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epitome of incomprehensibility
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From something I'm writing. Mostly dialogue, with minimal context. Plus there's a blooper reel in this_is_what_I_get!
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Personally, I have nothing against airplane crashes. If my mother’s first husband hadn’t died in an airplane crash, she’d never have married Dad and I’d never have been born.
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That was part of the problem. The other part was Mac’s stupidity. He was convinced that the blue cardigan was necessary. “Not if it’s warm out,” I said. “Notice you can wear short sleeves if it’s warm. It wouldn’t make sense to also wear a cardigan.”
“Well, you can’t count on the people at that school to make sense,” he grumbled, tearing through the closet. “And the only option for the cardigan was the shade of blue, not whether to wear it or not.”
I shook my head. “You don’t have any inference skills. You’d make a terrible detective.”
“Since when,” Mac slammed the closet door, “do I need to be a detective?”
...
Thinking about science made me remember the last question on the Evaluation Test: “Do you think religion and science are compatible?” I’d written a whole paragraph:
I think religion and science are very compatible. However, religion and math didn’t use to be compatible. For example, my best friend Hypatia is named after a math teacher in Ancient Greece who got killed by Christians. At that time, some Christians thought math wasn’t real because calculators weren’t invented yet. But that wasn’t a good excuse for killing someone. These days, most Christians believe in math. For example, I’m a Christian and I’m good at math. So is my best friend. Everyone calls her Hippie instead of Hypatia, though, because it’s easier to say. But we don’t mean a hippie who does drugs, because drugs are against both religion and science. This is because religion and science go well together.
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“Relax, relax,” said Dad, but Grandma insisted on standing up, so he let her dry the dishes as he washed them. “I thought that went well,” he said presently. “Minus certain squabbles.”
“Plus certain squabbles. I enjoy hearing young people argue religion and politics. It makes me feel young again myself. It only bothered me when—” She looked around, saw me, and stopped. “Would you know, this towel is wet already.”
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A noise sounded from the other room and in popped Mac, math book in hand. “Uncle Daniel voted for Bush? How could he??”
“Dual citizenship,” said Grandma. “Mail-in ballot.”
“Even Mom wouldn’t vote for him!”
“I will if you don’t get back here,” came her voice from the other room.
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This pathetic excuse for a school, which didn’t even have a cafeteria, wanted to make us write an academic essay.
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Mac wrote something on a piece of paper, like he was taking notes, but then he held it up behind him so I could see it. It said, “AREN’T THERE PATHS IN IRELAND?”
I looked straight ahead. I knew what he was trying to do. As if paths were funny! Well, they weren’t. There was nothing funny about them. But then I pictured Ireland without any paths. NO PATHS ALLOWED, a sign on the beach would say.
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Gabby’s sense of humour was to ask us nonsense questions like “Shall I ask Mac MacLeod if the carpet matches the drapes?” which didn’t bother Fern but made Melodia turn red. And when Gabby looked at the sky and added, “In his case, it’s more like whether the washcloth matches the mop,” she turned even redder and shook her head no, no, no, no.
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I thought that was a bit mean, so I smiled at Trisha and said, “Well, Vivi’s Lord-of-the-Rings-sexual. She’s obsessed with every single hobbit.”
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“The Eco-Anarchist Manifesto,” he laughed. “You’re a true visionary… Hey, wait.” One of the dice had rolled under the couch behind him, so he dug around for it and pulled out a dusty paperback as well. “Kristy’s Great Idea,” he read. “Let me guess, she wanted to abolish countries too?”
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“You don’t get to call me that just for, for defending old M.P.B. from your terrible essays.” He pitched his voice half an octave higher. “Miriam Philomela Berserker was the best composer in the world! She had three names, like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Johann Sebastian Bach! It was very embarrassing that she died of breast cancer, because it has the word breast in it!”
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I wondered for a moment if we’d all been whooshed up to heaven in the Rapture that Mrs. Sully had talked about last week in Morning Devotions.
Only there wouldn’t be TVs in heaven, especially not ones that showed an airplane crashing into a ruler-shaped office building. Behind the cloud of smoke that billowed up I could see another tower, exactly the same. Then the colour of the sky changed as the channel showed the buildings closer up, only to have another airplane crash into the second one.
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“Ah, a tribute. Like this poem I just made up.” And he intoned:
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
“It’s okay. You could make it longer, though.”
“Good idea.” Mac rocked back and forth. All of a sudden, he went, “But you do feel sorry for the innocent people.”
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As Mom went on about how she’d been about to call the police and had to put off making plans for our school's new and improved gym class, I slipped upstairs to my room and put on Schoenberg’s fourth string quartet. I’d forgotten to turn the volume down, so the first notes blasted out of the CD player. Mom stopped lecturing Mac for a moment and called up, “Turn that noise down!”
I had music that was much, much more like “noise” and I told her so.
“Well, I don’t want to hear it! Let’s leave the terrorist attacks on the other side of the border, please.” A silence. “I shouldn’t say that.” And she added something about bad luck even though, as a Christian, as the new gym teacher at a Christian school, she shouldn’t believe in bad lack.
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So I said, “Miriam? In Toronto? Why even leave Vienna? The Second Viennese School was in Vienna, you know.”
That made his nose wrinkle, as if avant-garde music was like raw onions to him. “And you supposedly like her so much. Jesus.”
And with that word—not the best one to say in a Christian school, at least not with a grossed-out expression—he stalked off.
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“Oh. So does ‘Anschluss’ mean hitting people with canes?”
He looked at me like I was speaking Swahili. “What?”
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Pastor Azar wasn’t very tall, but his low voice and bristly beard made him look like an angry dog. Plus, he’d taken the job that should have been Dad’s. Still… “Maybe I can interview him too. For the essay. He’s basically family, isn’t he?”
“So your crush on his son,” Mac looked at the sky, “is basically incest?”
I opened my mouth to object, but we were heading towards the bike rack where Gabby, Fern, and Melodia were standing and talking. Mac kept flirting with girls, even if they were in college. Especially if they were in college. I knew he wouldn’t look twice at Gabby or Fern, but maybe Melodia…
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“You see, I promised God I would never swear,” I told Melodia, who’d stopped patting my hand and was sitting with her cheek resting on her arm. “It’s like a covenant.”
“I don’t get it, though. How did they betray you?”
“I told you, they kept talking to each other and not to me. At my birthday party. And next week they went to the mall together! Without me!” Mel seemed to have a “why not?” look on her face, so I added, “I didn’t say they could, you know.”
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I followed Aviva into the middle of the second one and kicked my legs back and forth as she opened her binder, going, “Look, you don’t understand. Music composer or not, Trisha won’t care. She’ll be like, ‘Oh, it’s so sad, the poor girl starving to death…’”
Just then my stomach rumbled. That’s what I got for not eating supper: perfect timing. I pulled a bag of jellybeans out of my backpack and nibbled them as I spoke. “If she says that, just tell her anorexia wasn’t invented yet.”
“What?”
“It’s true. Probably. I mean, AIDS didn’t exist until the nineties.”
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“Why do you think the Blurk-a-bloinks left?”
“The Blurk-a-bloinks?” That was Mrs. Sully, getting ready to smile.
“Her dad’s relatives. Blorkenstein or Blickerbleck or something. One of them was a notorious music composer. Terrible influence on everyone.”
Mrs. Sully must have glimpsed the look I was giving Mac, because she pulled up her glasses and went, “Well! If he’s anything like Reverend Winter, I’m sure he was a good Christian man.”
...
“Why did you cry?” Melodia wanted to know, fiddling with the bracelet on her left wrist.
I shrugged. I thought of the word “nostalgia” but that didn’t quite seem to fit, and when I finally opened my mouth, something unexpected came out: “I was jealous of Grandma going to Austria for real. Although she did miss the Ice Storm…”
She stretched her arms. “Ice storm?”
“You didn’t have that in New York?” So I told her about the freezing rain, the ice coating trees and sending branches crashing down, the power outages, our family staying at the Smiths’ for three days, and Hippie thinking she had appendicitis because her side hurt and she’d just read a book called Prairie School where a girl gets appendicitis and has to be rushed to the hospital in a blizzard. But she was just constipated from eating too much pizza.
“Hey,” went a voice, and there stood my brother, hands on hips. “I hope you’re not comparing, like, the second Pearl Harbor to some random weather event.” Then he took something out of his pocket and turned to Mel. “By the way, do you like these?”
He held a small piece of shiny cardboard with a pair of earrings attached—small gold ovals. I recognized them right away.
“For me?” She looked up and down, her eyelashes quivering.
If I’d been Mac, I wouldn’t have ignored a girl who looked like that. I’d have forgotten Pranavy, forgotten Stanley Academy, and asked her on a date right then and there. But he had different ideas. “Oh—oh, sorry. I’m actually selling them.” He looked awkward, or pretended to. “I got them for this girl, actually, but my mom won’t let me give them to her because, well, she’s Hindu and I’m Christian.”
I jerked my head up. That was a lie—two lies, if you counted the Christian part.
...
I remember looking hard, hard, hard at the two photos, like a detective. The building had changed, the sidewalk had changed, but the fat gnarled tree was in the same place as the pale skinny one in 1907. I asked Grandma if it was the same one and she said, oh, it very well could be. But another thought hit me. The tree was dead! It didn’t have any leaves, I told her sadly. It would be cut down soon.
But Grandma said no, it was probably alive, but she’d taken the picture in December. And Carol—focus, Carol—what happens to leaves in the fall?
But a branch was hanging down! In a broken sort of way!
She squinted and said, okay, maybe that branch was dead, but the rest of the tree seemed alive. And then she straightened up, saying in her fancy librarian voice, “We’ll leave that for now, lest your father accuse me of allegory."
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