Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  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).

  "Hannah Schneider" fit her like stonewashed Jordache jeans six sizes too big. And once, oddly enough, when Nigel said her name during dinner, I could have sworn I noticed a funny delay in her response, as if, for a split second, she had no idea he was talking to her.

  It made me wonder, even if it was solely on the subconscious level, maybe Hannah Schneider didn't love "Hannah Schneider" either. Maybe she wished she was Angélique von Heisenstagg too.

  Many people speak enviously of the Fly on a Wall. They yearn for its characteristics: virtually invisible, yet privy to the secrets and shifty dialogues of an exclusive group of people. And yet, as I was nothing more than a fly on a wall for those first six, maybe seven Sunday afternoons at Hannah's, I can say with some authority such disregard gets old fairly quickly. (Actually, one could argue flies elicited more attention than I did, because someone always rolled up a magazine and doggedly chased them around a room, and no one did that to me —unless one counted Hannah's erratic attempts to insert me into the conversation, which I found more embarrassing than the others' disdain.)

  Of course, that very first Sunday ended up nothing more than a disastrous humiliation, in many ways worse than the Study Group at Leroy 's, because at least Leroy and the others had wanted me there (granted, wanted me as their beast of burden, so I could haul them up the steep hill toward eighth grade), but these kids —Charles, Jade and the others—they made it clear my presence at the house was entirely Hannah's idea, not theirs.

  "Know what I hate?" Nigel asked pleasantly as I helped him clear the plates off the dinner table.

  "What?" I asked, grateful he was attempting small talk.

  "Shy people," he replied, and of course there was no ambiguity about what shy person had prompted this announcement; I'd remained entirely mute during both dinner and dessert and the one instance Hannah had asked me a question ("You just moved here from Ohio?"), I was so taken aback my voice stumbled on the curb of my teeth. And then, minutes later, when I was pretending to be fascinated by the paperback cookbook Hannah had wedged next to her CD player, Cooking Without Processed Foods (Chiobi, 1984), I overhead Milton and Jade in the kitchen. He was asking her—in all seriousness it seemed —if I spoke English.

  She laughed. "She must be one of those Russian mail-order brides," she said. "With those looks though, Hannah got seriously ripped off. I wonder what the return policy is. Hopefully we can send her back COD."

  Minutes later, Jade was driving me home like a bat out of hell (Hannah must have only paid minimum wage) and I stared out the window, thinking it had been the most horrible night of my life. Obviously I'd never speak to these halfwits, these simpletons ("banal, spiritless teenagers," Dad would add) everagain. And I wouldn't give that sadistic Hannah Schneider the time of day either; it was she, after all, who'd lured me to that snake pit, let me flail around with nothing but a chic smile on her face as she chitchatted about homework or what fifth-tier college those slack-jawed mopes hoped to squeeeeze their way into, and then after dinner, that unforgivable way she calmly lit a cigarette, her manicured hand tipped into the air like a delicate teakettle, as if all was fantastic with the world.

  But then I don't know what happened. The following Tuesday, I passed Hannah briefly in Hanover Hall—"See you this weekend?" she called out brightly through the crowd of students; naturally my reaction was that of a deer in headlights—and then, on Sunday, Jade appeared in the driveway again, this time at 2:15 P.M. and the entire window unrolled.

  "Coming?" she shouted.

  I was powerless as a maiden who'd been fed upon by vampires. Zombielike, I told Dad I'd forgotten about my Study Group and before he could protest, I'd kissed him on the cheek, assured him it was a St. Gallwaysponsored event and fled the house.

  Embarrassedly—and then, after a month, kind of resignedly—
I settled into my appointed role as fly on the wall, as barely tolerated mute, because the truth was, when it came down to it (and I could never admit this to Dad), being snubbed at Hannah's was infinitely more electrifying than being mulled over back at the Van Meer's.

  Wrapped up like an expensive gift in her emerald batik caftan, her purple and gold sari or some wheat-colored housedress straight out of Peyton Place (for this comparison you had to pretend you didn't see the cigarette burn at the hip), on Sunday afternoons, Hannah entertained, in the old-fashioned, European sense of the word. Even now, I don't understand how she managed to prepare those extravagant dinners in her tiny mustard-yellow kitchen — Turkish lamb chops ("with mint sauce"), Thai steak ("with ginger-infused potatoes"), beef noodle soup ("Authentic Pho Bo"), on one less successful occasion, a goose ("with cranberry rub and sage carrot fries").

  She cooked. The very air began to sauté in a reduction of candle, wine, wood, her perfume, and damp animal. We picked through the remains of our homework. The kitchen door swung open, and she stepped forth, a Birth of Venus in a red apron smeared with mint sauce, walking with the fast, swingy grace of Tracy Lord in The PhiladelphiaStory, all soft bare feet (if those were toes, what you had was something else altogether, tuds), twinkles at her earlobes, the pronunciation of certain words with little shivers on the endings. (The same word, when you said it, went limp.)

  "How's everything? Getting everything done, I hope?" she said in her alwaysalittlehoarse voice.

  She carried the silver tray to the hunchback coffee table, kicking a paperback on the floor missing half its cover (The Lib Wo by Ari So): more Gruyère and British farmhouse cheddar fanned around the plate like Busby Berkeley girls, another pot of oolong tea. Her appearance caused the dogs and cats to come out of their salooned shadows and band around her, and when she returned in a swoosh to the kitchen (they weren't allowed, when she was cooking), they roamed the living room like dazed cowboys, unsure what to do with themselves with no showdown.

  Her house ("Noah's Arc," Charles called it) I found fascinating, schizophrenic, in fact. Its original personality was old-fashioned and charming, albeit slightly outmoded and wooden (the two-floor log cabin structure built in the late 1940s with a stone fireplace and low, beamed ceilings). Yet there was another persona lurking inside as well, which could spring forth unexpectedly as soon as one turned a corner, a profane, common, at times embarrassingly crude disposition (the boxy aluminum-siding additions she'd made to the ground floor the previous year).

  Every room was crammed with so much worn, mismatched furniture (stripe married to plaid, orange engaged to pink, paisley coming out of the closet), at any position in any of the rooms, you could take a haphazard Polaroid and end up with a snapshot that bore a startling resemblance to Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Instead of misshapen cube-ladies filling the frame, the angular shapes would be Hannah's skewed bookshelf (used, not for a library, but for displaying plants, Oriental ashtrays and her chopstick collection, with a few notable exceptions: On the Road [Kerouac, 1957], Change Your Brain [Leary, 1988], Modem Warriors [Chute, 1989], a Bob Dylan book of lyrics and Queenie [1985] by Michael Korda), Hannah's blistered leather chair, Hannah's samovar by the hat rack devoid of hats, the end table without an end.

  Hannah's furnishings weren't the only things tired and poor. I was surprised to observe that, despite her immaculate appearance, which rarely, upon even the closest inspections, had an eyelash out of place, some of her clothes were somewhat fatigued in appearance, though this was only obvious if you were sitting next to her and she happened to shift a certain way.There, suddenly, the lamplight stone-skipped across hundreds of tiny lint balls rippling through the front of her wool skirt, or, very faintly, as she picked up her wineglass and laughed like a man, the unmistakable smell of mothballs embedded in all that Palais de Anything.

  A lot of her clothes looked as if they'd gone a night without sleeping or had taken the red-eye, like her canary-and-cream Chanel-like suit with the weary hem, or her white cashmere sweater with the haggard elbows and debilitated waist, and a few articles, like the silver blouse with the drooping rose safety-pinned to the neck, actually looked like runner-ups in a three-day Depression dance marathon (see They Shoot Horses, Don't They?).

  I overheard the others referring to Hannah's "secret trust fund" on countless occasions, but I assumed these suppositions were incorrect and a precarious financial situation lay at the heart of Hannah's evident thrift store purchases. I once watched Hannah over a rump of lamb "with tea leaves and cherry-rose compote" and envisioned her teetering, like a cartooned man, drunk and blindfolded, on the craggy cliffs of Bankruptcy and Ruin. (Even Dad lamented teachers' salaries in a Bourbon Mood: "And they wonder why Americans can't locate Sri Lanka on a map! I hate to break the news to them, but there ain't no grease for the wheel of American education! Non dinero! Kein Geld!")

  As it turned out, money had nothing to do with it. On one occasion, when Hannah was outside with the dogs, Jade and Nigel were laughing about the gigantic peeling wagon wheel that had just appeared that day, leaning against the side of the garage like a fat man on a cigarette break. It was missing half its spokes and Hannah had announced she was planning to turn it into a coffee table.

  "St. Gallway must not pay her enough," I noted quietly.

  Jade turned to me. "What?" she asked, as if I'd just insulted her.

  I swallowed. "Maybe she should ask for a raise."

  Nigel suppressed his laughter. The others seemed content to ignore me, but then, something unexpected happened: Milton lifted his head from his Chemistry textbook.

  "Oh, no," he said smiling. I felt my heart shudder and stall. Blood began to flood my cheeks. "Junkyards, dumps —Hannah goes nuts for 'em. All this stuff? She found it in sad places, trailer parks, parkin' lots. She's been known to stop in the middle of a highway—cars honkin' crazy, mad pile-up—just so she can rescue a chair from the side of the road. The animals too—she saved them from shelters. I was with her once, last year when she stopped for a freaky-ass hitchhiker—muscles, head shaved, total skinhead. The back of his neck read, 'Kill or Be Killed.' I asked her what she was doin' and she said she had to show him kindness. That maybe he never had any. And she was right. Guy was like a kid, smilin' the whole way. We dropped him off at Red Lobster. He shouted, 'God bless you!' Hannah had made his year." He shrugged and returned to his Chemistry. "S'just who she is."

  Who she was, too, was a woman surprisingly daring and competent, whine and whimper free. The woman could fix, in a matter of minutes, any clog, drip, leak, seep—slacker toilet flushes, pipe clangs before sunrise, a dazed and confused garage door. Frankly, her handyman expertise made Dad look like a twitchy-mouthed grandmother. One Sunday, I watched in awe while Hannah fixed her own recessed doorbell with electrician gloves, screwdriver and voltmeter—not the easiest of processes, if one reads Mr. Fix-It's Guide to Rewiring the Home (Thurber, 2002). Another occasion, after dinner, she disappeared into the basement to fix the temperamental light on her water heater: "There's too much air in the flue," she said with a sigh.

  And she was an expert mountaineer. Not that she boasted: "I camp," was all she'd say. One could infer it, however, from the overload of Paul Bunyan paraphernalia: carabiners and water bottles lying around the house, Swiss army knives in the same drawer as junk mail and old batteries; and in the garage, brawny hiking boots (seriously gnarled soles), moth-eaten sleeping bags, rock-climbing rope, snowshoes, tent poles, crusty sunscreen, a first-aid kit (empty, apart for blunt scissors and discolored gauze). "What're those?" Nigel asked, frowning at what looked like two vicious animal traps atop a pile of firewood. "Crampons," Hannah said, and when he continued to stare confusedly: "So you don't fall off the mountain."

  She once admitted as a footnote to dinner conversation, she'd saved a man's life while camping as a teenager.

  "Where?" asked Jade.

  She hesitated, then: "The Adirondacks."

  I'll admit I almost leapt from my seat
and boasted, "I've saved a life too! My shot gardener!" but thankfully I had some tact; Dad and I held in contempt people forever interrupting fascinating conversations with their own rinky-dink story. (Dad called them What-About-Mes, accompanying said phrase with a slow blink, his gesture of Marked Aversion.)

  "He'd fallen, injured his hip."

  She said it slowly, deliberately, as if playing Scrabble, concentrating on sorting the letters, compiling clever words.

  "We were alone, in the middle of nowhere. I panicked—I didn't know what to do. I ran and ran. Forever. Thankfully, I found campers who had a radio and they sent help. After that, I made a pact with myself. I'd never be helpless again."

  "So the man was okay?" Leulah asked.

  Hannah nodded. "He had to have surgery. But he was fine."

  Of course, further inquiry into this intriguing incident—"Who was the guy?" Charles asked—was trying to scratch a diamond with a toothpick.

  "Okay, okay," Hannah said, laughing as she cleared Leulah's plate, "that's enough for tonight, I think." She kneed the swish door (a little aggressively I thought) and vanished into the kitchen.

  We usually sat down for dinner around 5:30 P.M. Hannah turned off the lights, the music (Nat King Cole demanding to be flown to the moon, Peggy Lee sermonizing you're nobody 'til somebody loves you), lighting the thin red candles at the center of the table.

  Dinner conversation wasn't anything Dad would be particularly impressed with (no debates about Castro, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, though sometimes she brought up materialism; "It's hard, in America, not to equate happiness with things."), but Hannah, chin in her hand, eyes dark as caves, was a master of the Art of Listening, and thus dinners could last two, three hours, maybe even longer, if I hadn't been the one who had to get home by eight. ("Too much Joyce isn't good for you," Dad said. "Bad for digestion.")