Special Topics in Calamity Physics (31 page)

"Oh, my
God,"
said Dee.

"That did
so
not happen," said Dum.

I clapped and beamed as everyone stared at me with big astonished faces as if I were a Crop Circle. I beamed at Ms. Hambone dabbing her eyes with the frilly cuff of her Rococo poet's blouse. I beamed at Mr. Fletcher who looked so happy you'd think he just finished an exceptionally grueling crossword, like last week's Battle of Bunker Hill, "Not Waving but Drowning?" I even beamed at Dee and Dum, who were staring at me with incredulous yet fearful looks on their faces (see Rosemary at the end of
Rosemary's Baby
when the old people shout,
"Hail Satan!").

"Blue van Meer," said Zach. He cleared his throat and approached my desk. The fluorescent lights made a soured halo around his hair so he looked like a hand-painted Jesus one finds hanging on clammy walls of churches that smell of Gruyère. "How about going to the Christmas formal with me?"

I nodded and Zach didn't pick up on my acute reluctance and horror. A Cadillac-sized smile drove away with his face as if I'd just agreed to pay him "in cayash," as Dad would say, for a Sedona Beige Metallic Pontiac Grand Prix, fully loaded, two grand over sticker price, driving it off the lot right then and there. He also didn't pick up on—no one did—the fact that I was experiencing a very severe lost
Our Town
feeling, which only intensified when Zach left the library with his Temptations, a supremely satisfied look on his face (Dad had described a similar look on Zwambee tribesmen in Cameroon after they'd impregnated their tenth bride).

"Think they've had
sex?"
asked Dum with slitty eyes. She was sitting with her sister a few feet behind me.

"If they had sex, you think he'd be skadiddiling over her? It's publicized knowledge the nanosecond you have sex with a guy you go from being a headline to being all blurbatized in the obituary section. He just Timberlaked in front of our
very eyes."

"She must be insane in bed. She must be man's best friend."

"It takes six Vegas strippers and a leash to be man's best friend."

"Maybe her mom works at The Crazy Horse." They began to laugh shrilly, not even bothering to quiet down when I turned around to glare at them.

Dad and I had seen
Our Town
(Wilder, 1938) during a torrential downpour at the University of Oklahoma at Flitch (one of his students was making his Flitch stage debut as the Stage Manager). Although the play had its share of faults (there seemed to be great confusion with the address, as "In the Eye of God" came before "New Hampshire") and Dad found the carpe diem premise much too syrupy ("Wake me up if someone gets shot," he said as he nodded off), I still found myself more than a little moved when Emily Webb, played by a tiny girl with hair the color of sparks off railroad tracks, realized no one could see her, when she knew she had to say good-bye to Grover's Corners. In my case, though, it was skewed. I felt invisible though
everyone
had seen me, and if Zach Soderberg and his mantelpiece hair were Grover's Corners, I could think of nothing I'd rather do than get the hell out of town.

This grim feeling reached a record high when, that same day, as I walked to AP Calculus in Hanover I passed Milton walking hand in hand with Joalie Stuart, a sophomore, one of those highly petite girls who could fit into a carry-on suitcase and look at home on a Shetland pony. She had a baby-rattle laugh: a jelly-bean sound that irked even if you were minding your own business about a light year away. Jade had informed me Joalie and Black were a magnificently happy couple in the Newman and Woodward tradition. "Nothing will come between those two," she said with a sigh.

"Hey there, Hurl," Milton said as he passed me.

He smiled and Joalie smiled. Joalie was wearing a blue icing sweater and a thick brown velvet headband that looked like a giant woolly worm was rummaging behind her ears.

I'd never contemplated relationships very much (Dad said they were preposterous if I was under twenty-one and when I was over twenty-one Dad considered it Fine Points, Minutiae, a question of transportation or ATM location in a new town; "We'll figure it out when we get there," he said with a wave of his hand) and yet, in that moment, when I moved past Milton and Joalie, both of them smiling confidently in spite of the fact at distances greater than fifteen feet they looked like a gorilla walking a teacup Yorkie, I actually felt awed by the remote possibilities of the person
you
liked ever liking you back a corresponding amount. And this mathematical conundrum started its long division in my head at breakneck speed, so by the time I sat down in the front row of AP Calculus and Ms. Thermopolis at the dry-erase board was trying to wrestle to the ground a robust function from our homework, I was left with a disturbing number.

I suppose it was why, after years of playing the odds, some people cashed in their measly chips for their Zach Soderberg, the kid who was like a cafeteria, so rectangular and brightly lit there wasn't a millimeter of exciting murk or thrilling secret (not even under the plastic chairs or behind the vending machines). The only saturnine miasma to be found in him was maybe a bit of mold on the orange Jell-O. The boy was all creamed spinach and stale hot dog.

You couldn't make a grisly shadow on his wall if you tried.

I suppose it was just one of those December
Dog Day Afternoons,
when Love and its wired cousins—Lust, Crush, Eat Up, Have It Bad (all of whom suffered from ADHD or Hyperkinetic Syndrome) were on the loose and in heat, terrorizing the neighborhood. Later that day, when Dad dropped me at home before heading back to the university for a faculty meeting, I was only five minutes into my homework when the telephone rang. I picked it up and no one said anything. A half hour later, when it rang again, I switched on the answering machine.

"Gareth. It's me. Kitty. Look, I need to talk to you."
Click.

Less than forty-five minutes later, she called again. Her voice was cratered and barren as the moon, exactly as Shelby Hollow's voice had been, and Jessie Rose Rubiman's before her, and Berkley Sternberg's, old Berkley who used
The Art of Guiltless Living
(Drew, 1999) and
Take Control of Your Life
(Nozzer, 2004) as coasters for her potted African violets.

"I-I know you don't like it when I call, but I
do
need to speak to you, Gareth. I have a feeling you're home and choosing not to pick up. Pick up the phone."

She waited.

Whenever they waited, I always pictured them on the other end, standing in their yellowed kitchens, twisting the telephone cord around an index finger so it turned red. I wondered why it never occurred to them
I
was the one listening, not Dad. I think if one of them had said my name, I would've picked up and done my best to console them, explained that Dad was one of those theories you could never know for certain, never prove beyond a reasonable doubt. And though there was a chance you could be struck by the lightning of genius it took to solve the man, the odds were so infinitesimal, so unbearable, the act of trying only had the effect of making one feel very small (see Chapter 53, "Superstrings and M-Theory, or Mystery Theory, the Theory of Everything,"
Incongruities,
V. Close, 1998).

"Okay. Call me when you get a chance. I'm at home. But you can reach me on my mobile if I go out. I might go out. I need eggs. On the other hand, I might stay home and make tacos. Okay. Forget this message. Speak to you soon."

In a seemingly astute statement Socrates wrote, "The hottest love has the coldest end." By these words, by their very definition—because I'm sure Dad never lied to them, never pretended his affections were anything not perfectly encapsulated by the words
lackadaisical
and
lukewarm—
every one of Dad's ends should have been a sun-drenched, rosy affair. They should have been polo matches. They should have been picnics.

I don't think Dad ever quite understood it himself, treating these sobs as he did, with a muddle of embarrassment and regret. When he came home that night, he did what he always did. He played the messages (turning down the volume when he realized who it was) and deleted them.

"Have you eaten, Christabel?" he asked.

He knew I'd heard her messages, but like Emperor Claudius in 54 A.D. upon hearing the thrum of Roman rumor that his dear wife, Agrippina, was plotting to poison him with a dish of mushrooms presented to him by his favorite eunuch, for some unknown reason, Dad chose to ignore these signs of impending doom (see
Lives of the Caesars,
Suetonius, 121 A.D.).

He never learned.

Two weeks later, the Saturday night of Maxwell's Christmas Cabaret, I was being unlawfully detained at Zach Soderberg's house. I was wearing one of Jefferson Whitestone's old black cocktail dresses, which Jade claimed Valentino himself had designed specifically for her, though when they feuded for the affections of "a shirtless bartender at Studio 54 named Gibb," she'd furiously ripped out the label, leaving the dress an amnesiac. ("This is how empires fall," Jade had said, sighing dramatically as she and Leulah pinned the armholes and waist so the thing no longer fit like a life jacket. "Trust me. You start breeding with the nimrods and that's the end of your civilization. But I suppose you couldn't help it. I mean, he asked you in front of all the whole
school.
What could you say, except that you'd be ecstatic to be his saltine? I feel sorry for
you.
That you have to spend an entire evening with the coupon." It's what they called Zach now, "the coupon," and it fit him. He really
was
all bar code, all Great Savings, all $5~0ff with Proof of Purchase.)

"Have some bonbons," said Zach's dad, Roger, holding out a bowl of powdery chocolates.

"Don't force her to eat," said Zach's mom, Patsy, shooing his hand.

"You like chocolate? You must. Everyone likes chocolate."

"Roger," protested Patsy. "No girl wants to eat before a party, when she's got the jitters!
hater's
when she gets the munchies. Zach, make sure she eats something."

"Okay," said Zach, blushing like a nun. He raised his eyebrows and tossed me a repentant smile as Patsy got down on one knee in the snowdrift carpet of the living room and squinted at us through the Nikon's viewfinder.

Unbeknownst to Patsy, Roge had moved to my left and was holding out the ceramic bowl again.

"Go on,"
he mouthed, winking. It seemed Roge, in his yellow cotton sweater and khaki pants—creases down each leg, clear cut as the International Date Line—would make a very convincing wholesaler of junk, white girl, afghan black, billy whiz and joy powder.

I obliged, took one. It began to melt in my hand.

"Roger!"
said Patsy,
tisking
(two dimples snagging her cheeks) as she took what was now our sixteenth picture, this one with Zach and me on the floral couch, our knees positioned at a perfect ninety degrees.

Patsy was a self-proclaimed "picture nut," and all around us, covering every hard, flat surface like thousands of wet, unraked leaves in a gazebo, were framed photos of skew-smiled Zach, urn-eared Bethany Louise, a few with Roge when he had sideburns and Patsy when her hair was a redder brown, which she wore as an amaretto bundt cake atop her head, drizzled with ribbons. The only hard, flat surface in the living room devoid of pictures—the coffee table in front of us—supported a paused game of Parcheesi.

"I hope Zach didn't embarrass you with his dance," said Patsy.

"Not at all," I said.

"He was practicing all the time. So nervous! He had Bethany Louise up all hours of the night going over the steps."

"Mom," said Zach.

"He knew it was risky," said Roge. "But I told him to take that leap of faith."

"It runs in the family," said Patsy, nodding toward Roge. "You should have seen this one when he proposed." "Sometimes you just can't help yourself." "Thank goodness for that!" "Mom, we should get going," said Zach. "All right! All right! One more by the window." "Mom." "Just one. There's gorgeous light over there. One. I promise." I'd never been inside a household full of ! and even more !!! I wasn't even

aware these nests of goodwill, these bubble baths of clasps and cuddles actually existed, except in one's head when one compared one's own fitful family to the seemingly blissful one across the street.

An hour ago, as Zach and I drove up the driveway and I saw his wooden house — up-front as an open-faced sandwich, served to the sky on skinny wooden stilts—Patsy in her beetle-green blouse scurried down the porch steps to greet us before Zach had even parked the car ("You said she was pretty, you didn't say
drop dead!
Zach never tells us anything!" she exclaimed. And that was her voice, even when she wasn't greeting people on the driveway, an exclamation).

Patsy was pretty (though some twenty-five pounds heavier than her bundt cake days) with a cheerful, round face suggestive of a fresh vanilla cake blessed with a cherry and placed lovingly in a sweet shoppe's window. Roge was handsome, but in the opposite way of Dad. Roge (Have enough gas in the car Zaehary, Just had her filled, Good boy) displayed the sparkling air of a brand new bathroom fixture in sought-after White Heat tile. He had sparkling blue eyes and skin so clear, you almost expected to see your own reflection winking back at you when you peered into his face.