Special Topics in Calamity Physics (19 page)

During such moments, I thought to myself, maybe these were my friends, maybe I'd confide in them about sex over rhubarb pie in a diner at

3:00 A.M. and someday we'd phone each other to chat about Tuskawalla Trails Retirement Community and back pain and our turtle-bald husbands, but then their smiles fell off their faces like Visual Aids on bulletin boards missing a tack. They'd look at me irritably, as if I'd tricked them.

They drove me home. I'd sit in the backseat doing my best to lip-read due to the ear-splitting levels of the heavy-metal CD (I decoded agonizingly shadowy phrases: "meet us later," "hot-ass date"), knowing full well because I hadn't said anything breathtaking (because I was about as cool as Bermuda shorts), they'd drop me like laundry and accelerate into the whispery night with its plum sky and black mountains snooping over the spiked tops of the pine trees. At an undisclosed location, they'd join Charles, Nigel and Black (what they called Milton), and probably park and neck, and race cars off cliffs (don leather jackets emblazoned with T-BIRD or PINK LADY).

"Astalowaygo," Jade said to my general vicinity as she smeared on red lipstick in the rearview mirror. I slammed the car door, heaved my backpack onto my shoulder.

Leulah waved. "See you Sunday," she said sweetly.

I trudged inside, the veteran who wished war had lasted longer.

"What on earth did you find compulsory to purchase at a store called Bahama-Me-Tan?"
shouted Dad from the kitchen when he returned from his date with Kitty. He appeared in the doorway of the living room with the orange plastic shopping bag I'd thrown on the foyer floor, holding it as if it were the carcass of a hedgehog.

"Bali-Me Bronzer," I said drearily without looking up from some book I'd yanked off the shelf,
The South AmericanJoven Mutiny
(Gonzalez, 1989).

Dad nodded and wisely decided not to probe further.

There was a turning point. (And I'm sure it had everything to do with Hannah, although her role, what she must have said to them—an ultimatum perhaps, a bribe or one of her suggestions—was never clear.)

It was the first week of October, on a Friday, during sixth period. It was a harsh, bright day for fall, glaring as a washed car, and Mr. Moats, my instructor for Beginning Drawing, had entreated the class to go outside with our No. 2 pencils and sketch —"Find your melting clocks!" he'd ordered, swooshing open the door as if freeing mustangs, his other hand O/éing in the air so for four seconds he was a Flamenco dancer in tight pants of Cadmium Green. Slowly, lazily, the class floated out across the campus with their giant sketch pads. I found it tricky to choose what to draw, and wandered for fifteen minutes before deciding upon a faded package of M&Ms hiding in a bed of pine needles behind Elton. I was sitting on the cement wall, drawing my first few wimpy lines, when I heard someone traipsing down the sidewalk. Instead of passing me, the person stopped.

"Hey, there," he said. It was Milton. His hands were stuffed in his pockets and his stringy hair mumbo-jumboed over his forehead.

"Hi," I said, but he didn't answer or even smile. He simply stepped over to my sketchpad and tilted his head to inspect my rickety pencil lines like a teacher looming over your shoulder, blithely helping himself to what you scribbled during an Essay Test.

"What're you doing out of class?" I asked.

"Oh, I'm sick," he said, smiling. "Flu. Goin' to the infirmary, then home to rest."

I should mention: while Charles was the obvious Cassanova at St. Gallway, popular among chicks, charlie-boys and cheerleaders, Milton, I'd learned, was sort of the Studhorse for the smart and strange. A girl in AP English, Macon Campins, who drew henna-style swirling designs in permanent ink on her palms, claimed to be obsessively in love with him, and before the bell, before flustered Ms. Simpson shuffled into the room muttering in escalating whispers—"no toner, nothing but legal paper, no staples, everything in this school, no, this country, no, the
world,
all going to seed"—you could hear Macon discussing Milton's mystery tattoo with her best friend, Engella Grand: "I think he did it himself. See, I was staring at his rolled-up sleeve in Biology? And I'm pretty sure it's a huge freakin' oil slick on his arm. That's sooo sexy."

I, too, felt there was something undercover and sexual about Milton, which made me act sort of inebriated whenever I was alone with him. I was once rinsing plates, loading them into Hannah's dishwasher when he came in with seven water glasses in his giant hands and, as he leaned past me to put them in the sink, my chin accidentally touched his shoulder. It was damp and muggy as a greenhouse and I thought I was going to fall down. "Sorry, Blue," he said when he stepped away. Whenever he said my name, which he did often (so often, I felt it came tantalizingly close to satire), his accent yo-yoed it, or else, turned it into a piece of elastic.
Bluuue.

"Got plans tonight, Blue?" he asked me now.

"Yes," I said, though my response didn't seem to register. (I think they'd figured by now, unless Hannah had actively arranged a suitor, no one came calling—not an outrageous assumption.)

"Well, we're hangin' at Jade's tonight if you want to come. I'll get her to pick you up. Should be mad crazy. If you can handle it."

He continued past me, down the sidewalk.

"I thought you had the flu," I said under my breath, but he heard me, because he turned and, walking backward, winked at me, saying: "Feelin' better by the minute."

He then began to whistle and, tightening his green-and-blue plaid tie as if about to interview for a job, he swung open the back doors of Elton and disappeared inside.

Jade lived in a thirty-five-room Tara-inspired McMansion (what she called the Wedding Cake) built atop a hill in a hick town "sprinkled with trailer parks and people without molars" known as Junk Spread (pop. 109).

"The house is vulgar when you see it for the first time," she said cheerfully, swinging open the massive front door. (From the moment Jade had picked me up, her spirits had approached Gzc/gef-like gladness, which made me wonder what kind of stellar deal she'd cut with Hannah; it had to have had something to do with immortality.)

"Yeah," she said, fixing the front of her black-and-white silk wrap dress so her electric yellow bra didn't show. "I made the suggestion to Jefferson that she have on hand some of those airplane sick bags, you know, right when you first walk in. She hasn't gotten them yet. Oh, and no you're not hallucinating. That really is Cassiopeia. Ursa Minor's in the dining room, Hercules in the kitchen. Jefferson dreamed it up, constellations of the Northern Hemisphere on all the ceilings. She was dating this guy Timber, an Astrologist and Dream Translator, when they were designing the house, and by the time Timber unloaded her and she was going out with Gibbs from England who hated the idea of all the fucking twinkling lights—'How the devil will you change those
bulbs?'—
it was too late. The electricians had already done Corona Borealis and half of Pegasus."

The foyer was white-on-white-on-white with a slick marble floor on which one could probably triple-lutz and double-toe-loop with little difficulty. I stared up at what really
was
Cassiopeia twinkling above us in the pale blue ceiling, which also seemed to hum that acid note of Frozen Food sections. It was freezing too.

"No, you're not coming down with something. Living in cool temperatures stalls, sometimes even reverses the aging process so Jefferson doesn't allow the thermostat in the house to get above forty." Jade flung the car keys onto the massive Corinthian column by the door, messy with change, toenail clippers, brochures for meditation classes at something called The Suwanee Centre for Inner Life. "Don't know about you, but I'm in dire need of a cocktail. Nobody's here yet, they're late, the motherfuckers, so I'll show you around."

Jade made us mudslingers, the first alcoholic drink I'd ever had; it was sweet yet fascinatingly throat scalding. We embarked on the Grand Tour. The house was ornate and filthy as a flophouse. Under the pulsing constellations (many of them with extinguished stars, supernovas, white dwarfs) almost every room looked confused, in spite of the very explicit title Jade gave it (Rec Room, Museum Room, Drawing Room). For example, the Imperial Room displayed an ornate Persian
vahze
and some large oily portrait of an "eighteenthcentury Sir Somebodyorother"; but also a stained silk blouse over a sofa arm, a sneaker capsized under a stool, and on a gilded end table, gruesome cotton balls huddled together in miserable commiseration after having removed blood-red polish from somebody's nails.

She took me to the TV Room ("three thousand channels and nothing on"), the Toy Room with a life-sized rearing carousel horse ("That's Snow-pea") and the Shanghai Room, empty, apart from a big bronze Buddha statue and ten or twelve cardboard boxes. "Hannah really likes it if we get rid of as much material possession as possible. I take stuff to Goodwill all the time. You should think about doing the same," she said. In the basement, under Gemini, was the Jefferson Room ("where my mother pays
ohmage
to her heyday"). It was a 1600-square-foot family room with a Drive-in-sized TV, carpeting the color of spareribs and wooden walls lined with thirty advertisements for brands like "Ohh!" Perfume, Slinky Silk™ Pantyhose, Keep Walkin' Bootwear, Orange Bliss Lite® and other obscure products. Each featured the same carrot-topped woman flashing a banana-grin that walked the fine line between ecstatic and fanatic (see Chapter 4, "Jim Jones,"
Don Juan de Mania,
Lerner, 1963).

"That's my mom, Jefferson. You can call her Jeff."

Jade frowned as she surveyed one of the ads for Vita Vitamins in which Jeff, sporting blue terry-cloth wristbands, did a jackknife over VITA VITAMIN YOUR WAY TO A BETTER LIFE.

"She was big in New York in 1978 for two minutes. See here, how her hair curves way up over, then ends right there above her eye? Well, she invented that hairstyle. When she came out with it everyone went bonkers. It was called The Crimson Marshmallow. She was also friends with Andy Warhol. I guess he let her see him without his wig all the time. Oh, wait."

She walked to the table beneath the Sir Albert's Spicy Sausages ads ("If it's good enough for royals, it's good enough for you.") returning with a framed photograph of Jefferson, apparently in the present day.

"This is her last year posing for her Christmas cards."

The woman had wandered deep into her forties and, to her evident panic, had been unable to make her way back. She still flashed the banana-smile, though it'd gone mushy on the ends, and her hair no longer had enough kinetic energy to swing itself up into The Crimson Marshmallow, but frizzled stiffly off her head in a Red Zinger Silo. (If Dad saw her he would not hesitate to call her "a badly aged Barbarella." Or he'd use one of his Stale Candy remarks reserved for women who spent the greater portion of their week attempting to halt Middle Age as if Middle Age was nothing but a team of runaway stallions: "a melted red M&M," a "stale strawberry Sweet Tart.")

Jade was looking at me intently, arms crossed, eyes narrowed.

"She looks very nice," I said.

"About as nice as Hitler."

After the tour, we retreated to the Purple Room, "where Jefferson gets to really know her boyfriends if you know what I mean. Avoid the paisley couch by the fireplace." The others still hadn't arrived, and after Jade busied herself with making more mudslingers and turning over the Louis Armstrong record on the antique gramophone, she finally sat down, though her eyes flew around the room like canaries. She checked her watch a fourth time, then a fifth.

"How long have you lived here?" I asked, because I sort of wished we'd get along so when the others arrived we were performing our favorite number, "Just Two Little Girls from Little Rock," Jade, a skinnier, angrier Marilyn to my unquestionably-more-flat-chested Jane Russell. But, much to my own disappointment, the odds didn't look good for being bosom buddies.

"Three years," she said distractedly. "Oh, where the fuck
are
they? I loathe when people are late and Black swore he'd be here by seven, the
fraud"
she complained not to me, but the ceiling. "I'll castrate him." (Orion, the constellation under which we sat, had not had his light bulbs changed and thus he'd lost his legs and head. He was nothing but a belt.)

Soon the others arrived wearing quirky accessories (plastic bead necklaces, fast-food crowns; Charles wore an old fencing shirt, Milton a blazer in navy velveteen) and they stormed the room, Nigel crawling over the leather couch, hitching his legs on the coffee table, Leulah air-kissing Jade hellos. She only smiled at me, then glided to the bar, her eyes glassy and red. Milton wandered toward a wooden box on the writing desk in the corner and unlatched it, removing a cigar.

"Jadey, where's the cutter?" he asked, sniffing it. She dragged on her cigarette and glared at him. "You said you'd be on time and you're late. I'll hate you until I die. Top drawer."

He chuckled, a muffled sound, as if he was being smothered with a pillow, and I realized I wanted him to say something to me—"Glad you could join us," "Hey,
Bluuue"—
but he didn't. He didn't see me.

"Blue, how about a dirty martini?" Leulah asked.

"Or something else," said Jade.