Anything Can Happen

by Roger Rosenblatt

  We can hear you ask: "Who's going to pay for all this?" The bathroom for you includes your very own bank, which will provide all the funds you ever require, and your very own stock exchange, where your stocks only go up up up. You will never "take a bath" (ha ha).

  The bathroom for you will be both city and country. It will include over fifty square hectares of fields, where you can grow oats and wheat and barley. Plenty of room for tractors and combines. And should an accident occur (God forbid!) you will have a fully equipped hospital, with several operating theaters and nurses on strike, to add that touch of realism. To further ensure your privacy, as well as your protection, there will be a fleet of planes on hand, outfitted with both short- and long-range missiles (nuclear, natch), in case of an invasion from another bathroom. Just kidding.

  The bathroom for you is infinitely expandable, so if there is anything we have left out—baseball and football stadiums, movie theaters, concert halls, museums, a petting zoo for your pets—the omission is easily remedied. Many of our customers are cautious by nature, so we have added your personal law firm and your own courthouse, including an appellate division, in case you slip in the tub and feel like suing yourself (ha ha).

  The bathroom for you means personal freedom, we realize that. So we will include a desert island; we call it "Your Escape Within an Escape." On the island will be all the things one needs in a state of seclusion—books on self-improvement, books on self-recrimination, and, naturally, a bathroom.

  At the same time, the bathroom for you may begin to feel too private, too enclosed, and you may feel guilty that you have focused all this attention on your bathroom, while so much of the outer world is starving or dying of disease. We know how you feel, so we have added most of Asia, all of Africa, and underclass America to your bathroom, along with medical researchers to find cures for the ill and captains of industry to provide meaningful work for the poor. As for those who still remain hostile after all that, who indeed may seek to eradicate you and your bathroom—we can see you begin to smile already—yes! We have provided them with bathrooms, too.

  In preparing the bathroom for you we have tried to think of everything, but we also realize that inevitably there will be items we could not have anticipated. So, just in case, we have added an architectural firm to make any additions or corrections you require to make this room uniquely yours. The only thing that matters is that you feel totally comfortable and that you achieve the peace of mind that says: This room is you. One thing we do ask is that you keep the shower curtain inside the shower and that you don't forget to flush. Just kidding.

  13 Ways of Looking at a Blackboard

  A manic syntax of desks and chairs; a lost syntax of knowledge and feeling; and the day the fat lady with the blue hair and nothing under it demanded that I spell the word syntax, and I guessed right, not because I was smart or clever, but because I knew that, more than anything, she wanted me to get it wrong.

  You Mean to Say You Didn't Learn a Thing? Long division, as long as it was not too long. The spelling of recommend. The poem, "Musée des Beaux Arts" and the proper pronunciation of Brueghel. And, speaking of that, the location of Auden's house on St. Mark's Place, where I would go instead of class in the afternoons and stand across the street from his apartment and stare up. I could take you there if you like.

  Today's Math and Science Questions: If every equation balances out; that is, if both sides always come to the same thing, why are we forcing you to take math?

  Except for the language of science, there is hardly a word that has but a single meaning. (Same question as math.)

  Wallace Stevens said that in the long run the truth does not matter. Lucky for us, because we certainly didn't learn the truth. We learned that art is long but life is short, and that certainly wasn't true. Come to think of it, I can't recall a single thing I learned that was true. One thing, maybe. On the wall next to my desk in a classroom in the basement, a prior lifer had written, very neatly, "Mushy mounds of Mongolian moose manure." That was true.

  Read The Forsythe Saga by Thursday.

  History—F

  Algebra—F

  French—F

  Desire to Make Friends—F

  Desire to Open a Book—F

  Desire to Do Anything But Write Poems

  and Shoot Baskets—F

  Belief in Self in Spite of Everything

  We've Done—A (See below.)

  We are very concerned about his performance in this class. We have done everything imaginable to smash his self-confidence, and yet he persists in feeling that he can make something of his life. Please schedule a conference immediately.

  Club Meetings for the Week: The Treachery Society; Malice and Gossip Team; Psycho Boys (aka Future Psychologists of America); Cowed, Lonely, and Scared People (CLASP)—please bring nicknames; Also, tryouts in the theater for major parts in Othello, The Bad Seed, All About Eve, Carrie.

  It was no more than a glimpse from one of the high, rippling windows of the Meeting House. A tree tilting in the playground. A daffodil poking up between two slabs of slate. A guillotine of morning light descending on a wall of old red brick. The picture could have been anywhere beautiful—the home of a great artist, a museum, a monastery, a school.

  Mr. McGrath, from the zoo, who has taken the claws out of animals, will speak at assembly this Tuesday. Bring your pets.

  From the principal's office: As you know, we have admitted one black student in the 150-year history of the school, and we admitted that one just yesterday. When he arrives, I trust that you will give him the school welcome and treat him as you would one another.

  P.S. Whoever wrote the following under "anonymous" in the yearbook, see me at once: "The Greeks say that we have death with us every step of our lives, so that when we finally die, we already know what death is. I cannot speak for my classmates. But I for one would like to thank the school for teaching me about the Greeks."

  Fucking up our lives was merely their way; they meant no harm. Or, to be accurate, they meant no more harm to us than they did to anyone else. In their previous lives they might have been people. Our luck! The drunk who taught chemistry and who was rumored to have been gassed in the war, which accounted, they said, for our inability to understand a syllable he uttered; the one who taught biology and theorized that if a fat man married a skinny woman, they would have an ordinary-size child; the baseball coach who called me a kike because I'd walked a man with the bases loaded and who claimed to have played in the majors under a different name, but hadn't; the wobbly married couple who taught math and bounced off each other like zeppelins making private, incomprehensible jokes; the one who threw bric-a-brac at the kids; the one who fed us sugar cubes (he was one of the nicest); the harridan who taught French so that she could make students feel like dirt in two languages. That was the quality of the faculty.

  All except Shank, who came from the Mormons by way of Yale and taught us how to read a poem and how to think of writing as a selection of exact words; who gave us passages of poetry with a key word missing and had us fill in the blanks; who gave us Canada Mints and asked us to write what they tasted like, to teach us metaphor; who began our study of Hamlet by having us build a model of the Globe Theatre; who had standards and who was gay and who was fired because of both defects. They called him a homo. He was.

  SECOND GRADERS—DO NOT ERASE! "Every day in every way I'm getting better and better."

  Something's Wrong

  You have that look on your face. You don't need a mirror. You can feel the squint of anguished curiosity, the formation of a poorly drawn set of quotation marks between your eyebrows, the absentminded, kind of dumb, pucker of the lips. Absentmindedness. That could be it. The location of the car keys, the sunglasses. Perhaps that's what's on your mind. Something is wrong, that's for sure. Perhaps you can't find a ballpoint pen. You must buy a billion of those pens every year, and they all disappear. Perhaps you can't recall the name of Max Von Sydow. You stared at his face for a full
hour as you watched the movie, Minority Report, knowing that you'd seen that face before, a long time ago, in Ingmar Bergman movies.

  You could be worried about that. You could be worried about forgetfulness in general, about the next time you see Max Von Sydow on the screen and having to wait until the credits roll in the blackness before his name comes to you. Something's wrong. Something's clearly wrong. If not that, this. If not this, then something else.

  Perhaps it's your money. Plenty of reason to be concerned about money these days. Your investments. Could be that. Your investment house. Could be a bunch of crooks. So could your bank. So many crooks in big business, these days. Is that what's behind your malaise? Malaise: Maybe it's your body. The body is supposed to send signals when it's in trouble, but some of the most serious diseases don't send any signals, none that we recognize. Is it your aorta, colon, spleen? Perhaps you don't know your ass from your elbow. Time to learn?

  Perhaps you're merely tired, pooped, bushed, and a benumbing weariness has fooled you into thinking that something's wrong. Then again, you may be going mad. Some of the best people do, you know. The phone rang once this morning, only once, and you wondered for quite a while why someone had hung up after just one ring. What possibly could have occurred to make someone do that? Had the call come from a car? Perhaps the car had been in an accident, gouged from behind by an oil truck, and both vehicles were sent plunging in a loop-the-loop of fire down a ravine into a lake.

  Had the phone call come from someone you hadn't seen in decades, since high school, who suddenly acted on an impulse, but then, after a single ring, thought the better of it and returned to her job as a waitress at Appleby's? Was it Mary Baker Eddy, calling from her cool tomb? Why did she pick you? But she must have regretted her choice. She hung up.

  It could be worse, of course. What's wrong could be a lie you told, a wrong you committed, or a right you omitted to commit. People do that, too. They fail to correct a false impression someone has of a friend of theirs, they fail to stand up for their loved ones, they maintain a self-protective silence when a good word would have been the right thing to say. They agree with disagreeable ideas. It has happened. That injury you caused so many years ago, is it still getting you down? Why, the injured party has probably forgotten the incident. Why bring it up now? Unless it is the thing that's wrong.

  Something's wrong, all right. You just can't put your finger on it. Maybe it's the position of the planets. Saturn's rings could be dipping a degree or two. Or something you're picking out of the air—a lounge singer, perhaps, sad-eyed in a tight yellow dress, standing beside a Yamaha baby grand in the Hyatt in Saipan and murmuring, "Am I Blue?" just a shade off-key, every note just a shade off-key—something like that could turn the trick. Or the way the fates operate. On the news you heard about a woman in Hawaii who was killed when a four-ton boulder broke loose, rolled down a mountain, and crashed through the wall of her home into her bedroom where she had been sleeping and crushed her to death. What are the odds of something like that happening? Enough to drive you to distraction, and you certainly are distracted.

  Whatever it is, you know it's important. Might even have been fundamental, indispensable to your well-being. Like an appointment missed that might have changed everything. Something you neglected to do, to follow up on, to say that could have made you happy forever. The day you failed to seize. The person you neglected to speak to. The love that was there for the taking. The life that was there for the taking. But you settled, didn't you? You let it stroll right past you, didn't you? Is that it? Is that it? Yes, yes. That's it. That's it. No, that isn't it.

  Shorter than Bacon's (More)

  On Bigotry

  You think it has to do with race and religion, but it goes much wider. The one who believes only in his own point of view is a fine old bigot.

  On Blushes

  They come to the surface when one is either modest or ashamed. Interesting, no?

  On Doubt

  Doubt is the mother (or father) of belief. And vice versa. I have no idea where that gets you.

  On Cheats

  It figures: One who hides behind a cheat has to be smaller than the cheat.

  On Murderers

  On the whole, they're better than liars. And a half-murder is a lot better than a half-truth.

  On Being Without Love

  If no one, absolutely no one, loves you, you're doing something wrong. Bet on it.

  The Giant Rat of Sumatra

  For much of my youth, my ambitions centered on lines from movies. There were certain things said in movies that I cherished—things that I knew that I wanted to hear again and again. I sought to incorporate them into my life, which is to say that I wanted to work them into normal conversations. Friends would be conducting a perfectly sensible chat, and I would be listening, like a lion in the brush, for an opportunity to slip in a line from, say, Beau Brummel ("Who's your fat friend?") or Double Indemnity ("There's a widespread feeling that just because a man has a large office, he must be an idiot") or Palm Beach Story (as said by Rudy Vallee to Mary Astor: "You know, Maude, someone meeting you for the first time, not knowing you were cracked, might get the wrong impression of you." For that one, of course, one would have to wait for someone named Maude).

  To be sure, this hobby of mine did not make me the ideal social companion, but this is how it is when career and popularity are in conflict. The "fat friend" line earned me the everlasting hatred of a plumpish girl in high school, who was standing beside a friend of mine when I tossed in my movie question. I tried to explain that I was merely quoting Stewart Granger as Beau Brummel when he was miffed with King George III, but she seemed uninterested.

  The lines I chose were never the garden variety, such as "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship" or "Frankly, my dear..." and so forth, but rather ones that had a special attraction for me. The other day I heard such a line in a movie called Jack Frost, in which someone who was attempting to rid the world of a large maniacal snowman, explained: "We tried blowing him up, but it only pissed him off."

  For many years, there were two lines I had never been able to slip into any conversation. The first of these, I never did get in. It occurred in Earthquake, one of the disaster films of the 1970s, in which a man was stalking a young woman to do terrible things to her. One would have thought that an earthquake would have been enough to divert his attention, but he was determined. At the height of the quake, he finally cornered his quarry and was about to jump her, when George Kennedy (a cop, of course) appeared, threw the attacker to the ground, and shot him dead. Consoling the shaking woman, Kennedy said: "I don't know what it is. Earthquakes bring out the worst in some guys."

  The other line was much more unusual and exotic so it presented a much greater challenge. It was spoken by Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson in one of the Sherlock Holmes movies of the 1940s when Watson was attempting to impress a couple on a ship who evidently were not familiar with Holmes's exploits. "Haven't you heard of the giant rat of Sumatra?" asked Watson, referring to one of the great detective's most famous cases. "Haven't you heard of the giant rat of Sumatra?"

  Years, decades, passed, and I never came close to a moment when I might work in that line. The degree of difficulty was steep; there were so many elements to the Watson remark. If one heard an opening for the rat, there would still be the matter of its size. If the rat and the size were there, one still had to contend with Sumatra. Above these concerns stood the context. In order to make the question really fit a situation, the opening had to allow for an attitude of superior surprise. "Haven't you heard of the giant rat of Sumatra?" Meaning: "Who has not?"

  In the late 1970s I was writing for the Washington Post, and I had all but given up on my quest. In all those intervening years not a single conversation had come remotely close to offering me my longed-for opportunity. Then, one day, some friends and I went out to lunch, and it happened to be the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of Mickey Mouse. There was
some chatter about Mickey, to which I had been paying scant attention—how much he had contributed to American culture. The usual harmless claptrap. Suddenly, one of the guys sat up with a quizzical look and asked, "Has there ever been a bigger rodent?"

  First, I smiled.

  In the Madhouse in Beirut

  When the twelve bombs hit the drab, gray hospital, six people were killed and twenty wounded. Two female patients were sliced to pieces by the shrapnel. The year is 1982, spring. The Beirut hospital is for people suffering from mental and psychological diseases. Among its patients are Lebanese, Palestinians, Maronites, Druze, Sunnis, Shi'ites, and Jews. An Armenian lies curled up on the second floor landing near a lateral gap that looks like an expressionless mouth. Flies collect on his bare feet. Nearby, a young woman cannot control her body. Her arms flail, her legs buckle; she smiles sweetly with her writhing lips. An old woman sits up in bed tearing a round slice of bread to small bits and tossing them on the floor. The children are penned in a small, dark space; they smell of urine; their thighs are stained with excrement. One boy shivers, another laughs. A legless girl spoons mush into the mouth of a younger one. A woman lurches forward and shouts in English: "I am normal!"

  I think of these people frequently, even now, twenty years later, as I walk the clean, free beach near my home. I think of them because I cannot help it, and I realize: Be grateful for those you meet who seem the most distant from you, the strangest and most alien. They are the closest.