Marisha Pessl: Special Topics in Calamity Physics

An excerpt from Dad’s personal University of Arkansas at Wilsonville Web page (www.uaw.edu/polisci/vanmeer):

Dr. Gareth van Meer (Ph.D. Harvard University, 1978) is the Visiting Professor of Political Science for the 1997–1998 school year. He hails from Ole Miss, where he is Chair of the Department of Political Science and Director of the Center for the Study of the United States. He is interested, broadly, in political and economic revitalization, military and humanitarian involvement, and post-conflict renewal of Third World nations. He is currently working on a book entitled The Iron Grip, about African and South American ethnic politics and civil war.

Dad was always hailing from somewhere, usually Ole Miss, though we never went back to Oxford in the ten years we traveled. He was also always “currently working on The Iron Grip,” though I knew as well as he did that the Grip—fifty-five legal pads filled with unintelligible handwriting (much of it water damaged), stored in a large cardboard box labeled in black permanent marker, GRIP — had not been worked on, currently or otherwise, in the last fifteen years.

“America,” Dad sighed as he drove the blue Volvo station wagon across another state line. Welcome to Florida, the Sunshine State. I flipped down the visor so I wasn’t blinded. “Nothing like this country. No indeedy-o. Really is the Promised Land. Land of the Free and the Brave. Now how about that Sonnet number 30? You didn’t finish. ‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past.’ Come on, I know you know this one. Speak up. ‘And with old woes…’”

From second grade at Wadsworth Elementary in Wadsworth, Kentucky, until my senior year of high school at the St. Gallway School in Stockton, North Carolina, I spent as much time in the blue Volvo as I did in a classroom. Although Dad always maintained an elaborate explanation for our itinerant existence (see below), I secretly imagined we wandered the country because he was fleeing my mother’s ghost, or else he was looking for it in every rented two-bedroom house with a grouchy porch swing, every diner serving waffles tasting of sponge, every motel with pancake pillows, bald carpeting and TVs with a broken CONTRAST button so newscasters resembled Oompa Loompas.

Dad, on Childrearing: “There’s no education superior to travel. Think of The Motorcycle Diaries, or what Montrose St. Millet wrote in Ages of Exploration: ‘To be still is to be stupid. To be stupid is to die.’ And so we shall live. Every Betsy sitting next to you in a classroom will only know Maple Street on which sits her boxy white house, inside of which whimper her boxy white parents. After your travels, you’ll know Maple Street, sure, but also wilderness and ruins, carnivals and the moon. You’ll know the man sitting on an apple crate outside a gas station in Cheerless, Texas, who lost his legs in Vietnam, the woman in the tollbooth outside of Dismal, Delaware, in possession of six children, a husband with black lung but no teeth. When a teacher asks the class to interpret Paradise Lost, no one will be able to grab your coattails, sweet, for you will be flying far, far out in front of them all. For them, you will be a speck somewhere above the horizon. And thus, when you’re ultimately set loose upon the world…” He shrugged, his smile lazy as an old dog. “I suspect you’ll have no choice but to go down in history.”

Typically, our year was divided between three towns, September though December in one, January through June in another, July through August in a third, though occasionally this increased to a maximum of five towns in the span of one year, at the end of which I threatened to start sporting a burdensome amount of black eyeliner and baggy clothing. (Dad decided we’d return to the median number of three towns per year.)

Driving with Dad wasn’t cathartic, mind-freeing driving (see On the Road, Kerouac, 1957). It was mind-taxing driving. It was Sonnet-a-thons. It was One Hundred Miles of Solitude: Attempting to Memorize The Waste Land. Dad could meticulously divide a state end to end, not into equal driving shifts but into rigid half-hour segments of Vocabulary Flash Cards (words every genius should know), Author Analogies (“the analogy is The Citadel of thought: the toughest way to condition unruly relationships”), Essay Recitation (followed by a twenty-minute question-and-answer period), War of the Words (Coleridge/Wordsworth face-offs), Sixty Minutes of an Impressive Novel (selections included The Great Gatsby [Fitzgerald, 1925] and The Sound and the Fury [Faulkner, 1929]), and The Van Meer Radio Theater Hour, featuring such plays as Mrs. Warren’s Profession (Shaw, 1894), The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde, 1895) and various selections from Shakespeare’s oeuvre, including the late romances.

“Blue, I can’t fully distinguish Gwendolyn’s sophisticated upper-class accent from Cicely’s girlish country one. Try to make them more distinct and, if I may give you a little Orson Wellian direction here, understand, in this scene they’re quite angry. Do not lie back and pretend you’re sitting down to a leisurely tea. No! The stakes are high! They both believe they’re engaged to the same man! Ernest!”

States later, eyes watery and focus sore, our voices hoarse, in the highway’s evergreen twilight Dad would turn on, not the radio, but his favorite A. E. Housman Poetry on Wenlock Edge CD. We’d listen in silence to the steel-drum baritone of Sir Brady Heliwick of the Royal Shakespeare Company (recent roles included Richard in Richard III, Titus in Titus Andronicus, Lear in King Lear) as he read “When I Was One-and-Twenty” and “To an Athlete Dying Young” against a sinuous violin. Sometimes Dad spoke the words along with Brady, trying to outdo him.

Man and boy stood cheering by,

And home we brought you shoulder-high.

“Could have been an actor,” said Dad, clearing his throat.

By examining the U.S. Rand-McNally map on which Dad and I marked with a red pushpin every town in which we’d lived, however brief the period (“Napoleon had a similar way of marking out his regime,” Dad said), I calculate that, from my years six to sixteen we inhabited thirty-nine towns in thirty-three states, not including Oxford, and I thus attended approximately twenty-four elementary, middle and high schools.

Dad used to joke that in my sleep I could pound out the book Hunting for Godot: Journey to Find a Decent School in America, but he was being unusually harsh. He taught at universities where “Student Center” referred to a deserted room with nothing but a foosball table and a vending machine with a few candy bars bravely tipped toward the glass. I, however, attended sprawling, freshly painted schools with slender corridors and beefy gyms: Schools of Many Teams (football, baseball, spirit, dance) and Schools of Many Lists (attendance, honor, headmaster’s, detention); Schools Full of Newness (new arts center, parking lot, menu) and Schools Full of Oldness (which used the words classic and traditional in their admissions brochures); schools with snarling, sneering mascots, schools with pecking, preening mascots; the School of the Dazzling Library (with books smelling of glue and Mr. Clean); the School of the Bog Library (with books smelling of sweat and rat droppings), the School of Teary-Eyed Teachers; of Runny-Nosed Teachers; of Teachers Never Without Their Lukewarm Coffee Mug; of Teachers Who Cakewalked; of Teachers Who Cared; of Teachers Who Secretly Loathed Every One of the Little Bastards.