson, and Donella Meadows, watching over their own namesakes.
This morning, Grace is loopy with lack of sleep and the oppressive heat. The rhythm of cycling loosens her resistance. Why didn’t her mother name her for Foote? At least she was a climate scientist. Then again, Eunice would be a tough name to go through life with.
She had her work stolen by a man, says a grouchy, heavily accented voice in Grace’s head. Do you like it when a man takes credit for your discoveries?
What the hell? In her distraction, Grace nearly plows into a stopped car. “Of course not,” she says aloud.
Right. You’re a fighter, like me. You demand visibility. We’re alike that way.
Grace thinks, It’s fucking exhausting. She really needs more sleep. Maybe she’s asleep right now.
It’s freedom, Dr. Hack’s voice presses in Grace’s head. Look at Eve.
Grace laughs. She might be losing it, but her bullshit meter still works. Eve is literally the scapegoat for humanity being kicked out the Garden of Eden. Hardly a role model.
Pure propaganda. Eve only wanted to know more. More about the laws of the Universe, more about the world around her, more about her own body. She refused to accept teachings from on high. Eve pitted the curiosity of science against the passivity of faith.
From what Grace has read about Hack, she’s describing herself. Classic projection.
All women of science are Eve. You too are Eve. How can you be so blind?
Grace takes a turn too fast, skids on some leaves in the gutter, barely recovers. How does she turn the voice off? Maybe if she ignores—
Eve liberated humanity to pursue our curiosity, you must see that.
Grace laughs. My life would be so much easier if literally anyone saw that.
You’re not going to bang on about sexism in science, are you?
Grace loses patience. Spare me. Next you’ll say it’s all women’s fault if we’re not famous like you. I won’t be lectured to by someone who lives in denial.
That made her mad. The bicycle tips sideways and dumps Grace onto the sidewalk. Or maybe she caught one of Baltimore’s notorious tire-eating storm grates. Whatever. Nobody notices, thank God.
God doesn’t exist, calls a faint voice as Grace locks her bike to a street sign.
“Ciao, bitch,” Grace whispers.
Grace waits at Zeke’s Coffee for three sweating employees to set up. The guy in front of her sports Baltimore Casual—rumpled pistachio Polo, fraying khaki cargo shorts, boat shoes, no socks. Dad bod, thick waist, blond hair with silver strands, horn-rim sunglasses.
After they both order large iced coffees, he catches her eye. “Are you a student?”
“Research scientist. Climate. Methane. You?”
“Journalist. For the Sun. Ned Clark.” He extends his hand.
Grace allows a brief shake. His hand is cold from the drink. “Grace Evans.” She reads the Baltimore Sun when she finds it abandoned at a café. A good paper with a storied history. In March, a third of the newsroom was laid off by the hedge fund that bought it. “One of the survivors,” she says. “Rare species.”
Curt nod, no smile. At the end where people add cream and sugar, she asks if his new overlords will deign to cover climate change or clean energy or anything at all about the environment. He’s defensive.
“We covered the governor’s push for that offshore wind farm.”
“Sure, fine. But you’re missing a whole world of science news. What about all the land being leased for fracking in Western Maryland?”
He shakes his head. “I cover crime,” and drifts off to the long tables piled with peaches.
The following week, they spar over what people care about, what stories the paper should tell.
“Polls don’t show people caring about the environment because all they read about is the economy, terrorism, sports, and celebrities,” Grace says. They linger with their iced coffees in the shade of the mushroom vendor’s tent. Her mouth waters from the pungent smoke of grilling shiitake.
“Say I want to pitch a piece on climate to my editor. What’s the story?” He peers at her over his sweating plastic cup and takes a long swallow.
“Fracking is coming to Western Maryland. You could do a story on how it’s devastated other places—Texas, Colorado, or Pennsylvania, where I work. You could propose a statewide ban.”
“That’s an easy no. Western Maryland is about as far from West Baltimore as the West Coast. Our homicide rate—”
“You’re missing the big picture. This affects everyone. Methane flux from these sites is super-charging the greenhouse gas effect globally.” She really wants to buy some grilled mushrooms, but she only has cash for staples today.
“I just fell asleep,” he says. “People worry about crime, jobs, housing, healthcare. Bread and butter daily concerns. Real life stuff. How do you tell a compelling story about . . . air?” He smiles a devilish gotcha smile.
“How about, without air, you’ll die.” Grace fingers the inhaler in her shorts pocket. The humidity is murder on her airways.
“But that’s not the story, is it? Fracking isn’t like asthma.” He runs slender fingers through a wayward clump of hair stuck to his forehead. The nails on his left hand are longer than the right.
“But it can cause asthma.” How is this guy so dense?
“Okay. Better. My ex and I have had some terrifying moments with our daughter’s asthma. We do cover stories about asthmatic kids living near chemical plants and incinerators. Or in poor housing with lead paint, roaches, rats, and mold. Stories have to be about real people who live here. In Baltimore neighborhoods. Not abstract concepts.”
“But you could help people make that connection from local to global.”
“I report stories. I don’t make connections.” He pivots toward the mushroom people. “This is driving me nuts. Want some?”
They snack on warm grilled mushrooms, slick with oil and savory with rosemary. Grace gets where he’s coming from. Her own hunches must be formalized into theories. Theories become hypotheses that can be tested methodically. And replicated, by her and others. She’s always kept opinion and emotion separate from her work.
“It’s all so frustratingly slow,” she says. Spending all this time and energy and now money to study something that’s objectively wrong.
“Hmmmm?” he says, mouth full of mushrooms.
“Nothing,” she says. She hears her student asking, If it’s wrong, why is it allowed?
The following Saturday is overcast and about 110% humidity. Ned isn’t there. Grace is surprised at how disappointed she is. She drifts past the peaches and artisanal bread to two women on bikes working up a sweat to power smoothie blenders. A dashboard hula girl bounces on one of the blender lids. A black and white plastic dog nods his head on the other. The bearded hipster overseeing his Wheely Good Smoothies stand, smiles. The women smile. Everyone who passes by smiles. Grace orders and in less than two minutes is smiling and sipping a cold, delicious raspberry basil smoothie.
Back at home, she scrambles eggs from the market. Her kitchen consists of a sheet of plywood set on two sawhorses, a mini fridge, microwave, and hot plate—all student cast-offs. The sink had seen hard use during the carriage house’s heyday. Oil stains and clumps of dried paint spatter its chipped cast iron interior. Jackson Pollack couldn’t have done better.
She pulls out the folder from her mother to read her old 6th-grade paper on women in science. She thinks of the librarian who helped her find scientific papers written by women, no easy feat. She remembers the temptation to ask her mother for an interview and deciding not to.
She calls her mother to check in. Francesca’s in the early weeks of cancer treatment, tolerating the chemo well. So far.
“I was just looking at that paper on women in science,” Grace says. “I remember interviewing my bio teacher’s wife. She was a chemist for the government, I think. She had some war stories.”
“Why didn’t you ask me for an interview?” Francesca asks. “I would’ve been happy to.”
“I don’t know. The teacher must have said no family members.” She’s surprised at how easily the lie comes.
“Oh. Well, I thought it was quite clever.”
Grace wonders what it would’ve been like to hear that as a kid. Even once.
“Read it to me,” her mother says. “I’m feeling low energy today and bored with everything.”
Grace should get to the lab. She’s buried under the expansion to three additional sites, the lab assistant search, and equipment shopping. True to his word, James has been patient, but she feels the pressure of all that money, all those expectations.
“Okay, just a bit,” she says. “My study investigated three historical figures (Marie Curie, Rosalind Franklin and Rachel Carson).”
“Just think. You could’ve studied Margherita Hack. If your father—”
“Really? We’re doing this?” Grace finishes her smoothie and begins pacing the small space. “Look, I need to get to the lab.”
“Sorry, sorry. Please, go on. I like to hear it in your voice.”
Grace clears her throat. “The sixth-grade classmates surveyed are not aware of women scientists or mathematicians, either from the past or now. . . .” She skims the section about methodologies and cuts to the chase. “My interviews showed that female scientists and mathematicians face many challenges in their careers, ranging from slights and insults to persecution and lack of promotion. Blah, blah, blah. . . This study concluded that girls are objectively as well suited as boys for careers in science and mathematics but are likely to face more difficulties due to widespread gender bias.”
“Brava,” her mother says. Through the phone, Grace hears her clapping hands.
The following week, Ned is there, waiting in the line at Zeke’s. Cool relief ripples through Grace’s body. She shakes it off before he notices.
He’s wearing an Ocean City t-shirt, the same shorts as always, and flip flops. “Hey, stranger,” he says with a warm smile. “How’d you fare last week without me?”
“Not well,” she blurts out before she can collect herself.
“Aha.” He smiles and tips his sunglasses up to peer at her. “My daughter Helène and I went downy ocean. We had a swell time. Get it?”
Swell. She smiles, despite herself. Barbara usually translates Baltimore idioms like downy ocean for Grace, but luckily the shirt gives it away. “Ah. Good weather?”
“It’s always good weather at the beach.”
He buys two cardboard dishes of grilled mushrooms, shiitake and oyster, and leads them to a pair of white plastic chairs in a patch of shade. “It’s good to see you,” he says. He touches her forearm with his left hand, the one with the longer fingernails.
She smiles, sips her iced coffee, and nods. She hasn’t felt this nervous around a guy since high school. If then. “Do you play guitar?” she asks. There’s a small, round tattoo on his inner wrist. She wants to ask about that, too. Men aren’t usually so fascinating. They’re more of a means to an end.
He studies his hand. “Yeah. I play with some friends, basically a dad band. We’re not great, but we have a good time massacring the Stones, Beatles, Springsteen, even some grunge. We kill ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit.’ I mean that literally.”
“Here we are now, entertain us.”
“Exactly.”
It amuses her to picture Ned or one of his dad friends impersonating Cobain. She’d like to see that sometime. “Does the band have a name?”
He laughs. “You sure you want to know?”
“Is it that bad?” She spears a mushroom. “Is this where you say it wasn’t your idea, your friends insisted?”
“Absolutely the opposite.” Is he embarrassed? The thought is enticing. She hasn’t seen this side of him before.
“Spill it.”
“I can see I should’ve played out this very scenario when we were debating names,” he says. “One day, you will meet a brilliant scientist at the farmer’s market and she’ll ask the name of your band, and you’ll have to say it. Out loud.”
“Quit stalling.”
He brightens, pulls his phone from his back pocket and opens it. “We had stickers made.” He turns the screen toward her. It’s an orange and black graphic of a guy with a pool donut around his thick middle, with the name arching above: THE LOVE HANDLES.
Grace laughs so hard that her entire body sizzles, down to her toes. Tears stream down her face. “That . . . is . . . ” She might need her inhaler.
“Ridiculous, I know.” His face is pinker than usual.
“Perfect. It’s perfect.”
They eat in silence punctuated by Grace’s occasional giggles.
“Okay, next question,” she says, pointing at his left arm. “Are those dogs?”
He twists his wrist to display an inch-round tattoo. It resembles the yin-yang symbol, but with two interlocked animal heads. “Wolves.” He meets her eyes with his warm hazel ones. “You know, the two wolves story?”
Should she? Does everyone? “Never heard of it. Nice ink, though.” She swallows coffee, the ice clinks cold on her teeth.
“Oh, come on, seriously? The one you feed? That story?”
She shakes her head. “Bad idea to feed wolves. They’re wild animals, y’know.”
He sits back to marvel that, here in his mid-thirties, he has only now met someone who doesn’t know the two wolves story. Grace has a hawk in silhouette centered on her lower back. She got it after a close encounter while gliding when it lunged at her rig like a gladiator. She’s never been so terrified in the air.
“You should go away, dear,” Francesca says. “At least take a long weekend. The ocean is so refreshing in hot weather. I would love to swim in salt water again.”
Is she angling for mother-daughter road trip? Grace just told her how slammed she is with Barbara away. Has the chemo addled her brain that much?
“When’s the last time you took a vacation?” her mother asks.
“Let’s see. . .” Grace pretends to think back. “Oh, yeah. Never. Unless you count being between jobs, which is technically unemployment.”
“You work too hard.”
“You think?” Who is her mother to lecture her? Francesca jokes that her three top reasons for teaching are June, July, and August.
The following week at the farmer’s market, Grace asks Ned, “Did you grow up in Baltimore?”
“Middle River. My dad was a mechanic at Martin State airport, just up the road. I spent my childhood between Wilson Point Park and the neighborhood pool, right on the river.”
“Sounds idyllic.”
“It was. I’d sit for hours on the beach, watching the herons and osprey, and in winter, the ducks and geese.”
“Same.”
“Oh? Where did you grow up?”
“Holland Island.” That one year is all that counts of her childhood.
“That’s amazing. I’ve only been there once. Before it. . .”
“Sank, yeah.” Grace shifts in the layer of sweat between her bare legs and the plastic chair. “I was long gone when that happened. My dad worked at NASA, in Greenbelt, so we . . . moved there.”
“Cool. And your mom?”
“AWOL.” She wants out of this conversation. “Yours?”
“My folks still live in the house I grew up in. Dogwood Drive. They were relieved to be on a trip when Isabel slammed into Middle River five years ago. The whole area was absolutely destroyed in the flood. It was like half the ocean pushed the entire Bay into our neighborhood. Four hundred people rescued, $820 million in damage, twice as much as North Carolina, where it made landfall as a Cat 5. You can still see the odd janky dock or abandoned boat. Some neighbors never recovered.”
“Storms on the Chesapeake are truly terrifying.”
“Facts. Wilson Point is way upriver, near the source, so it’s normally a great hurricane hole. I used to sit real quiet on the shore watching crabs mate.”
“Me too.”
“No way.”
“Way. I was obsessed. Read everything I could about crabs. My grandfather was a waterman and had a couple peeler sheds that I helped him with. I discovered a special spot on the other side of the island where I could sit in shallow water and get still. A female crab would come along to hide in the waving grasses, golden light filtering down.”
“And here comes Jimmy,” Ned says. “Dancing on the tips of his walking legs, waving his claws slow, slow.” He gestures with his arms and feet, still seated. It would be comical if not for his intent sincerity. “He sidles up and embraces her from behind. Creates a cage with his walking legs—”
“—and she sheds her shell,” Grace says. “Defenseless and—” She stops herself saying, ripe, which is the correct biological term, but too graphic. “—ready.”
“He cradles and protects her. Turns her oh so gently to face him, and . . .” His cheeks have gone pink again. He finishes his coffee, the melting ice softly shushing.
“It’s amazing that they mate for nine hours,” she says. “At least from what I read.”
“Oh, you never sat there to time it yourself? What kind of scientist are you?” He smirks.
“I tried, I did. They outlasted even me.” She can’t stop smiling.
“Same. You know, they stay locked in that embrace for two days while her shell hardens.”
This conversation is the oddest flirtation Grace has ever engaged in. “Can you even imagine?”
“I’d want to send out for pizza at least.”
She laughs. “Crabs are so weird.”
“Truly weird. And delicious.”
They sit there smiling while the bustle of the market flows around them. Grace hasn’t gone out for crabs since moving here. Last she checked, they were $75 a dozen at Phillips Harborplace.
“Hey,” Ned says. “We should go out for crabs sometime.”
“Only if you’re buying.” Why did she say that? He’s a reporter with a kid and an ex, probably just as poor as she is.
“Deal. I can swing it once.”
“I’ll buy the beer.”
“You’re on your own there. I don’t drink.”
“You’re full of surprises, aren’t you?” He’s got frat boy written all over him.
“Not really. I tried mightily, but never did find a way to drink for a living.” His smile is part dramatic grimace, part genuine relief. “Frida Kahlo summed it up best: I tried to drown my sorrows in alcohol, but the bastards learned how to swim.”
Grace studies him. She’s known plenty of drunks and addicts, even dated a few. She doesn’t know anyone in recovery. She always thought people in recovery must be boring. Given the current state of her life, she could do with some boredom.
Next chapter ➡️
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I had so much fun reading this chapter Julie. The easy banter between Grace and Ned is next level. And then you add “They eat in silence punctuated by Grace’s occasional giggles” and I could feel all the way into my toes the delight of good company. Bravo. Such revealing, honest, well-paced writing!
Love seeing the softer side of Grace. Really enjoyed the energy between her and Ned. Looking forward to seeing where it goes... Oh and the crabs... my God, what a metaphor for really giving yourself to another, leaving yourself totally vulnerable... ufff!