Half Life

and am somewhat surprised by the image staring back at me. I am altogether different in a brand-new dress, more feminine. Perhaps it’s the beautiful, spotless material, artfully steamed by my sisters, or the form that has been made just for me, that shows off the curves of my bosom and hourglass shape of my waist. But the person staring back at me is no longer a girl, no longer a Pole. I am an educated woman, a scientist, about to be a wife. A French wife, at that. Madame.
Someone knocks on the door, and I spin away from the mirror. “Marie,” Pierre’s voice comes through.
“Come in,” I say, brimming with excitement to see him.
He steps inside and smiles brightly. “You look so beautiful, mon amour.”
“You like my new dress?” I turn around, so he can see the full effect of it.
“You could wear your lab coat to our wedding and you would still be the most beautiful bride in all of Paris.”
I laugh and turn back to face him. He’s dressed in a dark suit, the tails hanging at the perfect length for his long legs. “Thank goodness you changed out of your lab coat,” I tease him. “You look quite good today yourself. But I think we’re not supposed to see each other before the wedding. Bad luck, they say?”
Pierre chuckles. “Luck? And how might we quantify that?” Neither of us believes in luck. Luck is nonsense, nothing scientific about it. I’m only repeating what Hela told me before she’d left, a superstition and a warning. I repeat it now more for Pierre’s amusement than for any real belief in such silliness.
He sweeps across the room in only two large steps, wraps me in a hug, and kisses me gently on the mouth. “I couldn’t wait another minute to tell you what I’d gotten for us,” he says.
“Something for the lab?” Really we could use so much more temperature-measuring equipment, though we haven’t the space for it.
“No, mon amour, something for us. My cousin sent some money as a wedding gift, and I purchased us two brand new bicycles. They’ve just arrived.”
“Bicycles?” It is so impractical of him, and yet the idea of a brand-new bicycle all my own, not a rickety hand-me-down from his brother, delights me beyond reproach, and I clap my hands together with excitement.
“Yes, and we can take them on our honeymoon. Ride through the entire French countryside.”
“Oh, Pierre. What a glorious idea.” We’d already planned a few weeks away from the city, but now the idea of bicycling with Pierre, for weeks on end, through the countryside! My chest swells, and I impulsively stand on my toes and kiss his cheek, the hairs of his beard scratching my lips in that delightful way they do. “I cannot wait to be Madame Curie,” I exhale.
“Come.” He holds out his hand. “Shall we test them out now, ride them to Luxembourg Station, to catch the omnibus to Sceaux?”
“Oh I don’t know. Will we ruin our wedding clothes going by bicycle?” A bicycle ride will undo all of Bronia’s steaming work on my dress, and probably mess up the curls Hela spent hours putting in my bun.
“Ruin them?” Pierre says. “Make them better, I say.”
I smile and take his hand. Though just a few months ago I had chided him for his ridiculous notion of forever, now the very idea of it bubbles up inside of me. I am so full and alive and light, that as I leave my room with this man, about to be my husband, I’m almost surprised my feet can touch the ground.
If happiness is helium, then love is hydrogen, light enough to float our bicycles upward, toward the sky.

Marya
Loksow, Poland, 1896
My body was not built to carry a baby.
From the very moment our child began growing within me, I was ill. At first I could not eat any food at all, because even the smell of it was unbearable. Just to prepare it for Kaz for supper—my stomach roiled, and I had to go lie down while he ate at the table alone. And still our apartment was so very tiny that the smells permeated my skin, even in bed. I could not escape them, nor the lingering metallic taste of my own tongue, and I had to constantly fight back the urge to gag.
After a few months, when my dresses began to fit too tight around the middle, I tried to force myself to eat. I knew enough biology to understand that the baby needed food from me to thrive. But as hard as I tried to force it, half the time, I would throw my meals back up again anyway. The nausea overwhelmed all my senses—I could barely hear or see or speak, because every sound, every sight, every word, made me blindingly, dizzily nauseated.
Kazimierz had begun assisting Hipolit around the same time I found out about the baby. And ever since, Kaz was gone more than he was home with me. Or maybe it was that I could not even see him, feel him, bear the smell of him when he was nearby. He was no longer my steady, because all I could feel was dizzy and ill.
I wanted to know how his studies were going, wanted to feel assured that everything was well, and that after our baby was born, things would get easier, and we could still move to Paris at some point. Hela wrote me that she was finishing a chemistry course there, passing her exams with the highest scores in her class. And Bronia had good work as an obstetrical doctor. She had two children now, her daughter Lou and her son Jakub, and she employed the help of a governess to look after them while she practiced medicine and Hela took classes full time.
I could still see Paris, like a white blinding light at the end of a long, dark passageway. If only I had the strength, if only I