Most people shudder at their family’s skeletons, those broken bones of past indiscretions they wished would disappear. But mine are so much my passion I sometimes wonder whether I shouldn’t have become an archeologist. Then again, memoirists like me are archeologists of a kind. We track down dead things, dig up remains, speculate on meaning, evolve theories. Where or when this mania started I can’t say. Only that as a child I never failed to exasperate my parents for asking too many questions. So I learned to listen and observe to find my answers. And when that wasn’t enough, use the stealth of thieves to root through drawers, cabinets and closets I had no business looking in whatsoever.

The family member who interested me most was Papa. My blue-blood mother had a pedigree she could trace back for centuries; but he had been a child with a Dickensian past. The little boy his foster mother never wanted enough to adopt. Born in Paris to a nameless woman who abandoned him at birth, the only thing he had besides an incomplete birth certificate was a Middle-Eastern sounding last name from a man he swore up and down wasn’t his father. I’m English, he’d say. My mother just snickered and called my father a liar. He doesn’t know who his parents are. He’s just saying that.

The freebooting child in me didn’t forget. Which is why, more than forty years later, I spit into a tube from an Ancestry DNA kit and waited eagerly for the results. The child had not succeeded in finding answers, but perhaps the adult could. The test results excited me—at first. There was British blood mixed with blood from Germanic Europe that explained Papa’s translucent white skin. There was Armenian blood, too; but that result mysteriously vanished when Ancestry recalibrated the results several years later. Skepticism creeped in. I didn’t doubt that Papa was English. But had the bias in the laboratory—perhaps because of my name—“created” incorrect data?

Skeptical as I was about the test, the genealogical database into which my results were entered did eventually yield a first-cousin match to an elderly man named Martin who lived in the West of England. I did not bother to contact him. Too often the other people I had contacted, the second and third cousin matches who answered my feverish queries could not help. Then the tables turned and an amateur genealogist and ex-priest who shared a connection to both me and Martin became the one to ply me with questions. Do you know Martin? Where are you on the family tree?

I had only my father’s strange, fragmented story to offer him in return. So he looked at the amount of shared DNA I had with Martin and concluded I was a half-first cousin, the child of a relative born out of wedlock. That wasn’t all. Because he had studied Martin’s family history, he was able to offer a theory about the parent who had given Papa his English bloodline. Papa’s English parent wasn’t a man. It was a woman named Ethel Maud, the sister of the man who became Martin’s father. Her name was unsettlingly ironic; naming me had been my mother’s business, not Papa’s.

Ethel’s story stuck with me. A spinster, she came from a respected West Country farming family. She kept house for an uncle who lived in Bristol, living there until both he—and eventually she—died. My imagination began spinning stories. Had this placid woman taken a lover in secret, perhaps—for whatever reason—not the taste of her family? One thing was for sure. If she was indeed Papa’s mother, she went to great lengths to hide her pregnancy, going to Paris to have the child, then abandoning it. Perhaps it was the very British need to keep up appearances that drove her. That and the fact that as a middle class woman of the 1920s, she had everything to lose from being a single mother.

Despite my DNA test skepticism, I decided to take a second test just to confirm there was no Armenian connection. I would not know who Papa’s father was; but perhaps I could lay that piece of the puzzle to rest. This one, by CRI Genetics, promised insights into a deeper past that went back thousands of years. I swabbed the inside of a cheek: three weeks later, I received confirmation of British, Northern and Southern European ancestry along with a huge surprise. Weaving in and out of Northern European and Tuscan Italian bloodlines was an Asian one stemming not from the Asia Minor of Armenia, but the Asia of the Far East. The line itself was split into others that came from Bengal, the Punjab, Southern China. And even Japan.

The romantic side of my imagination whether one of Papa’s relatives, perhaps someone on his still-unknown paternal side, was a gypsy. The Romani people originated in Northern India, mostly the Punjab region; their descendants live all over Europe and the world. But the Chinese connection? Before 1900, Asians (and Southeast Asians), came to Britain as servants or sailors, usually in service of the infamous East India Company. Those who stayed in Britain lived in London or big port cities like Liverpool; most lived in poverty or at best, working class. Perhaps a Britisher in Papa’s history had worked in India or China, perhaps for the East India Company or even as a colonial official; perhaps had a liaison with a woman there. And the child that resulted wound up in Britain, probably London. Whoever they were, these relatives, they were travelers. People on the move…just like Papa, a restless man who could never stay in one place for long.

Going back even further, to the 1600s, the test revealed another surprise: a Taino connection from Puerto Rico. CRI Genetics had found connections to Spain; so had the first version of Ancestry DNA. It was clear now that if the test was correct, my ancestors had been part of the Spanish Conquest…and that this Taino had more than likely been a woman. I had read enough history to know that this was how empire worked: kill the men or work them until they die. Enslave the women and turn them into concubines. It doesn’t matter which side, maternal or paternal, she came from. Only that she existed and that one or more of her children had followed their father to Europe.

With so many unknowns in my paternal ancestry (and a few on my mother’s side), I am tempted to further speculate that these people, these other ancestors, had no wish to be known, desiring instead to lose themselves in whitewash of Europeanness just to survive. One of the things I remember my father telling me over and over was how glad I should be for who I was. Which in his parlance meant white and middle class. But the curious child who didn’t obey her parents had already learned what was important to her and remains important to her still: knowing where her skeletons come from. And understanding them—loving them, even—rules be damned.

Mama was an Italian lapsed Catholic who sang while she cooked. It felt so much like a ritual I sometimes wondered whether her from-scratch meals and the songs that accompanied them weren’t a substitute for Sunday Mass. The noodles, though—they always came from a box. Perhaps she bought them because it was the modern thing to do. A time-saving convenience. I only realized this after I bought a pasta machine last December, a whirring, purring dream that efficiently pushes out 200 grams of everything, from capellini to linguine, pappardelle and lasagna, in under fifteen minutes. It seemed my desire to experience something like traditional pasta had made me regress.

The machine would have competed rather than harmonized with my mother’s sonorous mezzo-contralto. But its near-scientific precision? It would have won her over. She was a trained biochemist who transformed our kitchen into the culinary laboratory that was also her refuge. I think of this now, whenever I watch my machine work. Seeing the noodles wriggle from the tiny holes of my machine’s extruder, now, it sometimes seems I’m witnessing the birth of worms. Or maybe even the threads that, according to one branch of theoretical physics, make up all matter.

I think of string theory now because my mother was a scientist. But it didn’t become a recognized area of research until the 1970s, nearly twenty years after she fled biochemistry and disavowed her connection to the laboratory. On-the-fringe but not quite discredited, string theory suggests that vibrating “strings” create everything from single-celled amoebae to entire galaxies. Proponents further argue that it could unify space and time and everything in it with coextensive physical forces that keep large objects like planets and moons from flying apart. For believers, it’s the concept that explains the entire universe.

Just about the time homemade pasta became a menu staple, this strange theory became my personal food for thought. Like my meals, it’s one of the few things that links me to my mother. And—I like to imagine—to the aunts and grandmothers and grand aunts and great-grands who cooked from scratch, perhaps setting the noodles they made out to dry in the bright Italian sun. The women against whose way of life my mother rebelled through science; but to which she reluctantly returned as an unhappy housewife. Those strings of egg, water and semolina flour—they’re more than a meal. They are the invisible and complicated strands that remind me of the nurturing my mother could not offer except in the food she prepared.

String theory, of course, is not nearly as linear as the pasta I imagine connects me to my foremothers. Beyond the three dimensions our senses know and the invisible fourth dimension of time, there are as many as 25 separate dimensions. They exist as tiny balls of curled strings associated with every point in the three-dimensional world we live in and affect all different aspects of that world including time. Depending on how these cosmic strands move, they can create an infinite variety of effects in all dimensions. These can take the form of everything from invisible “collisions” (as between atomic particles) to large body connections (as between planets and their moons).

The possibilities string theory suggests have inspired others—especially science fiction writers—to play with the related idea that strings can create universes that parallel our own and exist with different versions of ourselves and the lives we know. No wonder the strangeness of string theory appeals. This space of what ifs and alternatives—this is a space I can understand. And yet…it’s not the science that draws me, or even the squirming strands of homemade pasta. It’s the strings themselves. The idea that behind the strings that they are vibrations, expression of pure creativity. The creativity of the universe.

Which takes me back to my mother. To what I now see as creativity. She sang along with Spanish-language songs broadcast from radio stations in Los Angeles; they were the closest thing to her native Italian she had. And they were sad, so full of regret. Those songs, those expressions of the artist my mother also was, reveal more about her than she would ever say or admit. Fearful of looking too far into the future, she lived in the past, in memories of what could have been…had she not come to the States, not met my father, not had children, not left the lab, not obeyed the twists and turns of her own rebel heart.

So now, when I stand in my kitchen, watching my machine spin the flour and water it will turn to strings of pasta, I picture my mother. Not in our old kitchen, but singing on a stage, her body swaying rhythmically, a rapt audience before her. In another universe, maybe that woman exists; and maybe, she is joyful.

I’d like to think so, anyway.