Marisha Pessl: Special Topics in Calamity Physics

VISUAL AID 2.2

Dad’s romances could last anywhere between a platypus egg incubation (19–21 days) and a squirrel pregnancy (24–45 days). I admit sometimes I hated them, especially the ones teeming with Ladies’ Tips, How-tos and Ways to Improve, the ones like Connie Madison Parker, who muscled her way into my bathroom and chastised me for hiding my merchandise (see “Molluscs,” Encyclopedia of Living Things , 4th ed.).

Connie Madison Parker, age 36, on Merchandise: “You got to put your goods on display, babe. Otherwise, not only will the boys ignore you but — an’ trust me on this, my sister’s flat as you — we’re talkin’ the Great Plains of East Texas— no landmarks — one day you’ll look down and have no wares at all. What’ll you do then?”

Sometimes June Bugs weren’t too terrible. Some of the sweeter, more docile ones, like poor, droopy-eyed Tally Meyerson, I actually felt sorry for, because even though Dad made no attempt to hide the fact they were as temporary as Scotch tape, most were blind to his indifference (see “Basset Hound,” Dictionary of Dogs , Vol. 1).

Perhaps the June Bug understood Dad had felt that way about all the others , but armed with three decades’ worth of Ladies Home Journal editorials, an expertise in such publications as Getting Him to the Altar (Trask, 1990) and The Chill Factor: How Not to Give a Damn (and Leave Him Wanting More) (Mars, 2000) as well as her own personal history of soured relationships, most of them believed (with the sort of unyielding insistence associated with religious fanatics) that, when under the spell of her burnt-sugar aura, Dad wouldn’t feel that way about her. Within a few fun-filled dates, Dad would learn how intoxicating she was in the kitchen, what an Old Sport she was in the bedroom, how enjoyable during carpools. And so it always came as a complete surprise when Dad turned out the lights, swatted her ruthlessly off his screen, and subsequently drenched his entire porch in Raid Pest Control.

Dad and I were like the trade winds, blowing through town, bringing dry weather wherever we went.

Sometimes the June Bugs tried to stop us, foolishly believing they could reroute a Global Wind and permanently impact the world’s weather system. Two days before we were scheduled to move to Harpsberg, Connecticut, Jessie Rose Rubiman of Newton, Texas, heiress to the Rubiman Carpeting franchise, announced to Dad she was pregnant with his child. She tearfully demanded she move with us to Harpsberg or Dad would have to pay a Onetime Initiation Fee of $100,000 with an ongoing direct debit of $10,000 per month for the next eighteen years. Dad didn’t panic. When it came to such matters, he prided himself with having the air of a maître d’ in a restaurant with an exorbitant wine list, preordered soufflé, and roving cheese cart. He calmly asked for confirmation with blood.

As it turned out, Jessie wasn’t pregnant. She had an exotic strain of stomach flu, which she’d eagerly confused with morning sickness. While we prepared for Harpsberg, now a week behind schedule, Jessie performed sad, sobbing monologues into our answering machine. The day we left, Dad found an envelope on the porch in front of the front door. He tried to hide it from me. “Our last utilities bill,” he said, because he’d rather die than show me the “hormonal ravings of a madwoman,” which he himself had inspired. Six hours later, however, somewhere in Missouri, I stole the letter from the glove compartment when he stopped at a gas station to buy Tums.

Dad found love letters from a June Bug as monumental as an extraction of aluminum, but for me it was like coming across a vein of gold in quartz. Nowhere in the world was there a nugget of emotion more absolute.

I still have my collection, which tallies seventeen. I include below an excerpt from Jessie’s four-page Ode to Gareth:

You mean the very world to me and I’d go to the ends of the earth for you if you asked me. You didn’t ask me though and I will accept that as a friend. I will miss you. I’m sorry about that baby thing. I hope we keep in touch and that you will consider me a good friend in the future who you can relie on in thickness and thin. In lou of yesterday’s phone call I am sorry I called you a pig. Gareth all I ask is to remember me not as I have been over the past couple days but as that happy woman you met in the parking lot of K-Mart.

Peace be to you forever more.

Most of the time, though, despite the occasional buzzing sounds reverberating through a quiet evening, it was always Dad and me, the way it was always George and Martha, Butch and Sundance, Fred and Ginger, Mary and Percy Bysshe.

On your average Friday night in Roman, New Jersey, you wouldn’t find me in the darkened corner of the parking lot of Sunset Cinemas with the Tanned Sporto with Shiny Legs, puffing on American Spirits waiting for the Spoiled Pretender (in his father’s car) so we could speed down Atlantic Avenue, scale the chain-link fence surrounding long-out-of-business African Safari Minigolf, and drink lukewarm Budweiser on the tatty Astroturf of Hole 10.

Nor would you find me in the back of Burger King holding sweaty hands with the Kid Whose Mouthful of Braces Made Him Look Simian, or at a sleepover with the Goody Two-Shoes Whose Uptight Parents, Ted and Sue, Wished to Prevent Her Ascent into Adulthood as if It Were the Mumps and certainly not with the Cools or the Trendies.

You’d find me with Dad. We’d be in a rented two-bedroom house on an unremarkable street lined with bird mailboxes and oak trees. We’d be eating overcooked spaghetti covered in the sawdust of parmesan cheese, either reading books, grading papers or watching such classics as North by Northwest or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington , after which, when I was finished with the dishes (and only if he’d sunk into a Bourbon Mood), Dad could be entreated to perform his impression of Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone. Sometimes, if he was feeling especially inspired, he’d even stick a piece of paper towel into his gums to re-create Vito’s mature bulldog look. (Dad always pretended I was Michael.):

Barzini will move against you first. He’ll set up a meeting with someone you absolutely trust, guaranteeing your safety. And at that meeting you’ll be assassinated…it’s an old habit. I’ve spent my entire life trying not to be careless.

Dad said “careless” regretfully, and stared at his shoes.

Women and children can be careless, but not men…Now listen.

Dad raised his eyebrows and stared at me.

Whoever comes to you with this Barzini meeting, he’s the traitor. Don’t ever forget that.

This was the moment for my only line in the scene.

Grazie, Pop.

Here Dad nodded and closed his eyes.

Prego.

On one particular occasion, however, when I was eleven in Futtoch, Nebraska, I remember quite distinctly I didn’t laugh at Dad doing Brando doing Vito. We were in the living room, and as he spoke, he happened to move directly over a desk lamp with a red lampshade; and suddenly, the crimson light Halloweened his face — ghosting his eyes, witching his mouth, beasting his jaw so his cheeks resembled a withered tree trunk into which some kid could crudely carve his initials. He was no longer my dad, but someone else, some thing else — a terrifying, red-faced stranger baring his dark, moldy soul in front of the worn velvet reading chair, the slanted bookshelf, the framed photograph of my mother with her bourgeois belongings.

“Sweet?”

Her eyes were alive. She stared at his back, her gaze mournful, as if she were an old woman in a nursing home who pondered and probably answered every one of Life’s Great Questions, but nobody took her seriously in those sticky rooms of Jeopardy! , pet therapy and Makeup Hour for Ladies. Dad, directly in front of her, stared at me, his shoulders seesawed. He looked uncertain, as if I’d just entered the room and he wasn’t sure if I’d seen him stealing.