Anthropology of an American Girl (2 page)

The rain had passed; all that remained up above was a series of garnet streaks. The sea slapped ominously, confessing its strategic impartiality. The sea is an international sea, and the sky a universal sky. Often we forget that. Often we think that what is verging upon us is ours alone. We forget that there are other sides entirely.

Kate and I waded quickly back to shore. As soon as we could, we broke free of the backward pull of the waves and started running. We dressed, yanking our Levi’s up over our wet legs, one side, then the other. Sand got in, sticking awfully.

“Shit,” she said as we scaled the dune to the lot. “I’m never getting high with you again.”

At Mill Hill Lane Kate cut left across Main Street, and I followed. The lane was steep and tree-lined. As we rounded the bend making a right onto Meadow Way, Kate’s foot lifted from the pedal, and her leg swung straight back over the seat, parallel to the ground, making me think of fancy skaters. She hopped off in front of a brown ranch house—her house—lying low, like a softly sleeping thing beneath a custodial cover of tree branches. A small sign marked the rim of the lawn—
FOR SALE. LAMB AGENCY.
Kate bent to collect fallen leaves and twigs from around the crooked slate walkway, which seemed like a lonely project. Once when we were little, maybe about nine, Kate swore she had the distances between the slate pieces of the walkway memorized. At the time I called her a liar, not because she was one but because that’s the sort of thing to say when you’re nine. But Kate had skipped to the first tile, closed her eyes, and continued along the twisting, broken path, never missing a step, never touching grass.

“Hey, Kate,” I called. She turned to me, her face tilting into the half-light. “Remember walking on the slate with our eyes closed?”

“Of course,” she said.

“Can you still do it?”

“Sure.” She set down the sticks she’d collected and she did it like it was nothing. When she was done, she said, “You try.”

I couldn’t exactly say no, since it had been my idea in the first place. My bike made a thumping sound when I dropped it. I went to the beginning and closed my eyes, trying to imagine the path I’d taken hundreds of times before. My neck felt vulnerable with my eyes closed, as though some famished thing might come and bite it.

“No grass,” I heard her say. I raised my right leg, and while considering where to step, my foot fell, landing inches ahead, slightly to one side. “Whoa,” she said. “You just made it.”

I only had to decide where my foot was going to go before I lifted it. I only had to imagine the next step. I stepped again, and life moved to greet me. I felt particulate, like pieces matching pieces. I heard the benign crinkle of the trees as the wind swept into the branches, and the music of birds popping to life like individual instruments singled out from an orchestra. I’d gone over ten pieces of slate; four more remained. I half-swung my right leg to the right, then lowered it. My heel left a pulpy impression.

“Grass!” Kate shouted. “I win!”

I opened my eyes to a flare of light. All that endured of the dark was a nostalgic radiance, like when you shut off a television and the shadow of the picture lingers like a minuscule ghost on the screen.

Kate and I sat on the front step of her parents’ house, watching the orphan moon elude the embrace of the trees. She was silent. I wondered if she too was waiting for the yellow porch light to click on, for the screen door to creak open from inside, for her mother to say,
On rentre, mes cheries
. Come back in, my loves.

The last time the door opened on us, Maman didn’t smile. That was May. Maman’s birthday is in May,
was
in May—I’m not sure how it goes with birthdays, whether they die when you do. Her arm unbended with difficulty to prop the door; when it snapped back on her, I caught it.

“Bon soir
, Eveline,” she murmured.

When Kate’s mother said my name, she did not say
Ev-a-line
, the way most people did, but
E-vleen
, the first part coming from her mouth, the
last part escaping from the cage of her throat. We embraced. Her shoulders floated waifishly within the vigorous circle of my arms. I wondered
, When did she get so small?
Kate and I followed her from room to room, and the floorboards grunted. In the dining room, her fingers skimmed the keys of her husband’s piano. He’d died one year before; immediately after burying him, Maman had become terminally ill. Sometimes you hear of people who are so much in love that they die together.

“I did have this piano tuned yesterday, Catherine,” Maman said in hobbled English, “in case you do ever wish to play again.”
Ca-trine
.

I adjusted the armchair Kate and I had moved to the kitchen weeks before, when the side effects of the chemotherapy had started to become severe. We lowered Maman down by the armpits, the way you bring a toddler to a stand, only in reverse. I tucked the chair under the table, inching her closer until she sighed,
“Ah bien.”

Kate prepared dinner, and the room came to life with daunting pops and sizzles. It’s shocking sometimes, the grief-stricken noises of food. I drew a chair alongside Maman’s. I hoped it was a somewhat happy birthday with us there, and all her treasures from France—linen and glass and those plates with painted peasants. I wondered what treasures I would keep when I got older. No one in East Hampton really made anything, at least not in the specialty manufacturing sense. I’d probably have to settle for an old map of the bay or a jar of sand. Kate and I once bought these clamshell dolls in Sag Harbor, an undersea barbershop quartet, but they were not exactly keepsakes. They had clipped feathers for eyebrows and mussel-shell shoes and crab-claw hands. They were funny for about a week, then they got really depressing.

On a slender strip of wall near the window to Maman’s left was a tiny oil painting, my first. She kept it in an elaborately carved frame without glass, with just a hole on top for a nail. The painting looked nice that way. I liked to prop things I drew or painted against the posts in the barn behind my mother’s house, or else thumbtack them to the shelves around her desk. My dad would always stick things I gave him into the sun visor of his car or into some book he happened to be reading. “Pretty good,” he’d say, “but off-center.” According to him, everything I did was
pretty good but off-center
. Unless it was a photograph, in which
case, he’d say, “Pretty good, but you cropped the head.
And
it’s off-center.”

The painting I’d given to Kate’s mother was an oil of a white rose, overblown and beginning to withdraw. Maman had the same quality of a flower receding. There was something eloquent about her admission of resign, something august about the inalterability of her position. I squinted to make her young again. If she could no longer be called beautiful, she possessed something better—a knowledge of beauty, its inflated value, its inevitable loss.

Maman spoke that day of the sea. In her velvety drone, she recalled sailing by ship to America. “The sea is generous,” she said. “She is there when you need her. Like a mother.” Her dying voice was a black sonata; it defied time. Though it was May, I could think only of the coming autumn, of a world without her in it.
“Ecoutez,”
she said.
“La mer, et la mère. Eh?”

I heard Kate say something. I looked across the kitchen, but she was not there, the kitchen was not there, not the food, not Maman. Everything had disappeared. The sweet castle of my hallucination had gone down, vanished. We were still sitting on the porch, Kate’s knee knocking against mine. Our eyes resisted communion; they scanned the new jet sky, contemplating the black, wondering whether heavens, whether angels.

“B
ig John’s coming over tonight,” my mother said. She was next to me, wiping the kitchen counter, her thin arms making sweeping circles on the blade- and burn-scarred Formica. “He’s Powell’s friend from the Merchant Marines. Did I mention that he’s an expert birder?”

I was eating my usual dinner of spinach out of a can, and, as usual, green juice dripped onto my shirt. My mother rubbed the spots with her
sponge. “Hold still,” she said, somewhat exasperated. Softly she added, “Be sure to ask John about his duck decoys.”

Later that night, Big John’s voice cut past the opened windows and into the yard. I was outside, moving my things from the barn, where I’d stayed for the summer, back to the front house for the school year, and every time he let loose with another bird whistle I could almost see the breeze from his breath in the leaves. He kept going on about
ducks
this and
ducks
that—
coots, broadbills, ringnecks, widgeons
.

I ventured into the kitchen at eleven o’clock. Mom perked up when she saw me. “Hi!”

Big John waved. He was a beefy, black-bearded man. Everything he did was loud. He talked loud, he breathed loud, he even sat loud. His chair creaked and moaned as gross spurts of wind shot out of his nose before getting recalled through his teeth. People who amplify like that are scary, especially when they do so at the beach or on a public phone or in your kitchen late at night.

“Big John’s telling me about—” My mother faltered elegantly. She turned back to him. “What is it that you’re telling me about?”

“ATVs,” he said with a giant sniff.

“All-terrain vehicles,”
she said experimentally. “Fascinating.” She patted the seat next to hers. “Come. Join us.”

I went to the sink for a glass of water. “No, thanks. School starts tomorrow.” My back was turned; I could hear a match burst to life.

“Oh,” she said, drawing in on her cigarette. “Right. And when is Jack back from Oregon?”

“What’s he doing up in Oregon?” Big John interrupted.

“Eveline’s boyfriend does Outward Bound,” Mom said. “River rafting. Mountain climbing.”

“I’m not sure when he’ll be back,” I said. “I haven’t heard from him.”

She tilted her head and squinted, smoking, lost in thought.

Big John cleared his throat, and my mother and I startled. “My brother runs a Harley dealership in Hauppauge,” he shouted to no one in particular. “He’s got ATVs, dirt bikes, mopeds, bicycles, skateboards—the whole gamut, basically.”

“Let’s just say John’s brother is
into wheels,”
Mom joked lightly.

“Basically.”

“Well,” I said. “Kate told me she gets up at six. I’m going to turn off the stereo.”

“Six?”
Mom said. “We’re a ten-minute walk from the school!”

“I guess she has to do stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“I don’t know—hair, ironing.”

“Ironing? I don’t know if we even have an iron.”

“I think she brought her own,” I said.

My mother seemed blue. Maybe she was upset about Kate’s not having a home anymore except for our ironless one. Maybe she was worried about where Jack had disappeared to and what trouble he might be in. Most likely she was dreading the prospect of hearing Big John’s voice without the muffling accompaniment of the stereo or without me as a distraction. I took the electric fan from the top of the refrigerator.

“Hot?” John inquired.

“No, not at all,” I said. “It’ll just cut down on noise.”

“Okay, then, night,” he offered, waving again. His hand knocked the edge of the glass table. There was a nasty
crack
.

Mom lurched across, examining the table. “Is it broken?”

“Nah.” He looked at the glow-blue school ring throttling his pinky finger. “It’s fine.”

“I meant the table,” she said.

He inspected it. “Oh,
that
. Just a small scratch.”

As I set the fan on my desk and plugged it in, the 11:07 passed, filling the bedroom with light. The Long Island Rail Road ran fifty feet from the side of my mother’s house. The windows rattled and the furnishings skidded and the pictures cocked sideways when trains passed, but it was a quaint intrusion, a topic of conversation, more amusing than threatening. The LIRR travels between the farmland of the East End of Long Island through the sprawling cemeteries and housing projects of Queens, into the center of Manhattan. In the middle of the ride there are identical houses with identical yards. Each lawn indicates nature. Each box indicates home.

“It’s not dying that scares me,” Jack would say whenever we went to my father’s apartment in the city. “It’s Levittown.” He planned to live in the mountains with guns. “The Rockies probably. You coming?”

“Yes,” I would lie. I could never live on the toothy tip of anything, but it wasn’t good to make Jack sad. When Jack felt sad, he hung his head and you couldn’t lift it if you tried. I preferred the apocalyptic terrain of cities—the melting asphalt, the artificial illumination. Unlike Jack, I looked forward to the future. At least when things are as bad as they can get, they can’t get worse. The future would be untouchable, hypervisual, and intuitive, a place where logic and progress have been played out to such absurd extremes that survival no longer requires the application of either.

“Notice how all it takes is the Force to blow up the entire Death Star?” I would tell Jack. “The future won’t be jet packs and space stations; it’ll be aboriginal. The language of the physical will atrophy. Our minds will coil inward, and our eyes will grow large to see beyond the seeable. No one dies in the future. We’ll all preserve ourselves to be reconstituted.”

“That’s the whole fucking problem,” Jack would say. “I don’t
want
to live forever. I’m having trouble with the idea of Tuesday.”

I held my face close to the air from the fan and said “Ahhh,” with my voice going choppy. In the mirror on the desktop, I could see my hair blowing up. It wasn’t a lot of hair, but it felt like a lot in the wind. I was squinting, so my eyes looked like cat eyes.

“They’re the color of absinthe,” my father likes to say, which is an odd compliment, since the definition of absinthe is
a green drink of bitter wormwood oil
—whatever that is.

My eyes are pointed at the ends like cartoon flames or the acuminate tips of certain leaves. Beneath the green are smoldering circles. They mark the place my skin is thinnest, and so my soul the closest. Mom’s boyfriend, Powell, says that the soul is contained in the body. He says if instruments are made from your bones when you die, the music tells your story. Powell got his bachelor’s in anthropology from Stanford and his master’s in engineering from Columbia, then he joined the navy before
moving on to oil rigs. He goes away for months at a time to places like Alaska or the Gulf, where he reads meters and plays harmonica. Powell can play “This Land Is Your Land” on harmonica better than anyone.