Special Topics in Calamity Physics (45 page)

"Are you down there?" Dad called into the stairwell.

"Doing research," I shouted.

"Have you eaten lunch?"

"No."

"Well, get your skates on—we just received twelve coupons in the mail for Lone Steer Steakhouse —ten percent off All-You-Can-Eat Spare Ribs, Buffalo Wings, Molten Onions and something they call, rather disturbingly, a Volcanic Bacon-Bit Potato."

Quickly, I scanned a few pages, seeing nothing remotely interesting or relevant—court documents detailing motions of Judge Howie Valerio of Shelburn County, records of Loggias Valerio born in 1789, Massachusetts — and switched off Dad's laptop.

"Sweet?"

"I'm coming," I called.

I hadn't had time to conduct any more recon work on Hannah or Missing Persons by the time Jade picked me up that Sunday, and when we arrived at Hannah's house, I thought to myself—more than a little relieved—perhaps I'd never have to again; Hannah, with renewed exhilaration, was dashing around the house in bare feet and a black housedress, smiling, engaged in six things at once and speaking in chic sentences that snubbed punctuation: "Blue did you meet Ono—is that the timer going off—oh Christ the asparagus." (Ono was a tiny green shaving of bird missing an eye who apparently hadn't taken to Lennon at all; she was putting as much birdcage between herself and him as she could.) Hannah also had taken the trouble to make the haircut look marginally more stylish, urging some of the edgier, meaner parts to lie down, chill out off to the side of her forehead. Everything was fine—perfect really—as the seven of us sat in the dining room eating our steaks, asparagus and corn on the cob (even Charles was smiling and when he told one of his stories he actually told it to
all
of us, not Hannah exclusively)—but then she opened her mouth.

"March twenty-sixth," she said. "The beginning of Spring Break. It's our big weekend. So mark your calendars."

"Big weekend for what?" asked Charles.

"Our camping trip."

"Who said anything about a camping trip?" asked Jade.

"I did."

"Where?" asked Leulah.

"The Great Smokies. It's less than an hour's drive."

I almost choked on my steak. Nigel and I locked eyes across the table.

"You know," continued Hannah brightly, "campfires and ghost stories and gorgeous vistas, fresh air—"

"Ramen noodles," muttered Jade.

"We don't have to eat ramen noodles. We can eat anything we like."

"Still
sounds wretched."

"Don't be like that."

"My generation doesn't do wilderness. We'd rather go to a mall."

"Well, maybe you should aspire to something beyond your generation."

"Is it safe?" Nigel interjected, as offhandedly as he could.

"Of course." Hannah smiled. "So long as you're not stupid. But I've been up there a million times. I know the trails. I just went actually." "With who?" asked Charles. She smiled at him. "Myself." We stared at her. It was, after all, January. "When?" Milton asked. "Over vacation." "You weren't freezin'?" "Forget about freezing," said Jade. "Weren't you
bored?
There's nothing to do up there."

"No, I wasn't
bored."

"And what about the bears?" Jade went on. "Even worse, the bugs. I'm
so
not an insect person. They
love me
though. Every bug is obsessed with me. They stalk me. They're crazed fans."

"When we go in March, there won't be bugs. And if there are, I'll drown you in Off," Hannah said in a severe voice (see "1940 publicity still for
Torrid Zone" Bulldog in a Henhouse: The Life of JamesCagney,
Taylor, 1982, p. 339).

Jade said nothing, bulldozing her spinach with a fork.

"For goodness' sake," Hannah continued, frowning at us, "what-what's the matter with you? I try to plan something fun, a little different—didn't you read, weren't you
inspired
by Thoreau,
Walden?
Didn't you read it in English class? Or don't they teach that anymore?"

She looked at me. I found it difficult to look back. In spite of her styling efforts, the haircut was still distracting. It looked like one of those alarming styles directors used in 1950s movies to illustrate that the main character had recently spent time in an institution or been branded a harlot by bigoted townsfolk. And the longer you looked at her, the more her shorn head seemed to isolate and float on its own like Jimmy Stewart's in
Vertigo,
when he suffers from a nervous breakdown and psychedelic colors, the pinks and greens of madness, swirl behind him. The haircut made her eyes unhealthily huge, her neck pale, her ears vulnerable as snails missing shells. Perhaps Jade was right; she
was
going to have a nervous breakdown. Perhaps she was "sick and tired of going along with Man's Great Lie" (see
Beelzebub,
Shorts, 1992,

p. 212). Or a more frightening possibility: perhaps she'd read too much of the Charles Manson
Blackbird
book. Even Dad said—Dad who wasn't in the least superstitious or fainthearted—such an explicit dissection of the workings of evil was truly not safe for the "impressionable, the confused, or the lost." For this very reason, he no longer included it on his syllabus.

"You
know what I'm talking about, don't you?"

Her eyes were bumper-stickered to my head.

" 'I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,' " she started to recite. " 'I wanted to suck all that marrow out of life, and-and afterwards, learn that if I had not lived, that-that I,' what is it, something or other deliberately

Her words slumped to the ground and stopped moving. No one spoke. She chuckled, but it was a sad, dying sound. "I need to read it again myself."

20

The Taming of the Shrew

L
eontyne Bennett skillfully dissected in
The Commonwealth of LostVanities
(1969) Virgil's renowned quotation: "Love conquers all." "For centuries upon centuries," he writes on p. 559, "we have been misinterpreting this famed trio of words. The uninformed masses breathlessly hold up this dwarfish phrase as a justification for snogging in public squares, abandoning wives, cuckolding husbands, for the escalating divorce rate, for swarms of bastard children begging for handouts in the Whitechapel and Aldgate tube stations—when in fact, there is nothing remotely encouraging or cheerful about this oft-quoted phrase. The Latin poet wrote
'Amor vincit omnia,'
or 'Love conquers all.' He did not write, 'Love
frees
all' or
'liberates'
all, and therein lies the first degree of our flagrant misunderstanding. Conquer: to defeat, subjugate, massacre, cream, make mincemeat out of. Surely, this cannot be a positive thing. And then, he wrote 'conquers
all'—not
exclusively the unpleasant things, destitution, assassination, burglary, but
all,
including pleasure, peace, common sense, liberty and self-determination. And thus we may appreciate that Virgil's words are not encouragement, but rather a caveat, a cue to evade, shirk, elude the feeling at all costs, else we risk the massacre of the things we hold most dear, including our sense of self."

Dad and I always snickered about Bennett's long-winded protestations (he never married and died, in 1984, of cirrhosis of the liver; no one attended his funeral but a housekeeper and an editor from Tyrolian Press) but by February, I actually noticed the value in what he prattled on about for over eight hundred pages. Because it was love that caused Charles to act increasingly sullen and inconsistent, wandering St. Gallway with his hair disheveled, a consumed look on his face (something told me he wasn't contemplating The Eternal Why). During Morning Announcements, he fidgeted restlessly in his seat (often banging the back of my chair) and when I turned around to smile at him, he didn't see me; he gazed at the stage the way sailor widows probably stared at the sea. ("I've had it with him," Jade announced.)

Love, too, could pick me up and chuck me into a bad mood with the relative easiness of a tornado uprooting a farmhouse. Milton would only have to say, "Old Jo" (what he called Joalie now—a pet name the most devastating of all high school relationship developments; like superglue, it could hold any couple together for months), and instantly I'd feel like I was dying inside, as if my heart, lungs and stomach were all punching their time card, closing up shop and heading home, because there was no point of beating, breathing, day in, day out, if life was this sore.

And then there was Zach Soderberg.

I'd completely forgotten about him, with the exception of thirty seconds during the plane ride home from Paris, when a frazzled stewardess accidentally spilled Bloody Mary mix on an elderly gentleman across the aisle. Instead of growling, the man's face crinkled into a smile as he dabbed his now gruesome-looking jacket with napkins, and he said without a smidgin of sarcasm: "Don't worry about it, my dear. Happens to the best of us." I'd thrown Zach contrite little smiles every now and then during AP Physics (but didn't wait to find out if he caught them or let them fall to the floor). I was taking Dad's counsel: "The most poetic of endings to love affairs isn't apology, excuse, extensive investigation into What Went Wrong—the St. Bernard of options, droopy-eyed and slobbery—but stately silence." One day, however, immediately following lunch, when I slammed my locker door, I found Zach standing directly behind me, smiling one of those tent smiles, one side hoisted way up, the other limp.

"Hello, Blue," he said. His voice was stiff as new shoes.

My heart, rather unexpectedly, began to jump-rope. "Hi."

"How are you?"

"Fine." I had to come up with something decent to say, of course, an excuse, an apology, my reason for forgetting him at the Christmas Cabaret like a winter glove. "Zach, I'm sorry abo—"

"I have something for you," he interrupted, his voice not angry, but cheerfully official, as if he was Deputy Manager of Such-and-Such, happily emerging from his office to inform me I was a valued customer. He reached into his back pocket and handed me a thick blue envelope. It was emphatically sealed, even at the very, very corners, and my name had been written in schmaltzy cursive across the front.

"Feel free to do whatever you want with them, you know," he said. "I just got a part-time job at Kinko's, so I could inform you of some printing options. You could do a blow-up, poster-size, then total lamination. Or you could go the greeting card route. Or a calendar, wall or desk. Then there's the T-shirt option. That's pretty popular. We just got in some baby tees. And then, what do they call it—there's art print on canvas. That's very nice. Higher quality than you'd expect. We also offer sign and banner options in a range of sizes, including vinyl."

He nodded to himself and seemed on the verge of saying something more—his lips were cracked, barely, like a window—but then, frowning, he appeared to change his mind.

'Til see you in Physics," he said, turning on his heel and heading down the hall. Instantly, he was greeted by a girl who'd walked by only a minute ago—watching us out of the corner of her coin-slot eyes, then stopping by the water fountain and taking a drink of water. (She must have just trekked the Gobi Desert.) She was Rebecca of the camel teeth, a junior.

"Is your dad preaching this Sunday?" she asked him.

With a pang of irritation (as they continued their sacred conversation down the hall) I ripped open the giant envelope and inside, found glossy
foe-toes
of Zach and me stationed around his living room, our shoulders rigid, irregular smiles pressed deep into our faces.

In six of them, to my horror, my right bra strap was visible (so white it was almost neon purple and if one looked at the bra strap, then at something else, it drifted in one's vision), but in the last
foe-toe,
the one Patsy had taken in front of the sun-lit window (Zach's left arm rigid around my waist; he was a metal stand, I a collector's doll) the light between us had gone buttery, splattering the lens, dissolving the outline of Zach's left side and my right so we blended together and our smiles went the same color of the white sky poured between the naked trees behind us.

Frankly, I barely recognized myself. Usually in pictures I was either Stork Stiff or Ferret Frightened, but in this, I looked strangely bewitching
(literally:
my skin was gold, there were paranormal pinpricks of green in my eyes). I looked relaxed too, like the kind of person one might find squealing in delight while kicking up sand on a pifia-colada beach. I looked like I could be a woman who could forget herself entirely, let go of all th
e strings, let her
self float away like a hundred helium balloons and everyone, everyone bound to the earth, stared at her enviously. ("A woman for whom reflection is as rare as a Giant Panda," Dad said.)

Without thinking, I turned to look after Zach —maybe I wanted thank him, maybe I wanted to say something more—but realized stupidly he was gone and I was left staring at the EXIT sign, the stampede of kids in stockings and shabby shoes rushing toward the stairs on their way to class.