Special topics in calamity physics - By Marisha Pessl Page 0,45

He shrugged and returned to his Chemistry. "S'just who she is."

Who she was, too, was a woman surprisingly daring and competent, whine and whimper free. The woman could fix, in a matter of minutes, any clog, drip, leak, seep—slacker toilet flushes, pipe clangs before sunrise, a dazed and confused garage door. Frankly, her handyman expertise made Dad look like a twitchy-mouthed grandmother. One Sunday, I watched in awe while Hannah fixed her own recessed doorbell with electrician gloves, screwdriver and voltmeter—not the easiest of processes, if one reads Mr. Fix-It's Guide to Rewiring the Home (Thurber, 2002). Another occasion, after dinner, she disappeared into the basement to fix the temperamental light on her water heater: "There's too much air in the flue," she said with a sigh.

And she was an expert mountaineer. Not that she boasted: "I camp," was all she'd say. One could infer it, however, from the overload of Paul Bunyan paraphernalia: carabiners and water bottles lying around the house, Swiss army knives in the same drawer as junk mail and old batteries; and in the garage, brawny hiking boots (seriously gnarled soles), moth-eaten sleeping bags, rock-climbing rope, snowshoes, tent poles, crusty sunscreen, a first-aid kit (empty, apart for blunt scissors and discolored gauze). "What're those?" Nigel asked, frowning at what looked like two vicious animal traps atop a pile of firewood. "Crampons," Hannah said, and when he continued to stare confusedly: "So you don't fall off the mountain."

She once admitted as a footnote to dinner conversation, she'd saved a man's life while camping as a teenager.

"Where?" asked Jade.

She hesitated, then: "The Adirondacks."

I'll admit I almost leapt from my seat and boasted, "I've saved a life too! My shot gardener!" but thankfully I had some tact; Dad and I held in contempt people forever interrupting fascinating conversations with their own rinky-dink story. (Dad called them What-About-Mes, accompanying said phrase with a slow blink, his gesture of Marked Aversion.)

"He'd fallen, injured his hip."

She said it slowly, deliberately, as if playing Scrabble, concentrating on sorting the letters, compiling clever words.

"We were alone, in the middle of nowhere. I panicked—I didn't know what to do. I ran and ran. Forever. Thankfully, I found campers who had a radio and they sent help. After that, I made a pact with myself. I'd never be helpless again."

"So the man was okay?" Leulah asked.

Hannah nodded. "He had to have surgery. But he was fine."

Of course, further inquiry into this intriguing incident—"Who was the guy?" Charles asked—was trying to scratch a diamond with a toothpick.

"Okay, okay," Hannah said, laughing as she cleared Leulah's plate, "that's enough for tonight, I think." She kneed the swish door (a little aggressively I thought) and vanished into the kitchen.

We usually sat down for dinner around 5:30 P.M. Hannah turned off the lights, the music (Nat King Cole demanding to be flown to the moon, Peggy Lee sermonizing you're nobody 'til somebody loves you), lighting the thin red candles at the center of the table.

Dinner conversation wasn't anything Dad would be particularly impressed with (no debates about Castro, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, though sometimes she brought up materialism; "It's hard, in America, not to equate happiness with things."), but Hannah, chin in her hand, eyes dark as caves, was a master of the Art of Listening, and thus dinners could last two, three hours, maybe even longer, if I hadn't been the one who had to get home by eight. ("Too much Joyce isn't good for you," Dad said. "Bad for digestion.")

To describe this singular quality of hers (which I believe holds one of the brightest lanterns to her sometimes shadowy profile) is impossible, because what she did had nothing to do with words.

It was just this way about her.

And the wasn't premeditated, condescending, or forced (see Chapter 9, "Get Your Teen to Consider You The 'In' Crowd," Befriending Your Kids, Howards, 2000).

Obviously, being able to simply , was a skill supremely underestimated in the Western world. As Dad was fond of pointing out, in America, apart from those who won the lottery, generally all Winners were in possession of a strident voice, which was successfully used to overpower the thrum of all the competing voices, thereby producing a country that was insanely loud, so loud, most of the time no actual meaning could be discerned—only "nationwide white noise." And thus when you met someone who listened, someone content to do nothing but , so overwhelming was the difference, you had the startling and quite lonely epiphany that