Special Topics in Calamity Physics (43 page)

I, however, took my time.

"Next time I look forward to meeting Psyche and Elektra in person," I said, staring straight into the man's hole-punched eyes. I almost felt sorry for him: the bristly white hair drooped over his head like a plant that hadn't had nearly enough water or light. Tiny red veins were taking root around his

nose. If Servo were in a Pulitzer Prize-winning play, he'd be the Painfully Tragic character, the one who wore bronze suits and alligator shoes, the man who worshipped all the wrong things so Life had to bring him to his knees.

" 'One's real life is, so often, the life that one does not lead,' " I added as I turned toward the taxi, but he only blinked, that nervous, sly smile again twitching through his face.

"So long, my dear, mmmm, safe flight."

On the drive to the airport, Dad barely said a word. He rested his head against the taxi window, mournfully staring out at the passing streets —such an unusual pose for him, I covertly took the disposable camera out of my bag, and while the taxi driver muttered at people dashing across the intersection in front of us, I took his picture, the last photo on the roll.

They say when people didn't know you were taking their picture, they appeared as they really were in life. And yet Dad didn't know I was taking his picture and he appeared as he
never
was—quiet, forlorn, somehow lost

"As far as one journeys, as much as a man sees, from the turrets of the Taj Mahal to the Siberian wilds, he may eventually come to an unfortunate conclusion —usually while he's lying in bed, staring at the thatched ceiling of some substandard accommodation in Indochina," writes Swithin in his last book, the posthumously published
Whereabouts, 1917
(1918). "It is impossible to rid himself of the relentless, cloying fever commonly known as Home. After seventy-three years of anguish I have found a cure, however. You must go home again, grit your teeth and however arduous the exercise, determine, without embellishment, your exact coordinates at Home, your longitudes and latitudes. Only then, will you stop looking back and see the spectacular view in front of you."

Part Three

Howl and Other Poems

U
pon my return to St. Gallway and the commencement of Winter Term, the first odd thing I noticed about Hannah—rather, what the whole

school noticed ("I think that woman was committed to an institution over vacation," surmised Dee during second period Study Hall)—was that over Christmas Break, she'd cut off all her hair.

No, it was not one of those cute 1950s haircuts labeled by fashion magazines as
chic
and
gamine
(see Jean Seberg,
Bonjour Tristesse).
It was harsh and choppy. And, as Jade noticed when we were at Hannah's for dinner, there was even a tiny bald patch behind her right ear.

"What the
hell?"
said Jade.

"What?" asked Hannah, spinning around.

"There's a—hole in your haircut! You can see your scalp!"

"Really?"

"You cut your own hair?" asked Lu.

Hannah stared at us and then nodded, visibly embarrassed. "Yes. I know it's crazy and looks, well —different." She touched the back of her neck. "But it was late at night. I wanted to try something."

The acute masochism and self-hatred behind a woman willfully defacing her appearance was a concept that featured prominently in the angry tome by proto-feminist Dr. Susan Shorts,
Beelzebub Conspiracy
(1992), which I'd noticed peeking out of the L. L. Bean canvas tote belonging to my sixth-grade science teacher, Mrs. Joanna Perry of Wheaton Hill Middle. In order to better understand Mrs. Perry and her mood swings, I procured my own copy. In Chapter 5, Shorts contends that since 1010 B.c., many women who'd tried and failed to be self-governing were forced to take action upon their very selves, because their physical appearance was the lone thing on which they could immediately "exert power," due to the "colossal masculine plot at work since the beginning of time, ever since man began to walk on his two stubby, hairy legs and noticed that he was taller than poor woman," growls Shorts (p. 41). Many women, including St. Joan and Countess Alexandra di Whippa, "crudely chopped off their hair," and cut themselves with "clippers and knives" (p. 42-43). The more radical ones branded their stomachs with hot irons to the "distress and revulsion of their husbands" (p. 44). On p. 69, Shorts goes on to write, "A woman will mar her exterior because she feels she is a part of a greater scheme, a plot, which she cannot control."

Of course, one never thinks about damning feminist texts at the time, and even if one does, it's to be theatrical and over-the-top. So I simply imagined there came a point in a mature woman's life when she needed to radically change her appearance, discover what she
really
looked like, without all the bells and whistles.

Dad, on Understanding Why Women Do the Things They Do: "One has a better chance of squeezing the universe onto a thumbnail."

And yet, when I sat next to Hannah at the dinner table and looked over at her as she daintily cut her chicken (haircut poised boldly atop her head like an atrocious hat worn to church), I suddenly had the nerve-racking feeling I'd
seen
her somewhere before. The haircut strip-searched her, uncovered her in a shoulder-cringing fashion, and now, crazily enough, the carved cheekbones, the neck—it was all vaguely familiar. I recognized her, not from an encounter (no, she was not one of Dad's long-lost June Bugs; it'd take more than glamorous hair to camouflage
their
brand of monkey face); the feeling was smokier, more remote. I sensed instead I'd seen her in a photograph somewhere, or in a newspaper article, or maybe in a snapshot in some discount biography Dad and I had read aloud.

Instantly, she noticed I was staring at her (Hannah was one of those people who kept tabs on all eyes in a room) and slowly, as she took an elegant bite of food, she turned her head toward me and smiled. Charles was talking on and on about Fort Lauderdale—God, it was hot, stuck at the airport for six hours (telling this rambling story as he always did, as if Hannah was the only person at the table)—and the haircut drew attention to her smile, did to her smile what Coke-bottle lenses did to eyes, made it huge (pronounced, "HYOOOGE"). I smiled back at her and sat for the remainder of the meal with my eyes taped to my plate, shouting silently to myself in a dictator voice

(Augusto Pinochet commanding the torture of an opponent)—to
stop staring
at Hannah. It was rude.

"Hannah's going to have a nervous breakdown," Jade announced flatly that Friday night. She was wearing a jittery black-beaded flapper dress and sitting behind a huge gold harp, plucking the strings with one hand, a martini in the other. The instrument was covered with a thick film of dust like the layer of fat in a pan after frying bacon. "You can quote me on that."

"You've been sayin' that all fuckin' year," said Milton.

"Yawn," said Nigel.

"Actually I kind of agree," said Leulah solemnly. "That haircut's scary."

"Finally!" Jade shouted. "I have a convert! I have one, do I hear two, two, going, going,
sold
at the pathetic number of
one."

"Seriously," Lu went on, "I think she might be clinically depressed."

"Shut up," Charles said.

It was 11:00 P.M. Sprawled across the leather couches in the Purple Room, we were drinking Leulah's latest, something she called Cockroach, a mishmash of sugar, oranges and Jack Daniel's. I don't think I'd said twenty words the entire evening. Of course, I was excited to see them again (also grateful Dad, when Jade picked me up in the Mercedes, said nothing but "See you soon, my dear," accompanied with one of his bookmark smiles, which would hold my place until I returned), but something about the Purple Room now felt stale.

I'd had fun on these types of nights before, hadn't I? Hadn't I always laughed and sloshed a little bit of Claw or Cockroach on my knees, and said quick things that sailed across the room? Or, if I'd never said quick things (Van Meers were not known for stand-up comedy), hadn't I allowed myself to drift in a pool with a deadpan expression on an inflatable raft wearing sunglasses as Simon and Garfunkel went "Woo woo woo"? Or if I hadn't allowed myself to drift with a deadpan expression (Van Meers did not excel at poker), hadn't I let myself become, at least while I was in the Purple Room, a shaggy-haired counterculture biker on my way to New Orleans in search of the real America, hobnobbing with ranchers, hookers, rednecks and mimes? Or if I hadn't let myself be a counterculture roadie (no, the Van Meers were not naturally hedonistic) hadn't I let myself wear a striped shirt and shout in a frankfurter American accent,
"New York Herald Tribune!"
with eyeliner jutting out from my eyes, subsequently absconding with a small-time hood?

If you were young and mystified in America you were supposed to find something to be a part of. That something had to be either shocking or rowdy, for within this brouhaha you'd find yourself, be able to locate your Self the way Dad and I had finally located such minuscule, hard-to-find towns as Howard, Louisiana, and Roane, New Jersey, on our U.S. Rand-McNally Map. (If you didn't find such a thing, your fate would sadly be found in plastics.)

Hannah has ruined me,
I thought now, pressing the back of my head into the leather couch. I'd resolved to dig an unmarked grave in the middle of nowhere and bury what she'd told me (shoe box it, save it for a rainy day much like her own alarming knife collection) but of course, when you deep-sixed something precipitously, inevitably it rose from the dead. And so, as I watched Jade pluck the harp strings in the absorbed manner of plucking hairs from an eyebrow, I couldn't help but envision her tossing her skinny arms around the barrel torsos of various truck drivers (three per state, thus the grand total for her journey from Georgia to California was twenty-seven grease-prone gear-jammers; roughly one per every 107.41 miles). And when Leulah took a sip of her Cockroach and some of it dribbled down her chin, I actually saw the twenty-something Turkish math teacher looming behind her, sinuously grooving to Anatolian rock. I saw Charles as one of those golden babies gurgling next to a woman with her eyes punched in, body naked, curled up on a carpet like overcooked shrimp, grinning madly at nothing. And then
Milton
(who'd just arrived from his movie date with Joalie, Joalie who'd spent Christmas vacation skiing with her family at St. Anton, Joalie who sadly had not fallen into a mile-deep crevice on an unmarked trail), when he dug into his jean pocket to remove a piece of Trident, I thought for a split second he was actually removing a switchblade, similar to the ones the Sharks danced with in
West Side Story
as they sang—

"Retch, what in hell's the matter with you?" demanded Jade, squinting at me suspiciously. "You've been staring at everyone with freaky-ass eyes
all night.
You didn't see that Zach person over the break, did you? There's a good chance he turned you into a Stepford wife."

"Sorry. I was just thinking about Hannah," I lied.

"Yeah, well, maybe we should do something instead of just thinking all the time. At the very least, we should stage an intervention so she doesn't keep going to Cottonwood, 'cause if something happens? If she does something
extreme?
We'll all look back on this moment and detest ourselves. It'll be a thing we won't get over for years and years and then we'll die alone with tons of cats or be hit by cars. We'll end up road pizzas—"

"Will you shut the fuck up?" shouted Charles. "I-I'm tired of hearing this shit
every
fu
cking
weekend!
You're a fucking moron! All of you!"

He banged his glass on the bar and raced from the room, his cheeks red, his hair the color of the palest, barest wood, the soft kind you could dent with your thumbnail, and then seconds later—none of us spoke—we heard the front door thump, the whining motor of his car as he sped down the driveway.

"Is it me or is it obvious none of this ends happily," Jade said.

Around 3:00 or 4:00 A.M., I passed out on the leather couch. An hour later, someone was shaking me.

"Want to take a walk, old broad?"

Nigel was smiling down at me, his glasses pinching the end of his nose.

I blinked and sat up. "Sure."

Blue light velveted the room. Jade was upstairs, Milton had gone home ("home," I suspected, meant a motel rendezvous with Joalie) and Lu was sound asleep on the paisley couch, her long hair ivying over the armrest. I rubbed my eyes, stood and blearily plodded after Nigel, who'd already slipped into the foyer. I found him in the Parlor Room: walls painted mortified pink, a yawning grand piano, spindly palms and low sofas that resembled big, floating graham crackers you didn't dare sit on for fear they'd break and you'd get crumbs everywhere.

"Put this on if you're cold," Nigel said, picking up a long black fur coat that'd been left for dead on the piano bench. It sagged romantically in his arms, like a grateful secretary who'd just fainted.

"I'm okay," I said.

He shrugged and slipped it on himself (see "Siberian Weasel,"
Encyclopedia of Living Things,
4th éd.). Frowning, he picked up a large, blue-eyed crystal swan that had been swimming across the top of an end table toward a large silver picture frame. The frame featured not a photo of Jade, Jefferson or some other beaming relative, but the black-and-white insert it had ostensibly been purchased with (FIRENZE, it read, 7" x 91/2").