From the Improvement Era, February 1954 –

Formula for Fun!

By Estelle Webb Thomas

Grandma couldn’t get it. Neither could I, for that matter. How Susie, who never gets the same answer twice when adding two and two and thinks milk turns sour because it thunders, should decide to take chemistry. But if there’s one thing you learn from being a brother to a girl like Susie, it’s tact. And then, I’ve found if you wait long enough, someone’s bound to say it for you and if it’s the wrong remark, they’re in the soup instead of you. Not bad reasoning, eh? Well, as Dad says, Sue’s education is a family affair. We’re all in it together.

It was Sally who came up with the answer. She’s Susie’s best friend, though why, is the sixty-four dollar question. Whatever Sally may have, it certainly isn’t tact. While the family handle sensitive Sue with kid gloves, as Grandma puts it, Sally uses a pickax. Sue was patiently trying to explain her choice of chemistry to Grandma, without much success.

“It just never would have entered my head when I was a girl!” Grandma said, looking bewildered.

“Naturally not, Grandma,” Sue answered with dignity. “It would not enter my head to sit and sew carpet rags for four or five hours a day, as you did when you were a girl.”

“But I had a rag carpet to start my married life with. How’s your chemistry going to help you there?”

“If I decide to marry,” Sue said coldly, “and whether I do or not, it will help in all sorts of ways. This is an atomic age, Grandma. One simply must have a knowledge of — of the laws that govern the universe — ”

“Wait a minute!” I interrupted, “aren’t you getting into advanced physics or something?”

Sue looked confused, “Well, I only enrolled yesterday. But it’s all the same thing. One can’t go on being blissfully ignorant at such a vital period of the world’s history; one simply has to — ”

“In other words, Grandma,” shouted Sally (because her grandmother is deaf, she always yells at ours — see what I mean about tact?), “in other words, there are eleven boys in the class — and Sue!”

“You mean — ?”

“Exactly. Susie’s the only girl in the class! You understand her sudden interest in chemistry now?”

Sally and Grandma laughed in that odious way people do when they’re discussing you as if you weren’t present. Somehow, although I razz Susie’ a lot, it always makes me boil when other people do. I said, “Oh, Formy’ll be there, in case she needs a chaperone.”

Sue gave me a glance that showed she appreciated that. After all, we’ve never failed each other in a crisis, although she puts quite a strain on friendly relations at times. Formy, I might explain, is Mr. Ferris. Away back in antiquity, some kid called him “Mr. Formula,” and the name stuck. He doesn’t mind. He even laughs if someone absent-mindedly calls him “Formy” to his face.

I wondered if there could be something in Sally’s crack when Susie took so long to dress next morning that she missed breakfast. She dashed downstairs at the last possible minute, breathlessly explaining she had overslept, kissed Mother and Grandma, and shook hands with Dad. Then she was out of the door calling, “Come on, Johnny, we’ll be late!”

“What’s the rush?” I grumbled, grabbing a piece of toast with one hand and my books with the other. But I was pretty sure it was to avoid comment on the fact she was wearing her new coral sweater and her pearls. Susie has been heard to say it is poor taste to wear jewelry to school.

It always looks sort of funny to see Dad and Sue shake hands so formally whenever she leaves the house. Susie has always been a great one to kiss us all good-bye as if she was leaving forever. But after Dad had gone to the office several times, with big, red kisses here and there, wherever Susie happened to light in her hurried flight and been razzed about it by the office force, he had it out with her.

“Susie,” Dad said solemnly, “you and I have been on kissing terms ever since the day we first met, haven’t we?”

“Sure, Daddy. Why?” Sue looked wide-eyed and puzzled.

“I want you to understand that, theoretically, we still are,” Dad went on, in the same tone. Then he said, irritably, “But hanged if I’m going to be the laughingstock of the office! Would you mind just shaking hands hereafter?”

Naturally, Sue was a little hurt and said, with dignity, that there were plenty of people who would be glad of the chance to kiss her. But Dad was firm, and so they simply shake hands except when Sue has scrubbed her warpaint off.

I don’t know what Susie learned in chemistry class that morning, but I learned why she was taking it. I happened to glance out of the library window at the end of the first period and saw her coming across the campus with Lex Brink. He was carrying her chemistry book. She was looking up into his face and he was looking down into hers until I wondered how they could tell where they were going. But since he’s the most perfectly co-ordinated member of the basketball squad, of course he couldn’t fall down, and no doubt he was guiding her by radio control. They may learn those things in chem. I wouldn’t know, I haven’t taken it.

But I hated to see Sue going all out for a guy like Lex. I figured we’d have another broken heart to cope with before long. That evening I tried to kid her about it a little, but she was very Big Sister, and I was demoted to the adolescent again. “Lex? He just happened to walk to study hall with me. I’m not even to do lab with him. Formy paired us off for lab, and Lex has Arthur.”

“Who did you get?”

“Paul. Lex acted sort of disappointed. I think he naturally thought, since I’m the only girl, Formy would put us together.” She smiled, self-consciously, “He said, coming across the campus, that was an axiom.”

“What’s an axiom?”

“Lex says it’s a self-evident truth. I’ll have to learn all those definitions. He talks so cute in chemical terms!”

As the weeks went by, Susie began using a lot of technical terms around home.

Lab was fun, she said, and Paul was a whiz, but she let him do the experiments alone at first, while she watched. Later, she’d take an active part. Poor, trusting Paul, I thought.

“You know, Grandma,” Susie said, one evening, as we sat around the fireplace, “wood used to be simply wood, and coal, coal!”

“What is it now?”

“Thanks to chemistry, it’s rayon and dozens of other things we couldn’t get along without.”

“Got along without ’em once!” Grandma said, unimpressed.

“Oh, Grandma!” Sue’s tone said all the things her lips were too polite to utter.

Just as I feared, Susie came home from the next lab session with her bangs singed. She was very nonchalant about it, and said gaily, “You should see Paul! He hasn’t a sign of an eyebrow left!”

“What happened?”

“Well, I was trying to prove the conception of combustion as oxidation and got confused — ”

“Never mind,” Dad said, passing the sweet potatoes, “eat your dinner.”

“Did you know chemists have discovered one hundred and eighteen uses for the sweet potato?” Sue asked, taking one and looking at it as if it were a molecule or something.

“They were created for food!” Grandma said sternly, as if Sue had been sacrilegious.

“Milk, dear?” Mother held the pitcher, ready to pour some on the troubled waters.

“Milk provides material for buttons, ornaments, telephone instruments — ” The telephone cut Susie’s lecture short, and everybody laughed. She came back to the table with her eyes shining. “Lex wants me to go to the show. Whatever will I do with these scorched bangs? Guess I’ll have to curl them, and curled bangs aren’t my type.”

“Surely chemistry has some solution for that!” Grandma sniffed. But Sue only laughed.

As the winter wore on, Susie had dates with Lex fairly often and went out occasionally with others of her classmates, except Paul. Paul never came around. I figured he thought he had done his duty by the femme fatale when he took lab with her, for Sue was actually a dangerous woman. She blew Paul up and otherwise injured him so often he took it as a matter of course. She said, resentfully, we didn’t need to waste so much sympathy on Paul — she didn’t get off scot-free. And it was true. She could match acid burn for acid burn, cut for cut. (Formy said Sue had the highest record for broken retorts in the history of the class.)

Paul was a shy, quiet sort of guy who didn’t seem to care much for girls and probably never would after this experience with Susie. I imagine that’s why Formy teamed them together in lab. He thought Paul wouldn’t lose his head over a girl companion.

Just before Christmas holidays, Susie came home rather pale and silent. At dinner, she seemed to have no, appetite. I passed her the hominy and urged her to have some, “You know, corn yields paper, acids, starch, and alcohol for motor fuel, and even as hominy, it’s pretty good.”

But instead of an admiring smile for effort, she gave me a look of horror.

“Never joke about that horrible chemistry again!” she said, bursting into tears.

“Why, honey, what’s wrong?” Dad asked, and Susie sobbed, “If I could ev-ever remember the silly old for-formulas! The l-least little old pinch of something makes all the d-difference!” And she started boo-hooing again.

“What happened, dear?” Mother demanded, anxiously.

“She’s blown up the science building,” Grandma said, calmly, “and we’ll all be hanged for arson.”

Susie wiped her eyes. Grandma’s sweeping statement made her crime look small by comparison, just as Grandma intended.

“N-not the whole building,” she stammered, “j-just Paul!”

“Oh, only Paul.” Grandma wagged her head, “Let’s hope his mother has other children and won’t miss him. Some people are ridiculously narrowminded about a missing child!”

“Paul isn’t a child, and he isn’t missing!” Susie cried, indignantly. “They took him home as soon as it happened! Anyway, it was only his foot and some of his leg. But that was mostly trousers.”

“Suppose we hear about it,” Dad said, sighing, “but spare us the technical details. I take it whatever happened was your fault, as usual?”

“Well,” Susie said resentfully, “Formy wants us to make experiments! I don’t know yet what I did wrong. I guess I just wasn’t noticing closely when I measured. Lex was telling me about the game last Friday, when I was sick, you know, and suddenly I saw my solution begin to fizz. I hurried and set the basin on the floor, and Paul — Paul came along and stepped into it!”

“Well?”

“It ate the leg of his trousers quite badly below the knee and — and his skin, too! He kept saying it didn’t hurt much,” she hastened to add, “and the doctor said he wouldn’t miss too much school, as part of it is holidays!”

But Paul evidently didn’t hold feelings. He sent Sue a funny Christmas card he had written one of those “little Willie” verses on:

“Little Willie’s gone to heaven,
We shall never see him more,
For what he thought was H 2 O
Was H 2 SO 4 !”

Sue made him a cake and wrote a little note promising it wouldn’t blow up in his face. She called up quite often, and she and I went to see him several times. But it embarrassed Paul for her to feel so bad about the accident.

“Gives me a chance to catch up on my notes,” he said, “and if you’ll bring your notebook over, I’ll do it while I’m about it.” Sue sent it over by me because she was going skating with Lex.

“Poor Paul can’t come back for a couple of weeks because on top of his burn, he got flu! Isn’t it awful?” Susie sang out, dashing in the day after school commenced again.

“That why you look so happy?”

“No, silly! I’m just sick about hurting him, but guess what?”

“You’re cooking up something to finish the job?” I guessed.

“Don’t be childish! I’m going to do lab with Lex! He asked Formy right out, and Formy couldn’t think of an excuse so — !”

It happened at the time of Sue’s very first accident — with him, I mean. And as Sue’s accidents went, it was a very small one, at that. He actually got mad and blew up under his own power. He said a chemistry lab was no place for a rattlebrained girl, and for his part he thought a woman’s place was in the home. Susie told him that was exactly where she was going, and she intended to stay there and hoped she’d never see his face again.

He said if he could only be sure she’d let him keep his face, he didn’t care whether she looked at it or not. It suited him just the way it was without any of her chemical experiments on it.

Susie was so upset she couldn’t eat her dinner again. I’m certainly thankful my appetite isn’t tied in with my emotions the way hers seems to be.

“Why, the big — if I ever again — of all the nerve!” she kept bursting out, throwing down her fork and twisting her napkin.

“Just what did you do, dear?” Mother asked, fearfully, and Grandma warned, “Better not ask. Leave the rest of us our appetites!”

“Oh, it was nothing! I didn’t burn him or blow him up or anything! I just wasn’t sure what was in this bottle, the label had come off — so I uncorked it and stuck it under his nose to see if he could tell by the smell.”

“That was all?”

“Well — it was super-strong ammonia, and he took a big whiff and — well, it knocked him down!”

“Oh.”

“I don’t think he’d have cared if all the other boys hadn’t laughed so hard. Lex hates being laughed at.”

“It doesn’t seem — ” Grandma was beginning, but Sue went on, “Of course, it did raise quite a turkey egg where his head hit the table leg. But all that fuss!” Grandma got up from the table and walked into her room. “I’m still glad I stuck to carpet rags!” she muttered.

Although she tried not to show it, Susie was pretty sober for the next few days. Then, believe it or not, Lex called her on the phone and asked her to the show, and Sue went with him. I knew everything was patched up when I heard them coming up the walk afterward, and I heard him say, as he left that night, “Lab as usual, tomorrow, Sue?”

“If you can trust me!” Susie laughed, and ran into the house.

So I was not prepared for what I saw from the library window next morning. There was Susie coming across the campus, but Lex was not with her. Neither were any of the other boys, though several were tagging behind like the forgotten men they were. I blinked twice before I recognized the fellow carrying her books and looking down at her with that unmistakable expression. (I should know it, I’ve seen it often enough, directed toward Sue.) He was limping slightly and looked sort of pale under his black hair, but I saw, after a moment, that it was Paul.

Susie was carrying what looked like a pane of glass, and when they met me in the hall, she showed it to me. “See what Paul made while he was sick, Johnny!” I’ll admit it was kind of pretty, though I could never see myself doing a thing like that for a girl. He had etched an intricate design of for-get-me-nots (Sue said they were) on the glass, and in the center, in fancy letters, her name.

“And he did all my notes up so neatly!” Susie added, smiling up at him, as if she hadn’t half-killed the poor guy a few weeks ago.

“But what about Lex?” I asked, “I guess I’m sort of slow on the uptake—”

“That’s a postulate!” Sue said, pertly.

“Or rather, an axiom!” Paul corrected her.

“But — but did you ditch Lex?” Ipersisted. The last I knew she was crazy about the guy.

“That was my solution,” Sue said, laughing, and Paul murmured something that sounded like Q.E.F.

I could see there was nothing more to be got out of them then, but that night Susie told me all about it. She said Q.E.F. meant quod erat faciendum, and that meant “which was to be done.” Then she said she found the etched glass on her desk when she got to class and her notebook, all filled up-to-date. “But the thing that decided mc it had been Paul all the time and not that big — and not Lex,” said Susie, being generous to the vanquished, “was this verse he had written in my notebook. He said he found it in a book of poetry his mother had, and it described me perfectly! Honestly, Johnny, after a tribute like that, what could I do?”

I read the verse:

“You are the spirit of the morning seas,
You are the awakening and the glad surprise;
You tint the skies and fill the world
With laughter and with light.”

Poor Paul, I thought, dream on! You’ll be lucky if she doesn’t tint the sky with flying atoms and fill the world with detonating hydrogen, if she keeps on monkeying with chemistry! But I didn’t say it aloud. After all, I didn’t want to spoil that sort of lovely, shining look on Sue’s face.