Special Topics in Calamity Physics (17 page)

Or she'd shrug.

"I —I'm a teacher. I wish I could say something more interesting."

"But you're part-time," Nigel said once. "What do you do with the other part?"

"I don't know. I wish I knew where the time went."

She laughed and said nothing more.

There was also the question of a certain word: Valerio. It was their mythical, tongue-and-cheek nickname for Hannah's secret Cyrano, her cloak-anddagger Darcy and her QT Oh Captain! My Captain! I'd heard them mention the word on countless occasions, and when I finally found the courage to inquire who, or what it was, so exciting was the subject, they forgot to ignore me. Eagerly, they recounted a puzzling incident. Two years ago, when they were sophomores, Leulah had left behind an Algebra textbook at Hannah's house. When her parents drove her back for the book the following day, while Hannah retrieved it upstairs, Lu went into the kitchen for a glass of water. She noticed, by the telephone, a small yellow notepad. On the topmost page, Hannah had doodled a strange word.

"She'd written
Valerio
all over it," Lu said heatedly. She had a funny way of wrinkling her nose, which made it look like a tiny bunched-up sock. "Like a
million
times. Kind of crazily too, the way psycho killers write things when the investigator breaks into his house on
CSI.
The one word over and over, like she was talking on the phone, unaware of what she was drawing. Still,
I
do stuff like that, so I didn't think anything of it. Until she walked in. She picked up the notepad immediately, facing the pages toward her so I couldn't see it. I don't think she put it down until I was in my car, driving away. I'd never seen her act so strange."

Strange indeed. I took the liberty of looking up the word in Cambridge etymologist Louis Bertman's Words,
Their Origin and Relevance
(1921).
Valerio
was a common Italian patronymic meaning "brave and strong," derived from the Roman name Valerius, derived in turn from the Latin verb
valere,
"to be in healthy sprits, to be robust and sturdy." It was also the name of several minor saints in the fourth and fifth centuries.

I asked them why they didn't simply ask Hannah outright who he was.

"Can't do that," said Milton.

"Why?"

"We already did," said Jade with irritation, exhaling smoke from her cigarette. "Last year. And she turned a weird red color. Almost purple."

"Like we'd smacked her in the head with a baseball bat," said Nigel.

"Yeah, I couldn't tell if she was sad or pissed," Jade went on. "She just stood there with her mouth open, then disappeared into the kitchen. And when she came out, like, five minutes later, Nigel apologized. And she said in a fake administrator voice, oh, no, it's
fine,
it's just that she doesn't like us snooping or talking about her behind her back. It's hurtful."

"Total bullshit," said Nigel.

"It wasn't bullshit," Charles said angrily.

"Well, we can't bring it up again," Jade said. "We don't want to give her another heart attack."

"Maybe it's her Rosebud," I said, after a moment. Naturally, none of them were ever thrilled when I opened my mouth, but this time, every one of their heads swiveled toward me, almost in unison.

"Her
what?"
asked Jade.

"Have you seen
Citizen Kane?"
I asked.

"Sure," said Nigel with interest.

"Well, Rosebud is what the main character, Kane, searches for his entire life. It's what he's desperate to get back to. An unrequited, aching yearning for a simpler, happier time. It's the last thing he says before he dies."

"Why didn't he just go to a florist?" asked Jade distastefully.

And thus Jade (who, although sometimes very literal, had a flair for the dramatic) enjoyed fashioning all kinds of exciting conclusions out of Hannah's mysteriousness whenever Hannah happened to be out of the room. Sometimes
Hannah Schneider
was an alias. At other times, Hannah was a member of the Federal Witness Protection Program after testifying against crime-tsar Dimitri "Caviar" Molotov of the Howard Beach Molotovs, and was thus chiefly responsible for his being found guilty of sixteen counts of fraud. Or else, she figured Hannah was one the Bin Ladins: "That family's big as the Coppolas." Once, after she happened to watch
Sleeping with the Enemy
at midnight on TNT, she told Leulah Hannah was hiding in Stockton in order to avoid detection by her ex-husband, who happened to be both physically abusive and clinically insane. (Naturally, Hannah's hair was dyed, her eyes, colored contacts.)

"And that's why she hardly ever goes out and pays cash for everything. She doesn't want him to trace her credit cards."

"She doesn't pay cash for everything," said Charles.

"Sometimes she does."

"Everyone on the planet sometimes pays cash."

I humored these wild speculations, even designed a few interesting ones of my own, but of course, I didn't genuinely believe them.

Dad, on Double Lives: "It's fun to imagine they're as epidemic as illiteracy or chronic fatigue syndrome or any other cultural malaise that graces the covers
oîTime
and
Newsweek,
but sadly, most Bob Joneses off the street are just that, Bob Jones, with no dark secrets, dark horses, dark victories, or dark sides of the moon. It's enough to make you give up on Baudelaire. Mind you, I'm not counting adultery, which isn't dark in the slightest, but rather clichéd."

I thus secretly concluded Hannah Schneider was a typo. Destiny had been sloppy. (Most likely because she was overworked. Kismet and Karma were too flighty to get anything done and Doom couldn't be trusted.) Quite by accident, she'd assigned an outstanding person of breathtaking beauty to a buried mountain town, where grandeur was like that slighted tree always falling in the woods and no one noticing. Somewhere else, in Paris, or Hong Kong probably, someone named Chase H. Niderhann with a face compelling as a baked potato and a voice like a throat clearing, happened to be living
her
life, a life of opera, of sun and lakes and weekend excursions to Kenya (pronounced "keen-YA"), of gowns that went "Shhhhh" across a floor.

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."