Special Topics in Calamity Physics (14 page)

We darted down Exit 19.

"That reminds me," she said, tossing me a look. "Why didn't you show?"

"What?" I managed to ask.

"You weren't there. We
waited."

"Oh. Well, I went to room 208—"

"208?" She made a face. "It was 308."

She wasn't fooling anyone. "You wrote 208," I said quietly.

"I did
not.
I remember perfectly—308. And you totally missed out. We had a cake for you and a lot of icing and candles and everything," she added sort of absentmindedly (I was bracing myself for tales of hired belly dancers, elephant rides, whirling dervishes), but then, to my relief, she leaned forward and with a haughty, "God, I love Dara and the Bouncing Checks," turned the CD
way
up, a heavy metal band with a lead singer that sounded as if he were being gouged by bulls at Pamplona.

We drove on, not a word spoken between us. (She'd resolved to shake me off like a hit funnybone.) She checked her watch, winced, huffed, damned stop lights, road signs, anyone abiding the speed limit in front of us, proudly surveyed her blue eyes in the rearview mirror, brushed specks of mascara off her cheeks, dabbed her lips with glittery pink lip gloss and then
more
glittery lip gloss so some of it started to ooze off the side of her mouth—a detail I didn't have the guts to point out. In fact, driving to Hannah's made the girl so apparently restless and anxiety ridden, I couldn't help but wonder if at the end of this nauseating parade of woods and pastures and nameless dirt roads, and shoe-box barns and gaunt horses waiting by fences, I'd find not a house, but a black door barred by a velvet rope, a man with a clipboard who'd look me over and, when ascertaining I didn't know Frank or Errol or Sammy personally (nor any other titan of entertainment), would declare me unfit to enter, by inference, to continue living.

But at last, at the very end of the twisting gravel road was the house, an awkward, wooden-faced coy mistress clinging to half a hill with bulky additions stuck to her sides like giant faux pas. As soon as we parked by the other cars and rang the bell, Hannah swung open the front door in a wave of Nina Simone, Eastern spices, perfume, Eau de Somethingfrench, her face warm as the living room light. A pack of seven or eight dogs, all different breeds and sizes, crept nervously behind her.

"This is Blue," Jade said indifferently, walking inside.

"Of course," said Hannah, smiling. She was barefoot, wearing chunky gold bracelets and an African batik caftan in orange and yellow. Her dark hair was a perfect swish of ponytail. "The lady of the hour."

To my surprise, she hugged me. It was an Epic Hug, heroic, big budget, sprawling, with ten thousand extras (not short, grainy and made on a shoestring). When she finally let go, she grabbed my hand and squeezed it the way people at airports grab the hands of people they haven't seen in years, asking how the flight was. She pulled me next to her, her arm around my waist. She was unexpectedly thin.

"Blue meet Fagan, Brody, he's got three legs—though it doesn't stop him from going through the garbage — Fang, Peabody, Arthur, Stallone, the Chihuahua with half-a-tail—accident with a car door—and the Old Bastard. Don't look him in the eye." She was referring to a skin-and-bones greyhound with the red eyes of a middle-aged, midnight tollbooth collector. The other dogs glanced at Hannah doubtfully, as if she were introducing them to a poltergeist. "Somewhere around here are the cats," she continued. "Lana and Turner, the Persians, and in the study we have our lovebird. Lennon. I'm in desperate need of an Ono, but there aren't many birds that show up at the shelter. Want some oolong tea?"

"Sure," I said.

"Oh, and you haven't met the others yet, have you?"

I looked up from the black-and-tan Chihuahua, who'd snuck over to me to consider my shoes, and saw them. Including Jade, who'd flopped down onto a half-melted chocolate couch and lit a cigarette (aiming it at me like a dart), they each stared with eyes so immobile and bodies so stiff, they might have been the series of paintings Dad and I scrutinized in the nineteenth-century Masters Gallery at the Chalk House outside Atlanta. There was the scrawny girl with brown seaweed hair, hugging her knees on the piano bench
(Portrait of a Peasant Girl,
pastel on paper); a tiny kid wearing Ben Franklin spectacles, Indian-style by a mangy dog, Fang
(Master with Foxhound,
British, oil on canvas); and another, a huge, boxy-shouldered boy leaning against a bookshelf, his arms and ankles crossed, brittle black hair sagging across his forehead
(The Old Mill,
artist unknown). The only one I recognized was Charles in the leather chair
(The Gay Shepherd,
gilt frame). He smiled encouragingly, but I doubted it meant much; he seemed to hand out smiles like a guy in a chicken costume distributing coupons for a free lunch.

"Why don't you introduce yourselves?" Hannah said cheerfully.

They said their names with paint-by-numbers politeness.

"Jade."

"We've met," said Charles.

"Leulah," said the Peasant Girl.

"Milton," said the Old Mill.

"Nigel Creech, very pleased to meet you," said the Master with Foxhound, and then he flashed a smile, which disappeared instantly like a spark off a defunct lighter.

If all histories have a period known as The Golden Age, somewhere between The Beginning and The End, I suppose those Sundays during Fall Semester at Hannah's were just that, or, to quote one of Dad's treasured characters of cinema, the illustrious Norma Desmond as she recalled the lost era of silent film: "We didn't need dialogue. We had faces."

I sort of like to think the same was true back in those days at Hannah's (Visual Aid 8.0). (Forgive my regrettable rendering of Charles—and Jade for that matter; they were much more beautiful in real life.)

Charles was the handsome one (handsome in the opposite way of Andreo). Gold-haired, mercury-tempered, he was not only St. Gallway's Track and Field star, excelling at both hurdles and the high jump, but also its Travolta. It wasn't unusual to see him sliding between classes engaged in a shameless, campus-wide soft shoe, involving not only known Gallway beauties but also the less physically heralded. Somehow he was able to twirl one girl away by the Teacher's Lounge just as another rumbaed over to him, and they pachangaed down the hall. (Amazingly, no one's feet were ever stepped on.)

Jade was the terrifying beauty (see "Tawny Eagle,"
Magnificent Birds of Prey,
George, 1993). She swooped into a classroom and girls scattered like chipmunks and squirrels. (The boys, equally afraid, played dead.) She was brutally blond ("bleached to the hilt," I heard Beth Price remark in AP English), five-feet-eight ("wiry"), stalked the halls in short skirts, her books in a black leather bag ("Guess she's Donna fucking Karan") and what I took to be a severe and sad look on her face, though most took it for conceit. Due to Jade's fortresslike manner, which, like any well-built castle, made access challenging, girls found her existence not only threatening, but flat out wrong. Although Bartleby Athletic Center featured the latest advertising campaign of Ms. Sturds's three-member Benevolent Body-Image Club (laminated
Vogue
and
Maxim
covers above captions, "You Can't Have Thighs Like This and Still Walk" and "All Airbrushing"), Jade would only have to swan by, munching on a Snickers to reveal a disturbing truth: you
could
have thighs like that and still walk. She emphasized what few wanted to accept, that some people did win Trivial Pursuit: The Deity Looks Edition and there wasn't a thing you could do about it, except come to terms with the fact
you'd
only played Trivial Pursuit: John Doe Genes and come away with three pie pieces.

Nigel was the cipher (see "Negative Space,"
Art Lessons,
Trey, 1973, p. 29). At first glance (even at second and third), he was ordinary. His face — rather his entire being—was a buttonhole: small, narrow, uneventful. He stood no more thanfive-feet-five with a round face, brown hair, features weak and baby-feet pink (neither complemented nor marred by the wire glasses he wore). At school, he sported thin, tonguelike neckties in neon orange, a fashion statement I guessed was his effort to force people to take notice of him, much like a car's hazard lights. And yet, upon closer examination, the ordinariness was extraordinary: he bit his nails into thumbtacks; spoke in hushed spurts (uncolored guppies darting through a tank); in large groups, his smile could be a dying light bulb (shining reluctantly, flickering, disappearing); and a single strand of his hair (once found on my skirt after sitting next to him), held directly under a light, shimmered with every color in a rainbow, including purple.

And then there was Milton, sturdy and grim, with a big, cushiony body like someone's favorite reading chair in need of reupholstering (see "American Black Bear,"
Meat-Eating Land Animals,
Richards, 1982). He was eighteen, but looked thirty. His face, cluttered with brown eyes, curly black hair, a swollen mouth, had a curdled handsomeness to it, as if, incredibly, it wasn't what it'd once been. He had an Orson Wellian quality, Gerardepardieuian too: one suspected his large, slightly overweight frame smothered some kind of dark genius and after a twenty-minute shower he'd still reek of cigarettes. He'd lived most of his life in a town called Riot in Alabama and thus spoke in a Southern accent so gooey and thick you could probably cut into it and spread it on dinner rolls. Like all Mysteriosos, he had an Achilles' heel: a giant tattoo on his upper right arm. He refused to talk about it, went to great pains to conceal it—never removing his shirt, always wearing long sleeves—and if some clown during P.E. asked him what it was, he either stared at the kid as if he were a
Price Is Right
rerun, barely blinking, or replied in his molasses accent: "Nunna ya goddamn business."

And then there was the delicate creature (see
Juliet,
J. W. Waterhouse, 1898). Leulah Maloney was pearl skinned, with skinny bird arms and long brown hair always worn in a braid, like one of those cords aristocracy pulled in the nineteenth century to summon servants. Hers was an eerie, old-fashioned beauty, a face at home in amulets or carved into cameos—a romantic look I actually used to wish I had whenever Dad and I were reading about Gloriana in
The Faerie Queene
(Spenser, 1596) or discussing Dante's love for Beatrice Portinari. ("Know how difficult it is to find a woman that looks like Beatrice in today's world?" asked Dad. "You've a better chance running at the speed of light.-)

Early in the Fall, when I least expected it, I'd spot Leulah in a long dress (usually white or diaphanous blue) strolling the Commons in the middle of a downpour, holding her little antique face up to the rain while everyone else streaked past her screaming, textbooks or disintegrating
GallwayGazettes
held over their heads. Twice I noticed her like this—another time, crouched in Elton House shrubbery, apparently fascinated by a piece of bark or tulip bulb—and I couldn't help but think such faerielike behavior was all very calculated and irritating. Dad had carried on a tedious five-day affair with a woman named Birch Peterson in Okush, New Mexico, and Birch, having been born outside Ontario on a "terrific" free-loving commune called Verve, was always entreating Dad and me to walk untroubled in rain, bless mosquitoes, eat tofu. When she came for dinner she said a prayer before we "consumed," a fifteen-minute plea asking "Shod" to bless every slime mold and mollusk.

"The word
God
is inherently male," said Birch, "so I came up with
she, he,
and
God
rolled into one.
Shod
exemplifies the truly genderless Higher Power."

I concluded Leulah —Lu, as they all called her—with her gossamer dresses, reedy hair, decisions to skip daintily along everything but sidewalks, had to have Birch's persona of bean curd, that esprit de spirulina, until I discovered someone had actually hexed the girl, cast a powerful spell, so her oddities were eternally unthinking, careless and unscripted, so she never questioned what people thought or how she looked, so the cruelties of the entire kingdom ("There's something sour about her. She's totally past her Eat-by date," I heard Lucille Hunter remark in AP English) dissolved miraculously—never reaching her ears.

Since much has already been made of Hannah's paramount face, I won't mention it again, except to say, unlike other Helens of Troy, who can never quite get over their own magnificence, like a pair of perilously high heels they're always wandering around in (self-consciously stooped over or haughtily towering over everyone), Hannah managed to wear hers day and night and still be only vaguely aware she was wearing shoes. With her, you noticed how exhausting beauty actually was, how used up one might feel after a day of strangers rubbernecking to watch you pour Sweet'N Low into your coffee or pick out the tin of blueberries with the least mold.

"Whatever," Hannah said, without a trace of false modesty when, one Sunday, Charles commented how great she looked in a black T-shirt and army fatigues. "I'm just a tired old lady."

There was, too, the problem of her name.

While it cartwheeled off the tongue nimbly enough, more elegantly than, say, Juan San Sebastien Orillos-Maripon (the lip-calisthenics name of Dad's teaching assistant at Dodson-Miner), I couldn't help but think there was something criminal about it. Whoever had named her—mother, father, I didn't know—was a person harrowingly out of touch with reality, because even as an infant, Hannah could never have been one of those troll-babies, and a troll-baby was what you dubbed "Hannah." (Granted, I was biased: "Thank God that thing's incarcerated in his carriage. Otherwise, people might start to panic, thinking we have a veritable
War of the Worlds
on our hands," Dad said, peering down at a happy, yet decidedly elderly baby parked in an aisle at Office Depot. Then the mother arrived. "I see you've met Hannah!" she cried.) If she
had
to have a common name, she was Edith or Nadia or Ingrid, at the very least, Elizabeth or Catherine; but her glass-slipper name, the one that
really
fit, was something along the lines of Countess Saskia Lepinska, or Anna-Maria d'Aubergette, even Agnes of Scudge or Ursula of Poland ("Hideous names on beautiful women tend to rumplestiltskin quite nicely," Dad said).