Special Topics in Calamity Physics (5 page)

Sometimes June Bugs weren't too terrible. Some of the sweeter, more docile ones like poor, droopy-eyed Tally Meyerson, I actually felt sorry for, because even though Dad made no attempt to hide the fact they were as temporary as Scotch tape, most were blind to his indifference (see "Basset Hound,"
Dictionary of Dogs,
Vol. 1).

Perhaps the June Bug understood Dad had felt that way about all the
others,
but armed with three decades' worth of
Ladies Home Journal
editorials, an expertise in such publications as
Getting Him to the Altar
(Trask, 1990) and
The Chill Factor: How Not to Give a Damn (and Leave Him Wanting More)
(Mars, 2000) as well as her own personal history of soured relationships, most of them believed (with the sort of unyielding insistence associated with religious fanatics) that, when under the spell of her burnt-sugar aura, Dad wouldn't feel that way about
her.
Within a few fun-filled dates, Dad would learn how intoxicating she was in the kitchen, what an Old Sport she was in the bedroom, how enjoyable during carpools. And so it always came as a complete surprise when Dad turned out the lights, swatted her ruthlessly off his screen, and subsequently drenched his entire porch in Raid Pest Control.

Dad and I were like the trade winds, blowing through town, bringing dry weather wherever we went.

Sometimes the June Bugs tried to stop us, foolishly believing they could reroute a Global Wind and permanently impact the world's weather system. Two days before we were scheduled to move to Harpsberg, Connecticut, Jessie Rose Rubiman of Newton, Texas, heiress to the Rubiman Carpeting franchise, announced to Dad she was pregnant with his child. She tearfully demanded she move with us to Harpsberg or Dad would have to pay a Onetime Initiation Fee of $100,000 with an ongoing direct debit of $10,000 per month for the next eighteen years. Dad didn't panic. When it came to such matters, he prided himself with having the air of a maître d' in a restaurant with an exorbitant wine list, preordered soufflé, and roving cheese cart. He calmly asked for confirmation with blood.

As it turned out, Jessie wasn't pregnant. She had an exotic strain of stomach flu, which she'd eagerly confused with morning sickness. While we prepared for Harpsberg, now a week behind schedule, Jessie performed sad, sobbing monologues into our answering machine. The day we left, Dad found an envelope on the porch in front of the front door. He tried to hide it from me. "Our last utilities bill," he said, because he'd rather die than show me the "hormonal ravings of a madwoman," which he himself had inspired. Six hours later, however, somewhere in Missouri, I stole the letter from the glove compartment when he stopped at a gas station to buy Turns.

Dad found love letters from a June Bug as monumental as an extraction of aluminum, but for me it was like coming across a vein of gold in quartz. Nowhere in the world was there a nugget of emotion more absolute.

I still have my collection, which tallies seventeen. I include below an excerpt from Jessie's four-page Ode to Gareth:

You mean the very world to me and I'd go to the ends of the earth for you if you asked me. You didn't ask me though and I will accept that as a friend. I will miss you. I'm sorry about that baby thing. I hope we keep in touch and that you will consider me a good friend in the future who you can relie on in thickness and thin. In lou of yesterday's phone call I am sorry I called you a pig. Gareth all I ask is to remember me not as I have been over the past couple days but as that happy woman you met in the parking lot of K-Mart.

Peace be to you forever more.

Most of the time, though, despite the occasional buzzing sounds reverberating through a quiet evening, it was always Dad and me, the way it was always George and Martha, Butch and Sundance, Fred and Ginger, Mary and Percy Bysshe.

On your average Friday night in Roman, New Jersey, you wouldn't find me in the darkened corner of the parking lot of Sunset Cinemas with the Tanned Sporto with Shiny Legs, puffing on American Spirits waiting for the Spoiled Pretender (in his father's car) so we could speed down Atlantic Avenue, scale the chain-link fence surrounding long-out-of-business African Safari Minigolf, and drink lukewarm Budweiser on the tatty Astroturf of Hole 10.

Nor would you find me in the back of Burger King holding sweaty hands with the Kid Whose Mouthful of Braces Made Him Look Simian, or at a sleepover with the Goody Two-Shoes Whose Uptight Parents, Ted and Sue, Wished to Prevent Her Ascent into Adulthood as if It Were the Mumps and certainly not with the Cools or the Trendies.

You'd find me with Dad. We'd be in a rented two-bedroom house on an unremarkable street lined with bird mailboxes and oak trees. We'd be eating overcooked spaghetti covered in the sawdust of parmesan cheese, either reading books, grading papers or watching such classics as
North by Northwest
or
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,
after which, when I was finished with the dishes (and only if he'd sunk into a Bourbon Mood), Dad could be entreated to perform his impression of Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone. Sometimes, if he was feeling especially inspired, he'd even stick a piece of paper towel into his gums to re-create Vito's mature bulldog look. (Dad always pretended I was Michael.):

Barzini will move against you first. He'll set up a meeting with someone you absolutely trust, guaranteeing your safety. And at that meeting you'll be assassinated . . . it's an old habit. I've spent my entire life trying not to be careless.

Dad said "careless" regretfully, and stared at his shoes.

Women and children can be careless, but not men . . . Now listen.

Dad raised his eyebrows and stared at me.

Whoever comes to you with this Barzini meeting, he's the traitor. Don't ever forget that.

This was the moment for my only line in the scene.

Grazie, Pop.

Here Dad nodded and closed his eyes.

Prego.

On one particular occasion however, when I was eleven in Futtoch, Nebraska, I remember quite distinctly I
didn't
laugh at Dad doing Brando doing Vito. We were in the living room, and as he spoke, he happened to move directly over a desk lamp with a red lampshade; and suddenly, the crimson light Halloweened his face—ghosting his eyes, witching his mouth, beasting his jaw so his cheeks resembled a withered tree trunk into which some kid could crudely carve his initials. He was no longer my Dad, but someone else,
something
else —a terrifying, red-faced stranger bearing his dark, moldy soul in front of the worn velvet reading chair, the slanted bookshelf, the framed photograph of my mother with her bourgeois belongings.

"Sweet?"

Her eyes were alive. She stared at his back, her gaze mournful, as if she were an old woman in a nursing home who pondered and probably answered every one of Life's Great Questions, but nobody took her seriously in those sticky rooms
of Jeopardy!,
pet therapy and Makeup Hour for Ladies. Dad, directly in front of her, stared at me, his shoulders seesawed. He looked uncertain, as if I'd just entered the room and he wasn't sure if I'd seen him stealing.

"What is it?" He stepped toward me, his face again soaked in the harmless yellow light of the rest of the room.

"I have a stomach
ache," I said abruptly, and then turned, ran upstairs to my room and pulled from the shelf an old paperback,
Souls for Sale: Unveiling John Doe Sociopath
(Burne, 1991). Dad himself had picked it up for me at some psychology professor's pre-retirement garage sale. I actually flipped through all of Chapter 2, "Character Sketch: A Lack of Connection in Romantic Relationships," and parts of Chapter 3, "Two Missing Pieces: Scruples and a Conscience," before I realized how hysterical and foolish I was. While it was true that Dad displayed a "marked disregard for others' feelings"

(p. 24), could "charm the pants off people" (p. 29), and wasn't "concerned with the moral codes of society" (p. 5), he
did
"love things other than himself" (p. 81) or the "splendid sage he saw whenever he regarded himself in the bathroom mirror" (p. 109): my mother and, of course, me.

III

Wuthering Heights

Princeton professor and leading sociologist Dr. Fellini Loggia made the somewhat gloomy statement in
The Imminent Future
(1978) that nothing in life is authentically astonishing, "not even being struck by lightning" (p. 12). "A person's life," he writes, "is nothing more than a series of tip-offs of what's to come. If we had the brains to notice these clues, we might be able to change our futures."

Well, if
my
life had a hint, a whisper, a cute, well-placed clue, it was when I was thirteen and Dad and I moved to Howard, Louisiana.

While my nomadic life with Dad might sound daring and revolutionary to the outside observer, the reality was different. There is a disturbing (and wholly undocumented) Law of Motion involving an object traveling across an American interstate, the sense that, even though one is careening madly forward, nothing is actually happening. To one's infinite disappointment, one always arrives at Point B with energy and all physical characteristics wholly unchanged. Every now and then, at night, before I fell asleep, I found myself staring at the ceiling, praying for something
real
to happen, something that would transform me—and God always took on the personality of the ceiling at which I was staring. If the ceiling was imprinted with moonlight and leaves from the window, He was glamorous and poetic. If there was a slight tilt, He was inclined to listen. If there was a faint water stain in the corner, He'd weathered many a storm and would weather mine too. If there was a smear cutting through the center by the overhead lamp where something with six or eight legs had been exterminated via newspaper or shoe, He was vengeful.

When we moved to Howard, God answered my prayers. (He turned out to be smooth and white, otherwise, surprisingly unremarkable.) On the long, dry drive through Nevada's Andamo Desert, listening to a book-on-tape, Dame Elizabeth Gliblett reading in her grand ballroom of a voice
The Secret Garden
(Burnett, 1909), I offhandedly mentioned to Dad that none of the houses we rented ever had a decent yard, and so, the following September when we arrived in Howard, Dad chose 120 Gildacre Street, a worried house of pale blue stranded in the middle of a tropical biosphere. While the rest of Gildacre Street cultivated prim peonies, dutiful roses, placid yards plagued only by the rare clump of crabgrass, Dad and I fought escalating plant life indigenous to the Amazon Basin.

Every Saturday and Sunday for three weeks, armed with nothing but pruning shears, leather gloves and Off, Dad and I rose early and trekked deep into our rain forest in a heroic attempt to scale back the growth. We'd rarely last two hours, sometimes less than twenty minutes if Dad happened to spot what was allegedly a Stag Beetle the size of his foot scuttling under the leaves of a talipot palm (men's size 12).

Never one to admit defeat, Dad attempted to rally the troops with "Nothing defeats the Van Meers!" and "You think if Patton lived here, he'd throw in the towel?" until that fateful morning he was mysteriously bitten by something
("Ahhhhhhh!"
I heard him cry from the front porch where I was trying to curtail knotted liana.) His left arm inflated to the size of a football. That evening, Dad answered an advertisement of an experienced gardener in
The Howard Sentinel.

"Yardwork," it read. "Anyhow. Anywhere. I do."

His name was Andreo Verduga, and he was the most beautiful creature I'd ever seen (see "Panther,"
Glorious Predators of the Natural World,
Good-win, 1987). He was tan, with black hair, gypsy eyes and, from what I could deduce from my upstairs bedroom window, a torso smooth as a river rock. He was from Peru. He wore heavy cologne and spoke in the language of an old-fashioned telegram.

HOW YOU DO STOP NICE DAY STOP WHERE IS HOSE STOP

Every Monday and Thursday at four o'clock, I'd procrastinate working on my French compositions or Algebra III and spy on him working, though most of the time he didn't work so much as hang out, chill, loiter, loaf, enjoy a laid-back cigarette in a scarce patch of sun. (He always threw the stub in a clandestine place, tossing it behind a bromeliad or into a dense section of bamboo without even making sure it was extinguished.) Andreo really only started working two to three hours after his arrival, when Dad came home from the university. With an array of showy gestures (heavy panting, wiping his brow), he'd then push the lawnmower ineffectively along the forest floor, or prop up the wooden stepladder on the side of the house in a futile attempt to hack back the canopy. My favorite observation was when Andreo muttered to himself in Spanish after Dad confronted him, demanding to know exactly
why
the knotted liana was still creating a Greenhouse Effect on the back porch, or why a brand new crop of strangler figs now lined the back of our property.

One afternoon I made sure I was in the kitchen when Andreo slipped inside to steal one of my orange push pops from the freezer. He looked at me shyly and then smiled, revealing crooked teeth.

YOU DON'T MIND STOP I EAT STOP BAD BACK STOP In the Howard Country Day library during lunch, I consulted Spanish textbooks and dictionaries and taught myself what I could.