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The number-two pencil. With her free hand, Elizabeth had found it, gripped it, and driven it straight into his side [...] all seven inches of it versus all seven inches of him. And in doing so, she pierced not only his large and small intestine, but her academic career as well.
As she endures a flashback to a brutal sexual assault by her graduate supervisor at UCLA, Elizabeth thinks about the fact that a pencil both saved her and destroyed her. When Meyers rapes her, Elizabeth tries to struggle away. He’s too big and strong, however, and so she defends herself by impaling him with her number-two pencil. It’s a literal and symbolic battle for control over her body in an oppressive academic environment, and she’s fighting with the only weapon she has. The pencil, which she uses to conduct her experiments and record her findings, becomes an instrument of self-defense. Even though Elizabeth’s “seven inches” seriously damage and her academic career, she doesn’t regret defending herself. However, when she retaliates against her rapist, the unfair social conditions she’s forced to exist in means her academic career gets completely derailed.
And then that feeling came over her again, the one she had every time she was with him, but this time she acted on it, reaching out with both hands to draw his face to hers, their first kiss cementing a permanent bond that even chemistry could not explain.
Elizabeth and Calvin have been trying to work together platonically for a long time by the time Elizabeth makes this move. When she acts on her deeply repressed feelings and kisses Calvin, it’s a moment that goes beyond scientific logic. This first kiss creates a deep connection between them, a “bond that even chemistry could not explain.” Elizabeth spends a lot of Lessons in Chemistry explaining to anyone who will listen that chemistry contains all of life’s answers. The only exception to this rule is her relationship with Calvin. She can’t explain their bond, even though she discusses other relationships using the terms of atomic bonding. She doesn’t believe in fate, but she tells people Calvin is her soulmate. In this intense moment, their relationship changes forever. It’s also notable that in typical gender-role-defying style, it’s Elizabeth who initiates their first kiss. Their relationship contains all the conventional elements of the gender-normative storybook romance, but arrives to them in unconventional ways.
I don’t want to be another Mileva Einstein or Esther Lederberg, Calvin. I refuse. And even if we took all the proper legal steps to ensure my name won’t change, it will still change. Everyone will call me Mrs. Calvin Evans. I will become Mrs. Calvin Evans.
When he proposes, Calvin doesn’t understand why Elizabeth keeping her own surname wouldn’t solve her worries about losing professional recognition. It’s partially because she has seen so many women losing their individuality through marriage, like Harriet Sloane and like her own mother. It is mostly, however, because she wants her professional achievements to be recognized on their own merits. This is a familiar story in history, and it’s one that she doesn’t want to be another character in. She cites Mileva Einstein, a physicist, mathematician, and the first wife of Albert Einstein, as an example of this. Mileva was brilliant in her own right, but her contributions to the field have largely been unrecognized and overshadowed by her husband’s fame. Similarly, Esther Lederberg was a pioneering geneticist who discovered a virus that infects bacteria called the “lambda bacteriophage.” Her work was invaluable in our current scientific understanding of gene regulation and genetic recombination. However, as Elizabeth says, her fame pales in the face of her husband Joshua Lederberg, who won a Nobel Prize. Elizabeth's decision to not change her name upon marriage is her way of taking a stand against this pattern. She wants to ensure that her identity and contributions remain distinctly hers.
When Calvin claimed he held no grudges and hated no one, he only meant it in that way that some people say they forget to eat. Meaning he was lying.
This quote suggests a gap between what Calvin understands about himself and what’s actually true. It’s an important moment in the novel because it’s one of the only instances when public opinion about one of the protagonists is more accurate than what they know themselves. There’s a lot of misinformation in the air surrounding Evans. It’s not true that Calvin and Elizabeth have a purely sexual relationship, or that he's wildly wealthy, for example. People make up a lot of deeply unpleasant stories about Calvin and Elizabeth, but Calvin’s idea that he doesn’t hold grudges is just as fictional as those rumors. Calvin’s a deeply logical man and grudges are illogical. Nevertheless, he can’t let them go. When he hates someone, he hates them forever, and there’s almost nothing that can change that.
