Special Topics in Calamity Physics (47 page)

"I don't like this kinda thing," she said. "Gives me the creeps."

"How'd you meet my dad?" I asked as cheerfully as I could.

She turned around, narrowing her eyes. They really
were
an incredible color: the softest blue-violet in all the world, so pure, it actually seemed cruel to make it witness this scene.

"He didn't tell you?" she asked suspiciously.

I nodded. "I think he did. I just can't remember."

She stepped away from the cases and bent over Dad's desk to scrutinize

his desk calendar (stuck in May 1998) covered with his illegible scrawl. "I'm the type of person who stays professional," she said. "A lot of the other teachers don't. Some father comes by, tells them he likes their teaching style and suddenly they're in the throes of some cheap romance. And I tell them over and over, you're meeting at lunch hours, you're driving by his house in the middle of the night—you really think it's going to turn into something cute? Then your dad comes along. He wasn't fooling anyone. The average woman, sure. But me? I
knew
he was a fraud. That's the funny thing, I
knew,
but I didn't know, you know what I mean? Because he also had such a
heart.
I've never been one of those romantic types. But suddenly I thought I could save him. Only you can't save a fraud."

With her long fingernails (painted the pink of kitten noses) she was riffling through Dad's mug of pens. She picked one out—his favorite actually, an 18-carat gold Mont Blanc, a good-bye gift from Amy Pinto, one present from a June Bug he'd actually liked. Eva turned it in her fingers, sniffing it like a cigar. She put it in her purse.

"You can't take that," I said, horrified.

"If you don't win
Hollywood Squares,
you still get a consolation prize."

I couldn't breathe. "Maybe you'd be more comfortable in the living room," I suggested. "He'll be home" —I looked at my watch and to my panic it was only nine-thirty—"in a few minutes. I can make you some tea. I think we have some Whitman's chocolates—"

"Tea, huh? How civilized.
Tea.
That's something
he
would say." She threw me a look. "You should watch that, you know. Because sooner or later we all turn into our parents.
Poof."

She slumped down into Dad's office chair, pulled open a drawer and started to page through the legal pads.

"Won't know what hit .. . 'Interrelationships Between Domestic and International Politics from Greek Site-Cit-City States to the Present-Day.' " She frowned. "You get any of this crap? I had a good time with the guy, but mostly I thought what he said was a load of dung. 'Quantitative methods.' 'The role of external powers in peacekeeping processes — ' "

"Ms. Brewster?"

"Yeah."

"What are your . . . plans?"

"Making it up as I go along. Where'd you move from, anyway? He was always fuzzy about it. Fuzzy about a lot of things —"

"I don't mean to be rude, but I think I might have to call the police."

She threw the legal pads back in the drawer, hard, and looked at me. If her eyes had been buses I'd have been run over. If they'd been guns I'd have been shot dead. I found myself wondering—ridiculously—if she perhaps had a gun on her and perhaps she wasn't afraid to use it. "You really think that's a good idea?" she asked.

"No
' I admitted.

She cleared her throat. "Poor Mirtha Grazeley, you know, crazy as a dog struck by lightning, but pretty organized when it comes to that Admissions Office. Poor Mirtha came back to school on Monday. Last term. Found her place, not as she'd left it but with a couple of moved chairs and messy seat cushions, a liter of eggnog gone. It also looked like someone had lost her cookies in the bathroom. Not pretty. I know it wasn't a professional job because the vandal left her shoes behind. Black. Size 9. Dolce & Gabbana. Not a lot of kids can afford the hoity-toity stuff. So I narrow it down to the big donors' kids, Atlanta types who let their kids run around in the Mercedes. I cross-reference that with the kids who went to the dance and come up with a list of suspects that, surprisingly, ain't all that long. But I have a conscience, you know. I'm not one of those people who get a kick out of wrecking some kid's future. It'd be sad. From what I hear the Whitestone girl has enough problems. Might not graduate."

I couldn't speak for a moment. The hum of the house was audible. As a child, some of our house hums were so loud, I used to think an invisible glee club had gathered in the walls, wearing burgundy choir robes, mouths open in earnest Os, chanting all night and all day.

"Why were you calling out my name?" I managed to ask. "At the dance — "

She looked surprised. "You heard me?"

I nodded.

"I
thought
I saw you two running toward Loomis." She made an odd "rumph" sound and shrugged. "Just wanted to chew the fat. Talk about your dad. Kinda like we're doing now. Not that there's much to say anymore. Jig is up. I
know
who he is. Thinks he's God, but really, he's just a small. . ."

I thought she was going to stop there, at the searing declaration, "He's just a small," but then she ended it, her voice soft.

"A small little man."

She was silent, crossing her arms, tipping back in Dad's office chair. Even though Dad himself had warned me, one should never take notice of the words that barged out of an irate person's mouth, I still
hated
what she said. I noticed too, it was the crudest thing to say about a person—that they were small. I was only consoled by the fact that, in truth,
all
humans were small when one considered them in the Grand Scheme of Things, put them side by side with Time, the Universe. Even Shakespeare was small and Van Gogh—Leonard Bernstein too.

"Who is she?" Eva demanded suddenly. She should have been triumphant, having made all those ground
-
breaking assertions about Dad, but there was a discernible sprain in her voice.

I waited for her to continue, but she didn't. "I'm not sure what you mean."

"You don't have to tell me who she is, but I'd appreciate it."

She was obviously referring to Dad's new girlfriend, but he didn't have one—at least, not to my knowledge. "I don't think he's seeing anyone, but I could ask him for you."
"Fine"
she said, nodding. "I believe you. He's good. I'd never know, never even
suspect
if I hadn't been friends since second grade with Alice Steady who owns the Green Orchid on Orlando. 'What's the name of the guy you're dating again?' 'Gareth.' 'Uh-huh,' she says. Guess he came in, blue Volvo, used a credit card to buy a hundred bucks' worth of flowers. Said no to Alice's offer of free delivery. And that was sneaky, see—no delivery address, no evidence, right? And I know the flowers weren't for himself because Alice said he asked for one of the little message cards. And from the look on
your
face, they weren't for
you
either. Alice's one of those romantic types, says no man buys a hundred bucks' worth of barbaresco orientals for someone he isn't madly in love with. Roses, sure. Every cheap piece of ass gets roses. But not barbaresco orientals. I'll be the first to admit I was upset—I'm not one of those people who pretends they never cared in the first place, but then he started not returning my calls, sweeping me under the rug like I'm crumbs or something. Not that I
care.
I'm seeing someone else now. An optometrist. Divorced. His first wife I guess was a real clinker. Gareth can do whatever he wants with himself."

She fell silent, not out of exhaustion or reflection, but because her eyes had again snagged on the butterflies in front of her.

"He really loves those things," she said.

I followed her gaze to the wall. "Not really."

"No?"

"He barely looks at them."

I actually saw the thought, the light bulb illuminating her head as if she were a comic book character.

She moved quickly, but so did I. I stood in front of them and hastily said something about receiving the flowers myself ("Dad talks about you all the time!" I cried rather pathetically) but she didn't hear me.

A garish flush bleeding into the back of her neck, she yanked open Dad's desk drawers and hurled every one of his legal pads (he organized them by university and date) into the air. They flew around the room like giant scared canaries.

I guess she found what she was looking for—a steel ruler, which Dad used for orderly cross-comparison diagrams in his lecture notes—and to my shock, she brutally shoved me aside and tried to stab it through the glass of one of the Ricker's cases. The ruler, silver aluminum, would have no part of it however, so with an infuriated "Fuckin' A," she threw it to the floor and tried punching one of the boxes with her bare fist, and then with her elbow, and when that didn't work, she scratched the glass with her nails as if she were some lunatic scraping the silver skin off a lottery ticket.

Still thwarted, she turned, her eyes swerving around Dad's desk until they stopped on the green lamp (a parting gift from the agreeable Dean at the University of Arkansas at Wilsonville). She seized it, jerking the cord out of the wall, and raised it over her head. She used the base, solid brass, to shatter the glass of the first case.

At this point, I ran at her again, lurching at her shoulders, also shouting, "Please!" but I was too weak and, I suppose, too stunned by it all to be effective. She pushed me again, elbowing me right in the jaw so my neck twisted to the side and I fell down.

Glass rained everywhere, all over Dad's desk, the rug, my feet and hands, all over her, too. Tiny shards glittered in her hair and stuck to her thick white tights, trembling like beads of water. She couldn't remove the cases from the wall (Dad used special screws to hang them) but she ripped through the pieces of mounting paper and tore the brown cardboard backing from the frames, ripping every butterfly and moth from their pins, squashing their wings so they became colored confetti, which, with eyes wide, her face creased like a wad of paper smoothed out, she tossed around the room, making something of a sacrament out of it like a priest gone mad with holy water.

At one point, with a muffled growl, she actually bit into one, and resembled for a horrifying and faintly surreal moment, a massive orange tabby eating a blackbird. (In the most peculiar of instances, one is struck by the most peculiar of thoughts, and in this case, as Eva bit into the wing of the Night Butterfly,
Taygetisecho,
I remembered the occasion when Dad and I were driving from Louisiana to Arkansas, when it was ninety degrees and the air-conditioning was broken, and we were memorizing a Wallace Stevens poem, one of Dad's favorites, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." " 'Among twenty snowy mountains / The only thing moving / was the eye of the blackbird/ " Dad explained to the highway.)

When she stopped, when she finally stood still, astonished herself by what she'd just done, there was the utterest of all utter silences, reserved, I imagined, for the aftermath of massacres and storms. You could probably hear the rustle of the moon if you concentrated, the earth too, its
whoosh
as it whirled around the sun at 18.5 miles per second. Eva then began to shiver an apology in a trembling voice that sounded as if it were being tickled. She cried a little too, a disquieting, low-pitched seeping sound.

I can't be sure of her crying, actually; I, too, had been hauled into a state of disorientation under which I could only repeat to myself,
this did not actually happen
as I gazed at the surrounding debris, in particular, at the top of my right foot, my yellow sock, on which rested a brown and furry torso of some moth, the Bent-Wing Ghost Moth perhaps, slightly crooked, as if it were a bit of pipe cleaner.

Eva then put the lamp down on Dad's desk, tenderly, the way one handles a baby, and, avoiding my eyes, walked past me, up the stairs. After a moment, I heard the front door slam and the sputter of her car as she drove away.

With a samurai-like precision and clarity of mind that promptly settles over one following the weirder episodes of one's life, I resolved to clean everything up before Dad returned home.

I obtained a screwdriver from the garage and, one by one, removed the destroyed boxes from the wall. I swept up the glass and the wings, vacuumed under Dad's desk, along the edges of the floor, the bookshelves and stairs. I returned the legal pads to their respective drawers, organizing them by university and date, and then carried to my room their cardboard moving box (BUTTERFLIES FRAGILE) in which I'd put all that was salvageable. It wasn't much—only torn white paper, a handful of brown wings still in one piece and the single Small Postman,
Heliconius erato,
which had emerged from the slaughter miraculously unscathed after hiding behind Dad's filing cabinet. I tried to read more of
Henry
V as I waited for Dad to return home, but the words snagged my eyes. I found myself staring at a single point on the page.

Despite the throb in my right cheek, I had no illusions Dad was anything other than the pitiless villain in this evening's freaky drama. Sure, I hated her, but I hated him, too. Dad had finally gotten what was coming to him, except he'd been otherwise engaged, so I, his guiltless direct descendant, had gotten what was coming to him. I knew it was melodramatic, but I found myself wishing Kitty had
killed
me (at the very least, knocked me provisionally unconscious) so when Dad returned home, he'd see me lying on his study floor, my body saggy and gray as a hundred-year-old sofa, my neck twisted at the disturbing angle indicating Life caught a bus out of town. After Dad fell to his knees, uttered King Learean cries ("No! Noooo! Don't take her God! I'll do anything!") my eyes would open, I'd gasp, then deliver my mesmerizing speech, touching upon Humanity, Compassion, the fine line between Kindness and Pity, the necessity of Love (a theme rescued from the trite and the maudlin by sturdy support from the Russians: ["Everything that I understand, I understand only because I love."] and a little Irving Berlin to keep things snappy ["They say that falling in love is wonderful, it's wonderful, so they say."]). I'd end with the pronouncement that the Jack Nicholson, Dad's customary modus operandi, would henceforth be replaced by the Paul New-man, and Dad would nod with his eyes lowered, his face pained. His hair would turn gray, too, a uniform steel-gray, like Hecuba's, the emblem of Purest Sorrow.