Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

School began in three days and Dad, in keeping with his recent Open-a-New-Window persona, insisted on spending the afternoon at Blue Crest Mall in the Adolescent Department of Stickley’s, urging me to try on various articles of Back-2-School clothing and soliciting the fashion expertise of one Ms. Camille Luthers (see “Curly Coated Retriever,” Dictionary of Dogs , Vol. 1). Camille was Adolescent Department Manager, who not only had worked in Adolescent for the last eight years but knew which Stickley styles were de rigueur this season due to her own esteemed daughter around my age named Cinnamon.

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 0: “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,32Rooms: 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 I’m-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.