The Beautiful Miscellaneous Read online

  This state of affairs was even worse when it came to girls my age. Since there were no girls at St. John’s, only the most confident and enterprising boys had girlfriends. They were part of an elite, a legion of daredevils who spoke to girls in movie-ticket lines and in bowling alleys. They made passes at the girls from Sacred Heart, the sister school of St. John’s that was located three blocks away. Riding their BMX bikes into the outer suburbs, they would stand beneath girls’ second-story bedroom windows. They made out in parking lots, under beds, in the backseats of cars, on stadium bleachers. The rest of us heard their stories of conquest and listened with awe, slack-jawed at the thought of a girl’s tongue inside our mouths.

  I might have stood a chance with the girls of Sacred Heart if I’d had the gumption to approach any of them. Every weekday afternoon I passed their school as they were lining up for the buses—standing in twos and threes, braiding one another’s hair, animated with that day’s scandal. But when I walked by, their banter slowed and I felt their eyes on me. I have my father’s dark hair and brooding eyes but my mother’s high cheekbones, fine nose, and pale skin. It is a face that’s both troubled and refined. One day a girl was half pushed from the bus line and with her eyes on the sidewalk said, “Do you have a girlfriend?” Stupidly, I said, “What?” as if I were annoyed by this intrusion. The girl’s cheeks fumed red and she darted back to her snickering friends. They never spoke to me again.

  But back at St. John’s, I tried to correct the image of my standoffishness by inviting two of my classmates home. Max Sutherland and Ben Thornberg were both from the nearby subdivision known as Maple Ridge. Their fathers were salesmen. This particular weekend my father was holed up in his study, listening to Count Basie, and had asked for no interruptions. So for most of the day we played outside in the orchard. Max, a shrewd boy with glasses who headed the junior debate team, and Ben, a quiet oaf of a boy, got hungry after swinging and jumping from trees all morning. We went inside and found my mother baking in the kitchen.

  “We’re completely starving,” I said.

  “Is that right?” she asked.

  My mother opened the oven door and pulled out two loaves of bread.

  Ben said, “I’ve never seen bread like that.”

  “Like what?” my mother asked, smiling.

  “You know, in the oven,” Ben said.

  “My mother’s a terrible cook,” Max said. “Strictly beans in a can.” He wiped his hands down his T-shirt.

  My mother put the bread on the table and removed her hands from the oven mitts. A burst of old-time jazz came from my father’s study. “Would you boys like some sandwiches?” she said.

  Max, in an ingratiating tone, said, “We’d like that a great deal, Mrs. Nelson.”

  My mother looked at him oddly; there was something vaguely flirtatious in his tone—the sixth-grade debate captain trying to come off suave. She said, “Nathan, why don’t you take some slices of bread and jam to your father in his study? He’s been in there for three days and heaven knows what you’ll find. Tell him to send me a postcard sometime.” She arranged a plate of thick-cut bread, a dollop of jam, and a butter knife. I took the plate from her and began to leave the kitchen. Max and Ben were right behind me; they had only ever glimpsed my father from afar. I knocked with medium loudness on the study door, trying to be heard above the music. There was no answer, so I opened it. The room was draped in shadow except for a dusty slat of light that came from a high window and divided the room in two. Piles of books and jazz albums were everywhere. A row of unlabeled home-brew bottles were arranged in a perfect line on his desk. A small kerosene heater rattled from one corner. The Count Basie LP spun and crackled from an outmoded record player. My father sat with his back to us, in his undershirt and some loose-fitting slacks, his bare feet up on the windowsill. Taped to the wall in front of him was a sheet of white paper. It was completely blank except for a black squiggle, dead center.

  “Dad?” I said.

  He did a half-turn with his head. In the dimness I could see the whites of his eyes.

  “Who is that?” he called.

  “We have some bread for you,” I said.

  “It’s hot and fresh out of the oven,” said Ben, swallowing.

  “Good,” my father said, allowing us further entry.

  The study had the musky bite of infrequent bathing and the hopsy scent of ale.

  I set the plate down on the desk and planned my retreat.

  My father stood and rubbed his bare arms. “What are you boys up to, then?” he asked, coming over to the desk.

  “Commando raids in the orchard mostly,” Max said, stepping forward, trying to get a better look at my dad.

  “Fearless,” said my father. It was the tone of a benediction. He picked up a piece of bread and looked underneath it. He broke off a piece, dipped it into the jam, and wedged it into his mouth. It disappeared behind his beard.

  “What are you working on?” Max asked.

  “Me? Oh, I’m scraping the mold off some old heat dissipation theorems.”

  “What’s that mean, exactly?” Max asked, his hands behind his back.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go eat.”

  My father said, “Ah, that means I’m trying to reduce the molten core of the sun to a known numerical value. In terms of its potential heat dissipation.” There was jam in the corners of his mouth.

  “So, like, you’re trying to tell when the sun is going to explode,” Max said, leaning over the desk for emphasis.

  My father squinted slightly at Max, then looked at me: a visual comparison. “That would be one way of putting it,” my father said, staring out into the hallway.

  “I’m really famished,” Ben whispered to no one in particular.

  My father inched back toward the window. He picked up a marker in his right hand and held it poised in the air. “If you boys have a few minutes…I can show you the theorem. See, I figure the differential between the sun’s radiation and known—”

  “Dad, we haven’t eaten lunch,” I said.

  “Ah, then,” my father said, registering slight disappointment. He swiveled his body and glowered at the paper on the wall. “Eat!” he boomed, one arm waving us off. “Yes, by all means, eat your mother’s bread.” There was a pause, then he said contritely, “Thank you boys for the visit.”

  “Good luck with the sun, Mr. Nelson,” said Max.

  We walked down the hallway toward my mother’s fresh bread. Max quickened his pace and announced, “Your dad is definitely weirder than both our dads put together.” His dad sold cars in a Buick dealership and Ben’s father worked at a carpet store. I turned and saw my father’s silhouette in the study doorway. We’d forgotten to close the door and I wondered if he’d heard Max’s comment. I looked away, guilty that I’d invaded his sanctuary, that I’d brought the sons of petty commerce into his private kingdom and now he would be a school-yard mockery. We stepped into the kitchen, where my aproned mother held out a pyramid of cut sandwiches on a plate. I noticed that the sandwiches had been cut as if for preschoolers—into triangles and with the crust removed. There was a sprig of thyme on top. I felt a flush of embarrassment for everything in our house.

  “Any sign of life in there?” my mother asked me.

  “He says thanks for the bread,” I lied. I took the plate of sandwiches from her and led Ben and Max outside and away from the house.

  nine

  At the end of the seventh grade, there was a science fair inside the St. John’s church hall. Apart from the student exhibits, there was going to be a quiz, in which I was entered. My father drilled me in the Oldsmobile as we drove across town. “What’s the first element of the periodic table?” he asked, his eyes narrowing in the rearview mirror.

  “Hydrogen,” I said.

  “Very nice,” my mother said.

  He was starting with easy questions: the molecular composition of water and glucose, the nature of photosynthesis.

  “Was it Galileo or Co
pernicus who thought the center of the universe was the earth?”

  “Copernicus.”

  “Correct,” my father said. He smoothed a wrinkle in his shirt. “All right, let’s get the machinery going. What’s the difference between endothermic and exothermic reactions?”

  I paused, looked out the window at a row of sparrows on a fence. I was a little nervous. “Something to do with heat.”

  My father placed one hand on the dash and said, “Be precise, for God’s sake.”

  My mother registered a glance in his direction.

  “Endothermic reactions absorb heat, exothermic put out heat,” I said.

  “Good,” he said, exhaling. “According to Einstein, why can’t anything travel faster than the speed of light?”

  “Dad, they’re not going to ask me about Einstein’s general theory of relativity. It’s the seventh grade.”

  “Well, then, let’s talk about Newton. He’s the right level for a seventh grader.”

  And so it went. By the time we arrived at St. John’s I was harried. I got my display out of the back of the Oldsmobile—a papier-mâché volcano with a pump powered by a voltaic cell battery. It could spew magma and lava with the touch of a button. At the base of the volcano was a small model village that eventually became submerged in gelatinous imitation lava. The exhibit had been my idea; my father tolerated its simplicity because he was primarily concerned with the science quiz. We went inside the hall and I set up at a card table. The competition wasn’t for another few hours, so I sat at my table and answered parent and student questions about volcanoes, demonstrated the lava pump. The hall filled with kids and their displays: dissected frogs in brine, popsicle-stick bridges that could withstand the weight of ten encyclopedias, battery-powered windmills, aquascapes, tarantulas and scorpions glazed inside box frames, chemical reactions involving dry ice. Darius Kaplansky, a suspected genius from my school, had a display involving rats inside a maze. His maze contained three white rats: one had been injected with parasites from birth, one was normal, and one was made to listen to Mozart for an hour each day. The Mozart fan, Darius told his admirers, won the dash through the maze every time. After a demonstration, Darius explained to the onlookers, “We’re interested in neural coherence as a result of the symmetry in the music.” I sat with my jelly lava, suddenly humiliated by my display’s banality. Of course, since each rat looked identical, it was impossible to know which rat won. It may have been a trick. Besides, I suspected that his father, a psychiatrist, had designed the experiment.

  I spent the morning watching Darius eat powdered donuts and chatting with onlookers at his crowded booth. His face was slightly feminine—full red lips and long eyelashes. His hair was slick and parted, his shoes spit-shined. When we were called to the stage I looked at him and saw the undilated pupils of steely confidence. “Good luck,” I said, hoping to get inside his head. He smiled a little warily. My parents sat in the front row. My father wore his new black polo shirt—a recent attempt of my mother’s to spruce him up. The competitors took the stage: a girl from Sacred Heart who smiled behind the weight of braces, a curly-haired boy wearing a tie, a hefty-set boy with a Dodgers cap, and finally serene Darius. We sat behind a long table like contestants at a pie-eating competition.

  Father Rajmani, my science teacher—an Indian man with round glasses and a thin mustache—was the quizmaster. He held pink index cards in front of him and launched himself onto the balls of his feet as he asked each question. Darius and I dominated. I was surprised by how much I knew. I looked at my father, who held a program up to his mouth and blew across its edge. My mother nodded and smiled every time I got a question right. I knew how hot lightning could get (70,000 degrees Fahrenheit), that dry ice is the solid state of carbon dioxide, that the world’s first computer was switched on in 1946. Darius and I were evenly matched, but sometimes his hand shot up before mine. The girl with the crooked teeth put her face in her hands; she didn’t answer a single question. The boy in the Dodgers cap picked at his chin and shot up his hand when Rajmani asked what dinosaur meant.

  “I think maybe it means terrible lizard. Is that right?” he said.

  “Correct,” Father Rajmani said, relieved that another student had answered something.

  I looked at Darius. He was staring at the back of the pink index cards, as though the answers were printed there in indelible ink. When Darius and I had twenty points each, Father Rajmani requested a round of applause, and the other children took their seats with their parents. Darius leaned so far forward in his chair that his head practically rested on the table. My father grinned. My mother’s arm was linked through his. All those years of scientific cross-examination had paid off. Had I arrived? I sat back in my chair, confident, allowing the brain food and my DNA to do their work. Where Darius hesitated, I jumped in. I guessed the multiple choices when I didn’t know the answer and kept getting them right. My question arm cramped and it felt good, like the tendons and muscles were pulling their weight.

  “Next section: astronomy,” Rajmani said.

  The church hall was filled with late-afternoon light. The whistle of the overhead fans coated the room. The planets and stars spoke to me: Pluto takes 248 years to orbit the sun; iron gives Mars its reddish color; it takes eight and a half minutes for the sun’s light to reach Earth. I was ahead by two points. Darius’s father—the psychiatrist and secret designer of the rat experiment—sat a row behind my parents with his hands gripping his knees. My father’s face revealed itself before me; his eyes were ablaze with hope. The final section was physics. I took a deep breath.

  Father Rajmani had two blooms of sweat in the armpits of his starched cleric’s shirt. He picked up a set of index cards from a table.

  “Best of five questions. Darius, you need to get all five to win. Nathan, you need only answer one right to take the match.”

  My father tilted his head to one side, craning to listen.

  “Who proposed the law of motion that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction? A., Albert Einstein, B., Isaac New—”

  Darius had his hand in the air. “B.—Isaac Newton.”

  “Correct. Does a strawberry look red because: A., it absorbs light, or B., it reflects light?”

  Darius and I shot our hands into the air at the same instant, but Rajmani called on him.

  “B.—it reflects light. Actually,” Darius went on, “it absorbs every other color except red, which it reflects.” He swallowed.

  The Darius troops let out a loud whoop, causing my father to turn around abruptly and ask them to be quiet. I heard his voice and the word concentrate.

  Rajmani nodded. “The distance between two consecutive crests or troughs on a wave is called the: A., wavelength, B., amplitude, or C., frequency?”

  “Amplitude,” I yelled.

  “Incorrect. Darius?”

  “That would be wavelength.”

  “That is the right answer,” said Father Rajmani. I couldn’t look at my parents. There were two questions left. I tried to imagine a vacuum as a way of relaxing, to conjure a velvety black void—a technique my father used before giving lectures at conferences. But Darius caught my attention; he was hunched over the table, his backside off the chair, finally nervous.

  “Whispering creates sounds of about: A., five decibels, B., twenty decibels, C., seventy decibels?”

  Darius rose with both hands in the air and said loudly, “Five!”

  “Correct. Final question.” Rajmani rocked onto the balls of his feet.

  We were tied. The hall turned silent save for the mechanical whir of the fans. I looked around at the card tables loaded with flashing LEDs and chemical glassware. My volcano emitted wispy strands of smoke. My father was saying something to my mother and I wondered what those words could be. The priest’s voice came to me like a television from an adjacent room—dull and filtered.

  “Who devised the general theory of relativity? A., Copernicus, B., Einstein, C., Oppenheimer, or D., Newton?�
�

  The question was so easy that I didn’t even need to think. Einstein was evoked in our house as a guardian spirit, warding off the non-relative. Although general relativity evaded me in its subtleties, I knew who was responsible for it as surely as I knew our telephone number. I shot up my hand before Darius and stood, because I wanted the full effect of the hall audience exploding to life. I wanted to see Darius’s father, the shrink, walk to the back of the hall and put his rats inside a shoe box; I wanted to see my mother kiss my father in public. I stared at the clock on the rear wall, the luminous face, the needle-like hands, and I caught a flash of the years that lay ahead of me—chemistry sets for every birthday, each one surpassing the last in its complexity; late-night drives with my father, talking about the half-spin of quarks, about the density of black holes; summer vacations to NASA and the Stanford Linear Accelerator instead of Disneyland; road trips that traversed points of scientific interest; he might even take me to Newfoundland so I could stand in the very spot where Marconi made his first transatlantic radio transmission.

  My father hunched forward and my mother clutched his arm.

  “Oppenheimer,” I said.

  The Darius crowd was out of their seats, waiting to rush the stage.

  “Incorrect. Darius, for the match, do you know the answer?”

  Darius looked at me for the first time during the quiz. We both knew that I knew the answer, and he hesitated, wondering. He looked down at his own father, who was already inching toward the stage. I believe in that moment Darius also saw what could lie ahead for him. Already he spent his summers at a science camp where smart boys in shorts fired Bunsen burners and filled beakers with boric acid and smoked their fathers’ cigars out in the piney woods. Things would only get worse. If he was a genius, he was destined to be the worst kind—the slow and plodding, the salaried, the unrecognized. A prophecy that was already beginning to show in his body: he was the only seventh grader with stooped shoulders.