Special Topics in Calamity Physics (9 page)

As the oily hand of Fate would have it, I'd only wait twenty-four hours to see her again, this time in a speaking role.

School began in three days and Dad, in keeping with his recent Open-a
-
New-Window persona, insisted on spending the afternoon at Blue Crest Mall in the Adolescent Department of Stickley's, urging me to try on various articles of Back-2-School clothing and soliciting the fashion expertise of one Ms. Camille Luthers (see "Curly Coated Retriever,"
Dictionary of Dogs,
Vol. 1). Camille was Adolescent Department Manager, who not only had worked in Adolescent for the last eight years but knew which Stickley styles were de rigueur this season due to her own esteemed daughter around my age named Cinnamon.

Ms. Luthers, on a pair of green pants, which resembled those worn by Mao's Liberation Army, size 2: "These look like they'd suit you perfectly." She eagerly pressed the hanger against my waist and stared at me in the mirror with her head tilted, as if hearing a high-pitched noise. "They suit Cinnamon perfectly too. I just got her a pair and she lives in them. Can't get her to take them off."

Ms. Luthers, on a boxy white button-down shirt, which resembled those worn by the Bolsheviks when they stormed the Winter Palace, size o: "Now this is you, too. Cinnamon has one of these in every color. She's around your size. Bird boned. Everyone thinks she's anorexic, but she's not and a lot of her peers get jealous living on fruit and bagels just to squeeze into a size 12."

After Dad and I left the Adolescent Department of Stickley's with most of Cinnamon's rebel wardrobe, we made our way to Surely Shoos on Mercy Avenue in North Stockton, per Ms. Luthers' helpful tip-off.

"I believe these are right up Cinnamon's alley," said Dad, holding up a large black platform shoe.

"No," I said.

"Thank God. I can safely say Chanel's rolling in her grave."

"Humphrey Bogart wore platform shoes throughout the filming of
Casablanca"
someone said. I turned, expecting to see a mother circling Dad like a Hooded Vulture eyeing carrion, but it wasn't.

It was
she,
the woman from Fat Kat Foods.

She was tall, wearing skintight jeans, a tailored tweed jacket, and large black sunglasses on her head. Her dark brown hair hung idly around her face.

"Though he wasn't Einstein or Truman," she said, "I don't think history would be the same without him. Especially if he had to look
up
at Ingrid Bergman and say, 'Here's looking at you, kid.' "

Her voice was wonderful, a flu voice.

"You aren't from around here, are you?" she asked Dad.

He stared at her blankly.

The phenomenon of Dad interacting with a beautiful woman was always an odd, sort of uninspired chemical experiment. Most of the time there was no reaction. Other times, Dad and the woman might
appear
to react vigorously, producing heat, light, and gas. But at the end, there was never a functional product like plastics or glassware, only a foul stench.

"No," said Dad. "We're not."

"You've just moved down here?"

"Yes." He smiled, though it didn't do a fig leaf's job of hiding his desire to end the conversation.

"How do you like it?"

"Magnificent."

I didn't know why he wasn't friendlier. Usually, Dad didn't mind the odd June Bug spiraling over to him. And he certainly wasn't above encouraging them, opening all the curtains, turning on all the lights by launching into certain extemporaneous lectures on Gorbachev, Arms Control, the 1-2-3S of Civil War (the gist of which the June Bug missed like a rare raindrop), often dropping hints about the impressive tome he was authoring,
The Iron Grip.

I wondered if she was too attractive or tall for him (she was almost his height) or perhaps her unsolicited Bogie comment had rubbed him the wrong way. One of Dad's pet peeves was to be "informed" of something he already knew and Dad and I were well aware of her crumb of trivia. Driving between Little Rock and Portland, I'd read aloud all of the eye-opening
Thugs, Midgets, Big Ears and Dentures: A Real Profile of Hollywood's Leading Men
(Rivette, 1981), and
Other Voices,
32
Rooms: My Life as L. B. Mayer's Maid
(Hart, 1961). Between San Diego and Salt Lake City I'd read aloud countless celebrity biographies, authorized and unauthorized, including those of Howard Hughes, Bette Davis, Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant and the highly memorable
Christ, It's Been Done Before: Celluloid Jesuses from 1912—1988,

Why Hollywood Should Cease Committing the Son of God to Screen

(Hatcher, 1989).

"And your daughter," she said, smiling at me, "what school will she be attending?" I opened my mouth, but Dad spoke. "The St. Gallway School." He was looking at me intently with his Fm-Thumbing-a-Lift-Here look,

which soon slipped into his Please-Pull-a-Ripcord face, and then, If-You-Would-Be-So-Kind-as-to-Administer-a-Rabbit-Punch. Normally, he reserved those faces for instances when a June Bug with some sort of physical deformity was actively pursuing him, like a faulty sense of direction (extreme nearsightedness) or an erratic wing (facial tic).

"I'm a teacher there," she said, extending her hand to me. "Hannah Schneider."

"Blue van Meer."

"What a wonderful name." She looked at Dad.

"Gareth," he said, after a moment.

"Nice to meet you."

With the brazen self-confidence present only in one who had shucked off the label of Sweater Girl and proved herself to be a dramatic actress of considerable range and talent (and enormous box-office draw), Hannah Schneider informed Dad and me that for the last three years she had taught Introduction to Film, an elective class for all grades. She also told us with great authority that the St. Gallway School was a "very special place."

"I think we should be getting along," Dad said, turning to me. "Don't you have piano?" (I hadn't, nor have I ever, had piano.)

But, quite unabashedly, Hannah Schneider did not stop talking, as if Dad and I were
Confidential
reporters who'd waited six months to interview her. Still, there was nothing outright haughty or overbearing in her manner; she simply assumed you were deeply interested in whatever she was saying. And you
were.
She asked where we were from ("Ohio," seethed Dad), what year I was ("Senior," fumed Dad), how we liked our new house ("It's fun," frothed Dad) and explained that she had moved here three years ago from San Francisco ("Astonishing," fizzed Dad). He really had no choice but to throw her a scrap.

"Perhaps we'll see you at a home football game," he said, waving goodbye (a one-hand-in-the-air "So long" that could also pass for "Not now") and steering me toward the exit at the front of the store. (Dad had never attended a home football game and had no intention of attending one. He considered most contact sports, as well as the hooting and woofing spectators, to be "embarrassing/' "very, very wrong," "pitiful exhibitions of the
Australopithecus
within." "I suppose we
all
have an inner
Australopithecus,
but I'd prefer mine to remain deep in his cave, whittling away at Mammoth carcasses with his simple stone tools.")

"Thank God we made it out alive," said Dad, starting the car.

"What
was
that?"

"Your guess is as good as mine. As I've told you, these aged American feminists who pride themselves on opening their own doors, paying for themselves, well, they're not the fascinating, modern women they imagine themselves to be. Oh no, they're Magellan space probes looking for a man they can orbit without end."

One of Dad's favorite personal comments regarding the sexes was his likening assertive women to Spacecraft (fly-by probes, orbiters, satellites, landers) and men to the unwitting subjects of these missions (planets, moons, comets, asteroids). Dad, of course, saw himself as a planet so remote it had suffered only a single visit—the successful but brief
Natasha
Mission.

"I'm talking about
you,"
I said. "You were rude."

"Rude?"

"Yes. She was nice. I liked her."

"Someone is not 'nice' when they intrude upon your privacy, when they force a landing and take the liberty of discharging radar signals that bounce off your surface, formulating panoramic images of your landscape and transmitting them ceaselessly through space."

"What about Vera Strauss?"

"Who?"

"Vera P. Strauss."

"Oh. The veterinarian?"

"Check-out girl in the express lane at Hearty Health Foods."

"Of course. She wanted to
be
a veterinarian. I remember."

"She accosted us in the middle of your—"

"Birthday dinner. At Wilber Steak, yes, I know."

"Wilson Steakhouse in Meade."

"Well, I-"

"You invited her to sit down for dessert and for three hours we listened to those awful stories."

"About her poor brother getting all that psychosurgery, yes, I remember, and I
told
you I was sorry. How was I supposed to know she herself was a candidate for shock treatment, that we should've called those same people who arrive at the end of
Streetcar
to cart the woman off?"

"At the time I didn't hear you bemoaning
her
panoramic images."

"Point taken. But I remember with Vera, very distinctly, she had an unusual quality. The fact that this unusual quality turned out to be of the Sylvia Plath variety, well, it wasn't
my
fault. And at least she was extraordinary on some level. At least she provided us with a raw, uncensored view of complete lunacy. This last woman, this—I don't even remember her name."

"Hannah Schneider."

"Well, yes, she was. . ."

"What?"

"Commonplace."

"You're nuts."

"I didn't spend six hours quizzing you on those 'Far, Far Beyond the SAT' flashcards for you to use the word 'nuts' in everyday speech — "

"You're
outré/'
I said, crossing my arms, staring out the window at the afternoon traffic. "And Hannah Schneider was" —I wanted to think of a few decent words to blow Dad's hair back—"prepossessing. Yet abstruse."

"Hmm?"

"You know, she walked by us in the grocery store last night."

"Who?"

"Hannah."

He glanced over at me, surprised. "That woman was in Fat Kat Foods?"

I nodded. "Walked right by us."

He was silent for a moment, then sighed. "Well, I only hope she's not one of those defunct Galileo probes. I don't think I could withstand another crash landing. What was her name? The one from Cocorro —"

"Betina Mendejo."

"Yes, Betina, with the sweet little asthmatic four-year-old."

"She had a nineteen-year-old daughter studying to be a dietician."

"Of course," Dad said, nodding. "I remember now."

VI

Woman in White

Dad said he'd first heard about the St. Gallway School from a fellow professor at Hicksburg State College, and for at least a year or so, a copy of the school's shiny 2001-2004 admissions catalogue, breathlessly entitled
Higher Learning, Higher Grounds,
had been riding around in a box in the back of our Volvo (along with five copies
of Federal Forum,
Vol. 10, Issue 5, 1998, featuring Dad's essay,
"Nâchtlich:
Popular Myths of Freedom Fighting").

The catalogue featured the proverbial wound-up rhetoric drenched in adjectives, sunny photos filled with bushy autumn trees, teachers with the kind faces of mice and kids grinning as they strolled down the sidewalk holding big textbooks in their arms like roses. In the distance, looking on (and apparently bored stiff) sat a crowd of glum plum mountains, a sky in wistful blue. "Our facilities leave nothing to be desired," moaned p. 14, and sure, there were football fields so smooth they looked like linoleum, a cafeteria with bay windows and wrought-iron chandeliers, a monster athletic complex that resembled the Pentagon. A diminutive stone chapel did its best to hide from the massive Tudor buildings slouched all over the lawns, structures christened with names like Hanover Hall, Elton House, Barrow and Vauxhall, each sporting a façade that brought to mind early U.S. presidents: gray-topped, heavy brow, wooden teeth, mulish bearing.

The booklet also featured a delightfully eccentric blurb about Horatio Mills Gallway, a rags-to-riches paper industrialist who'd founded the school back in 1910, not in the name of altruistic principles like civic duty or the persistence of scholarship, but for a megalomaniacal desire to see
Saint
in front of his surname; establishing a private school proved to be the easiest way to achieve this.