The Bride of Catastrophe by Heidi Jon Schmidt Page A

overarching theory, her key to all mythologies. One of her exclamation points swelled and blurred.
    â€œNow. Beatrice. Now …” she said, looking very badly alarmed, as if she was afraid my tears were going to wash away all her efforts, and speaking to me like the unruly student I was. “Beatrice, we must not, we must not  … we … What if soldiers cried on the battlefield? Where would we be? Enslaved! And certainly if soldiers can keep from crying on a battlefield, you can manage…”
    â€œPhilippa, I love him!” I said, smearing the words together with sloppy feeling. “I need him, I’m lost without him.”
    She’d had a moment to collect her thoughts, now she could interrupt with confidence. “You what ? You’re “ lost without him ”? Beatrice, I find that very hard to believe. You weren’t lost without him two months ago, why should you be lost without him now? Listen, males spill their seed and die. That’s their purpose on earth. It’s essential that a man spread his genetic material as widely as possible. Of course you received his nightmares by telepathy! Women are born to nurture, and nurturance depends on empathy, which, at its highest intensity, becomes telepathy. But you can’t expect that in return, not from a man anyway. It’s not what they’re made for.”
    She hurried on, piling up intellectual sandbags against the flood. After all, she said, a man is aware that once there’s a child, he’ll be cast aside. Did I know, for instance, that female bees sting the males and stuff them alive into the honeycomb to protect the stores of food for their young? “Stuffing behavior” it was called—how loyal would I be to a gender that was willing to use me as a living bottle stopper? Of course I was distraught—quite understandable, but …
    â€œWhich one is it?” she asked. “The one you pointed out across the cafeteria?”
    I nodded, miserably. It hurt me to think of Sid, his long bones that I’d felt were part of me, his air of living at a great distance from ordinary things.
    â€œThat one looked like a physics major!” she said.
    â€œHe is a physics major,” I admitted, and after a minute, “What do physics majors look like?”
    She drew back a little, twinkling all over, ready to press her point home. “Physics majors, my dear, are psychically extraterrestrial. They mean to impose a grand plan on the universe.” (She gestured to show that I was the universe.) “They imagine they can think their way out of orbit!” She threw her head back, laughing, then reined herself in, pursed her lips, and added, in precise, campy diction: “However, they are wrong.”
    â€œHe was my celestial twin!” I insisted, but it was my last sob of the day.
    â€œI have never heard anything so preposterous!” she said, making a show of sputtering. “Your celestial twin ? He is your polar opposite. My God , he belongs on Easter Island. No, no, I don’t say he wasn’t worth your while, it will serve you very well, in the end, to have had an experience with a type like that. You want to try all types.…” she turned to size me up again, and nodded briskly—yes, she had been right the first time, she was always right.
    â€œYes,” she said, laughing a little nervously, “yes, I’m sure you’ll try all types. I don’t see any problem there.”
    And suddenly I was as curious as heartbroken; the process of my sophistication was begun.

Five
    T HE FINANCIAL aid director laid my father’s tax return out on his desk, to show me an “adjusted gross income” in the minus six figures. A man who had lost two hundred thousand dollars in a year had once possessed that same amount. Did I understand?
    I did not. My father only borrowed that money, I insisted, it had never really been his. But, this