White Noise - Don Delillo [23]
“It’s amazing how many people teach these days,” I said. “There is a teacher for every person. Everyone I know is either a teacher or a student. What do you think it means?”
He looked off toward a closet door.
“Do you teach anything else?” I said.
“Meteorology.”
“Meteorology. How did that come about?”
“My mother’s death had a terrible impact on me. I collapsed totally, lost my faith in God. I was inconsolable, withdrew completely into myself. Then one day by chance I saw a weather report on TV A dynamic young man with a glowing pointer stood before a multicolored satellite photo, predicting the weather for the next five days. I sat there mesmerized by his self-assurance and skill. It was as though a message was being transmitted from the weather satellite through that young man and then to me in my canvas chair. I turned to meteorology for comfort. I read weather maps, collected books on weather, attended launchings of weather balloons. I realized weather was something I’d been looking for all my life. It brought me a sense of peace and security I’d never experienced. Dew, frost and fog. Snow flurries. The jet stream. I believe there is a grandeur in the jet stream. I began to come out of my shell, talk to people in the street. ‘Nice day.’ ‘Looks like rain.’ ‘Hot enough for you?’ Everyone notices the weather. First thing on rising, you go to the window, look at the weather. You do it, I do it. I made a list of goals I hoped to achieve in meteorology. I took a correspondence course, got a degree to teach the subject in buildings with a legal occupancy of less than one hundred. I’ve taught meteorology in church basements, in trailer parks, in people’s dens and living rooms. They came to hear me in Millers Creek, Lumberville, Watertown. Factory workers, housewives, merchants, members of the police and the fire. I saw something in their eyes. A hunger, a compelling need.”
There were little holes in the cuffs of his thermal undershirt. We were standing in the middle of the room. I waited for him to go on. It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.
When I got home, Bob Pardee was in the kitchen practicing his golf swing. Bob is Denise’s father. He said he was driving through town on his way to Glassboro to make a presentation and thought he’d take us all to dinner.
He swung his locked hands in slow motion over his left shoulder, following through smoothly. Denise eyed him from a stool by the window. He wore a half shaggy cardigan with sleeves that draped over the cuffs.
“What kind of presentation?” she said.
“Oh, you know. Charts, arrows. Slap some colors on a wall. It’s a basic outreach tool, sweetheart.”
“Did you change jobs again?”
“I’m raising funds. Busy as hell, too, better believe.”
“What kind of funds?”
“Just whatever’s out there, you know? People want to give me food stamps, etchings. Hey, great, I don’t mind.”
He was bent over a putt. Babette leaned on the refrigerator door with her arms folded, watching him. Upstairs a British voice said: “There are forms of vertigo that do not include spinning.”
“Funds for what?” Denise said.
“There’s a little thing you might have had occasion to hear of, called the Nuclear Accident Readiness Foundation. Basically a legal defense fund for the industry. Just in case kind of thing.”
“Just in case what?”
“Just in case I faint from hunger. Let’s sneak up on some ribs, why don’t we? You got your leg men, you got your breast men. Babette, what do you say? I’m about semiprepared to slaughter my own animal.”
“How many jobs is this anyway?”
“Don’t pester me, Denise.”
“Never mind, I don’t care, do what you want.”
Bob took the three older kids to the Wagon Wheel. I drove Babette to the river-edge house where she would read to Mr. Treadwell, the blind old man who lived there with his sister. Wilder sat between us, playing with the supermarket tabloids that Treadwell favored as reading matter. As a volunteer reader to the blind, Babette had