Special Topics in Calamity Physics (30 page)

"Some people are fragile as-as butterflies and sensitive and it's your responsibility not to destroy them," she went on. "Just because you
can."

She was staring at
me
again, minute reflections of light dancing in her eyes, and I tried to smile reassuringly, but it was difficult because I could see how drunk she was. Her eyelids sagged like lazy window shades and she was trying too hard to herd her words together so they jostled, bumped, stepped all over each other.

"Grow up in a country," she said, "a house of-of privilege, endless commodity, you think you're better than other people. You think you belong to a fucking country club so you can kick people in the face on your way to acquiring more
things."
She was staring at Jade now and said
things
as if biting it off the end of a candy bar. "It takes years to overturn th-this conditioning. I tried my whole life and I
still
exploit people. I'm a pig. Show me what a man hates and I'll show you what he is. Can't remember who said that. . ."

Her voice went dead. Her teary eyes drifted toward the center of the table, bobbing around the rose centerpiece. All of us were sort of madly
eyeing
each other, holding our breaths in mutual queasiness—what people do in restaurants when a soiled drunk person walks in and starts shouting through a mouthful of kernel teeth about working for The Man. It was as if Hannah had sprung a leak and her character, usually so meticulous and contained, was spilling all over the place. I'd never seen her speak or behave in this way, and I doubted the others had either; they stared at her with sickened yet fascinated expressions, as if watching crocodiles mate on the Nature Channel.

Her teeth snagged her bottom lip, there was a little manifestoed frown between her eyebrows. I was deathly afraid she'd go on about needing to go live on a kibbutz or relocating to Vietnam where she'd become a hash-smoking beatnik ("Hanoi Hannah," we'd have to call her) or else she'd turn on us, chastise us for being like our parents, odious and square. Even more frightening was the possibility she might cry. Her eyes were wet, murky tide-pools where things unseen lived and glowed. I felt there were few things in the world more horrific than the adult weep—not the rogue tear during a long-distance commercial, not the stately sob at a funeral, but the cry on the bathroom floor, in the office cubicle, in the two-car garage with one's fingers frantically pressing down on one's eyelids as if there was an ESC key somewhere, a RETURN.

But Hannah didn't cry. She lifted her head, looking around the dining room with the confused expression of someone who'd just woken up in a bus station with seams and the button of a shirtsleeve imprinted on her forehead. She sniffed.

"Let's get out of this fucking place," she said.

For the rest of the week, even a little bit after that, I noticed Smoke Wyannoch Harvey, age 68, was still sort of alive.

Hannah had brought him back to life like Frankenstein his Monster by her deluge of detail, and thus, in all of our heads (even that of the painfully pragmatic Nigel) Smoke didn't really seem dead, but simply offstage somewhere, kidnapped.

Jade, Leulah, Charles and Milton had been outside on the patio as Smoke lurched to his death (Nigel and I simply told the others we were "amusing ourselves inside," which technically was the truth). They were plagued by the If Onlys.

"If only I'd been paying attention," said Lu.

"If only I hadn't smoked the rest of that joint," said Milton.

"If only I hadn't been hitting on Lacey Laurels from Spartanburg who just graduated from Spartan Community College with a major in Fashion Merchandizing," said Charles.

"Oh,
pu-leese,"
said Jade rolling her eyes, turning to stare at the freshmen and sophomores standing in line to buy their two-dollar hot chocolates. They appeared to be afraid of her gaze, as certain diminutive mammals must tremble at the thought of a Golden Eagle.

"I'm
the one who was
there.
How hard is it to notice some green polyester person floating facedown in a pool? I could have dived in and
saved
the man, done one of those good deeds that more or less guarantees entry through the Pearly Gates. But
no,
now I'm going to suffer from Post Traumatic Stress. I mean, it's a possibility I never get over this. Not for years and years. And when I'm thirty I'll have to be submitted into some asylum, with the walls all green and I wander around in an unflattering nightgown with hairy legs because they don't allow razors in case you feel the urge to tiptoe into the communal bathroom and slit your wrists."

That Sunday, I was relieved to find Hannah back to her old self, spiriting around the house in a red-and-white floral housedress. "Blue!" she called cheerfully as Jade and I walked through the front door. "Good to see you! How is everything?"

Hannah neither commented on, nor apologized for, her tipsy behavior at Hyacinth Terrace, which was fine, because I wasn't so sure she
needed
to apologize. Dad said certain people's sanity, in order to maintain a healthy equilibrium, required getting messy once in a while, what he called "going Chekhovian." Some people, every now and then, simply
had
to have One Too Many, go drifty voiced and slouch mouthed, swimming willfully around in their own sadness as if it were hot springs. "Once a year, they say Einstein had to blow off steam by getting so inebriated on
hefeweizen,
he was known to go skinny-dipping at 3:00 A.M. in Carnegie Lake," Dad said. "And it's perfectly understandable. You carry the weight of the world on your shoulders, in his case, the unification of all space and time—you can imagine it'd get quite exhausting."

Smoke Harvey's death—any death, for that matter—was as perfectly noble a reason as any for words to stagger out of one's mouth, for eyes to take almost as much time to blink as it takes for an old man with a cane to descend stairs—especially if, afterward, you looked as epically spic and span as Hannah did. She busied herself with Milton setting the table, slipping into the kitchen to remove a shrieking kettle from the stove, swooping back into the dining room and, as she speedily folded the dinner napkins into cute geisha fans, holding a glorious smile up to her face like a glass during a wedding toast.

And yet, I must have been overly zealous in my attempt to convince myself Hannah was all Fiddle Dee Dee and La Dee Da, that our dinners would return to the weightlessness of Pre-Cottonwood, Pre-costume party days. Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe Hannah was trying too hard to make things chic and upbeat, and it was akin to beautifying one's cell; no matter what kind of curtains you hung, or rug you placed by your cot, it was still prison.

The Stockton Observer
had published the second and final article on Smoke Harvey that day, detailing what we'd already assumed, that his death had been an accident. There'd been "no indication of trauma to the body" and his "blood-alcohol level had been .23, nearly three times the North Carolina legal limit of .08." It seemed he'd inadvertently fallen into the pool, been too drunk to swim or cry for help and, in less than ten minutes, he'd drowned. Hannah had been so eager to tell us about Smoke at Hyacinth Terrace, and was in such well-adjusted spirits
now,
I don't think Nigel thought twice about bringing him up again.

"You know the number of drinks Smoke would've had to knock back to get his BAC to that level?" he asked us, tapping the end of his pencil against his chin. "I mean, we're talking, for a man about what? Two hundred and fifty pounds? Like, ten drinks in an hour."

"Maybe he was doing shots," said Jade.

"I wish the article said more about the autopsy." Hannah spun around from the coffee table, where she'd just placed the tray of oolong tea.

"For God's sake! Stop it!"

There was a long silence.

I find it difficult to sufficiently describe how strange, how disconcerting her voice was in that moment. It was neither outright angry (though anger was certainly in there somewhere) nor exasperated, neither weary nor bored, but
strange
(with the "a" of that word drawn out in "ayyy").

Without saying anything more, head down, her hair quickly falling over the sides of her face like a curtain when a magic trick goes wrong, she vanished into the kitchen.

We stared at each other.

Nigel shook his head, stunned. "First she gets sloshed at Hyacinth Terrace. Now she just
snaps
—?" "You are a fucking asshole," said Charles through his teeth. "Keep your voices down," Milton said. "Hold on, though," Nigel went on excitedly. "That was exactly what she did when I asked her about Valerio. Remember?"

"It's Rosebud again," Jade said. "Smoke Harvey's another Rosebud. Hannah has
two
Rosebuds— " "Let's not get graphic," said Nigel. "Shut the fuck up," said Charles angrily.
"All
of you, I— " The door thumped and Hannah emerged from the kitchen carrying a

platter of sirloin steaks.

"I'm sorry, Hannah," Nigel said. "I shouldn't have said that. Sometimes I get caught up in the drama of a situation and I don't think about how it sounds. How it might hurt someone. Forgive me." His voice I thought a little hollow and bland, but he went over with rave reviews.

"It's okay," Hannah said. And then her smile appeared, a promising little towrope for all of us to grab onto. (You wouldn't be surprised at all if she said, "When I lose my temper, honey, you can't find it anyplace," or "It's the kissiest business in the world," one hand poised in the air, holding an invisible martini.) She brushed Nigel's hair off his forehead. "You need a haircut."

We never mentioned Smoke Wyannoch Harvey, age 68, around her again. And thus concluded his Lazarus-like resurrection, fuelled by her boozey Hyacinth Terrace monologue, our If Onlys and Might Have Dones. Out of empathy for Hannah (who, as Jade said, "must feel like a person who killed someone in a car accident") we tactfully returned the Great Man—a latter-day Greek hero, I liked to imagine, an Achilles, or an Ajax prior to going mad ("Dubs lived the lives of a hundred people, all at once," Hannah had said, baton-twirling that dessert spoon expertly in her fingers like a late-night Swingin' Door Suzie)—to that unknown place people go when they die, to silence and ever afters, to cursivy The Ends materializing out of blackand-white streets and his-and-her deliriously happy faces pressed together against a soundtrack of scratchy strings.

Rather, we returned him there for the time being.

‘I'd like to make a minor adjustment to Leo Tolstoy's oft-quoted first sentence: "All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family

- is unhappy in its own way,
and when it comes to the Holiday Season, happy families can abruptly become unhappy and unhappy families can, to their great alarm, be happy."

The Holiday Season was, without fail, a special time for the Van Meers.

Since I was very small, over any December dinner, during which Dad and I cooked our acclaimed spaghetti with meat sauce (J. Chase Lamberton's
Political Desire
[1980] and L. L. MacCaulay's 750-page
Intelligensia
[1991] were also known to join us), Dad was fond of asking me to explain, in great detail, how my latest school was getting into the Holiday Mood. There was Mr. Pike and his Infamous Yule Log in Brimmsdale, Texas, and Santa's Secret Shoppe in the Cafeteria Featuring Twisty Rainbow Candles and Crude Jewelry Boxes in Sluder, Florida, the Forty-Eight-Hour Toymaker Village Hideously Vandalized by Spiteful Seniors in Lamego, Ohio, and one appalling recital in Boatley, Illinois, "The Christ Child Story: A Mrs. Harding Musical." For some reason, this subject made me as sidesplitting as Stan Laurel in a two-reel comedy for Metro in 1918. Within minutes, Dad was in stitches.

"For the life of me," he said between howls, "I cannot comprehend why no producer has realized its untapped potential as a horror movie,
Nightmare of the American Christmas
and such. There's even enormous commercial promise for a number of sequels and television spin-offs.
St. Nick's Resurrection, Part 6: The Final Nativity.
Or perhaps,
Rudolph Goes to Hell
with a certain ominous tagline,
'Dont
Be Home for Christmas.' "

"Dad, it's a time of good
cheer."

"So I am thus inspired to good cheerfully inject fuel into the U.S. economy by purchasing things I don't need and can't afford —most of which will have funny little plastic parts that suddenly snap off, rendering it inoperative within weeks—thereby digging myself a debt of elephantine proportions, causing me extreme anxiety and sleepless nights yet, more importantly, arousing a sexy economic growth period, hoisting up droopy interest rates, breeding jobs, the bulk of which are inessential and able to be executed faster, cheaper and with greater precision by a Taiwanese-manufactured central processing unit. Yes, Christabel. I
know
what time it is."

Ebenezer had very little criticism and no remarks at all on "the plague of American consumerism," "corporate gluttons and their Botswana-sized bonuses" (not even a passing allusion to one of his choice social theories, that of the "Tinseled American Dream") when I detailed how lavishly St. Gallway was celebrating the season. Every banister (even the one in Loomis, Hannah's banished building) was wrapped in boughs of pine, thick and bristly as a lumberjack's mustache. Massive wreaths had been posted Reformation-style with what had to be iron spikes to the great wooden doors of Elton, Barrow and Vauxhall. There was a Goliath Christmas tree, and, looping around the iron gates of Horatio Way, white lights blinking like demented fireflies. A brass menorah, staunch and skeletal, flickering at the end of second-floor Barrow stalwartly staved off, as best it could, Gallway's Christian proclivities (AP World History professor Mr. Carlos Sandbom was responsible for this brave line of defense). Sleigh bells the size of golf balls fell around the handles of Hanover's main doors and they jingle-sighed every time a kid hurried through them, late for class.

I believe it was the sheer force of the school's festivities that allowed me to set the uneasiness of the preceding weeks a little bit off to the side, pretend it wasn't there like a largish stack of unopened mail (which, when finally confronted at a belated date, indicated I'd have to declare bankruptcy). Besides, if Dad was to be believed, the American holidays were a time for "coma-inspired denial" anyway, an occasion of "pretending the working poor, widespread famine, unemployment and the AIDS crisis were simply exotic, tart little fruits that, mercifully, were out of season," and thus I wasn't completely responsible for letting Cottonwood, the costume party, Smoke, the unusual behavior of Hannah herself be upstaged by the encroaching cloud of Finals Week, Perôn's used clothing drive (the kid who brought in the most trash bags of clothes won a Brewster's Gold Ticket, ten points added onto any Final Exam; "Hefty Cinch Sak Lawn and Leaf Bags," she roared during Morning Announcements, "Thirty-nine gallons!") and, most dizzying of all, Student Council President Maxwell Stuart's pet project, the Christmas formal, which he'd rechristened "Maxwell's Christmas Cabaret."

Love, too, had something to do with it.

Unfortunately, little of it was my own.

The first week of December, during second period Study Hall, a freshman entered the library and approached the desk in the back where Mr. Fletcher sat working on a crossword.

"Headmaster Havermeyer needs to see you immediately," the boy said. "It's an emergency."

Mr. Fletcher, visibly annoyed he'd been pried away from
The X-word X-pert's Final Face-off
(Pullen, 2003), was led out of the library and up the hill toward Hanover.

"This is it!" shrieked Dee. "Fletcher's wife, Linda, has finally attempted suicide because Frank would rather do a crossword than have
sex.
It's her cry for help!"

"It
is,"
cooed Dum.

A minute later, Floss Cameron-Crisp, Mario Gariazzo, Derek Pleats and a junior I didn't know the name of (though from his alert expression and soggy mouth he looked like some sort of Pavlovian response) entered the library with a CD player, a microphone with amplifier and stand, a bouquet of red roses and a trumpet case. They proceeded to set up for a rehearsal of some kind, plugging in the CD player and microphone, relocating the tables in the very front to the side wall by the Hambone Bestseller Wish List. This included relocating Sibley "Little Nose" Hemmings.

"Maybe I don't
want
to move," Sibley said, wrinkling her perky, symmetrical nose, which, according to Dee and Dum, had been handcrafted for her face by an Atlanta plastic surgeon who'd fashioned a host of other high-quality facial features for some CNN anchors and an actress on
Guiding Light.
"Maybe
you
should move. Who are you to tell me? Hey, don't touch that!"

Floss and Mario unceremoniously picked up Sibley's desk scattered with her personal belongings—her suede purse, a copy of
Pride and Prejudice
(unread), two fashion magazines (read)—and carried it to the wall. Derek Pleats, a member of the Jelly Roll Jazz Band (with whom I also had AP Physics), was standing off to the side with his trumpet, playing ascending and descending scales. Floss started to roll back the cruddy mustard carpet and Mario crouched over the CD player, adjusting the sound levels.

"Excuse me," said Dee, standing up, walking over to Floss, crossing her arms, "but what exactly do you think you're doing? Is this an attempt at anarchy, to like, gain control of the school?"

"Because we'll tell you right now," said Dum, striding over to Floss, crossing her arms next to Dee, "it's not going to work. If you want to start a movement you'll have to plan better because Hambone's in her office and she'll summon the authoritates in no time."

"If you want to make a strong personal statement, I suggest you save it for Morning Announcements when the whole school is all in one place and can be held captive."

"Yep. So you can make your demandations."

"And the administration knows you're all a force to be reckoned with."

"So you can't be
ignored."

Floss and Mario acknowledged neither Dee nor Dum's demandations as they secured the rolled-back rug with a few extra chairs. Derek Pleats was gently shining his trumpet with a soft purple rag and the Pavlovian response, tongue out, was absorbed with checking the microphone and amplifier: "Testing, testing, one, two, three." Satisfied, he signaled to the others and all four of them huddled together, whispering, nodding excitedly (Derek Pleats doing fast flexing exercises with his fingers). Finally, Floss turned, picked up the bouquet and without saying a word, he handed it to me.

"Oh, my God," said Dee.

I held the flowers dumbly in front of me as Floss spun on his heels and jogged away, disappearing around the corner in front of the library doors. "Aren't you going to open the card?" Dee demanded. I ripped open the small, cream-colored envelope and pulled out a note.

The words were written in a woman's handwriting.

LET'S GROOVE.

"What's it say?" asked Dum, leaning over me. "It's some kind of threat," said Sibley. By now everyone in second period Study Hall —Dee, Dum, Little

Nose, the horse-faced Jason Pledge, Mickey "Head Rush" Gibson, Point Richardson —swarmed around my table. Huffing, Little Nose grabbed the card and reviewed it with a pitying look on her face, as if it was my Guilty verdict. She passed it to Head Rush, who smiled at me and passed it to Jason Pledge, who passed it to Dee and Dum who huddled over the thing as if it were a piece of WWII intelligence encrypted by the German Enigma Cipher Machine.

"Too weird," said Dee.

"Totally-"

Suddenly, they were quiet. I looked up to see Zach Soderberg bent over me like a windswept rhododendron, his hair plummeting dangerously across his forehead. I felt as if I hadn't seen him in
years,
probably because ever since he'd talked to me about A Girl, I'd gone out of my way to look zealously preoccupied in AP Physics. I'd also strong-armed Laura Elms into being my laboratory partner until the end of the year by offering to write up
her
lab reports as well as mine, never copying or even using an identical turn of phrase (in which case I'd be suspended for cheating), but faithfully adopting Laura's restricted vocabulary, illogical mind-set and blubbery calligraphy when I wrote the report. Zach, no longer wanting to partner with his ex, Lonny, had to partner with my old partner Krista Jibsen who never did her homework because she was saving for a breast reduction. Krista worked three jobs, one at Lucy's Silk and Other Fine Fabrics, one at Bagel World and one in the Outdoors department at Sears, the minimum-waged drudgery of which she felt pertinent to the study of Energy and Matter. Thus we all knew when one of her co-workers was new, late, sick, stealing, let go, jerking off in the storeroom, also that one of her managers (if I remember correctly, some poor overseer at Sears) was in love with her and wanted to leave his wife.

Floss reached down and pressed the Play button on the CD player. Robotic sounds from a 1970s disco exploded out of the speakers. To my infinite horror, while watching me (as if on my face he could see his reflection, monitor his tempo, the height of his kicks), Zach began to take two steps forward, two steps back, pulsing his knees, the boys shadowing him.

" 'Let this groove. Get you to move. It's alright. Alright," Zach and the others sang in falsetto along with Earth, Wind & Fire. " 'Let this groove. Set in your shoes. So stand up, alright! Alright!' "

They sang "Let's Groove." Floss and the boys shrugged, snapped and foxtrotted with such concentration, one could almost see the moves running through their brains like Stock Exchange ticker tape
(kick left front, touch back left, kick left, step left, kick right front, knee right).
"I'll be there, after a while, if you want my looove. We can boogie on down! On
down!
Boogie on
down!"
Derek on his trumpet was playing a rudimentary melody. Zach sang solo with the occasional side step and shoulder lunge. His voice was earnest yet awful. He spun in place. Dee squeaked like a crib toy.

A sizable crowd of sophomores and juniors gathered in front of the library doors, watching the Boy Band with their mouths open. Mr. Fletcher reappeared with Havermeyer, and Ms. Jessica Hambone, the librarian, who'd been married four times and resembled Joan Collins in her more recent years, had emerged from her office and was now standing by the Hambone Reserves Desk. Obviously, she'd intended to shut down the disturbance because shutting down disturbances, with the exception of fire drills and lunch, was the only reason Ms. Hambone ever emerged from her office, where she allegedly spent her day shopping www.QVC.com for Easter Limited-quantity Collectibles and Goddess Glamour Jewelry. But she wasn't coming over to the scene with her arms in the air, her favorite words, "This is a library, people, not a gym," darting out of her mouth like Neon Tetra, her metallic green eye shadow (complimenting her Enchanted Twilight Lever-back earrings, her Galaxy Dreamworld bracelet) reacting against the overhead fluorescent lights to give her that explicit Iguana Look for which she was famous. No, Ms. Hambone was speechless, hand pressed against her chest, her wide mouth, deeply lip-lined like the chalk outline of a body at a crime scene, curled into a soft, wisteria-fairy-pin of a smile.

The boys were diligently Lindy Hopping behind Zach, who spun in place again. Ms. Hambone's left hand twitched.

At last, the music faded and they froze.

It was silent for a moment, and then everyone —the kids at the door, Ms. Hambone, those in second period Study Hall (all except Little Nose) — erupted into mind-numbing applause.