Anthropology of an American Girl (16 page)

Would Jack feel better or worse knowing that because the back of my
neck was pressed against the wall, I could hear but not see Nico’s zipper coming undone with one sharp shot. And unwillingly, I memorized the feel of my two wrists fitting into someone’s one hand, and the feel of drunken gasps on my neck going in time with strokes that tore me open, and the feel of a stranger’s hair against my skin.

“Rapture” by Blondie played. It seemed to play exponentially, with each next verse multiplying out. Surely no one had described that to Jack, or the part about Mary banging on the bathroom door and pushing it open onto the three of us, shrieking,
“Get out of my house!”
and
“You tramp!”
Did people include in the notes they passed a description of her nails going into my arms when she dragged me into the hallway with my pants around my ankles? How when I reached down to dress, there were streams of someone else’s fluid running down my inner thighs? How I stumbled down the stairs, how I ran out the front door, how I had hoped against hope that no one had noticed?

The night was moonless but not entirely unkind. Three bodies appeared. Rocky Santiago and his younger brother, Manny, and some underclassman whose name I could not recall. Rocky eased me into the passenger seat of his dented Chevy. My bike fit into his trunk. He drove cautiously toward East Hampton from Amagansett, and Manny followed in his friend’s car, cautiously also.

Rocky asked was I okay.

I felt bad not to answer. I could not get past this feeling, this harrowing after-feeling, a feeling beyond grasp or intelligence. Beyond any obvious comparison to having been robbed or cheated, inside I
felt
robbed and cheated. Inside, I felt the physics of injustice, which, as it turns out, has little or nothing to do with the language of injustice. The indisputable wrongness of someone’s having taken something that did not belong to them, filthied something that I’d kept clean, made their mark on property that was mine, and contemptibly crossed over into
my
intimacy in defiance of
my
desire, was all distant conjecture compared to the pragmatics of my situation—the pulled muscle in my neck, the cut on my mouth possibly from a watch, the stinging scratches on my arms made by Mary, the dampness in my underwear not from me, the surface abrasions and internal hairline splits that I could not mention to Rocky despite
his kind interest because it is hard for people to understand the inside of a girl, the way it is shaped like a conch with filigreed avenues that are spectacular and ornamental. People tend to think it’s just a hole.

I asked him to pull over and when he did, I leaned out to vomit. Manny turned off the headlights on the second car to give me privacy.

When we arrived at my house, Rocky shifted the arm of the car into park and asked was I all right to go in on my own. I said that I was. Maybe I was in shock, but I didn’t feel embarrassed with him. I had the feeling he’d seen enough of the world to understand the random brutality of instinct and to know I was not to blame for what had happened to me. He’d come from Colombia in 1976, from Pereira. His real name was Raúl. I would have liked to know about his home, about what had made his family leave it for East Hampton of all places, but I didn’t want to make him nervous with talk. We both knew that it would have made the story of my assault far more plausible if I’d blamed
him
for what the others had done. It would have made me a more credible victim. It was good of him to take a chance on me.

“Thanks, Raúl,” I said, waving my hand weakly.

He ran his fingers through his hair, scratching the back of his scalp. “No problem, Evie.”

Rocky walked to the rear of the car, lifted the bike out of the trunk, and waited for me to join him. Then he stood watchfully as I moved down the driveway. The dimmed headlights of the two idling cars poured onto the ground. They were waiting headlights, fraternal and discreet. When I reached the garage door, I turned and waved again, not realizing then that the timing of Rocky’s benevolence, the gentlemanly readiness of his heart, had reversed in one elegant gesture the violence I’d experienced. In fact, it saved me. It was poetry, really—the random enmity, the random good.

Jack was saying that I should have done something. That reporting it to the police would have been cathartic. “You know,” he said, “like, helpful.”

It was a funny suggestion, the part about the police, coming from him. I was sorry for my involvement in an incident that would cause him to betray the basic tenets of his thinking.

Even if he was right, it was easy to say in retrospect what would have been the sensible thing to do. At the time, I did not feel sensible. At the time I was too busy thinking. Should I slice off the top layer of my skin? Should I scrape the lip marks from my neck? Would I use a knife for that, and with that knife could I make a pocket in my belly wide enough for a hand to reach in and remove the contaminated organs? I had the compulsive desire to scrub each fleshy gelatin piece of myself in acid. Periodically throughout the night I would tell myself to get over it, to act practically, to take a shower. Instantly after, I would drop back to the floor of my room, made sick by the thought of my own body, afraid to glimpse even the smallest portion of my undressed self. It didn’t seem possible that they’d had ink on their fingers, but somehow I was sure that underneath I looked splotchy like a zebra. Not a zebra, but one of the spotted kinds of animals. I just thought of zebras because of the sorrowful way they hang their heads.

“Have you seen those cops?” I asked Jack, trying to bolster his mood with complaints. My hands made circle motions around my eyes. “Those mirrored aviator glasses they wear?”

“Yeah,” Jack muttered. “Fucking assholes.”

Maybe the image of me talking to my own bloated reflection in gleaming Ray-Bans would make him understand how pointless it would’ve been to file a report. Still, if I could have guessed that telling the police would have profited Jack, I might have done it. He seemed to need to know that some manner of justice had occurred. It was like sticking a pin into a bruise, to hear him wish so naïvely for equity.

Jack’s body had not yet moved. He was like a jetty rock, obstinate and motionless against the savage force of the sea. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do or say so I waited, passing time by thinking of things I knew. I knew that he loved me desperately, never more so than at that moment. I knew that he was ready, aroused for once by the honorableness of his emotions, and yet the anger that moved him had no means of expression. How betrayed he must have felt by his belligerent pacifism, by the ambivalence he’d constantly displayed. He was thinking that the attack had not been arbitrary, that it had happened to me for a reason. He was thinking the reason was him.

“Don’t you see,” I said. “It’s like trying to catch a flying bird.”

Nothing could have changed what happened. No cop or court would have had the jurisdiction to do what was fair—to vacuum the grizzling glue from my insides and cram it back into the pinhole openings of their penises.

A bleak shaft of carrot-colored light grazed his left eye and a round patch beneath it, making Jack seem one-eyed and invincible like a Cyclops. I wondered if it was three o’clock. Usually things get carroty and bleak and Homeric at three.

“Say the rest,” he demanded.

He wanted to hear the part about him—that he should have been different than he was, that he should have been a falsely obedient son who would not have taken a knife to his father and would not have been shipped to boarding school, that he should have been a typical male who walked with his arm around my waist and his hand crammed in my back pocket, who bragged about fucking me to guys he despised, who played a sport and not an instrument. He wanted me to connect it to him.

I shrugged. “There is no rest.”

I accepted that things had to happen as they did when I walked back in that night after Rocky left me and I found the kitchen still smelling like food from dinner. The dishes in the drain board were not yet dry, and the radio by the stove that I had turned on earlier was still playing. The time was one-thirty in the morning, on Sunday, October 22nd, 1978. Hours before, it had been the 21st, Powell’s thirty-eighth birthday. On Saturday at six, Kate had called to say she couldn’t make it to the birthday dinner or to Mary’s party, that her mother was too sick to be left alone. They were leaving Sunday at noon for Manhattan. They would stay for two days of tests at Sloan-Kettering. At that time the cancer was just a
suspicious lump
.

I rested my knee on the same chair I’d used at dinner. While we were eating birthday cake, Mom had told the story of a new student who’d ordered a soda at a fast-food place but was given a cup of lye instead. He drank it and permanently lost the use of his voice, but he won four hundred thousand dollars in a lawsuit. He decided to apply the winnings in part to the expense of an education, which he would not otherwise have been able to afford.

“See that?” she’d said, slapping the tabletop lightly with two palms.

“Well now, that really is something,” Powell said, brushing down his mustache with his napkin and considering the dark peculiarities of fate.

“I think I’ll go to Mary’s party,” I’d said as I cleared the dishes.

“Need a ride?” Powell had asked.

“No, thanks. I’ll take my bike.” I hadn’t wanted to bother him on his birthday. The bike had affected my destiny; I’d arrived late and alone, and by the time I got there, everyone was very drunk. Like the guy who ordered a soda but got lye instead—had the timing of his day transpired differently, he might have gotten a Coke after all.

I scanned the kitchen hopelessly. Around me lay the gruesome evidence of a seemingly inconsequential chain of events, which, as it turned out, had not been inconsequential after all. I was feeling hysterical. I wanted to laugh, but instinct would not have it. I wanted to move, but there was no place to go.

I threw my ruined underwear into the garbage, then sat in bed and stared at the clock, watching the numbers flap. I timed my headaches.

At 4:09
A.M.
it occurred to me that someone might see my underwear in the trash and pull them out, thinking I’d made a mistake. I returned to the kitchen and cut them up with scissors, then shoved them into a cereal box, a Rice Krispies box I emptied. I crammed the package down to the bottom of the can and covered it with other garbage. When I pulled my hands out, they had jiggling flecks of congealed chicken grease on them. I lifted the bag from the can, tied it, and dragged it into my room. Then I returned and put a clean liner in, wondering how people manage to conceal murder. What do they do with their consciousnesses? I could do nothing with my consciousness.

Morning hummed when it came, like a choir of light, and in the clear, I showered. I could not select clothes: I kept trying things until the contents of my dresser were emptied onto the floor. My skin was itching, and there were hives vining up around my neck like ivy. Since I couldn’t pick one outfit, I wore several. In the mirror I looked homely, like a straw corn doll with stick-out hair and no neck. I looked like the product of impoverished child artisans.

It was very cold in Powell’s car while I waited for the 6:17 train to pass. As soon as it rumbled by, I started the engine and pulled out of the
driveway, stopping first at the nature trail, where I fed the leftover Rice Krispies to the ducks. From there I went to the dump, where I had the distinction of being the first customer, if in fact dump users can be considered customers. In Paris, some women are the first customers at the
boulangerie
, where they wait on the dim blue cobblestone
rue
for the doors to open so they can buy bread. I wondered would I ever be one of those women. It hardly seemed possible.

I teetered on the precipice of the sandy mound and swung my arm back to hurl the bag into the abyss. Vulture seagulls swarmed down. I wondered whether they would pick so far through the bag that they would arrive at the cereal box and my underpants, and then would they fly about with shreds of stained cotton hanging from their beaks. I unbuttoned one of the several sweaters I was wearing and listened to the repetitive caws of the gulls. I stood on the edge of the pit of sand feeling like a slave in the Roman Colosseum, with the wind whooshing like a wild opus through the seemingly endless sky above me.

Back at home, Mom and Powell were in the kitchen having breakfast. I considered telling them what had happened, but I couldn’t bear the proud way they looked at me to change. Besides, Powell would have ended up going over to everyone’s houses, and there would have been confrontations and arrests, more than likely of him.

The telephone rang, awfully.
Bllwanngg!

“Whoa!” my mother shouted.

“I’ll get it,” I yelled, diving to prevent a second ring.

Nico Gerardi’s voice cracked through the wire. “Hello?”

I took the phone to the staircase, nearly to the top, where I sat, facing up. The carpet felt especially synthetic. Sometimes it hits you, the way a carpet is just weird fake stuff.

He asked was I okay.

“I guess,” I said, wondering what would he have done if I’d said no. And, who’d told him to call? His father, his brother? How many people already knew, when I’d told no one?

He kept talking and I kept listening, trying to stay in the present, to keep my mind from receding into recall.

“I think it’s gonna rain today,” he said. “Do you?”

“Do I—what?”

“Think it’s going to rain. Or not rain. You know, get sunny.”

Nico and L.B. had families who denied them nothing. Their parents bought them their favorite foods, gave them new cars and nice clothes, intended to pay in full for their college tuition, and dispensed generous allowances without demanding responsibility in return. Such parents are wrong to shelter children so completely, to condone immaturity, to exempt boys from basic social requirements of fair exchange. People can get hurt that way.

“Sun, I think,” I said. “Or rain. I’m not sure.”