Marisha Pessl: Special Topics in Calamity Physics

On countless occasions, I pointed out New York City or Miami on our Rand-McNally map. “Or Charleston. Why can’t you teach Conflict Resolution at University of South Carolina at This Is Actually a Civilized Location?” My head mashed against the window, seatbelt strangling me, my gaze dazed by the ceaseless rewinding of cornfields, I’d fantasize that one day, Dad and I would quietly settle somewhere — anywhere — like dust.

Due to his stock refusals over the years, however, during which he ridiculed my sentimentality (“How can you eschew travel? I don’t understand. How can my daughter wish to be dimwitted and dull as some handmade ashtray, as floralized wallpaper, as that sign — yes, that one — Big Slushy. Ninety-nine cents. That’s your name from now on. Big Slushy.”), during our highway discussions of The Odyssey (Homer, Hellenistic Period) or The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck, 1939), I’d stopped even alluding to such literary themes as the Homestead, Motherland or Native Soil. And thus it was with great fanfare Dad unveiled over rhubarb pie at the Qwik Stop Diner outside of Lomaine, Kansas (“Ding! Dong! The Witch Is Dead,” he sang facetiously, causing the waitress to frown at us suspiciously), that for the entirety of my high school senior year, all seven months and nineteen days, we would reside in a single location: Stockton, North Carolina.

I’d heard of it oddly enough, not only because I’d read, a few years back, the cover story in Ventures magazine, “Fifty Top Retirement Towns,” and Stockton (pop. 53, 339), marooned in the Appalachian Mountains, evidently quite pleased with its nickname (The Florence of the South), had been written up as #39, but also because the mountain city had featured prominently in a fascinating FBI account of the Jacksonville fugitives, Escaped (Pillars, 2004), the true story of the Vicious Three who escaped from Florida State Prison and survived for twenty-two years in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. They roamed the thousands of trails veining the foothills between North Carolina and Tennessee, living on deer, rabbit, skunk and the refuse of weekend campers, and would have remained at large (“The Park is so expansive it could effectively hide a herd of pink elephants,” wrote the author, retired Special Agent Janet Pillars) had one of them not acted on the apparently uncontrollable urge to hang at the local mall. On a Friday afternoon in fall 2002, Billy “The Pit” Pikes wandered into a West Stockton shopping center, Dinglebrook Arcade, bought a few dress shirts, ate a calzone and was identified by a cashier at Cinnabon. Two of the Vicious Three were captured, but the last, known simply as “Sloppy Ed,” remained at large, somewhere in the mountains.

Dad, on Stockton: “As dreary a mountain town as any in which I’ll collect a frighteningly diminutive paycheck from UNCS and you’ll secure your place next year at Harvard.”

“Hot diggity dog,” I said.

The August before our arrival, while living at the Atlantic Waters Condotel in Portsmouth, Maine, Dad had been in close contact with one Ms. Dianne L. Seasons, a Senior Associate with a very impressive sales and long-term lease record at the Stockton-based Sherwig Realty. Once a week, Dianne mailed Dad glossy photos of Featured Sherwig Properties, each one accompanied with her handwritten note on Sherwig memo stationery, paper clipped to the corner: “A lovely mountain oasis!” “Full of Southern charm!” “Exquisite and special, one of my all-time faves !”

Dad, famous for toying with Salespersons Desperate to Close like grassland cats with a limping wildebeest, deferred making a final decision on a house and responded to Dianne’s evening phone calls (“Just wanted to know how ya’ll liked 52 Primrose!”) with melancholic indecision and plenty of sighing and thus, Dianne’s handwritten memos became increasingly frenzied (“Won’t last the summer!!” “Will go like a hot cake!!!”).

Finally, Dad put Dianne out of her misery when he chose one of the most exclusive of all Featured Sherwig Properties, the fully furnished 24 Armor Street, #1 on the Hot List.

I was shocked. Dad, hailing from his visiting professorship at Hicksburg State College or the University of Kansas at Petal, certainly had not been amassing great reserves of wealth ( Federal Forum paid a derisory $150 per essay) and almost every other address at which we’d lived, the 19 Wilson Streets, the 4 Clover Circles, had been tiny, forgettable houses. And yet Dad had selected the SPRAWLING 5BR TUDOR FURNISHED IN KINGLY LUXURY, which looked, at least in Dianne’s glossy photo, like an enormous two-humped Bactrian Camel at rest. (Dad and I would discover that the Sherwig photographer had taken particular care to conceal the fact that it was a molting Bactrian Camel at rest. Almost all of the gutters were detaching and many of the wooden beams decorating the exterior fell down during Fall Term.)

Within minutes of our arrival at 24 Armor Street, Dad began his customary effort to transform himself into Leonard Bernstein, orchestrating the men of Feathery Touch Moving Co. as if they weren’t simply Larry, Roge, Stu and Greg hoping to get off early and go for a beer, but sections of Brass, Woodwinds, Strings and Percussion.

I snuck away and did my own tour of the house and grounds. Not only did the mansion come with 5BR, a COOK’S HEAVEN ON EARTH W/GRANITE, HARDWOODS, IN-DRAWER FRIDGE and CUSTOM HEART PINE CABINETS, but also a MASTER SUITE W/ MARBLE BATH, an ENCHANTING FISH POND and a BOOKWORM’S FANTASY LIBRARY.

“Dad, how are we paying for this place?”

“Hmm, oh, don’t worry about that — excuse me, must you carry that box on its side? See the arrow there and those words that read, ‘This End Up’? Yes. That means, this end up.”

“We can’t afford it.”

“Of course we — I ask you once and I will ask you again, that goes in the living room, not here, please don’t drop — there are valuables — I’ve saved a little in the last year, sweet. Not there! You see, my daughter and I employ a system. Yes, if you read the boxes you will discover that there are words written there in permanent marker and those words correspond to a particular room in this house. That’s right! You get a gold star!”

Carrying a gigantic box, Strings lumbered past us into COOK’S HEAVEN ON EARTH.

“We should leave, Dad. We should go to 52 Primrose.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I worked out a fine price with Miss Seasons Greetings — yes, now that goes downstairs into my study, and please, there are actual butterflies in that box, do not drag — don’t you read? Yes, lighten your grip.”

Brass clumsily made his way down the stairs with the giant box marked BUTTERFLIES FRAGILE.

“Hmm? Now, yes, simply relax and enjoy—”

“Dad, this is too much money.”

“I’m, well, yes, I understand your point, sweet, and certainly, this is…” Dad’s eyes drifted up to the giant, brass light hanging from the ten-foot plaster ceiling, an upside-down representation of the 1815 Mt. Tambora eruption (see Indonesia and the Ring of Fire , Priest, 1978). “It’s somewhat more ornate than we’re used to, but why not? We’re going to be here the entire year, aren’t we? It’s the last chapter, so to speak, before you go off, conquer the world. I want to make it memorable.”

He adjusted his glasses and looked back down into the opened box labeled LINENS like Jean Peters gazing into the Trevi Fountain, about to throw in a coin and make a wish.

I sighed. It was evident, and had been for some time, that Dad was determined to make une grande affaire out of this year, my senior year (hence, the Bactrian Camel and other perplexing Auntie Mame — like lavishes I shall soon detail). Yet he was dreading it too (hence, the gloomy gaze into LINENS). Part of it was that he didn’t want to think about me leaving him at the end of the year. I didn’t particularly want to think about leaving him either. The thought was difficult to fathom. Abandoning Dad felt like de-boning all the old American musicals, separating Rodgers from Hammerstein, Lerner from Loewe, Comden from Green.