Since much has already been made of Hannah’s paramount face, I won’t mention it again, except to say, unlike other Helens of Troy, who can never quite get over their own magnificence, like a pair of perilously high heels they’re always wandering around in (self-consciously stooped over or haughtily towering over everyone), Hannah managed to wear hers day and night and still be only vaguely aware she was wearing shoes. With her, you noticed how exhausting beauty actually was, how used up one might feel after a day of strangers rubbernecking to watch you pour Sweet’N Low into your coffee or pick out the tin of blueberries with the least mold.
“Whatever,” Hannah said, without a trace of false modesty when, one Sunday, Charles commented how great she looked in a black T-shirt and army fatigues. “I’m just a tired old lady.”
There was, too, the problem of her name.
While it cartwheeled off the tongue nimbly enough, more elegantly than, say, Juan San Sebastién Orillos-Marípon (the lip-calisthenics name of Dad’s teaching assistant at Dodson-Miner), I couldn’t help but think there was something criminal about it. Whoever had named her — mother, father, I didn’t know — was a person harrowingly out of touch with reality, because even as an infant, Hannah could never have been one of those troll-babies, and a troll-baby was what you dubbed “Hannah.” (Granted, I was biased: “Thank God that thing’s incarcerated in his carriage. Otherwise, people might start to panic, thinking we have a veritable War of the Worlds on our hands,” Dad said, peering down at a happy, yet decidedly elderly baby parked in an aisle at Office Depot. Then the mother arrived. “I see you’ve met Hannah!” she cried.) If she had to have a common name, she was Edith or Nadia or Ingrid, at the very least, Elizabeth or Catherine; but her glass-slipper name, the one that really fit, was something along the lines of Countess Saskia Lepinska, or Anna-Maria d’Aubergette, even Agnes of Scudge or Ursula of Poland (“Hideous names on beautiful women tend to rumplestiltskin quite nicely,” Dad said).
“Hannah Schneider” fit her like stonewashed Jordache jeans six sizes too big. And once, oddly enough, when Nigel said her name during dinner, I could have sworn I noticed a funny delay in her response, as if, for a split second, she had no idea he was talking to her.
It made me wonder, even if it was solely on the subconscious level, maybe Hannah Schneider didn’t love “Hannah Schneider” either. Maybe she wished she was Angelique von Heisenstagg too.
Many people speak enviously of the Fly on a Wall. They yearn for its characteristics: virtually invisible, yet privy to the secrets and shifty dialogues of an exclusive group of people. And yet, as I was nothing more than a fly on a wall for those first six, maybe seven Sunday afternoons at Hannah’s, I can say with some authority such disregard gets old fairly quickly. (Actually, one could argue flies elicited more attention than I did, because someone always rolled up a magazine and doggedly chased them around a room, and no one did that to me — unless one counted Hannah’s erratic attempts to insert me into the conversation, which I found more embarrassing than the others’ disdain.)
Of course, that very first Sunday ended up nothing more than a disastrous humiliation, in many ways worse than the Study Group at Leroy’s, because at least Leroy and the others had wanted me there (granted, wanted me as their beast of burden, so I could haul them up the steep hill toward eighth grade), but these kids — Charles, Jade and the others — they made it clear my presence at the house was entirely Hannah’s idea, not theirs.
“Know what I hate?” Nigel asked pleasantly as I helped him clear the plates off the dinner table.
“What?” I asked, grateful he was attempting small talk.
“Shy people,” he replied, and of course there was no ambiguity about what shy person had prompted this announcement; I’d remained entirely mute during both dinner and dessert and the one instance Hannah had asked me a question (“You just moved here from Ohio?”), I was so taken aback my voice stumbled on the curb of my teeth. And then, minutes later, when I was pretending to be fascinated by the paperback cookbook Hannah had wedged next to her CD player, Cooking Without Processed Foods (Chiobi, 1984), I overhead Milton and Jade in the kitchen. He was asking her — in all seriousness it seemed — if I spoke English.
She laughed. “She must be one of those Russian mail-order brides,” she said. “With those looks though, Hannah got seriously ripped off. I wonder what the return policy is. Hopefully we can send her back COD.”
Minutes later, Jade was driving me home like a bat out of hell (Hannah must have paid only minimum wage) and I stared out the window, thinking it had been the most horrible night of my life. Obviously I’d never speak to these halfwits, these simpletons (“banal, spiritless teenagers,” Dad would add) ever again. And I wouldn’t give that sadistic Hannah Schneider the time of day either; it was she, after all, who’d lured me to that snake pit, let me flail around with nothing but a chic smile on her face as she chitchatted about homework or what fifth-tier college those slack-jawed mopes hoped to squeeeeze their way into, and then after dinner, that unforgivable way she calmly lit a cigarette, her manicured hand tipped into the air like a delicate teakettle, as if all was fantastic with the world.
But then I don’t know what happened. The following Tuesday, I passed Hannah briefly in Hanover Hall—“See you this weekend?” she called out brightly through the crowd of students; naturally my reaction was that of a deer in headlights — and then, on Sunday, Jade appeared in the driveway again, this time at 2:15 P.M., and the entire window unrolled.
“Coming?” she shouted.
I was powerless as a maiden who’d been fed upon by vampires. Zombielike, I told Dad I’d forgotten about my Study Group and before he could protest, I’d kissed him on the cheek, assured him it was a St. Gallway-sponsored event and fled the house.
Embarrassedly — and then, after a month, kind of resignedly — I settled into my appointed role as fly on the wall, as barely tolerated mute, because the truth was, when it came down to it (and I could never admit this to Dad), being snubbed at Hannah’s was infinitely more electrifying than being mulled over back at the Van Meers’.
Wrapped up like an expensive gift in her emerald batik caftan, her purple and gold sari or some wheat-colored housedress straight out of Peyton Place (for this comparison you had to pretend you didn’t see the cigarette burn at the hip), on Sunday afternoons, Hannah entertained, in the old-fashioned, European sense of the word. Even now, I don’t understand how she managed to prepare those extravagant dinners in her tiny mustard-yellow kitchen — Turkish lamb chops (“with mint sauce”), Thai steak (“with ginger-infused potatoes”), beef noodle soup (“Authentic Pho Bo”), on one less successful occasion, a goose (“with cranberry rub and sage carrot fries”).
She cooked. The very air began to sauté in a reduction of candle, wine, wood, her perfume, and damp animal. We picked through the remains of our homework. The kitchen door swung open, and she stepped forth, a Birth of Venus in a red apron smeared with mint sauce, walking with the fast, swingy grace of Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story, all soft bare feet (if those were toes, what you had was something else altogether, tuds), twinkles at her earlobes, the pronunciation of certain words with little shivers on the endings. (The same word, when you said it, went limp.)