Disturbances in the Field by Lynne Sharon Schwartz Page A

Nina. “Won’t you take my word for it?”
    “No. You believe what you’ve been told. Didn’t you believe in heaven and hell for the first fifteen years of your life?”
    “This sort of jejune discussion is not what Descartes had in mind,” Gabrielle said severely from the floor. “Not what he had in mind at all.”
    “Jejune?” said Esther with a lively flick of her curls. “Jejune? Is that French?”
    I also found the three Continental Rationalists disappointing, but I tucked in the right-hand corner of my mirror the sentence that most intrigued me: “The effort by which each thing endeavors to persevere in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself.” Spinoza. I didn’t really know what it meant, but I hoped that I would in time, and that it would be worth the wait.
    Gabrielle, in a royal blue leotard and tights, sat with the soles of her feet touching, her class notes in the parallelogram formed by her legs. She was eating Pecan Sandies. Every few moments her long bare arm would extend mechanically up towards the bag on the windowsill. She rarely indulged that way, only when she was getting her period and craved sweets, but it was the night before the final exam. I was replaying Professor Boles’s voice in my head; I heard tones and intervals, with words giving them boundaries and shape. The hard part was restoring meaning to the words. Nina’s and Esther’s duet was a distraction.
    “Entelechy, Esther?”
    She was smoking ravenously. “Entelechy. Each thing’s essence moves from its potential to realization. Aristotle.”
    “Very good. What are the four ways? Or she may call it the four causes of a phenomenon. With an example.”
    “Material, formal, efficient, final. The example in the book is a house. But a house is so unoriginal. If she asks that I’m going to use something else. A shoe.”
    “Why not start with the house?” Nina cajoled. She was eating too. She had even kicked off her black pumps, and sat curled in her chair, a box of Mallomars on her lap.
    “Such a conventional mind, Nina. It’s a pity. Material cause: bricks. Or mud, as the case may be. Ice, for an igloo. Formal cause: plans or blueprints. Efficient cause: labor. Tote that barge, lift that bale. Final cause: someone needs a place to live.”
    “Very good!” Nina’s eyes shone with pleasure. Her labor was paying off: Esther was being built. “Of course on the exam you’ll leave out the asides.”
    “But the asides are my essence. Give me a Mallomar, would you? I’m thin this week. Now I will tell you about a shoe. Just to show I can do it on my own. Material cause: leather. More likely plastic, these days. Formal cause: design for a shoe, I suppose. Efficient cause: same thing, labor. No! Elves! Final cause: The foot wants a covering. Baby needs a new pair of shoes. Shall I go on? I could do more complex things. A nervous breakdown. A painting by Picasso. An orgasm. Hey, would you like me to do an orgasm? I’ve read all about it.”
    “There really isn’t time,” said Nina coolly. She licked chocolate off each finger. “I think we’d better go on to his ideas about friendship.”
    Gabrielle suddenly moaned in agony. I thought she must have pulled a muscle. “Oh, this stuff makes me so sick,” she growled. She stood up in one spasm of motion, swishing her hair around, waving the sheaf of notes in her hand. Her voice spiraled; the mellow, sensible girl was left far behind. “Sick! A whole term of trash! I thought there’d be some connection with reality. But all this is nothing but classification. Three grades of faculties of the soul. Four kinds of law. Four cardinal virtues. Is that truth? It’s some kind of mumbo-jumbo numerology! Five proofs of the existence of God. Oh sure, first you decide what you want to believe, then you invent the reasoning.”
    Her face glistened with sweat. She bolted through the room, a jagged path of bright blue, and flung open the window. A gust of air