Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  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 herse
lf 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.

  My favorite section was "Where Have All the Gallwanians Gone?" which featured a proud blurb written by the Headmaster, Bill Havermeyer (a big old Robert Mitchum type), then went on to summarize the unparalleled achievements of Gallwanian alumni. Rather than the typical boasts of most puffed-up private schools—stratospheric SAT scores, the vast number of seniors who vaulted into the Ivy League—St. Gallway touted other, more extraordinary achievements: "We have the highest number of graduates in the country who go on to be revolutionary performance artists;. . . 7.27 percent of all Gallway graduates in the last fifty years have registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office; one out of every ten Gallway students becomes an inventor; . . .24.3 percent of all Gallwanians become published poets; 10 percent will study stage-makeup design; 1.2 percent puppetry;. . . 17.2 percent will reside in Florence at some point; 1.8 percent in Moscow; 0.2 percent in Taipei." "One out of every 2,031 Gallwanians gets into The Guinness Book of World Records. Wan Young, Class of 1982, holds the record for Longest Operatic Note Held . . ."

  As Dad and I sped down the school's main road for the first time (the aptly named Horatio Way, a narrow drive that teased you through a forest of pin-thin pines before abandoning you at the center of campus), I found myself holding my breath, inexplicably awed. To our immediate left tumbled a lawn of Renoir green, which pitched and swelled so excitedly, it appeared as if it might float away had it not been for the oak trees nailing it to the ground ("The Commons," sang the catalogue, "a lawn expertly cultivated by our ingenious caretaker, Quasimodo, who some say is the original Gallwanian . .."). To our right, chunky and impassive, was Hanover Hall, poised to cross the Delaware under icy conditions. Beyond a square stone courtyard ringed with birch trees, sat an elegant auditorium of glass and steel, colossal yet chic: Love Auditorium.

  Our intentions were strictly business. Dad and I had come, not only to take a campus tour with Admissions guru Mirtha Grazeley (an elderly woman in fuchsia silk who led us like an old moth in dazed zigzags across the grounds: "Eh, we haven't seen the art gallery have we? Oh dear, the cafeteria slipped my mind. And that horse weathervane on top of Elton, not sure if you remember, it appeared in Southern Architecture Monthly last year.") but also to ingratiate ourselves with the administrator in charge of translating the credits from my last school into the St. Gallway Grading System and hence, determining my class rank. Dad approached this task with the seriousness of Reagan approaching Gorbachev with the Nuclear Forces Treaty.

  "Let me do the talking. You sit and look erudite."

  Our target, Ms. Lacey Ronin-Smith, was tucked away in the Rapunzellike clock tower of Hanover. She was sinewy, salt voiced, and unequivocally dreary haired. Now in her late sixties, she'd served as St. Gallway Academic Chancellor for the past thirty-one years, and, according to the photographs on display around her desk, was keen on quilting, nature hikes with her lady friends and a lapdog sporting more greasy black hair than an aged rock star.

  "What you have in your hands is an official copy of Blue's high school transcript," Dad was saying.

  "Yes," said Ms. Ronin-Smith. Her thin lips, which even in repose tended to look as if she were sucking on a lime, trembled slightly at the corners, hinting at vague dismay.

  "The school Blue is coming from —Lamego High in Lamego, Ohio—is one of the most dynamic schools in the country. I want to make sure her work is adequately recognized here."

  "Of course you do," said Ronin-Smith.

  "Naturally, students will be threatened by her, especially those who anticipate they'll be first or second in the class. We don't wish to upset anyone. However, it's only fair that she is placed in close proximity to where she was when my work forced us to relocate. She was number one—"

  Lacey gave Dad the Bureaucratic Stare—regret, with a hint of triumph. "I hate to discourage you, Mr. Van Meer, but I must inform you, Gallway policy is very clear in these matters. An incoming student, no matter how outstanding his or her marks, can not be placed higher than — "

  "Good God," Dad said abruptly. Eyebrows raised, mouth an enraptured smile, he was leaning forward in his seat the precise angle of the Tower of Pisa. I realized, in horror, he was pulling his Yes-Virginia-There-Is-a-Santa-Claus face. I wanted to hide under my chair. "That is a very impressive diploma you have there. May I ask what it is?"

  "Eh—what?" squeaked Ronin-Smith (as if Dad had just pointed out a centipede inching along the wall behind her), and she swiveled around to survey the giant, gold-sealed, cream, calligraffitied diploma mounted next to
a photo of the Môtley Crue dog in a bowtie and top hat. "Oh. That's my N.C. certificate for Distinguished Academic Counseling and Arbitration."

  Dad gasped a little. "Sounds like they could use you at the U.N."

  "Oh, please," said Ms. Ronin-Smith, shaking her head, reluctantly breaking into a small yellowed smile of rickrack teeth. A flush was starting to seep into her neck. "Hdrdly."

  Thirty minutes later, after Dad had sufficiently wooed her (he worked like a ferocious evangelist; one had no choice but to be saved), we descended the corkscrew stairs leading from her office.

  "Only one twerp ahead of you now," he whispered with unmitigated glee. "Some little tarantula named Radley Clifton. We've seen the type before. I surmise three weeks into Fall Term, you'll turn in one of your research papers on relativism and he'll go 'splat.' "

  The following morning at 7:45, when Dad dropped me off in front of Hanover, I felt absurdly nervous. I had no idea why. I was as familiar with First Days of School as Jane Goodall her Tanzanian chimps after five years in the jungle. And yet, my linen blouse felt two sizes too big (the short sleeves creased off my shoulders like stiffly ironed dinner napkins), my red-and-white checkered skirt felt sticky and my hair (usually the one feature I could count on not to disgrace me) had opted to try a dried-dandelion frizz: I was a table in a bistro serving Bar-B-Q.

  " 'She walks in beauty, like the night,' " Dad shouted through the unrolled window as I climbed from the car. " 'Of cloudless climes and starry skies; / And all that's best of dark and bright / Meet in her aspect and her eyes'! Knock them dead, kiddo! Teach them what educated means."