Making Contact Read online

  Her mother, here and in life in general, acted as the pragmatic complement to her father’s American-dream-style encouragements. “When my dad was alive, and for a while afterward, he was the one who reinforced the idea that if you’re willing to work hard enough, you can do anything,” she says. “But what does that really mean? How do you ‘do anything’? It took me a long time to realize that my mother gave me the skills I needed to actually do it.”

  Those skills included the ones necessary to pursue an engineering degree. Tarter applied to a number of New York colleges, but Cornell University especially caught her eye. After all, its first name was her last name. She and her mother did some detective work and discovered that Ezra Cornell, the school’s founder, was her five-greats-back half-uncle—enough to qualify her, or so they thought, for a bloodline-based scholarship. Ezra himself may have had enough money to warrant a bronze statue in the middle of an ivy-invaded campus, but Tarter’s family had never had much, especially not after her father died. So Betty composed a letter to the financial aid office, informing them of Tarter’s genetic code and applying for the scholarship.

  Cornell University wrote its great-great-great-great-great-half-niece. “Dear Mrs. Cornell,” the reply read. “We are so sorry to inform you that this scholarship is only for male descendants.”

  Within a week, though, an unexpected envelope arrived, the address of Cornell’s financial aid office staring from the upper left corner. Tearing it open, Tarter found a letter offering her full tuition and fees, courtesy of Procter & Gamble, for the five years usually required to get an engineering degree. They even agreed to let Tarter take the fifth year’s money and use it during summer sessions so she could complete the program in four years.

  Once a year, executives from Procter & Gamble schlepped up to Ithaca to eat a meal with their scholarship students. Tarter was grateful for the free dinner, but the businessmen had no idea what to do with her, the only female student there. During Tarter’s senior-year dress-up dinner, one of the suits said to her, “I hope you don’t expect to have a job with us when you’re finished.”

  Another of the professional engineers piped. “Actually, you know, we have this department that makes the chemical for home permanents,” he said. “You’re enough of a woman to know what home permanents are, right?”

  These men were far from the only ones whose antics she dealt with in college. While the engineering college’s class of 1965 had 300 students, she was the only woman. The female dorms were all the way across campus from the engineering school. From November to April, Cornell’s campus is a frozen wasteland of frostbite, split by icicled gorges. But even in single-digit weather, female students had to wear skirts once they crossed the all-too-symbolic bridge connecting their dorm area to the rest of the school. Pants were permitted only in their residence area.

  She moved to campus a week early to participate in orientation, get settled in the dorm, and meet her all-male classmates. These boys fastened slide rules to their belts like nightsticks. The metal, inscribed with the tiny lines and integers that made the world a quantifiable thing, jangled unbecomingly against their thighs.

  Tarter decided to date only architects. Architects, with their visions of an aesthetically pleasing world and their tools left safely on draft tables, were the opposite of engineers. Every two or three years, these architects took over an under-construction campus building. They transformed it into the kind of building they wanted and held a themed dance inside. Tarter, who began dating an architect her first year, was invited to attend.

  That year, the theme was “Black Orpheus,” an artsy reimagination of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which the former rescues the latter from the underworld. But this version was set in Rio de Janeiro.

  The night before the dance, Tarter stayed up late fashioning her costume (having predictably put the project off). Holding a can of spray paint a few inches from a volleyball net, she pressed the button and plated it in aerosolized gold. The costume’s immodesty meant she had to creatively cover herself, so in a cauldron constructed from a trash can and a hot plate, she created DIY body paint using lavender dye. Surveying herself in the mirror, she saw patches of purple skin peeking through each roped-off square. It was good. She scampered across the bridge toward her date and his party.

  The pair propelled each other well around the dance floor, winning the evening’s dance contest. She still has the prize: a stylized sun pendant, made of aluminum and black ebony wood. At the end of the night, the solar system’s center laid against her chest, she returned to the dorms at 1 A.M., having received special permission to come back after curfew. But she had to wake up her dormmates to help her scrub the paint off her skin. “Everybody thought I was weird as heck,” she says. “But they thought I was weird as heck anyway for being in engineering in the first place.”

  She was close enough to some of the female students to rouse them and take them into a shower stall. But she orbited, rather than inhabited, their world. She was a nerd. She worked all the time. And she worked alone, safely ensconced in pants on the cordoned-off part of campus, while the male engineering students split the homework and shared their solutions at the bottom of Libe Slope, right next to the engineering quad. Most of the girls in Tarter’s dorm spent their evenings in the library, not to study but to socialize, and returned just in time for curfew with loud mouths and the latest gossip. She started going to bed at 10 P.M. and waking at 5 A.M., when the world was quiet and no one could watch her do vector analysis.

  Tarter’s dorm was next to Beebe Lake, a body of water flanked by Frisbee teams during the warmer months but frozen (like everything else) in the winter. Some days, Tarter finished her work early and glided across the ice, a rare frictionless space. The dorms, though, were locked until 6 A.M. She waited alone on the steps, ice skates dangling by knotted laces from her neck, pages of perfect equations behind her in a building of sleeping students. Still, while her peers didn’t get her, they were mostly aloof, not often mean. There were exceptions, of course.

  The freshman Engineering Problems and Methods course, a 300-person lecture class, had homework problems like

  A semitruck pulls over, and the driver gets out and bangs on the side. He does it again a few miles later. And again. And again. When you can’t stand it anymore, you pull off and ask him what’s going on. “I’ve got five tons of pigeons on board, and my axle is only rated for two tons,” he says, “so I have to keep the majority of the birds in the air at all times.” Comment.

  Tarter was excited to think critically, even if the topic was pigeons, even if it meant being surrounded by 299 boys. Betty was excited, too, and she wanted to take care of her only daughter even though she was away at school. Doing what she could, Betty ordered special cloth nametags and sewed them into all Tarter’s clothes. She sat up late at night, her daughter asleep in another room, plunging the needle up and down and thinking with each prick through the fabric about her daughter. She didn’t notice when the tag on one sweater declared the clothing to be “100% virgin wool.”

  One day in that beloved freshman course, Tarter shrugged that sweater off her shoulders. The boys behind her read the shirt’s tag: “100% virgin Jill Cornell.” An undercurrent of whispering swelled to a hum (Tarter, ever the physicist, characterizes the noise as “propagating backward and sideways”). The instructor stopped the lecture.

  “What’s going on?” he asked, peering out over the stadium seating. “What is this commotion?”

  The boys looked back and forth at each other, then down at their laps, until one finally said, “Well, Jill’s got a sweater that proclaims that she’s one hundred percent virgin.”

  Tarter sat there silently, staring straight ahead and wishing a wormhole would open in the floor beneath her, ferrying her to a different part of the universe.

  Tarter’s first year wasn’t all embarrassment and isolation. After the architects, she began to date her physics teaching assistant, a grad student she’d me
t the first semester: C. Bruce Tarter. “However it happened and however appropriate or inappropriate it would be in the modern world, we were mutually attracted,” says Bruce.

  Bruce was smart. Bruce was motivated. And, Tarter thought, Bruce was worldly and sophisticated. He’d grown up as a Southern gentleman—a society man from Louisville, Kentucky. Such an upbringing wowed Tarter, who was far from a debutante.

  Bruce shared an off-campus apartment in an old house with another physics graduate student, named Hakki Ögelman. Ögelman had a girlfriend, too: Ivy. The foursome often ate dinner together. At one dinner, Ögelman, who later became a pipe-smoking gamma-ray astronomer, attempted to explain to Ivy why salt thrown onto the gas stovetop turned the flame yellow. When they meet fire, the electrons inside the sodium atom jump from a high energy level to a lower one, letting loose a single photon of light when they do so. This photon has a specific wavelength, and every visible wavelength of light represents a specific color. For scorched sodium, that color is a nearly green yellow of 589.3 nanometers.

  But this is hard to explain in words, especially for a man who’d been shooting bourbon all night. Instead of talking about 3p and 3s atomic energy shells, Ögelman jumped on and off a kitchen chair—high energy, low energy, photon; high energy, low energy, photon—until the chair broke.

  That summer, as he had the summer before, Bruce got an internship at Lawrence Livermore Labs in California. Tarter, just 18, accompanied him. “Her mother was violently opposed, in the mores of that time, so we found a friend to bribe to ‘travel’ with us,” says Bruce.

  For the first months, Tarter got an apartment in Berkeley and took summer classes at the university. When she finished her courses, she went out to Livermore to live with Bruce and worked at a Chinese restaurant. Together, they settled into a California life. Their new world could never be silenced by snow. The Pacific was always nearby, throwing itself cold against the rocky coastline. People were looser, happier than in the Northeast. It was then that Tarter decided she wanted end up there for the rest of her life. She made the decision in the same way she made all big life decisions—quickly, with finality. Goddammit.

  Once she returned to Cornell, Tarter didn’t want to wave to the dorm mother when she walked in at 9:59 P.M. intoxicated, from both liquor and her receding sexual horizons. She didn’t want to walk in at 9:59 P.M., period.

  Upon their return to Cornell, during her junior year, Tarter and Bruce decided to marry at the faculty club. Bruce’s parents loved Jill, but in photo albums, Jill’s mother, Betty, shows up gritting her teeth in a nice dress. She was not a fan of the union. Procter & Gamble wasn’t either. If Tarter wanted a husband, it was clear she didn’t want a degree and wasn’t a serious enough student to deserve their money. The company retracted her scholarship. Enraged, she marched to Dean Dale Corson’s office.

  “We were counting on that money,” she said to him. She and Bruce had run the numbers for upcoming grad school finances—and certainly hadn’t made any mathematical mistakes—and they wouldn’t be able to swing it without this scholarship.

  “I just don’t think this is fair,” she concluded.

  She stood there, arms taut like baseball bats.

  Corson put his hands together and nodded. “I agree,” he said.

  He stepped up to the plate in her defense. Someone like Tarter was not going to drop off the face of the academic Earth, he told the company, just because someone bought her a nice ring. It was a home run.

  Years later, Corson became Cornell’s president, at the same time that Tarter was on the President’s Advisory Committee for the Arecibo radio telescope, which the university then operated for the National Science Foundation. Tarter walked up to President Corson at one of the meetings. “See? I didn’t just quit and have babies,” she told him. “I’m a PhD. I’m your advisor on this observatory you’re running. Thank you so much.”

  Tarter finished the engineering program in four years, with a GPA that should have gotten her inducted into the engineering society Tau Beta Pi. But when she applied, she was told she could not be a full member because she was a woman. Years later, when the gender policy changed, a Tau Beta Pi representative called to say she could now join, for a few thousand dollars.

  “It hasn’t done me a damn bit of good so far, and it isn’t going to,” she said. “Enjoy your day.”

  After Tarter graduated, she didn’t go to work test-tubing perm chemicals. She didn’t want to be any kind of engineer at all, especially not one sweating under a lab hood for beauty products. She hated the slide rules, and strict rules in general. She was going to find something else to do. Now that she had graduated, she felt she had achieved her goal of “becoming” an engineer but needed a new path for the rest of her life.

  She stuck around Ithaca, waiting for Bruce to finish his PhD, which took him a year longer than expected. But rather than sitting idle, she sampled classes in other departments—Russian, world history, nuclear physics, and astronomy. Astronomer Ed Salpeter’s class dealt with star formation: How do stars become stars? Why are there stars in the first place?

  These, she thought, were interesting problems to solve. She applied to graduate school in astronomy. She would become an astronomer, goddammit.

  Her tendency to jump in hasn’t changed in the five decades since Salpeter’s astronomy course. It is 8 A.M. at the cabin on Donner Lake, and early-morning fog hovers above the water. The air temperature is holding in the 50s. The lake water, still in shadow, nudges the mercury to just 62 degrees. Nevertheless, a bathing-suited figure stands on the edge of the dock below “Jill and Jack’s.” The silhouette dives into air-clear water.

  “Not too cold,” Tarter says when she pops back up, surveying the landscape. Jack is still asleep. Mountains sprout from the lake’s edges. With their Douglas firs and vocal tree squirrels, they seem habitable. But in a couple of months, they’ll be covered in the kind of head-deep snow that left the pioneering Donner Party stranded. Trapped in a six-month-long, 20-foot snowpack, many died. As you likely learned in some horrifying history class, the remaining party members ate the bodies.

  When asked if she would become a cannibal in such a circumstance, Tarter smiles before she says, “Yes, absolutely.”

  CHAPTER 2

  BABIES, BROWN DWARFS, AND BIG MOVES

  Physicist Hans Bethe stood before his quantum mechanics class, fingers holding the nub of chalk against the upper left-hand corner of the blackboard. By the end of the lecture, he would fill that board plus another below and two next to it, sticking a perfect landing at the lower right-hand corner. The length of his notes was a known quantity, although the point of quantum mechanics is that the universe is, at its most fundamental level, uncertain.

  Tarter had recently graduated from Cornell and was waiting for Bruce to finish his degree. She had chosen this extra class because she adored Bethe. Earlier in his career, he had helped mushroom atomic theory as a member of the Manhattan Project, although he campaigned against the bomb itself. In this atomic research, though, he realized something important: the same ideas that allow humans to rip individual atoms apart, leaving trees bare and genes skewed, also play out 93 million miles away. Inside the sun—and inside all other stars—atoms combine to create new elements and release the warmth and light that bathe our planet. This discovery won Bethe the Nobel Prize in 1967.

  Tarter copied down his chalky scrawling, feeling only intermittent twinges from her torso. This was a good day. Some days, she didn’t make it to class at all. The week before, as she walked toward the large lecture room, with its heavy uncomfortable oak chairs, she felt the nausea rising again, like a fist thrusting up her esophagus. At the last second, she ran into the bathroom across from the lecture hall. As much as she loved Bethe and Bose-Einstein distributions, morning sickness won.

  This was not what she’d had planned when she and Bruce decided to get pregnant. If humans were supposed to have babies, why did the body act like the fetus was something foreign to
be fought? But she was in it now, the cells splitting like atoms in a chain reaction that would last six more months. She couldn’t say, “No, this isn’t what I asked for.” And it wouldn’t kill her. Difficult experiences are difficult because they make you live through them.

  Of that time, generally, and their relationship then, Bruce says only, “The pressures were never minor.”

  During those in-between months in Ithaca, when Tarter was sick and sampling classes and Bruce was finishing his doctorate, she also entered the social life of the Cornell astronomers.

  At one department party, of which there were many subsequent and similar iterations, the smell of the Sara Lee pound cake crept into the Salpeters’ living room, where Tarter was dancing. Everyone else in the department had long ago stopped, and were probably either amused or embarrassed by her exuberance. These others moved toward the kitchen and conversation, but Tarter wasn’t finished moving and shaking. Only after she couldn’t dance any more did she walk to the Salpeters’ kitchen. People crowded around the counter. Tarter wiped sweat away and joined its periphery, watching people pick particles from their pound cake. Miriam (Mika) Salpeter, Ed’s wife, had set a number of the desserts out to thaw hours earlier and warmed them in succession, supplying them as demand warranted.

  Mika was a prototypical hostess, but not in the singular way of most faculty wives. She had a doctorate in psychology and was interested in neuroanatomy and neuromuscular disorders. Normally, Tarter thought being a faculty wife was “a fate worse than death,” even when the wife had serious academic credentials. The university did not often hire female spouses. According to a memorial statement Cornell put out after Mika’s death, after her only male ally in the department where she was a postdoc left, “her chances for an academic post at Cornell were reduced to nil. There was downright disbelief at the time that academic performance could be combined with motherhood, and Mika did not initially escape the consequences of such misjudgment.”