Anthropology of an American Girl (24 page)

“Parker and I saw one when we were skiing,” she stated on one occasion. We were in art class; she was speaking of bobcats.

“Can you hand me the glue?” I requested.

“Sure,” she said, reaching for the bucket. “We were in Aspen and—”

“What do you think of this?” I lifted my decoupage.

“You need a wider margin,” she suggested. “Anyway, he’s even—”

“
Wider?
Are you sure?”

Alicia crammed in her sentence. “He’s more gorgeous in person, if you can imagine.”

“Who?”
I asked.

“Parker!”

“Parker who?”

“Parker Stevenson, silly. From
The Hardy Boys.”

Miss Starr was explaining that the family who had donated money for the drama program had also earmarked funds for the art and music departments to create original works. The senior art class would be responsible for creating backdrops and costumes.

Alicia tugged twice on the lapel of Rourke’s jacket, saying something to make him smile. Then she spun on her stool, and her black hair bobbed serenely about her face. I wondered how they knew each other when she was not even in drama.

Cathy Benjamin asked, “When are the drawings due?”

“You’re the experts,” Mr. McGintee said. “You tell us. A week? Three days? I’m guessing here.” He waved a half-erect index finger around the room. “Any suggestions?”

An uncanny quiet descended, as quiets often do. I was about to be called on. Sometimes you just know. I lowered my head, engrossing myself in my task.

“Miss Auerbach,” McGintee declared. “Your thoughts?”

I didn’t bother to look up. “Is
Our Town
even supposed to have
scenery?” In Kate’s playbook, I’d read something about no scenery. It was in Thornton Wilder’s notes.

Mr. McGintee laughed as though something was funny. “Bravo! If only our actors were as familiar with the script. Isn’t that right, Mr. Rourke?”

Rourke was still next to Alicia. He stepped forward, his body soaking emphatically through space like an inky spill. He located without effort the precise center of the room.

“The script calls for no scenery,” he said, him looking at me, me looking at him. “That’s true.” His voice was mossy and opaque; it had this lastingness, this abidingness. “But I think we can get away with some set design without compromising the integrity of the play.”

No one moved when he spoke, not even Miss Starr. I bit a tag of flesh on the inside of my cheek and continued with my onion, with the silky feel of it. I’d penciled a luxurious arc that tapered to a flush and narrow run, with feathery stuff at the end. I inclined my head to view my drawing. I supposed it was madness to think I knew him. I knew nothing about him.

“How about, like, a village green?” Dave Meese asked.

I touched the actual onion. Its barrier was no more than a dried membrane, papery brown and tearable. It was ironic that something so potent could have such a fragile shell.

“How about a chapel?” I heard myself say.

McGintee said, “What’s that, Eveline?”

Denny answered for me. “She said, ‘a chapel.’”

“Wonderful! A chapel. And, Dave, yes—a village green.”

Miss Starr told us to set aside the Object Project and see what we could come up with for the play. We all instantly complied. She was a huge fan of spontaneity. Frequently in the middle of class she would call out a challenge.
Two minutes—low tide! Ten seconds—a toe!

Rourke came toward me, and the room behind him collapsed in the wake of his steps. He touched down at the bench on my left. He was close, his leg brushing my leg, the scent of him captivating me. I could almost hear his blood, the cadence; in my mind I trailed its avenue.

He lifted the rendering of my onion, raising it an inch from the table, tilting it, asking softly, “What is it?”

“Well, it’s not an onion,” I said, and he smiled. “It’s the
feel
of an onion.”

He reached for a new piece of paper and slid the sheet to my belly. Beneath the umbrella of his protectorship I took my pencil to paper and began to draw freely. It was not difficult to do with sunlight bearing down on the snow in the courtyard, and the light drenching us, making all things around us chalk and silver. I remembered a place I’d visited with Dad and Marilyn, a town in winter; Amherst. They’d taken me to see the home of Emily Dickinson, where the floors squeaked like slowly stabbed things, and through the purling windows daylight was sterling and merciless. After lunch, my father bought Marilyn a Rookwood vase from an antiques store in a barn near a stone bridge. I waited on the stairs of a clapboard church beneath trees with no leaves.

Rourke’s arm moved minimally, signaling for me to stop. I formed two more lines. We studied the paper. It was unifying to share a visual object with him. Until now we had only looked at each other. I imagined what it would be like for us to have a child, the way we would observe it, separately and sometimes together. The steeple of my church extended at a peculiar angle, tipping forward like an antler or horn, and the main body of the building was low like a plank. Rourke took the paper from me.

“I’d like to take this,” he said, meaning the drawing. He spoke softly. No one could hear but me. It was strange—the size of his arm, the whiteness of my hand.

He had not moved, not physically, but he was receding. I thought he was brave. I couldn’t bear to abandon the solace conceived by our nearness, knowing that as soon as he was gone, I would be left to confront the known range of my own frontiers, the plaintive vacancy there. He had filled it so perfectly.

He was waiting for an answer.

My eyes focused keenly on nothing in particular—a name carved in the art shop bench,
Winn
, a date that followed, ’76. I wondered where Winn was. Four years was a long time to be gone.

“You can take it,” I said. It was just a thing. What he actually took away was more precious, infinitely so.

H
e came through the door of the darkroom as I was laying out my prints to dry. Betsy Callaghan and Annie Jordan were developing in the back. My drawing was in his hand.

“Okay,” Rourke said as he returned it to me.

“Okay,” I repeated, taking it from him.

We were face-to-face, almost but not quite, since I hardly came as high as his shoulders. If I were to lie against him, my hand would just reach the recess between his arm and chest.

I did not raise my head, just my eyes. “Is that it?”

He nodded. “That’s it.”

Reverend Olcott exited the rectory, his belly jiggling ever so slightly as he crossed the driveway. He was dressed as usual in casual black, no silk, no sash.

“Hello there, Eveline,” he said. “Long time no see.”

I’d been leaning on a tree, regarding the church spire through the rolled-up tube of my sketch. “I’m sorry. I’ve been, you know—”

He raised a comforting hand. “Any word on college yet?”

“NYU, probably.”

The reverend came from Wisconsin. I couldn’t recall the name of the town, but it must have been nice if the people in it were like him. He was a man of restless intelligence and limitless energy. Powell always said that the reverend had so much bounce as to make you think privately of fleas. If Kate and I happened to be feeding the ducks in the morning, we’d see him jogging past, or, if you stopped by the church to use the bathroom, you might find him painting the wheelchair ramp. Everyone said he was the best Cajun cook on the East End.

I gestured with my sketch. “I’m designing a chapel. For the Drama Club.”

He jerked his neck toward the church. “Let’s have a look.”

The mammoth white door closed behind him with a tidy click, and the room we entered was stark and still. It made me think of the inside of an egg. We moved in the direction of the front pew. We sat, and Reverend Olcott examined my sketch.

“Yes,” he said, and he nodded. “I see.”

With a low stroke of one hand, he referred to the body of the church, which was nothing compared to the steeple. “The congregation is minimized,” he said. “The architecture is part of the landscape. It has a proportionate relationship to nature.”

My eyes ventured to his face. His glasses bridged the base of his nose, and his head was tucked into his neck, adjusting to the near distance of the sheet of paper.

“But the steeple, the
reaching
to God—to godliness—is immense. Symbolic, muscular, like a fist thrust into the air.” He tapped the drawing twice and returned it to me. “Very nice.”

I considered his remarks. It was strange to have communicated something that I supposed I believed, but didn’t think I knew how to relate.

“It’s the striving that intrigues you, the theoretical endeavor,” he proposed.
“Abstraction.”
The reverend cleared his throat. “Do you know it’s been nearly thirty years since I joined the church? January 1951. In that time, I’ve encountered as many devoted worshippers who lack true compassion as”—he paused to search for a word—
“individualists
like you who possess a pious reverence for life.”

He pointed to the paper, now in my hands. “I especially like the easy lines, the quickness of hand, the conservation of voice. Spontaneity is too frequently mistaken for immaturity. But we are spontaneous when we are at our genuine best—
childlike
as opposed to
childish
. Standards of goodness and propriety are necessary, of course. They’re guideposts for those who stray. But ideally, decency resides in the heart, undiminished from birth.” He continued, “One sometimes wonders, though, whether purity of heart is sufficient.”

“It does confuse me,” I ventured, “the whole idea of God as a man.” Reverend Olcott looked toward the altar. I hoped he was not offended. “You know, the beard and the robes. Six days to create the earth.”

For a while we sat in silence. I gathered he was thinking what to say. Probably he wanted to choose his words carefully. It did seem like a risky and unofficial way to discuss God, sitting in the first pew with our legs stretched out.

“Some prefer to draw inspiration from the story of Jesus rather than from belief in God.” His tone was circumspect. “We can be certain that a man named Jesus existed and that he preached—at great personal sacrifice and without material compensation—the virtues of faith and forgiveness. And from that ancient narrative, we continue to extract messages pertaining to the sacredness of devotion, and we follow its prescriptions for living peaceably. In fact,” he added as he gestured to the steeple in my drawing, “such a proposal is in keeping with your notion of ideological enterprise, the expenditure of spiritual energy in working toward actual understanding. That’s the reaching part,” he said. “Do you see?”

I thought I did. I thought he was saying it was okay to be confused. I thought he was alluding to how he himself had come to terms with confusion.

“It’s like, heaven is not an actual destination,” I said, “but a conceptual place of peace.”

He said nothing, which was okay. I understood that he couldn’t. It seemed like the right time for the conversation to end, so I stood. He encouraged me to sit and think.

“Oh, no,” I said. “It’s hard for me to sit and think.” I had to move and think, or sit and do. It was just one of those things. I held up my sketch. “But thank you very much.”

As Reverend Olcott and I parted, I thought again of light glowing through an eggshell. I thought of mosaic, geometry, overlap. Maybe I could use texture instead of color and line. Maybe I could use pieces of vanilla canvas to make a collage. If I shined stage lights through the back of a scenery flat, it would make the muslin glow like an incubated egg. I thought of that candle in my house, of light coming through a wall.

N
ico’s book landed on his desk with a
whumpf
, and he straddled his seat, peeling my hands from my face, prying them apart like shutters.

“Happy Valentine’s Day,” he said. His hands smelled like metal.

I blinked and shook my head. “Is that today?”

“Is that today?”
he said, dropping my hands in mock disgust.

I sat up tall and stretched. “I’m just a little—”

“Out of it.” Nico gave Mike Stern a wave. He spoke to me, but his eyes darted professionally.
Professionally
because to some people popularity is a business. “You gonna get a rose in homeroom today? Or is your boyfriend anti-flowers?”

I lowered my head. “He’s anti-flowers.”

Somebody smacked Nico as he passed. His desk knocked into mine and my teeth jolted. “Watch it! Evie’s napping.” He tousled my hair. “Poor kid.”

Mr. Shepard entered, and I propped myself on one arm. I set my pen on my open notebook, and as he began to talk, the pen began to move, transcribing everything.

I was drifting, so I wrote my name, over and over.
Eveline Aster Auerbach
. I didn’t know what it was supposed to mean, my name, how it
promised to define me. Jack loved the way Maman used to say
E-vleen
, but he would never copy it because she was French and we were not. Nothing is more annoying than when people randomly insert exotic pronunciations into everyday talk. One thing Americans do best is mispronounce words they know nothing about. It’s a confession of sorts. It’s like saying,
We may be stupid, but we’re not pretentious
.

I wrote the letter
A
, several letter
A
’s, one leading to the next, charging forth like a locomotive, stark and emphatic, the way screams are discharged—
AAAAAAAAAA
. Just as the row neared the margin, my wrist dropped sharply to produce a single vertical line; then it retraced that line to the top, unfolding in a curve to the right, making a bubble and collapsing at last in a bar to the finish:
R
. I finished it off—
o-u-r-k-e
. It was true that I was tired, because when I looked at his name, at the way I’d written it, jittery and uncertain, I began to cry.