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YOU MIGHT FEEL A LITTLE PINCH A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts by Sarah Amelia Scoles February 2010 © 2010 Sarah Amelia Scoles BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Sarah Scoles received a BA in Astrophysics from Agnes Scott College in 2007. The knowledge she gained from studying the sciences figures heavily in her work, which has been published in DIAGRAM, Sotto Voce, and SNReview. iii To all the people who gave me ideas, since it turns out I’m not a very creative person. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the John S. Knight Institute, David L. Picket Endowment, and Epoch magazine for providing the funding that made it possible for me only to worry about writing, not about paying rent. Michael Koch at Epoch has been a reassuring presence the past few years, even when I was not working at the magazine. I would also like to thank my invaluable committee members, Stephanie Vaughn, Maureen McCoy, and John Lennon, for the support, criticism, and occasional free lunch. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch iii Dedication iv Acknowledgments v Section One They Were Only Kids 1 Sofia Breen's First Pet 10 The Words of God 17 Cataclysmic Variables 26 Eterfinity 38 The Passenger Seat 50 Section Two Cosmogyny I 67 Cosmogyny II 71 The Early Universe I 79 The Early Universe II 82 Section Three Modeling 105 Binary System 118 Absorption 132 Algorithmic Behavior 147 You Might Feel a Little Pinch 162 THEY WERE ONLY KIDS During my fifth-grade year at Stenstrom Elementary, Home of the Stallions, my mother dressed up as the school’s mascot on Fridays. “Why are you dressing up as the horse?” I asked her when we picked up the costume from the costume store. “It’s not a horse,” she said. “It’s a stallion. And a member of Jimmy Buffet’s band once wore it at a concert.” “Who is Jimmy Buffet?” I asked. “Margaritaville,” she said. “Someone you don’t want to be.” Sometimes when she talked, she either did not mean the words for me or she thought I was smarter than I was. That doesn’t matter, though. What matters is that my mother, on Fridays, became an animal, and I became her keeper. It was a job that, like her sentences, was not meant for children. In the parking lot of the costume shop, she put the horse’s head over mine, said, “How do you look?” and pulled down the car’s vanity mirror. Looking through mesh eyes at the sloping nose and the forehead like a parking lot, I could hardly convince myself that I was under there. I had disappeared. It was awesome. I did not know why my mother had volunteered to be the school’s mascot. It had been decided at a PTA meeting, and PTA meetings, like Jimmy Buffet, were a mystery to me. I only knew that my mother was a willful outsider, attending meetings but never running for office. The most popular girls had mothers who were President, Secretary, Treasurer, Campus Beautification Coordinator, and I wanted to be popular. Now, though, I know that having my mother write the Hoofbeats Newsletter would not have changed my social status. Here’s why: Before class one day, Sharon Szymanski (a fifth-grader who 1 owned outfits, not just pieces of clothing) asked if she could copy my homework. “I know you did it,” she said. “Of course I did it.” “Well, let me see it. I just want to check something.” “No,” I said. “Why?” she asked. “Are you a bitch or something?” I just shook my head, over and over, like a windshield wiper. “You must be,” she said. “Good thing I know now.” This is characterization. I never, of course, told my mother about this incident. A) because I was not allowed to say the word for a female dog, B) because I preferred to keep my indignities to myself, and C) because Sharon was wrong, and I was actually quite nice. This niceness, combined with relentless completion of vocab worksheets and aggressive division of two whole numbers, qualified me to be a safety patrol. In an ideal world, all of the slacker kids would have been jealous of my status and reconsidered their negative behavior patterns when they saw how cool and authoritative I looked in my neon orange sash, making sure no one ran in the hallways or upset the before- or after-school equilibrium. “Man, I wish I were a safety patrol like Claire Stucke,” I imagined them saying. “If only I didn’t talk out of turn every three seconds, I could have my own fashion-forward sash.” Unfortunately, what actually happened was that I said, “Please don’t throw your trash on the sidewalk,” and they said, “What, are you a bitch or something?” When the PTA president asked me, as a safety patrol, to guard my mother the mascot while she stood greeted the kindergarteners and also the people who called me names, I did not say, “No one respects the authority of ten-year-olds, especially when ten-year-olds are me, and I can’t even stop them from throwing their Airhead 2 candy wrappers on the ground, so how am I supposed to stop them from hurting my mother?” I said, “Yes, ma’am.” “Your mother is not allowed to speak or give away her identity, so you will have to answer questions and make sure no one touches the costume,” the president said. “You know Jimmy Buffet wore it, right?” “Yes,” I said. “It’s a very important costume.” The very important costume sat in our hall closet all week, waiting for Friday. Thursday night, I stood in front of the closet and stared into the costume’s eyes. I was almost afraid to touch it, in the way that it’s scary to touch the lion statue at the zoo, like you might rouse it, make it decide to digest you. When my mom found me there, she said, “Tomorrow’s my big debut. Are you excited, kiddo?” And although I didn’t know why she was debuting in the first place, I sensed it had something to do with how she loved me, so I said, “Yes, I’m excited,” although I felt more like hiding inside the costume myself. The next morning, my mother loaded the costume into the car, laying it carefully along the backseat so that it looked like it was sleeping. “You don’t have to do this, Mom,” I said. “What?” she said. “Are you embarrassed? I’m sure your friends will all think you are very cool.” She grabbed the top of my thigh and said, “This is a very cool thing we’re doing.” “I know,” I said. “Thanks for being a cool mom.” She smiled into the steering wheel like no one, not even my father or something, had given her a compliment quite like that one. “I am pretty cool, kiddo,” she said. “That’s how I gave birth to such a cool kid.” I stood outside the teachers’ bathroom door while my mother fit herself into the body of polyester fur and then set the stallion’s face over hers. I bounced my 3 foot like it was on a manic treadle: My fear of the cooler students was now accompanied by the fear that my mother might find out I was not one of them, and that she would feel sorry for me. Then my mother emerged, in all her equine glory, and I said, “Ready, Stenstrom Stallion?” and tried to look the way brave people did. Holding her hoof, I led her outside. At the car ramp, my orange sash and I were nonchalant. “Yeah, I’m guarding this horse,” I imagined saying to someone who asked me if I was guarding this horse. But the younger kids, who always got to school first, just waved and said, “Whoooooooaa, it’s a horse!” “Stallion.” I said. “Our mascot. Go school spirit!” My mother put her hoof up for high-fives and down for low-fives and did clumsy jigs, her tail swishing behind her. The little kids didn’t seem interested in knowing who she was. They walked up to their newly arrived friends and said, “Look, it’s our mascot,” and when the friends said, “What’s a mascot?” they shrugged and pointed at my mom. Even as the older kids arrived, they treated the stallion with the respect she deserved. They danced with her; they scratched her nose; they laughed when she tried to chase her tail, which horses don’t actually do, but facts seemed irrelevant. Even the fact that I was a loser seemed to be lost in the shuffle of interspecies bonding rituals. People gathered and smiled and asked, “What are you doing here?” and I said, “Well, I’m guarding this stallion,” and they said, “From what?” because they intended my mother no harm and could not imagine anyone who would. The stallion pretended to flex its muscles, and I said, “The stallion works out,” and everyone laughed again. My mother and I were quite a team. “How’d you get this awesome job?” my peers asked. “I got 100s on my spelling tests,” I said. They laughed, and it was okay that they thought it was a joke. 4 Then, Sharon Szymanski got out of her mother’s car. She said, “Hey,” which she had never said to me before.

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