Syzygy
by Jane Berg
A story that my mother loves to tell is about how she got stuck in traffic on the day of an eclipse. She was headed to the airport to meet her brother. “Meet” she’d stress, not “collect,” because he was only going to be there for a brief layover. At that time, they hadn’t spent more than a few hours together in years.
Because she knew the way to the airport, she didn’t consult her phone. And although she’d been hearing news reports about the total solar eclipse for weeks, she hadn’t memorized the date. So, there she was, heading in the same direction as thousands of people who were trying to get as close as they could to the shadow of the moon: a route that arched like a rainbow across the continental United States.
Of course, these tourists had gone headlong into the usual highway hooligans and soon enough a collision bloomed in vermillion over thousands of tiny screens. Fortunately, there was a slight rise in the freeway before the traffic had truly curdled, and seeing the cascade of brake lights, my mother swerved towards the nearest exit. She parked at a gas station and weighed her options. She’d left pretty late: there was no hope of making it there before his plane departed, even if she took backroads.
Next to the gas station was one of those ugly, little city parks that are usually deserted, but today it was full of people: hordes of senior citizens, neat little families laying out their picnic blankets over the bottle caps and needles, and even a group of sixth graders on a field trip. She walked over to the crowd and looked where they were looking — directly into the sun. That’s the moment she almost burned her retinas, forgetting everything she’d vaguely learned in school about an eclipse.
Rubbing her eyes to dispel a painful galaxy of static, she saw something unusual: a woman wearing a colander. A metal kitchen colander with lime green plastic handles. The old woman was shaking her head at my mother. Then, she removed the colander from its place on her hair and pointed it to the ground where it cast a speckled shadow. Now, my mother remembered that in lieu of special glasses you could view an eclipse this way. The eclipse was already in progress, so what would have been little circles of light shining through the holes of the colander were dozens of crescent shapes against a dark background. She watched as these many small suns were subsumed by their surroundings.
***
“In Ancient China, they used to believe that, during an eclipse, a dragon was eating the Sun.”
That’s me, I’d grown so tired of hearing my mother retell this particular story that I decided every time she did so I’d chime in with a different fact about eclipses. These I’d found in a pocket-sized science book that I got for fifty cents at a yard sale. I was eight years old and full to bursting with trivia, which I rarely had the opportunity to express because adults only wanted to know about school or sports—not sea monsters, Roswell, or the Bermuda Triangle. Nor were they especially interested in the fact that the Babylonians knew that eclipses occurred every 6,585.32 days, which is just over eighteen years, and that they called this a “saros cycle.”
By adults I mean the women in my mother’s book club, which was a popular venue for her retelling of the eclipse story. The other time I often heard my mother telling the story was at Thanksgiving. My uncle was rarely at my Grandma’s house for the holiday, or he wasn’t in the room when she told the story.
I liked my uncle. He was a big, lanky man with thinning hair that made his already round face look almost completely spherical. He had a job, which made bank, and always gave me cash when no one was looking. He’d put the notes into a small manila envelope and say, “Give this to Mr. Faxman.” That was our imaginary accountant who looked after my imaginary savings. I did not tell him any of my facts about eclipses, although sometimes not telling them was like holding onto a compressed spring.
***
Here are a few of my favorites:
1. There’s a story in the Bible about a day on which God made the Sun stand still. This was to give the Israelites more time to defeat the Amorites in battle. Some believe this miracle could have involved an eclipse.
2. There is also an account by Herodotus of an eclipse that happened during a battle between two Kingdoms at war in 585 B.C. He writes that both armies were so alarmed by the event that they immediately ceased fighting and sought peace.
At the time, I found the latter story more plausible because I thought that if God had wanted to stop time it was unlikely that he would have done so with an eclipse. Because, surely, by virtue of causing darkness to descend during the day, an eclipse gives the impression that time has sped up unnaturally.
***
“Ouch! Hey!”
That’s me again. My mother has yanked me out of the kitchen and into the back garden so that she can slap me round the face in private.
“You keep talking over me. Why do you keep doing that?” she says. “And you are talking over everyone who’s trying to have a conversation. You need to learn to wait your turn.”
***
Back at the city park on eclipse day (this was about a year before I was born), my mother realized that the old woman was accompanied by a little girl who was growing tired of sharing their colander with this stranger. But the eclipse would be over in moments, and there was only a sliver of the sun left before it melted away. She felt a chill, as a breeze flowed against her bare arms. The sky was submerged into a violet gloaming, and a flock of geese threaded a line through the air above their heads. The streetlights around the park turned on. She wondered if it would be safe to look up now. But then the crowd uttered a sound like something between a gasp and a sigh. Above, there was nothing, either dangerous or safe. A cloud bank had covered the sun.
***
“I’m sorry,” my mother said as we were sitting in the car on the day she’d slapped me for speaking out of turn. “But don’t you think you’re too old to be acting like a kid?”
“Don’t you think I’m too old to be hit every time I do something that upsets you?” I said. I was fourteen at the time.
“I said I’m sorry” she said.
“Are you though?” I asked.
“Are you?”
***
In 1919, a group of astronomers led by Sir Arthur Eddington traveled to Brazil and the West coast of Africa. At these two geographic points, the eclipse that was due on May 29th was likely to be clear of obstruction. Eddington was conducting an experiment that would finally prove Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Einstein had proposed that space was not inert, as Newton had said, but that there was a fabric of space-time which could be warped or distorted by the motion of entities with great mass. People had been wondering what made stars sometimes appear in different positions in the sky at certain times; Einstein believed that the composition of light did not change but that its path had to bend around these curves in space-time.
The day of the eclipse dawned cloudless and bright. Situated neatly in the path of totality, Eddington saw the delicate halo of the sun’s corona delineated by the moon. But he was really looking just to the side of the sun at stars in the Hyades cluster, which as he expected, had been nudged just ever so slightly out of the way.
***
Staying with my uncle and his wife for a weekend, on my own, was something of an experiment. It only happened once, because shortly afterwards my cousin was born, and they no longer had the time to host. It must have been during winter as there was snow on the ground and gleaming sprays of it falling from trees in the park. Their apartment was in a swanky neighborhood downtown, and the night I arrived, we were going to go to the theatre. But my aunt-in-law said that I looked tired and suggested that we stay inside and do puzzles.
Those two were obsessed with puzzles, and my uncle’s pet peeve was with the kind of garish images that puzzle manufacturers used for their products. He could rarely find one where the image appealed to him. They were only tolerable to the extent that he paid attention to the details in isolation. As soon as the larger picture came into focus, he rushed the puzzle to completion so he could put it back in the box and out of sight. In fact, the part he enjoyed the most was the very beginning, when you sorted the contents of the box into middle pieces and corner pieces. Sadly, that part was always over too soon. He told me so that evening, as we were sorting the pieces for a new puzzle. He offered me my choice of what to search for, and I chose the middle pieces.
“Like your mother,” he said, adding that she not only wanted to find those pieces, but she also would start the puzzle by choosing her favorites. For example, one that contained a bit of bright color or an interesting line, and then she would start trying to build her puzzle around them. This was extremely inefficient, as everyone knows that you need to start from the corners, building the frame, and then work your way from the outside in. The result was that he would be halfway done with the puzzle before she had even created a few puddle-like shapes.
“And she would hog the best pieces, just ramming them together in a way that she thought would work, but really it was all in her imagination,” he said.
I laughed as though I knew exactly what he meant, although I couldn’t remember my mom and I ever making a puzzle together. She worked a lot and, when she wasn’t working, she still liked to be out of the house, seeing friends or spending money, ideally doing both those things at once. Although, it did occur to me that he didn’t have much respect for her. He would love her, and probably protect her, but she didn’t fit into his taxonomy of respect. If he did respect her, then he would have to extend that gesture to all the disorganized and unsuccessful people like her. All of those who wanted to start from the middle.
That must have been a bitter pill for her, knowing there’s almost nothing you can do about the absence of a feeling as foundational as this one. Yet, it would have been frustrating for him too, seeing a world filled with people who couldn’t seem to follow common sense.
***
The thing about celestial mythologies is that they tend to gender the sun and moon differently. In some traditions, it is the sun that’s feminine and the moon masculine. In many of these early cosmologies, the entity that does not get gendered, that gets left out altogether is the Earth itself. This is understandable; ancient peoples did not see themselves situated on a rock moving through space. They did not realize that, during an eclipse, the Earth traveling along its orbit has its own part to play. For example, if you were suspended somewhere directly behind the Earth, then our planet would appear to eclipse both the sun and the moon. The word for three or more celestial bodies arranged in a straight line is called a “syzygy”, from the Greek syzygos meaning “yoked together”.
***
“They don’t have milk, only creamer,” I told my mother, knowing she wouldn’t drink the coffee I’d brought, as she believed that the ingredients in the creamer were carcinogenic. It was a hospital, however, there weren’t many options. My aunt and my cousin were there, waiting for my uncle to complete his first session of chemotherapy. Certainly, he would have preferred it if there were less witnesses. But oftentimes your illness is not always about you. My mother and my aunt got on well enough; the silence between us was companionable at least. It was only broken by my fidgeting. I can never sit still. I paged through the books on the coffee table: magazines, pamphlets, kids books, etc.
“That looks like the one you used to torment me with when you were little,” said my mother, pointing to a kids book about astronomy, then turning to my aunt. “She memorized all the facts and would just shout them out at the strangest moments.”
“And you never guessed I was on the spectrum,” I said.
“I didn’t know the word for it, no. But I knew you were going to be more like him than me. And that’s good. He’s the more successful one. I just always felt like time was moving too quickly, and before long you would be grown up, but we’d never really get to know each other.”
“It was only you and me,” I said.
“It’s never enough,” she said. “Everyone’s inside their own heads most of the time. How often do we ever even sit down and talk like this?”
My aunt looked uncomfortable; we weren’t the only people in the waiting room. But that’s what my mother was like, the world her stage.
I chucked the kids book on the table, it hitting a glossy magazine with a pathetic slap.
“We’re here now,” I said. “What do you want to talk about?”
“I just had a funny story to tell, about your old book. I wasn’t trying to start a fight.”
***
What I never wanted to mention was that many of the eclipse facts I read in my fifty cent book were negative. For example, I read that Christopher Columbus used his knowledge of an imminent lunar eclipse to frighten the indigenous people of Jamaica into submission. Even at that early age, I could sense that this was an ugly turn of events. Most ancients saw the eclipse as a bad omen. It foretold death and destruction, the end of an era. An eclipse seemed to portend that the universe was dis-regulated and that some kind of mass cultural atonement was necessary.
I didn’t like to dwell on those connotations. But they are concepts that my mother wove into her well received poetry collection Path of Totality, and maybe if you are reading this you’ve already heard of it. The book’s titular poem contemplates the coincidence that my mother received her cancer diagnosis on the same calendar date that her brother had received his; hers was eighteen years later; which if you’ll remember, is nearly one full “saros cycle”. Sadly, those were battles that neither my mother, nor my uncle, could win.
This event also features in my mother’s memoir, which I’ve had the pleasure of helping edit and bring to publication, and is available for preorder using the link below. What also appears in her memoir is the original eclipse story. Except, as I was surprised to discover, it's told in a way I’d never encountered before.
She writes about driving to the airport, furious that her brother expects her to leave work early to meet him at his convenience. She knows that he’s been in the city for three days already and has only just now bothered to contact her. This time, however, she does not swerve off the highway as soon as she sees the brake lights up head. Instead, she joins the slowdown, sliding her car into one gap between vehicles, then another, until her steady progress despite the heavy traffic starts to feel strange. It's almost as if everyone else has frozen in place, and only she is able to slip through. She reaches the airport miraculously early.
For once, I’ll let her finish the story.
***
He is sitting by the window of a cafe in the food court, hunched over a coffee, the paper and his phone. An old man, although only thirty. I want to disturb the tableau — grab the back of his coat, spill the coffee, tear the paper, smash his phone. I don’t do anything but sit down. He pushes over the polystyrene cup. It is still warm and entirely full. He’d recently quit caffeine but knew that, of course, I hadn’t. The plane is boarding. He’d hoped it would be delayed, but that isn’t how things work do they?
“Could we speak on the go?” he says, as though to a personal assistant. We walk in silence; there’s noise all around the court from other families with other histories.
I stop to catch my breath, then something makes me stop all over again. An old woman on the balcony of the food court is wearing a colander on her head. Yes, a kitchen colander with lime green plastic handles; a small girl is hoisted up on the woman's hip. The balcony is crowded with people watching the sky and wearing little cardboard sunglasses.
And now the light suddenly dims, and they start to remove the glasses. I walk outside and he follows me, for once. What was the sun is now a circle that we can see clearly. I touch my brother’s shoulder. A moment in time bends towards us.
BIO: Jane Berg is a writer and photographer. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Flint Hills Review, Months to Years, The Rappahannock Review, Superstition Review, and elsewhere. She lives near San Francisco, CA.