Dropping the ‘H’ Bomb
by Dominic Hilton
November 2021
“You know perfectly well,” I whispered in her ear, “that no one who wears shoes like that ever went to Harvard.”
We were waiting in line outside a health food store in Buenos Aires. Exactly two metres ahead of us, an august silvery-haired couple in matching tweed jackets and blue jeans were locking pinkies. Exactly two metres behind, slouching against a decorative gold lamppost, a plump young emo couple with green and purple hair grumbled incoherently. It was the early days of the pandemic, and the strong autumnal sun felt warm and welcome on my forehead.
“Peppermint tea!” Catherine silently snapped her fingers inside her leather gloves, her smile smothered by a grape-red face mask. “What else?”
“Olive oil,” I tried to say.
“Hm? What’s that?”
“Olive. Oil. I can barely speak in this thing.”
An old crone gingerly mounted the nearby curb. She was dressed in full mourning, hunched over a knobby wooden cane.
“Oh, yes, right,” Catherine said. “Olive oil. Fourteen dollars a bottle, now—did I tell you that? When we first moved here it was only two hundred pesos.”
“Wasn’t two hundred pesos fourteen dollars back then?”
Catherine shrugged. “Who remembers?”
I unbuttoned two buttons of my shirt. A police patrol car idled by, lights flashing. The couple in the tweed jackets linked arms. The comatose emo couple didn’t move a muscle.
“Stop touching your face mask,” Catherine said.
“Wasn’t.”
“You were. I saw you. You keep pulling at it. It spreads germs.”
I rolled my eyes. “Well, what do you expect? I can’t breathe in this thing. Isn’t shortness of breath one of the symptoms?”
“Don’t be silly. Try to enjoy the sun while we’re outside.”
Something tickled my hip. I looked down to spot a small dead-eyed girl staring up at me.
“¡Hola!” I said, but she just continued to stare silently, as if I was a zoo animal that she didn’t quite believe was real.
Six metres behind us, her tennis shoes touching the very edge of the white demarcation line, the girl’s mother started to shriek in Spanish. “Alma, keep away from those people! Get back here, right now!”
The girl had her makeshift mask tucked under her chin and a chubby finger stuck in her mouth. She mumbled something that I didn’t catch. Then, still chewing on her finger, she slowly retreated backwards into her mother’s outstretched arms.
“Dear me,” Catherine said to herself. “What a world.”
“Alright, so let’s imagine that, on some particular day in the recent past, the woman was forcibly removed off the Harvard campus.”
The security guard let someone into the store ahead of us. We all shuffled forward two metres as a short, greasy-haired woman tottered past us wearing a welder’s visor and a tight-fitting hoodie with the words I WAS KICKED OUT OF HARVARD emblazoned across her large, jiggling chest.
“Well, I doubt that,” I said to Catherine, who was giving me one of her looks.
“Doubt what?”
I indicated the subject of my remark with a nod of my head. “I doubt that woman was ever kicked out of Harvard.”
Catherine groaned. “Oh, for heaven’s sake. How would you know?”
“Are you serious?” I tugged again at my clammy face mask. “For one thing, did you see her shoes?”
“What about her shoes?” Catherine asked.
“They were those giant platform jobbies,” I said, “with cheap metal studs sticking out every which way.”
There was zero conviction in Catherine’s voice. “And?”
I hadn’t expected this. I thought she’d be on my side. ““And?”” I said, a little too loud. “What do you mean, “And?”?”
The attractive couple in front turned to watch. I raised both eyebrows at them in a jolly sort of way. Then I moved nearer to Catherine, lowering my voice.
“You know perfectly well,” I whispered in her ear, “that no one who wears shoes like that ever went to Harvard.”
Catherine blinked three or four times above her face mask. “Is that right?” she said at length. “So you’re saying that you can tell, just by looking at a person’s shoes, whether or not they went to Harvard?”
I nodded. “Anyone can.”
A few seconds ticked by. Then Catherine took a long sideways step away from me. “Okay, Sherlock Holmes.”
“Unfair,” I protested. “I said anyone can. I’m saying that woman never went to Harvard.”
For some reason, Catherine started patting at the tiny pockets of her skirt. Habit, I think. “We’ve had this conversation before,” she said. “Or something exactly like it. What’s your point?”
I cleared my throat, before adopting the professorial voice that always drives her nuts. “Well,” I said, “think about it. If that woman never went to Harvard, it only stands to reason that she was never kicked out of Harvard.”
Catherine was now rummaging inside one of the shopping bags. We’d bought a kilo of beef from the butchers earlier and doubtless she was worrying it would get ruined in the sun. “Unless the reason she was kicked out is because she didn’t go there,” she said into the bag.
“What’s that?”
She lifted her head. “I said, maybe the reason the girl was kicked out of Harvard is precisely because she didn’t go there in the first place.”
I frowned. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“It makes perfect sense,” Catherine insisted.
“No, it doesn’t,” I said, with a firm shake of the head. “You can’t get kicked out of somewhere you were never in in the first place.”
“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘in’ is,” Catherine said.
I let that one slide. “Alright,” I argued, “so let’s imagine that, on some particular day in the recent past, the woman was forcibly removed off the Harvard campus—on charges of trespassing, or something like that.”
“Fine.”
“Well, that’s clearly not the same thing as having been kicked out of Harvard in the way that her hoodie implies, is it?” I said. “Her hoodie implies that she was once a fully-enrolled student at Harvard University, reading Classics, or Advanced Mathematics, or something equally clever—but that she was subsequently kicked out of the venerable institution for bad behaviour of some unspecified kind.”
Catherine slapped my hand. “You’re touching your face mask again.”
“And besides,” I continued, “what was she even doing there?”
“Where?”
“At Harvard.”
“You know perfectly well that no one who wears shoes like that ever went to Harvard.”
The small girl reappeared at my hip, wearing the same fish-like expression, and her mother started yelling again. The girl went away.
Catherine gave a loud tut. “What’s the matter with you? You said she was never at Harvard.”
The stately couple turned once more to gawp at us, and it occurred to me that they looked exactly like people who had gone to Harvard. Also, people who understood English.
“Yes,” I said to Catherine, “but you said she was there, but got kicked out because she didn’t go there.”
“What are you talking about?”
I laughed. “So, what was she doing there if she wasn’t there?”
“This is ridiculous,” Catherine said. “You’re being ridiculous. Haven’t you got anything better to do?”
I glanced around. The line wasn’t moving, and the emo couple were still slouched against the lamppost. “Not really,” I said.
“Maybe you’re right,” Catherine said. “Maybe you have got the virus. Does it eat away at people’s brains?”
“Was she sneaking into seminars?” I continued.
“We should get you tested.”
I paused. “So, to recap, according to you, the busty woman in the cheap platform shoes who walked past us earlier flew from Buenos Aires to Boston, via Miami, at vast expense, just to sneak into seminars at Harvard, from which she was eventually kicked out, for not passing the entrance exam, or paying her fees, or whatever, and as a token was then presented with an extra small hoodie stating the facts of her circumstance?”
“Yes, that’s right,” Catherine said in a flat voice. “Pretty clever, if you ask me.”
“Clever?”
“It shows initiative. Doesn’t it cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to Harvard these days?”
This annoyed me. “That was my point, wasn’t it?”
“Was it?” She hesitated a moment before striking her final blow. “I thought you were suggesting that the woman wasn’t smart enough to go to Harvard. I see now that you mean she was just too poor.”
The couple in front of us began to laugh as I shuffled my feet, thinking how snobby and fascistic they looked in their perfect, matching outfits.
“Actually,” I said weakly, “I was suggesting both.”
Something had caught Catherine’s eye. She was staring fixedly over my shoulder. Laugh lines appeared around the corners of her eyes, and she pointed one of her gloved fingers. “Look!” she said, triumphantly.
I turned around. A young man was walking past us the other way. His T-shirt read, in large English print, YOU KNOW NOTHING.
When I turned back to face Catherine, she was shaking her head slowly at me. The queue moved up again.
OK, I thought, so that’s how you want to play it, is it?
“What about the T-shirt we saw a couple of months back?” I said.
Catherine sighed an exasperated sigh. “What T-shirt? What now?”
“That woman from the slum,” I said, “climbing out of that enormous bin, wearing a T-shirt that said, NEW YORK IS ALWAYS A GOOD IDEA.”
“How do you remember these things?” Catherine asked, anxiously checking on the beef again.
“I wrote it down,” I explained.
“God help us,” Catherine said. It wasn’t clear if she was referring to me or to the meat.
“According to your logic,” I told her, “that same toothless woman from the slum, hunting for scraps in a public bin with all that muck smeared across her face, regularly flies back and forth between Buenos Aires and New York. Do you really believe that it is at all likely that she’s ever even once visited New York?”
“Tea, olive oil—I know we’ve forgotten something else,” Catherine said.
The security guard waved the handsome woman in the tweed jacket into the store. Her identically dressed husband was ordered to wait outside, his theatrical protests casually ignored.
“They’re only letting in one person at a time,” Catherine said. “You go stand over there, away from the queue.”
“Hot sauce,” I said.
“Huh?”
“We need hot sauce.”
“Oh, that’s true!” Catherine exclaimed. “What else have we forgotten? Come on, try to think. I’m not leaving the house again for another week.”
I tried to think, but instead I said, “Eighty percent of Argentines want to leave Argentina altogether.”
“To go to Harvard?” Catherine asked flippantly.
“To go anywhere,” I said. “The article I read was from last year, too. The percentage is probably higher now, what with everything.”
The man in the tweed jacket was staring now. I caught his eye and he addressed me in a loud voice through his face mask. “Americanos?”
“Ingleses.”
He stood nodding to himself.
“Peanut butter!” I said to Catherine, but she was already halfway inside the store.
