Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  I decided to take control of the situation (see Emma, Austen, 1816).

  It was October. Dad was dating a woman named Kitty (whom I hadn't yet had the pleasure of swatting away from our screen), but she was of no consequence. Why should Dad settle for a Standard American Wirehair when he could have a Persian? (I can blame Hannah's croony music taste for my wayward vision, old Peggy Lee and her incessant whining about the crazy moon and Sarah Vaughan sniveling about her lover man.)

  I acted with uncharacteristic vehemence that rainy Wednesday afternoon as I set my Disney-inspired plan into action. I told Dad I had a ride and then asked Hannah to drive me home. I made her wait in the car, giving her a lame excuse ("Hold on, I have a great book for you.") before I ran inside to pry Dad away from Patrick Kleinman's latest tome published by Yale University Press, The Chronicle of Collectivism (2004), so he'd come outside and talk to her.

  He did.

  In short, there was no world on a string, no tender trap, no wee small hour of the morning and certainly no witchcraft. Dad and Hannah exchanged moonless pleasantries. I believe Dad even said, "Yes, I've been meaning to attend one of those home football games. Blue and I will see you there," in an effort to clothespin the silence.

  "That's right," said Hannah. "You like football games."

  "Yes," said Dad.

  "Don't you have a book to lend me?" Hannah asked me.

  Within minutes, she was driving away with my only copy of Love in the Time of Cholera (Garcia Marquez, 1985).

  "Touched as I am by your efforts to play Cupid, my dear, in the future, please allow me to do my own riding into the sunset," Dad said as he walked inside.

  That night I couldn't sleep. Even though I'd never said anything to Hannah, and she'd never said anything to me, a certain foolproof Thesis had been floating around in my head, that the only plausible explanation for her including me in the Sunday soirees, for her brutally shoehorning me in with the others (determined to pry open their airtight clique like a frenzied housewife with a jar opener) was that she wanted Dad. Because I couldn't have mistaken, at least back at Surely Shoos, her eyes hovering a little fretfully over his face like green dragontails over a flower (Family Fapilionidae), that sure, she'd smiled at me back at Fat Kat Foods, but it was Dad whom she wanted to notice her, Dad whom she wanted to stun.

  But I was wrong.

  I tossed and turned, analyzing every look Hannah had thrown me, every word, smile, hiccup, throat clear and distinctly audible swallow until I was so confused, I could only lie on my left side staring at the windows with its swollen blue and white curtains where night melted so slowly it hurt. (Mendelshon Peet wrote in Loggerheads [1932], "Man's wobbly little mind isn't equipped for hauling around the great unknowns.")

  Finally I fell asleep.

  "Very few people realize, there's no point chasing after answers to life's important questions," Dad said once in a Bourbon Mood. "They all have fickle, highly whimsical minds of their own. Nevertheless. If you're patient, if you don't rush them, when they're ready, they'll smash into you. And don't be surprised if afterwards you're speechless and there are cartoon tweety birds chirping around your head."

  How right he was.

  IX

  Pygmalion

  The legendary Spanish conquistador Hernando Nunez de Valvida (La Serpiente Negra) wrote, in his diary entry of April 20, 1521 (a day he allegedly slaughtered two hundred Aztecs), "La gloria es un millôn ojos asustados" roughly translated as, "Glory is a million frightened eyes." This never meant much to me, until I became friends with them. If the Aztecs regarded Hernando and his henchmen with fright, then the entire St. Gallway student body (more than a few teachers too) regarded Charles, Jade, Lu, Milton and Nigel with awe and outright panic.

  They had a name, as all choice societies do. Bluebloods.

  And daily, hourly (possibly even minutely) that posh little word was whispered and whined over in envy and agitation in every classroom and corridor, every lab and locker room.

  "The Bluebloods catwalked into the Scratch this morning," said Donnamara Chase, a girl who sat two seats away from me in AP English. "They stood in the corner and went, 'Ew’ to everyone who walked by to the point that Sam Christenson—you know that mannish sophomore girl? Well, she actually broke down at the beginning of Chemistry. They had to cart her off to the Infirmary and all she'd say was that they made fun of her shoes. She was wearing Aerosole pink suede penny loafers in a size nine and a half. Which isn't even that bad."

  Obviously at Coventry Academy, at Greenside Junior High, there'd been the popular ones, the VIPs who cruised the halls like an arcade of limousines and invented their own tongue in order to intimidate like fierce Zaxoto tribesmen in the Côte d'Ivoire (at Braden Country I was a "mondo nuglo," whatever that meant), but the asthma-inducing mystique of the Bluebloods was unparalleled. I think it was due in part to their diva foxiness (Charles and Jade were the Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly of our time), their for-real fabulousity (Nigel was so tiny he was trendy, Milton so vast he was vogue), their trippy confidence (there goes Lu proudly across the Commons, her dress on inside-out), but also, most singularly, because of certain tabloidal rumors about them, a HI' somethin' somethin' and Hannah Schneider. Hannah kept a surprisingly low profile; she taught only the one class, Intro to Film, in a squat building at the edge of campus called Loomis, famous for laundering credit fillers like Intro to the Fashion Business and Woodshop. And as Mae West is quoted in the out-of-print Are You Just Happy to See Me (Paulson, 1962): "Y'ain't nobody 'til you've had a sex scandal."

  Two weeks after my first dinner at Hannah's, I overheard two senior girls slinging such sleaze in my second period Study Hall, held in the Central Reading Room of the Donald E. Crush Library, monitored by crossword-puzzle enthusiast, Mr. Frank Fletcher, a bald man who taught Driver's Ed. The girls were fraternal twins, Eliaya and Georgia Hatchett. With curly auburn hair, stout frames, shepherd's-pie potbellies and alehouse complexions, they resembled two oily portraits of King Henry VIII, each painted by a different artist (see The Faces of Tyranny, Clare, 1922, p. 322).

  "I don't get how she got a job at this school," said Eliaya. "She's three sandwiches short of a picnic."

  "Who're you talking about?" asked Georgia absentmindedly as she poured over colored photos in a magazine, VIP Weekly, her tongue sticking out the side of her mouth.

  "Duh. Hannah Schneider." Eliaya tipped her chair backward and drummed her fat fingers on the cover of the textbook on her lap, An Illustrated History of Cinema (Jenoah, 2002 éd.). (I could only assume she was enrolled in Hannah's class.) "She totally wasn't prepared today. She disappeared for fifteen minutes 'cause she couldn't find the DVD we were supposed to watch. We were supposed to watch The Tramp, but she comes back with friggin' Apocalypse Now, which Mom and Dad would go mental over— the movie's three hours of harlotry. But Hannah was like planetary—didn't have a clue. She puts it in, doesn't even think about the rating. So we see the first twenty minutes and the bell rings, and then that kid Jamie Century, he asks her when we're gonna see the rest and she says tomorrow. That she's changing the syllabus around a little. I'll bet by the end of the year we're watching Debbie Does Dallas. It was ghetto."

  "Your point?"

  "She's tweaked. Wouldn't be shocked if she went Klebold."

  Georgia sighed. "Well, everyone and their grandmother knows she's still banging Charles after all these years —" "Like a screen in a tornado. Sure." Georgia leaned closer to her sister. (I had to be very still to hear what she

  said.) "You really think the Bluebloods go all Caligula on the weekends? I'm not sure if I believe Cindy Willard."

  "Of course," said Eliaya. "Mom said royals only bed royals."

  "Oh, right," said Georgia, nodding, then breaking into toothy laughter, a sound like a wooden stool being dragged across a floor. "That's how they keep their gene pool from getting contaminated."

  Unfortunately, as Dad pointed out, there's often a seed of Truth within the Flash and Trash (h
e himself wasn't above perusing a few supermarket tabloids while standing in line: " 'Plastic Surgery Smash-ups of the Stars'— there's something rather compelling about that headline.") and I'll admit, ever since I saw Hannah and Charles together in the courtyard on the first day of school, I suspected there was something clammy going on between them (though I'd decided, after a Sunday or two, while Charles was almost certainly infatuated with Hannah, her attitude toward him was pleasantly platonic). And though I was in the dark regarding the Bluebloods' weekend activities (and would be until the middle of October) I did know they were quite preoccupied with maintaining the superiority of their line.

  I, of course, was the one contaminating it.

  My inclusion into their Magic Circle was as painless as the invasion of Normandy. Sure, we had faces eventually, but for the first month or so— September, the very beginning of October—though I saw them all the time peacocking through campus, and acted as hushed, horrified journalist to the anxieties they inspired ("If I ever see Jade injured, facedown in the street, homeless, riddled with leprosy—I'll do humanity a favor and run her over," pledged Beth Price in my AP English class), I only ever hung out with them at Hannah's.

  And obviously, during those first few evenings, the scenario was more than a little humiliating. Obviously it made me feel like a dumpy bachelorette on a reality show called In-sta-love no one wanted to take for drinks and I sure as hell could forget about dinner. I'd sit on Hannah's shabby chaise longue with one of her dogs, pretending to be transfixed by my AP Art History homework while the five of them talked in hushed voices about how "hardcore," how "juiced," they'd been on Friday at mysterious places they'd nicknamed "The Purple" and "The Blind," and when Hannah emerged from the kitchen, immediately they'd hurl me greasy little sardine-smiles. Milton would blink, aw-shucks his knee and say, "So how's it goin', Blue? You're awful quiet over there." "She's shy," Nigel would observe, deadpan. Or Jade, who without fail dressed like a famous person working the red carpet at Cannes: "I love your shirt. I want one. You'll have to tell me where you got it." Charles smiled like a talk show host with poor Neilsen Ratings and Lu never said a word. Whenever my name was mentioned, she examined her feet.

  Hannah must have sensed we were heading toward a stalemate, because shortly thereafter, she launched her next assault. "Jade, why don't you take Blue with you when you go to Conscience? It might be fun for her," she said. "When are you going again?"

  "Don't know," Jade said drearily, sprawled on her stomach on the living room carpet, reading The Norton Anthology of Poetry (Ferguson, Salter, Stall-worthy, 1996 éd.).

  "I thought you said you were going this week," Hannah persisted. "Maybe they can squeeze her in?"

  "Maybe," she said without looking up.

  I forgot this conversation, until that Friday, a worn, gray afternoon. After my last class, AP World History with Mr. Carlos Sandborn (who used so much gel, one always thought he'd just come from swimming laps at the Y), I returned to the third floor of Hanover to find Jade and Leulah standing by my locker: Jade, in a black Golightly dress, Leulah, a white blouse and skirt. Standing with her hands and feet together as if waiting for choir practice, Leulah looked pleasant enough, but Jade looked like a kid in a nursing home impatiently waiting for her designated fogey to be wheeled in so she could read him Watership Down in a monotone, thereby earning her Community Outreach credit, thereby graduating on time.

  "So we're going to get our hair and nails and eyebrows done and you're coming," Jade informed me with a hand on her hip.

  "Oh," I said, nodding, spinning through the combination of my padlock, though I don't think I was actually entering the combination, only vigorously turning it in one direction, then the other.

  "Ready?"

  "Now?" I asked.

  "Of course now."

  "I can't," I said. "I'm busy."

  "Busy? Withwhat?"

  "My dad's picking me up." Four sophomore girls who'd drifted by had

  snagged, like garbage in a river, by the German Language Bulletin Board. They blatantly eavesdropped.

  "Oh, God," said Jade, "not your wonderdad again. You'll have to let us know his civilian name and what he looks like without the mask and the cape." (I'd made the serious mistake of bringing Dad up the previous Sunday. I think I actually said the phrase "brilliant man" in relation to him, also "one of the preeminent commentators on American culture at work in this country today," a line lifted verbatim from the two-page spread on Dad inTAPSIM, the American Political Science Institute's quarterly [see "Dr. Yes," Spring 1987, Vol. XXIV, Issue 9]. I'd said it because Hannah had asked what he did for a living, how he "kept busy," and something about Dad simply invited the boast, the brag, the self-congratulating monologue.)

  "She's just kidding," Lu said. "Come on. It'll be fun."

  I collected my books and walked outside with them to inform Dad my Ulysses Study Group had decided to meet for a few hours, but I'd be home for dinner. He frowned at the sight of Jade and Lu standing on the Hanover steps: "Those two tartlets think they can read Joyce? Heh. Good luck to them—let me revise that—pray for a miracle."

  I could tell he wanted to say no, but was reluctant to make a scene.

  "Very well," he said with a sigh and a pitying look. He started the Volvo. "Tallyho, my dear."

  As we walked to the Student Parking Lot, I heard his rave reviews.

  "Shit," Jade said, looking at me with surprised esteem. "Your dad'smagnifico. You said he was brilliant but I didn't realize you meant in a Clooney way. If he wasn't your dad, I'd ask you to set me up with him." "He looks like what's his name . . . the father in The Sound ofMusic," said Lu.

  Frankly, it could get a little stale how Dad, within minutes, could elicit such worldwide acclaim. Sure—I was the first person to stand up and throw him roses, shout, "Bravo, man, bravo!" But sometimes I couldn't help but feel Dad was an opera diva who garnered reverential ratings even when he was too lazy to hit the high notes, forgot a costume, blinked after his own death scene; something about him seized approval from everyone, regardless of the performance. For instance, when I passed Ronin-Smith, the guidance counselor, in Hanover Hall, it seemed she'd never gotten over the minutes Dad had spent in her office. She asked not "How are your classes?" but "How's your father, dear?" The only woman who'd met him and not inquired after him ad nauseam was Hannah Schneider.

  "Right. . . Mr. Von Trapp," said Jade thoughtfully, nodding, "Yeah, I always had a thing for him. So where's your mom in all this?" "She's dead," I said in a dramatic, bleak voice, and for the first time, enjoyed their astonished silence.

  They took me to purple-walled, zebra-couched Conscience, located in downtown Stockton across from the public library, where Jaire of the alligator boots (pronounced "jay-REE") gave me copper highlights and cut my hair so it no longer looked "like she did it herself with a pair of toenail scissors." To my surprise, Jade insisted my new grooming initiative was complimentary, care of her mother, Jefferson, who'd left Jade her black American Express card "in case of Emergency" before disappearing for six weeks in Aspen with her new "hottie," a ski instructor "named Tanner with permanently chapped lips."

  "I'll give you a thousand dollars if you can do something with those broom-bangs," Jade instructed my hairdresser.

  Also funded by Jefferson, over the next two weeks, was my six-month supply of disposable contact lenses procured from ophthalmologist Stephen J. Henshaw, MD, with eyes like an Arctic Fox's and a bad head cold, as well as clothes, shoes and undergarments hand-selected for me by Jade and Lu not from the Adolescent Department of Stickley's, but at Vanity Fair Bodiwear on Main Street, at Rouge Boutique on Elm, at Natalia's on Cherry, even at Frederick's of Hollywood ("If you ever decide to get kinky, I suggest this for the occasion," Jade instructed, thrusting something at me that resembled the harness one dons before skydiving, only in pink). The final coups de grâce to my previous dull appearance were moisturizing makeups, the thyme and myrtle lip shimmers, the day (shiny) and evening (murky)
eye shadows exhumed especially for my skin tone from Stickley's cosmetics main floor, as well as the fifteen-minute application tutorial by gum-chewing Millicent with her powdery forehead and spotless lab coat. (She artfully crammed the entire white light color spectrum onto both of my eyelids.)

  "You are a goddess," Lu said, smiling at me in Millicent's hand mirror. "Who would've thought," cracked Jade. I was no longer apologetically owl-like, but impenitently pastrylike

  Dad, of course, witnessing this transformation, felt the way Van Gogh would probably feel, if, one hot afternoon, he happened to wander into a Sarasota Gift Shoppe and found next to the cardboard baseball caps and Fun-in-the-Sun seashell figurines, his beloved sunflowers printed on one side of two-hundred beach towels on SALE for just $9.99.

  "Your hair appears to blaze, sweet. Hair is not supposed to blaze. Fires are supposed to blaze, illuminated clock towers, lighthouses, Hell perhaps. Not human hair."

  Soon, however, rather miraculously, apart from the odd gripe or humph, most of his indignation subsided. I assumed it had to do with his absorption with Kitty, or, as she called herself on our answering machine, "Kitty Cat." (I hadn't met her, but had heard the latest headlines: "Kitty Swoons in Italian Restaurant Due to Dad's Musings on Human Nature," "Kitty Begs Dad's Forgiveness for Spilling Her White Russian on Cuff of His Irish Tweed," "Kitty Plans Her Fortieth Birthday and Hints at Wedding Bells.") It was bizarre, but Dad appeared to have accepted the fact that his work of art had been shamelessly commercialized. He even seemed to harbor no ill will.

  "You're satisfied? You're responsible? You respect the youths in this Ulysses Study Group, which unsurprisingly, spend more time roaming the mall and bleaching their hair than tracking the whereabouts of Stephen Dedalus?"

  (No, I never quite disabused Dad of the idea that I spent Sunday afternoons trying to scale that Himalayan tome. Thankfully, Dad had no real taste for Joyce—excessive wordplay bored him, so did Latin—but in order to avoid even the most basic questioning, I told him periodically that due to the weak constitutions of others, we were still unable to make it past Base Camp, Chapter 1, "Telemachus.")