Special Topics in Calamity Physics (8 page)

Sometimes I was afraid Dad felt having a daughter was a last stop, a finishing point. Sometimes when he was in a Bourbon Mood, I worried he wanted to ditch me and America and return to former Zaire, presently the Democratic Republic of the Congo
(democratic
in Africa, a word like the slang usage of
totally
and
bobbing for fries,
used purely for cool effect) in order to play a Che-cum-Trotsky-cum-Spartacus to the native people's fight for freedom. Whenever Dad spoke of the four treasured months spent in the Congo River Basin in 1985, hobnobbing with the "kindest, hardest-working, most genuine" people he'd ever met, he adopted an unusually flimsy appearance. He resembled an aged silent movie star photographed with buttery lights and lens.

I'd accuse him of secretly wanting to return to Africa in order to spearhead a well-organized revolution, single-handedly stabilizing the DRC (expunging Hutu-aligned forces), then moving on to other countries waiting to be freed like exotic maidens tied to railroad tracks (Angola, Cameroon, Chad). When I voiced these suspicions, he'd laugh of course, but I always felt the laugh wasn't
quite
hard enough; it was conspicuously hollow, which made me wonder if I'd haphazardly thrown in my line and caught the biggest, most unlikely of fishes. This was Dad's deep-sea secret, never before photographed or scientifically classified: he wished to be a hero, a poster boy for freedom, silk-screened, reduced to bright colors and printed on a hundred thousand T-shirts, Dad with Marxist beret, martyr-ready eyes, and a threadbare mustache (see
The Iconography of Heroes,
Gorky, 1978).

There was too a certain uncharacteristic, boyish gusto he reserved solely for sticking another pushpin through the Rand-McNally map and briefing me on our next location in a show-offy factoid riff, his version of Gangsta Rap: "Next stop Speers, South Dakota, homeland of the Ring-necked Pheasant, the Black-footed Ferret, the Badlands, Black Hills Forest, Crazy Horse Memorial, capital, Pierre, largest city, Sioux Falls, rivers, Moreau, Cheyenne, White, James. . ."

"You take the large bedroom at the top of the stairs," he said now, watching Percussion and Woodwinds as they carried a heavy box across the yard toward the separate gabled entrance of the EXPANSIVE MASTER SUITE, "Hell, have the upstairs wing to yourself. Isn't it nice, sweet, to have a
wing?
Why shouldn't we live it up like Kubla Khan for a change? If you go up there, you'll find a surprise. I think you'll be pleased. I had to bribe a housewife, a real estate agent, two furniture salesmen, a UPS Head of Operations —now
listen,
yes, I'm talking to you — if you could go downstairs and aid your compatriot in unpacking the materials for my study, it would be most effective. He seems to have fallen down a rabbit hole."

Over the years, Dad's surprises, large and small, had been scholarly in nature, a set of 1999 Lamure-France
Encyclopedias of the Physical World
translated from the French and unavailable for purchase in the United States. ("All Nobel Prize-winners have a set of these," Dad said.)

But as I pushed open the bedroom door at the top of the stairs and walked into the large blue-walled room covered in pastoral oil paintings, giant arc windows along the far wall blistered with bubble curtains, I discovered not a rare, underground edition of
Wie schafft man ein Meisterwerk,
or
The Step-by-Step Manual for Crafting Your Magnum Opus
(Lint, Steggertt, Cue, 1993), but astonishingly, my old Citizen Kane desk pushed into the corner by the window. It was the real thing: the elephantine, walnut, Renaissance Revival library table I'd had eight years ago at 142 Tellwood Street in Wayne, Oklahoma.

Dad had found the desk at the Lord and Lady Hillier Estate Sale just outside of Tulsa, to which antiques wheeler-and-dealer June Bug, Partie "Let's Make a Deal" Lupine, had dragged Dad one stuffy Sunday afternoon. For some reason, when Dad saw the desk (and the five struggling Arnies it took to get it on the auction platform), he saw me and only me presiding over it (though I was only eight with a wingspan less than half its length). He paid a huge, undisclosed amount for it and announced with great flourish that this was "Blue's Desk," a desk "worthy of my little Eve of St. Agnes, upon which she will unmask all the Great Ideas." A week later, two of Dad's checks bounced, one at a grocery store, another at the university bookstore. I secretly believed it was because he'd paid "way above treasure price" for the desk, according to Let's Make a Deal, though Dad claimed he'd simply been slapdash with his bookkeeping. "Snubbed a decimal point," he'd said.

And then, rather anticlimactically, I was only able to unmask Great Ideas in Wayne, because we weren't able to take the desk with us to Sluder, Florida—something to do with the movers (the falsely advertised You
Can
Take It With You Moving Co.) being unable to fit it in the van. I shed ferocious tears and called Dad a reptile when we had to leave it, as if it wasn't just an oversized table with elaborate talon legs and seven drawers requiring seven individual keys, but a black pony I was abandoning in a barn.

Now I hurried back down the TWELVE OAKS STAIRCASE, finding Dad in the basement carefully opening the BUTTERFLIES FRAGILE box containing my mother's specimen—the six glass display cases she'd been working on when she'd died. When we arrived at a new house, he took hours to mount them, always in his office, always on the wall opposite his desk: thirty-two lined up girls in a petrified beauty pageant. It was why he didn't like June Bugs—or anyone, for that matter—nosing around his study, because the most devastating aspect of the Lepidoptera was not their color, or the unexpected furriness of the Polyphemus Moth antennae, not even the gloomy feeling you felt whenever you stood in front of something that had once zigzagged madly through the air, now still, wings uncouthly spread, body pinned to a piece of paper in a glass case. It was the presence of my mother within them. As Dad said once, they allowed you to see her face in greater close-up than any photographic likeness (Visual Aid 4.0). I'd always felt too that they held a strange adhesive power, so when a person looked at them, it was difficult to yank his/her gaze away.

"So how do you like it?" he asked cheerfully, lifting out one of the cases, frowning as he inspected the corners.

"It's perfect," I said.

"Isn't it? The perfect surface on which to draft an admissions essay to make any Harvard graybeard shiver in his dress slacks." "But how much did it cost for you to buy it again—and then the shipping!" He glanced at me. "Hasn't anyone told you it's blasphemous to ask the price of a gift?"

"How much?
In total."

He stared at me. "Six hundred dollars," he said with a resigned sigh, and then, returning the case to the box, squeezed my shoulder and moved past me, back up the stairs, shouting at Brass and Woodwinds to speed up the tempo of their last movement.

He was lying. I knew this, not only because his eyes had flicked to the side when he'd said "six hundred" and Fritz Rudolph Scheizer, MD, had written in
The Conduct of Rational Creatures
(1998) that the cliché of a person's eyes flicking to the side when he or she lies is "utterly true," but also because, while surveying the underside of the desk, I'd spotted the tiny red price tag still knotted around the leg in the far corner ($17,000).

I hurried back upstairs, into the foyer where Dad was looking through another box, BOOKS LIBRARY. I felt bewildered—a little upset, too. Dad and I had long put into effect the Sojourner Agreement, the understanding we'd always give each other The Truth "even if she was a beast, frightening and foul smelling." Over the years, there'd been countless occasions when the average dad would've cooked up an elaborate story, just to preserve the Parental Ruse, that they were sexless and morally
flawless as Cookie Monsters—like the time Dad disappeared for twenty-four hours and when home, sported the tired yet satisfied look of a ranch hand who'd successfully horse
whispered a touchy Palomino. If I asked for The Truth (and sometimes I chose not to ask), he never let me down —not even when it let me hold his character up to the light and I could see him for what he sometimes was: harsh, scratchy, a few unexpected holes.

I had to confront him. Otherwise, the lie could wear me away (see "Acid Rain on Gargoyles/'
Conditions,
Eliot, 1999, p. 513). I ran upstairs, removed the price tag and kept it in my pocket for the rest of the day, waiting for the perfect checkmate moment to fling it at him.

But then, just before we left for dinner at Outback Steakhouse, he was in my room examining the desk, and he looked so absurdly cheerful and proud of himself ("I'm
good"
he said, animatedly rubbing his hands together like Dick Van Dyke. "Fit for St. Peter, hmm, sweet?"). I couldn't help but feel to call him out on this well-intentioned extravagance, to embarrass him, was sort of unnecessary and cruel —not unlike informing Blanche Dubois that her arms looked flabby, her hair dry and that she was dancing the polka dangerously close to the lamplight.

It was better not to say anything.

V

The Woman in White

We were in the Frozen section of Fat Kat Foods when I first saw Hannah Schneider, two days after our arrival in Stockton. I was standing by our shopping cart, waiting for Dad to choose which flavor of ice cream he preferred.

"America's greatest revelation was not the atom bomb, not Fundamentalism, not fat farms, not Elvis, not even the quite astute observation that gentlemen prefer blondes, but the great heights to which she has propelled ice cream," Dad was fond of commenting while standing with the freezer door open and inspecting every flavor of Ben and Jerry's, oblivious to the customers swarming around him, waiting for him to move.

As he scrutinized the cartons on the shelves like a scientist engaged in creating an accurate DNA profile from a hair root, I became aware of a woman standing at the far end of the aisle.

She was dark haired, thin as a riding crop. Dressed in funeral attire, a black suit with black 1980s stilettos (more dagger than shoe), she looked incongruous, bleached in the neon lights and achey tunes of Fat Kat Foods. It was obvious, however, in the way she examined the back of the box of frozen peas that she liked being incongruous, the lone Bombshell slinking into a Norman Rockwell, the ostrich amongst buffalo. She exuded that mix of satisfaction and self-consciousness of beautiful women used to being looked at, which made me sort of hate her.

I'd long decided to hold in contempt all people who believed themselves to be the subject of everyone else's ESTABLISHING SHOT, BOOM SHOT, REACTION SHOT, CLOSE-UP or CHOKER, probably because I couldn't imagine myself turning up on anyone's storyboard, not even my own. At the same time, I (and the man staring at her with his mouth in an O holding a Lean Cuisine) couldn't help but shout, "Quiet on the set!" and "Roll 'em!" because, even at this distance, she was unbelievably stunning and strange, and as Dad was famous for quoting in one of his Bourbon Moods, 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all /Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.' "

She returned the peas to the freezer and began to walk toward us.

"New York Super Fudge or Phish Food?" asked Dad.

Her heels stabbed the floor. I didn't want to stare, so I made an unconvincing attempt to examine the nutritional content of various popsicles.

Dad didn't see her. "There's always Half Baked, I suppose," he was saying. "Oh, look. Makin' Whoopie Pie. I believe that's a new one, though I'm not sure how I feel about marshmallow with what, devil's food. Seems a bit overwrought."

As she passed, she glanced at Dad gazing into the freezer. When she looked at me, she smiled.

She had an elegant sort of romantic, bone-sculpted face, one that took well to both shadows and light, even at their extremes. And she was older than I'd realized, somewhere in her late thirties. Most extraordinary though was the air of a Chateau Marmont bungalow about her, a sense of RKO, which I'd never before witnessed in person, only while Dad and I watched
Jezebel
into the early hours of the morning. Yes, within her carriage and deliberate steps like a metronome (now retreating behind the display of potato chips) was a little bit of the Paramount lot, a little neat scotch and air kisses at Ciro's. I felt, when she opened her mouth, she wouldn't utter the crumbly speech of modernity, but would use moist words like
beau, top drawer
and
sound
(only occasionally
ring-a-ding-ding),
and when she considered a person, took
in
him/her, she would place those nearly extinct personality traits— Character, Reputation, Integrity and Class—above all others.

Not that she wasn't
real.
She was. There were hairs out of place, a quiver of white lint on her skirt. I simply felt somewhere, at some time, she'd been the toast of something. And a confident, even aggressive look in her eyes, made me certain she was planning a comeback.

"I'm thinking Heath Bar Crunch. What do you think? Blue?"

If her appearance in my life had amounted only to that single, Hitchcock cameo, I still think I would have remembered her, perhaps not in the same detail I remembered the ninety-five-degree summer night I watched
Gone with the Wind
for the first time at the Lancelot Dreamsweep Drive-in and Dad found it necessary to provide ongoing commentary on which constellations were visible ("There's Andromeda"), not only while Scarlett took on Sherman and when she got sick on the carrot but even when Rhett said he didn't give a damn.