The sensational lie, which children believe: Geniuses are born. When most people first meet Doll, they think she was always this way. Always cold, always high-minded, always rational. They imagine her a precocious child, who corrected her classmates and parents on anything and everything. The idea she was ever a true child, innocent and ignorant, seems impossible.
Some adults know better. They believe the mature lie: Geniuses are trained. Doll had a mentor, or an excellent education, and they made her into this automaton of a woman, who lives for nothing but research. How amazing, but implicitly tragic. Anyone could be her, if only they sacrificed all human joys and pleasures!
The truth is neither sensational nor mature. It is boring: a little bit of both. Doll was not born smart, nor was she trained into it. No, her genius started with a light bulb.
It was Doll's eighth winter. After years of replacing candles, her mother's landlord had renovated their decaying one bedroom apartment, and now, every room sported a hanging bulb. For her mother, it was a tiny luxury offset by a painful increase in rent. For Doll, it was a miracle. With the flick of a switch, one could create light without fire, or wax, or wood. How?
When Doll asked her mother, she got a vague answer about electricity. When she pressed further, her mother admitted she wasn't sure. It was a normal response, but to Doll, it was unbearably sad. How could her mother, the source of all wisdom and truth, not know something? Maybe her mother's mother—a woman Doll had never met, but her mother prayed to often—had forgotten to tell her.
It was a tragedy Doll had to rectify. But to ask her mother for help would just put another weight on her terribly burdened shoulders. So, with what little allowance she had, she bought a book.
It was beyond her years. The pages were filled with copious equations and adult words, and despite studying it late into the night, long after her mother had gone to sleep, she couldn't understand most of it. But it was a rare book, one of those written by someone with passion for both the subject, and the art of teaching it, and that was enough. It taught her of something called 'electrons', and how they could pass through copper like water through a stream. It taught her that some substances resisted this flow, and in resisting produced heat. Heat that glowed.
It took her a week of crying and begging, but her mother relented. She gave an advance on her allowance, and with it, she bought copper wire, filament, and a battery. In the corner of their kitchen, as winter wind howled outside, Doll played. She connected copper and copper, copper and filament, and then—
Light. She had made light. It was dim, and flickered as her tiny hands held the wires unsteady, but it was light!
In the morning, she asked her mother the same question: "Mom, how do light bulbs work?"
"I don't know," her mother said, smiling. "Do you?"
"I do!" Doll grinned. She took her mother's hand, and led her to kitchen, where a towel covered her first invention. "Everything is made of these little balls called atoms, and those little balls are followed by these smaller balls called 'electrons'!"
She sat her mother in one of the two chairs they had. "In some things, the electrons can flow. And when they can't flow very well, they make the thing hot! And what happens when something's hot?"
"It glows?" her mother ventured.
"Yes!" Doll ripped the towel off the table, and beneath was a battery, and copper wire connected to a filament.
Doll put on gloves, and took the two ends of the wire. "This is the copper, which the electrons flow through, and this is the filament, which heats up as they do. When I connect it to the battery—"
The filament glowed. It was dim, and flickered as her tiny hands held the wires unsteady, but it glowed.
Her mother stared at her. "How did you...?"
Doll beamed. "I read about it in a book!"
"Dolores... are you a genius?"
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