Author: Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar

It’s my turn to peek through the eyepiece of the giant telescope at the Lowell Observatory.
“Ma, do you see the binary stars?” Vivek asks. “I could see them clearly.”
With my right eye on the lens, I observe two silver balls shining close to each other in a nebulous haze, one visibly brighter than the other.
“The distance between these stars is so small that they appear as one without a telescope, but in reality, they are two objects moving in separate orbits,” my son states facts he’s learned at the School Science Olympiad.
Although he’s speaking science, my mind drifts and the skin on my neck turns cold. I zip my sweater all the way up to my chin. My husband Samir didn’t accompany us on this spring break trip—he had a deadline at work. Last winter, I didn’t join him and Vivek on the skiing trip.
Samir and I are traversing our orbits. Our differences—he’s movies, I’m books; he’s steak, I’m salad; he’s malls, I’m parks—that we appreciated and made accommodations for, have over the years expanded into light years. We keep it quiet for Vivek—not to disrupt his APs and SATs—but, at times, I want to scream out aloud, pound the pillows, even punch the drywall.
Later, at the gift shop, Vivek looks at mini telescopes while I read up on binary stars in a book. I’m intrigued that this star system is my marriage explained in the parlance of space.
On the way to our hotel, Vivek is excited and voluble. “Ma, did you notice the difference in the binary stars? The brighter one’s called the primary, the dimmer one, the secondary.”
“Yes,” I say, focusing my eyes on the road. A fog has descended, making visibility poor. “But I don’t like how the astronomers have smeared their earthly biases into space. The primary, always the head of household—the one who brings in more money.”
“I know what you mean,” Vivek says. “Not fair.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I notice the faint stubble on my son’s chin, his jawline squaring and maturing a man’s. He digs into his pocket and removes a magnet. “I bought this for Pa. Maybe he’ll like it.”
“It’s good,” I reply.
“Ma, do you know the binary stars are also classified based on the gravitational area around them,” Vivek starts talking again. “It’s called the Roche lobe.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that,” I said. “I thought lobes belonged to brains.”
“Stars have lobes too. Their own gravitational areas. In contact binaries, the individual stars spill out of their Roche lobes and shape each other.” Vivek pauses, then continues after a breath. “Then there are detached binaries where the stars stay within their gravitational areas and evolve separately while being together.”
There. My son’s found the raw nerve throbbing in my neck. I try to sprinkle in some levity. “Can their behavior be explained through quantum physics, Professor Vivek?”
“No, Ma. This is pure old gravitational force.” He chuckles before his tone turns pensive. “I hope that’s enough to keep the stars together.”
My heart splits and my eyelashes itch. The boy has observed everything despite Samir’s and my attempts to maintain a façade of normalcy.
“Yes, that’s more than enough,” I say, clearing my throat to gain control over my emotions, recalling the facts I read in the gift shop. “Besides, it’s the barycenter that will hold them together forever. The center, you know, around which both the binary stars orbit.”
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