Special Topics in Calamity Physics (24 page)

"Promise I won't ever do this," Lu said suddenly in a mousey voice.

"What," said Jade in a monotone, her eyes papercuts.

"When I'm old." Her voice was something frail you could tear right through. "Promise me I'll be married with kids. Or famous. That. . ."

There wasn't an end to her sentence. It just stopped, a grenade that'd been thrown but hadn't exploded.

None of us said anything more, and at 4:03 A.M. someone turned off the lights in Room 22. We watched the man emerge, fully clothed (though his heels, I noticed, were not fully inside his shoes) and he drove away in the rusty Blue Bird Taxicab (I-8OO-BLU-BIRD), purring as it waited for him by the Registration Office.

It was just as Dad said (if he'd been in the car with us he would have tipped up his chin, just a little, raised an eyebrow, his gesture for both Never Doubt Me and I Told You So) because the only eyewitnesses should have been the neon sign shuddering VACANCY, and the thin asthmatic trees seductively trailing their branches down the spine of the roof, and the sky, a big purple bruise fading too slowly over our heads.

We drove home.

PART TWO

MOBY DICK

Two weeks after the night we spied on Hannah
("Observed,"
Chief Inspector Ranulph Curry clarified in
The Conceit of a Unicom
[Lavelle,

X 1901]), Nigel found an invitation in the wastepaper basket in her den, the tiny room off the living room filled with world atlases and half-dead hanging plants barely surviving on her version of flora life support (twenty-fourhour plant lights, periodic Miracle-Gro).

It was elegant, printed on a thick, cream, embossed card.

The Burns County Animal Shelter

Cordially invites you to

Our annual charity event

In support of all animals in need

At 100 Willows Road

On Saturday November 22
^nd

At Eight o’ clock in the evening

Price $40 Per Person

RSVP

Costume Required, Masks Preferred

"I think we should go," Nigel announced that Friday at Jade's.

"Me too' said Leulah.

"You can't," Charles said. "She didn't invite you."

"A minor detail," Nigel said.

In spite of Charles' words of warning, the following Sunday, halfway through dinner, Nigel removed the invitation from his back pocket and brazenly placed it next to the platter of veal chops, without saying a word.

In that instant, the dining room became nail-bitingly unbearable (see
Midday Face-Off at Sioux Falls: A Mohave Dan Western,
Lone Star Publishers, Bendley, 1992). Dinners had already become a teensy bit unbearable since I'd gone to Cottonwood. I found it impossible to look at Hannah's face, to smile gaily, to shoot the breeze about schoolwork or term papers or Mr. Moats' penchant for textured shirts without envisioning Doc and his accordion legs, his wrinkled face like wood once infested with termites, not to mention the horror of their Hollywood Kiss, which granted, had taken place off-screen, but was still scary. (It was two different movies crudely edited together—
Gilda
with
Cocoon.)

Of course, when I considered Jade, Lu, and the handicapped stall, I also felt queasy; but with Hannah it was worse. As Dad said, the difference between a dynamic and a wasted uprising depends upon the point at which it occurs within a country's historic timeline (see Van Meer, "The Fantasy of Industrialization,"
Federal Forum,
Vol. 23, Issue 9). Jade and Lu were still developing nations. And thus, while it wasn't fantastic, it also wasn't too terrible for them to have a backward infrastructure and a poor human development index. But Hannah—she was much farther along. She should have already established a robust economy, peacefulness, free trade—and as these things weren't yet assured, frankly, it wasn't looking good for her democracy. She could very well struggle forever, with "corruption and scandal perpetually undermining [her] credibility as a self-ruled state."

Milton had opened a window. A puppyish draft tore around the dining room, causing my paper napkin to fly off my lap, the flames to dance violently atop the candles like lunatic ballerinas. I couldn't believe what Nigel had done, acted like a jealous husband presenting his wife with an incriminating cufflink.

And yet, Hannah gave no reaction.

She didn't even seem to
notice
the invitation, concentrating instead on her veal chop, cutting it into identically sized pieces with an elegant handbag of a smile on her face. Her blouse, satin and sea-green (one of her few articles of clothing that didn't carry itself like a refugee), clung to her as a languid, iridescent skin, moving when she moved, breathing when she breathed.

This uneasiness continued for what felt like an hour. I toyed with the idea of stretching my arms over my veal chop in the direction of the sautéed spinach, grabbing the thing, stealthily slipping it under my leg, but, to be honest, I didn't have the moral aplomb to perform such things as The Sir Thomas More or The Jeanne d'Arc. Nigel was sitting in his chair staring at Hannah, and the way his eyes were buried behind his glasses, reflecting the candles, until he turned his head and they emerged for a moment like beetles in sand, the way he sat so straight, so small yet so substantial, he looked like Napoleon, especially the unappealing oil rendering of the diminutive French Emperor on the cover of Dad's foundational seminar textbook,
Mastering Mankind
(Howards & Path, 1994). (He looked as if he could perform a coup d'état in his sleep and had no qualms being at war with every major European power.)

"I didn't tell you," Hannah said suddenly, "because if I did, you'd want to come. And you can't. I'm inviting Eva Brewster, which makes your attendance out of the question if I'm to keep my job."

Not only was her reaction surprising (also a bit of a let-down; I suppose I was in the stands, drinking Anis del Toro, awaiting the matador), but also remarkable and slick was the way she'd
seen
the invitation but appeared
not
to have seen it.

"Why'd you invite Eva Brewster?" asked Leulah.

"She heard I was planning the fund-raiser and asked if she could come. I couldn't say no. Nigel, I don't appreciate your going through my things. Please give me the courtesy of privacy."

No one said anything. It was Nigel's cue to explain himself, to give some semblance of an apology, attempt some flea-bitten joke about his sticky fingers or refer to
Cool Parenting s
Chapter 21, "Teenagers and the Joy of Kleptomania," quoting one of the surprising statistics, that it was common for teenagers to go through a period of "appropriation" and "embezzlement" (Mill, 2000). Sixty percent of the time it was something "the youngster eventually grew out of, like Gothic eye makeup and skateboarding" (p. 183).

But Nigel wasn't paying attention. He was cheerfully helping himself to the last veal chop.

Soon the food was cold. We cleared the plates, collected our books, said weak good-byes into the monstrous night. Hannah leaned against the doorway, saying what she always did —"Drive home safely!"—but something in the timbre of her voice, that certain campfire quality, was gone. As Jade and I drove down the driveway, I looked back and saw her still standing on the porch, watching us, her green blouse in the gold light shivering like a swimming pool.

"I feel sick," I said.

Jade nodded. "Utterly wretched."

"Wonder if she'll forgive him."

"Of course she will. She knows him like the back of her hand. Nigel was born without the feeling gene. Other people have no appendix, not enough white blood cells. He doesn't have enough feeling. I guess they did a scan of his brain when he was kid and where other people have emotion, he has a vacuum of total space, poor kid. And he's gay, too. And sure, everyone's open-minded and accepting—all that jazz—but it
still
can't be easy in high school."

"He's gay?" I asked in amazement.

"Earth to Retch?
Hello?"
She looked at me as if I were a snag in tights. "You know, sometimes I wonder if you're all there, if you know what I mean. Have you ever gone to a doctor to make sure you have all your furniture upstairs? Because I have serious doubts about it, Gag. I really do."

Such things as anguish, woe, affliction, guilt, feelings of awfulness and utter wretchedness, the bread and butter of Days of Yore and Russians, sadly have very little staying power in these lickety-split Modern Times.

One has only to consult the 2002 edition of R. Stanbury's
Illuminating Statistics and Cross-Century Comparisons,
under "Grieving," to learn that the very idea of being Broken-hearted, Wretched, Desolate and Despairing is a thing of the past, soon to take on the amusing novelty of such archaic things as the Jalopy, the Jitterbug and Jams. The average American widower in 1802 waited an average of 18.9 years before remarrying, while in 2001 he holds out for an average 8.24 months. (In the "By State" snapshot, you will see in California he holds out for a horrifying 3.6 months.)

Of course, Dad made it his business to rage against this "cultural anesthetizing," this "ironing out of deep human sentiment, leaving only a flat, unwrinkled vacuity," and thus he'd deliberately raised me to be an insightful, sensitive sort of person, someone aware, beneath even the most tedious surfaces, of good, evil and the smoky shades in between. He made sure I took the time between Muders, Ohio, and Paducah, Washington, to commit to memory not one or two, but
all
of Blake's "Songs of Innocence and Experience," and thus I couldn't look at a fly buzzing around a hamburger without fretting, "Am not I / A fly like thee? / Or art not thou / A man like me?"

When I was with the Bluebloods though, it was easy to pretend I hadn't committed anything to memory except the lyrics of a thousand corn syrup R&B songs, that I'd never heard of anyone named Blake except that junior who always had his hands in his pockets and looked like he wanted to hit someone, that I could simply notice a fly and not think anything but shrill girlish expressions (Ew). Naturally, if Dad knew about my attitude, he would've called it "stomach-turning conformity," maybe even "a disgrace to the Van Meers." (It often slipped his mind he was an orphan.) Yet I saw it as thrilling, Romantic, if I allowed the current to take me along the "willowy hills and fields," or wherever it wanted, regardless of the consequences (see "The Lady of Shalott," Tennyson, 1842).

This was why I had no objections the following slattern Saturday night, November 22, when Jade made an entrance in the Purple Room wearing a black wig and a billowing white pantsuit. Colossal shoulder pads jutted off of her like the White Cliffs of Dover and she'd drawn
duomo
eyebrows over her eyes with what appeared to be a burnt sienna Crayola crayon.

"Guess who I am."

Charles turned to survey her. "Dame Edna."

" 'I never go out unless I look like Joan Crawford the movie star. You want The Girl Next Door? Go next door.' " She threw her head back and villain-laughed, falling onto the leather couch, and putting her feet with their big, dinghy-like, black pumps in the air. "Guess where I'm headed."

"Hell," said Charles.

She rolled over, sitting up. A clump of wig stuck to her lipstick.

"The Burns County Animal Shelter cordially invites you to our annual—"

"Not a chance."

"—charity soiray—"

"We can't."

"-RSVP-"

"Absolutely not."

"Rowdy sex
very
possible."

"No."

"I'll go," said Leulah.

In the end, we couldn't agree on a group costume, so Charles was Jack the Ripper (for blood, Leulah and I doused him with A.1. Steak Sauce), Leulah was a French maid (helping herself to the array of Hermès silk scarves in various equestrian motifs, folded into neat squares in Jefferson's bureau), Milton, refusing to dress up, was Plan B (the ambiguous sense of humor that bubbled up whenever he smoked pot), Nigel was Antonio Banderas as Zorro (he used Jeff's toenail scissors to cut small holes around the rhinestone zzzzzs of her black sleeping mask), Jade was Anita Ekberg of
La Dolce Vita
replete with stuffed kitten (she duct-taped it to a headband). I was one very unlikely Pussy Galore in shrublike red wig and baggy, teal nylon bodysuit (see "Martian 14,"
Profiling Little Green Men: Sketches of Aliens from EyewitnessAccounts,
Diller, 1989, p. 115).

We were drunk. Outside, the air was supple and warm as a dance hall girl after her opening number; and in our costumes, we sprinted sloppily across the nighted lawn, laughing at nothing.

Jade, in her giant conch-shell gown, crunchy with crinolines, ruffles and ribbons, screamed and threw herself against the grass, rolling down the hill. "Where are you going?" shouted Charles. "It started at eight! It's nine-thirty!"

"Come on, Retch!" shouted Jade.

I crossed my arms over my chest and hurled myself forward.