The Bride of Catastrophe by Heidi Jon Schmidt Page B

forbearing man asked, setting a box of Kleenex discreetly before me on the desk, could I see that this showed my father had spent two hundred thousand dollars in the last year?
    At the sight of the Kleenex I, who always tried to do as expected, began to cry.
    â€œHas there been trouble? An illness maybe … or…?” Was there some other reason my father couldn’t have spared a bit for my tuition? He looked at me with bafflement and concern. He was a ruddy WASP in corduroy trousers, whose handshake and ringing voice had come down to him through generations of wealth and confidence—such blessings can cramp a man’s imagination. I went over the possible answers: Teddy had climbed up the ladder-back rocking chair, and when it started to tip, had clung to the television set, which came over on top of him. He needed twenty-two stitches. (Why does one boast of one’s sutures? But one does.) The white pine that had towered beside the house, which Pop had been meaning to cut down, had come down of its own accord during an ice storm, smashing out the whole bedroom window. Days later Ma found a perfect bird’s nest on her dresser top among the scarves. And the demand for ping-pong balls was not what they had expected, but Pop insisted sales would “bounce back.”
    That was the important thing, after all—to meet the vicissitudes with a smile. The sob that shook me arose from depths unfathomable. We were poor, poor, I insisted—my mother cooked on a single burner because mice had taken over the rest of the stove, Sylvie did without orthodonture though her teeth were crowded into her face so that, in just the moment of perfect delight when a woman is most beautiful, she seemed to turn into a vampire. After all, it wasn’t as if I were an only child; the others needed things— shoes , for instance. A struggling ping-pong ball company absorbs cash like a sponge, everyone knew that. My God, if losing two hundred thousand dollars in a year didn’t impoverish a family, what on earth would? Did he really think it was so important that I have the opportunity to explicate Sexton’s “Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator” that I should take the bread out of children’s mouths?
    He sighed, he checked the clock, he began again.
    *   *   *
    â€œ IT IS, in fact, a lot more sensible for you to study ‘The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator’ than for you to give up and go home,” Philippa said.
    â€œWe can’t afford this. They need me there.”
    â€œWater safety!” she said.
    â€œExcuse me?”
    â€œWater safety, ever studied it? What do you do when someone is drowning? Or, no, what would you do if you saw a number of people, all drowning together in the middle of a lake?”
    â€œSit on the bank reading ‘The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator’?”
    â€œWell, better that than jumping in to join them!” she said. “They are drowning in American anti-intellectualism!”
    â€œGod, I thought it was debt.”
    â€œSame, same!” she said. “You could get a student loan. You should go forward, Beatrice.
    â€œYou should not go home. If you want to understand the disintegration of the WASP tradition, you’d do better to read Robert Lowell.”
    She was my thunderbolt; I loved to watch her teaching, her eyes darting as if thoughts were pinging back and forth in her head like badminton birdies, while she lit each cigarette from the last until there were too many birdies, and too many cigarettes, in play, and she blinked and shook the head to clear it, and rapped her pointer on the blackboard and asked, “Miss Wolfe, may we assume your full attention is focused on the text?”
    It was, it was! “Okay,” I said, and rushed to the library to get Life Studies , and to the bank to get a loan.
    *   *   *
    I’D STARTED sleeping in Sid’s bed, since he was