“The Bible,” I said. “Song of Solomon. Chapter 1, Verse 6.”
“Oh,” she said, relieved. “That’s not in the Bible anymore. We threw it out.”
Ms. Harrows had left a note for me. She was at the doctor’s. I was supposed to meet with her third period.
“Do we get to start today?” Wendy asked.
“If everybody remembered to bring in their slips. I’m going to lecture on Shakespeare’s life,” I said. “You don’t know what the forecast for today is, do you?”
“Yeah, it’s supposed to be great.”
I had her collect the refusal slips while I went over my notes. Last year Delilah’s sister Jezebel had filed a grievance halfway through the lecture for “trying to preach promiscuity, birth control, and abortion by saying Anne Hathaway got pregnant before she got married.” “Promiscuity,” “abortion,” “pregnant,” and “before” had all been misspelled.
Everybody had remembered their slips. I sent the refusals to the library and started to lecture.
“Shakespeare—” I said. Paula’s corder clicked on. “William Shakespeare was born on April twenty-third, 1564, in Stratford-on-Avon.”
Rick, who hadn’t raised his hand all year or even given an indication that he was sentient, raised his hand. “Do you intend to give equal time to the Baconian theory?” he said. “Bacon was not born on April twenty-third, 1564. He was born on January twenty-second, 1561.”
Ms. Harrows wasn’t back from the doctor’s by third period, so I started on Delilah’s list. She objected to forty-three references to spirits, ghosts, and related matters, twenty-one obscene words, (“obscene” misspelled), and seventy-eight others that she thought might be obscene, such as pajock and cockles.
Ms. Harrows came in as I was finishing the list and threw her briefcase down. “Stress induced!” she said. “I have pneumonia, and he says my symptoms are stress induced!”
“Is it still cloudy out?”
“It is seventy-two degrees out. Where are we?”
“Morticians International,” I said. “Again. ‘Death presented as universal and inevitable.’ ” I peered at the paper. “That doesn’t sound right.”
Ms. Harrows took the paper away from me. “That’s their ‘Thanatopsis’ protest. They had their national convention last week. They filed a whole set at once, and I haven’t had a chance to sort through them.” She rummaged around in her stack. “Here’s the one on Hamlet. ‘Negative portrayal of interment-preparation personnel—’ ”
“The gravedigger.”
“ ‘—And inaccurate representation of burial regulations. Neither a hermetically sealed coffin nor a vault appear in the scene.’ ”
We worked until five o’clock. The Society for the Advancement of Philosophy considered the line “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” a slur on their profession. The Actors’ Guild challenged Hamlet’s hiring of nonunion employees, and the Drapery Defense League objected to Polonius being stabbed while hiding behind a curtain. “The clear implication of the scene is that the arras is dangerous,” they had written in their brief. “Draperies don’t kill people. People kill people.”
Ms. Harrows put the paper down on top of the stack and took a swig of cough syrup. “And that’s it. Anything left?”
“I think so,” I said, punching reformat and scanning the screen. “Yes, a couple of things. How about, ‘There is a willow grows aslant a brook / That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.’ ”
“You’ll never get away with ‘hoar,’ ” Ms. Harrows said.
Thursday I got to school at seven-thirty to print out thirty copies of Hamlet for my class. It had turned colder and even cloudier in the night. Delilah was wearing a parka and mittens. Her face was a deep scarlet, and her nose had begun to peel.
“ ‘Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings as in obeying the voice of the Lord?’ ” I asked. “First Samuel 15:22.” I patted her on the shoulder.
“Yeow,” she said.
I passed out Hamlet and assigned Wendy and Rick to read the parts of Hamlet and Horatio.
“ ‘The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold,’ ” Wendy read.
“Where are we?” Rick said. I pointed out the place to him. “Oh. ‘It is a nipping and an eager air.’ ”
“ ‘What hour now?’ ” Wendy read.
“ ‘I think it lacks of twelve.’ ”
Wendy turned her paper over and looked at the back. “That’s it?” she said. “That’s all there is to Hamlet? I thought his uncle killed his father and then the ghost told him his mother was in on it and he said ‘To be or not to be’ and Ophelia killed herself and stuff.” She turned the paper back over. “This can’t be the whole play.”
“It better not be the whole play,” Delilah said. She came in, carrying her picket sign. “There’d better not be any ghosts in it. Or cockles.”
“Did you need some Solarcaine, Delilah?” I asked her.
“I need a Magic Marker,” she said with dignity.
I got her one out of the desk. She left, walking a little stiffly, as if it hurt to move.
“You can’t just take parts of the play out because somebody doesn’t like them,” Wendy said. “If you do, the play doesn’t make any sense. I bet if Shakespeare were here, he wouldn’t let you just take things out—”
“Assuming Shakespeare wrote it,” Rick said. “If you take every other letter in line two except the first three and the last six, they spell ‘pig,’ which is obviously a code word for Bacon.”
“Snow day!” Ms. Harrow said over the intercom. Everybody raced to the windows. “We will have early dismissal today at nine-thirty.”
I looked at the clock. It was 9:28.
“The Overprotective Parents Organization has filed the following protest: ‘It is now snowing, and as the forecast predicts more snow, and as snow can result in slippery streets, poor visibility, bus accidents, frostbite, and avalanches, we demand that school be closed today and tomorrow so as not to endanger our children.’ Buses will leave at nine thirty-five. Have a nice spring break!”
“The snow isn’t even sticking on the ground,” Wendy said. “Now we’ll never get to do Shakespeare.”
Delilah was out in the hall, on her knees next to her picket sign, crossing out the word “man” in “Spokesman.”
“The Feminists for a Fair Language are here,” she said disgustedly. “They’ve got a court order,” She wrote “person” above the crossed-out “man.” “A court order! Can you believe that? I mean, what’s happening to our right to freedom of speech?”
“You misspelled ‘person,’ ” I said.
I’VE BEEN IN LOVE WITH SCREWBALL COMEDIES since I first watched Bringing up Baby and Shall We Dance on Academy Matinee. They’re wonderful. They always have a heroine (Jean Arthur) who’s engaged to the wrong person (Ray Milland), and a hero (Cary Grant) who isn’t what he seems to be, and all sorts of smart-aleck or daffy or obnoxious supporting characters. The plot makes almost no sense (usually the hero and heroine have to get married at some point to keep his job or save her reputation or win a bet), but it doesn’t matter because there are all these complications and chases and bantering conversations and sometimes singing and dancing, and you know they’re not going to get it annulled.
“Spice Pogrom” is my heartfelt homage to The More the Merrier, and to It Happened One Night and How to Steal a Million and Little Miss Marker. It’s a tribute to everything I love best about movie comedies: meeting cute and good-hearted chorus girls, and marriages-in-name-only, and traveling incognito, and all those revoltingly adorable little girls. And most of all to the view of the world that says good sense may be in short supply and goodness in even shorter, but sanity (sort of) and true love are still possible.
SPICE POGROM
“You’ve got to talk to him,” Chris said. “I’ve told him there isn’t enough space, but he keeps bringing things home anyway.”
“Things?” S
tewart said absently. He had his head half-turned as if he were listening to someone out of the holographic image.
“Things. A six-foot high Buddha, two dozen baseball caps, and a Persian rug!” Chris shouted at him. “Things I didn’t even know they had on Sony. Today he brought home a piano! How did they even get a piano up here with the weight restrictions?”
“What?” Stewart said. The person who had been talking to him moved into the holo-image, focusing as he entered, put a piece of paper in front of Stewart, and then stood there, obviously waiting for some kind of response. “Listen, Chris, darling, can I put you on hold? Or would you rather call me back?”
It had taken her almost an hour to get him in the first place. “I’ll hold,” she said, and watched the screen grimly as it went back to a two-dimensional wall image on the phone’s screen and froze with Stewart still smiling placatingly at her. Chris sighed and leaned back against the piano. There was hardly room to stand in the narrow hall, but she knew that if she wasn’t right in view when Stewart came back on the line, he’d use it as an excuse to hang up. He’d been avoiding her for the last two days.
Stewart’s image jerked into a nonsmiling one and grew to a full holo-image again. With the piano in here, there wasn’t really enough room for the phone. Stewart’s desk blurred and dissolved on the keyboard, but Chris wanted Stewart to see how crowded the piano made the hall. “Chris, I really don’t have time to worry about a few souvenirs,” he said. “We’ve got real communications difficulties over here with the aliens. The Japanese translation team’s been negotiating with them for a space program for over a week, but the Eahrohhs apparently don’t understand what it is we want.”
“I’m having communications difficulties over here, too,” Chris said. “I tell Mr. Ohghhi …” She stopped and looked at the alien’s name she had written on her hand so she could pronounce it. “Mr. Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh that there isn’t room in my apartment and that he’s got to stop buying things, and he seems to understand what I’m saying, but he goes right on buying. I’ve only got a two-room apartment, Stewart.”
“You could move your couch out of the living room,” he said.
“Then where would I sleep? On top of the piano? You said you’d try to find him someplace else to stay.”
“I’m giving the matter top priority, darling, but you don’t know how impossible it is to find any kind of space at all, let alone space with the kinds of specifications Mr. Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh requires.” A blond young woman moved into the image and put a computer printout down in front of Stewart. Chris braced herself against being put on hold again. “We were already full over here at NASA, and today Houston sent a dozen linguistic specialists up on the shuttle, and I don’t know where we’re going to put them.” He shook his head. “With all these reporters and tourists coming up, there isn’t a spare room on Sony.”
“Can’t you send some of these people back down to earth?” Chris said. “I’ve got two little girls living on my stairs who’re here because they think Spielberg’s bound to make a movie about the aliens so they came up here to try to get a part in it, which is ridiculous. I’m not even sure Spielberg’s still alive, but if he is, he’s got to be at least eighty. Isn’t there some way to send people like that home?”
“You know Sony’s got an automatic thirty-day travel permission wait. It’s been in effect since Sony was first built so that immigrants couldn’t change their minds before they got over shuttle-lag. NASA’s trying to get the Japanese to limit the earth-to-Sony traffic, but so far they’ve refused because they like all the business it’s bringing up.”
“Can’t NASA put on its own limits? They own the shuttle.”
“We don’t want to jeopardize relations with the Japanese. We’ve got too many of our own people who need to come up to see the aliens.”
“And they’re all using my bathroom,” Chris said. “How long will it take you to find another apartment for him?”
“Chris, darling, I don’t think you understand the overcrowding problem we’ve got over here.… Hold on a second, will you?” he said, and flattened and froze.
“We’ve got an overcrowding problem over here, too, Stewart,” Chris said. Someone rang the bell. “Come in,” Chris shouted, and then was sorry.
Molly came in. “My mother thaid to tell you to get off the phone,” she said, lisping the word “said.”
“I’m really six,” Molly had told her without a trace of a lisp the day she and her mother moved onto the landing outside Chris’s apartment, “but six is box-office poison, because your teeth are going to fall out pretty soon, so my screen age is four and a half.” She was certainly dressed to look four and a half today, in a short yellow smock with ducks embroidered on it and a giant yellow bow in her shingled brown bob.
“My mother thayth to tell you we’re eckthpecting a call from my agent,” she said, with her dimpled hands on her hips.
“Your mother does not have phone privileges in this apartment. Your agent can call you on the pay phone in the hall.”
“It’th a holo-call,” Molly said, and strolled over to the piano. “He thaid he’d call at thickthteen-thirty. Did you know thum new people moved in on the thtairs today?”
“A slut and an old guy,” Bets said, coming into the hall. She was wearing a pink dress with a sash, pink ribbon bows, and black patent-leather shoes, “My mother says to ask you how we’re supposed to get the lead in Spielberg’s movie if we can’t talk to our agent.”
“How could new people move in?” Chris said. Molly’s mother had sublet half of the landing to Bets (who was also six according to Molly, even though she swore she was five) and her mother last week, and Chris had thought at the time that the only good thing about it was that nobody else could move in because Mr. Nagisha’s cousins were renting the hall outside Chris’s apartment, and Mr. Nagisha himself was living in the downstairs hall.
“Mr. Nagithha rented them the thtairth,” Molly said, plunking the piano keys, “for twenty thouthand yen apiethe.”
“The slut says she’s in show business,” Bets said archly, patting her golden curls, “but I think she’s a hooker.”
“The old guy came up to thee the alienth,” Molly said, banging out “Chopsticks.” “He thayth he’th alwayth wanted to meet one. My mother thayth he’th thenile.”
“Chris,” Stewart said, his face expanding out from the screen. Molly stopped banging on the piano. Bets tossed her yellow curls. They both turned and flashed Stewart a dimpled smile.
“They were just leaving,” Chris said hastily, and pushed them out of the hall.
“What adorable little girls!” Stewart said. “Do they live in your apartment building?”
“They live on the stairs, Stewart. At last count, so do four other people, not counting Mr. Nagisha’s cousins, who are living in the hall outside my apartment. They use my bathroom and make earthside calls on my phone, and I don’t have room for them or for Mr. Ogyfen … whatever his name is.”
“Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh,” Stewart said disapprovingly. “You’re going to have to learn how to pronounce his name properly. You don’t want to make him angry. I’ve told you before how important it is we don’t do anything that might offend the Eahrohhs.”
“He can’t stay here, Stewart.”
He looked aghast. Chris thought about putting him on hold that way. It was better than his frozen smile. “You can’t mean that, Chris. The negotiations are at an incredibly delicate stage. We can’t risk having anything upset them. It’s a matter of national security. Besides, NASA intends to make generous compensation to people whose apartments have been requisitioned.”
“You work for NASA. Why can’t he stay with you?”
“Chris, darling, we’ve been through all this before. You know Mother’s xenophobic. Just the thought of the Eahrrohhs being on Sony has given her terrible migraines. And you know Mr. Oghhifoehnnahigrheeh has to have ceilings at least twelve feet high for his vertical claustrophobia, and you were the only
other person I knew who had ceilings that high. The Japanese didn’t design Sony for Americans. It’s hard enough to find buildings with even normal American ceilings, let alone twelve-foot ones. And with the Eahrohhs’ privacy fetish, we can’t ask them to double up with people.”
“I know, Stewart,” Chris said, “but …”
“The only twelve-foot ceilings on Sony are in the apartment buildings Misawa designed. Like your building.”
And your mother’s, Chris thought.
“It’ll only be for a few more days. We’re currently negotiating with the Japanese to transfer the Eahrohhs down to Houston. When that happens, you’ll have your apartment all to yourself again.” He pressed some buttons on his desk. “Darling, I’ve got a call coming in. Can’t we …”
The door to her apartment slid open, and someone said, “Hey, this is great!”
She looked back at Stewart. He had flattened out again, this time with a decidedly impatient look on his face.
“My room in here,” Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh said, and squeezed past Chris carrying two shopping bags, a bouquet of cherry blossoms, and what looked like a tent. The pockets of his long orange coat looked lumpy, too, but Chris hadn’t figured out yet which of the bulges and lumps were part of Mr. Ohghhifoennahigrheeh’s peculiar shape and which weren’t.
He looked a little like a sack of potatoes with short, wide legs and arms. His legs and arms were lumpy, too, and so was his head, except for the top, which was round and bald and surrounded by a fringe of fine pinkish-orange hair that extended down the sides of his face in wispy sideburns. “Except for he’s an alien, he’d never make it in the movies,” Bets had said the first time she’d seen him.
“Mr. Ohghhifoeh …” She stopped and looked down at her hand to get the name right. “Mr. Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh, I have to talk to you. You’ve got to stop buying things. There simply isn’t any more room for …”