Anthropology of an American Girl (34 page)

The real truth behind college for every American is that high school graduates would cripple the job market and drain social services if their dependency was not extended.

We’d just found out that Nico had been accepted to the University of Vermont.

“Cool,” Jack said when he heard the news. “Is he going to major in Physical Molestation?”

“Actually, he’s on the payroll,” Denny said. “They’re going to study him in bio lab.”

In America, college is not simply a privilege, it is an industry. It begins early in high school, where there are people on staff whose job it is to feed the machine. Sexless, pink-faced men like Mr. McGintee help students
evaluate qualities
and
calculate options
. Ladies with long dry hair and “degrees-in-progress,” like Lydia Kilty, let you know whether or not you have
the right stuff
.

At seminars in creepy, carpeted guidance rooms, cultish recruitment officers draw looping arrows on glossy easels with bizarre-smelling Vis-à-Vis markers, while you sit in a cataleptic stupor, tracing dust pyramids in the air and making planes out of pamphlets until the sales pitch slithers to a suspicious semi-halt. You are roused in the midst of a damp handshake with some guy named Stu from Ithaca, and you wonder, “Good God, have I just been initiated?”

If you take time off after high school, you are thought to be a pariah. Former friends ignore you on the streets, and their parents freak out like you are a dope addict. Parents cannot really be blamed for their paranoia, when all they ever hear about from the time their kids are in kindergarten are tests and essays, scores and tours, deadlines and fees. At money management assemblies, they are reassured that what they cannot provide
through savings and second mortgages, the government will generously supplement with low-interest loans.

“What a racket,” my father would say while sorting through the brochures that flooded the mailbox. “Jimmy the Onion never had it so good.”

One thing they make sure to teach in high school is how to drive. Well-meaning people, such as Mr. O’Donnell, the librarian, believe that driver’s education contributes to public safety. What they fail to see is that in order to accommodate additional drivers, families need
more
automobiles and
more
insurance. Teaching and insuring teens is not a social service, it’s good business—otherwise companies wouldn’t bother to do it, no matter how many lives might be saved. The problem is, when you give cars to people with no responsibilities, no destinations, and no privacy, they will most likely use them for things other than driving. Two weeks after Troy had won the school’s coveted Driving Ace Award, he and Jack got so stoned off homegrown pot in their shampoo bottle bong that Troy drove his Vista Cruiser home from Indian Wells beach in reverse.

Lots of programs make sense in theory but go awry in practice. It’s similar to when town planners bring in one species to lower the population of another, and then the town is overrun by the predator. Sometimes you interfere with nature, and its ferocity emerges in new ways, in perverse extremes of attitude or number. Sometimes it happens quickly; other times, you can’t see the effects until it’s too late. Sometimes you can’t help but feel you are part of a giant out-of-control science experiment.

Dad said that when they introduced rabbits to Australia, the rabbits had no natural predators, so they evolved into a crazy kind of super-rabbit. They decided to poison the rabbits, only the poison was the wrong poison, and all the rabbits died an exceptionally cruel death. “I can’t even think about it,” he said, and he shuddered.

If you ask, “Who are
they?”
he’ll say,
“They
. Those college bastards.” According to my mom,
“They
are the ones who killed Kennedy.” Jack would say,
“They
are the pharmaceutical companies.”

Mr. Shepard finished the lesson. I heard notebooks flapping shut. Too bad about the courtyard. The grass looked nice. I would have liked to spend some time outside.

——

Miss Panetta sighed hard. “This is basic science, Miss Palumbo.” She repeated the question, enunciating peevishly. “The function of water in photosynthesis is—
what?”

Arms shot up, sleeves lightly whipping.

“Thank you, everyone, but Miss Palumbo is going to impress us with the truth.”

Mike Stern took advantage of the delay to talk to Billy Martinson. “We went to Tick Pete’s last night.” Tick Pete sold beer from the back of a shut-up diner in Amagansett. He slept behind the counter on a cot and watched TV, living off Slim Jims and Trix, Jack claimed, though Dan swore he once saw Pete eating Chinese takeout. “We still have half a case left,” Mike told Billy. “Meet us at Sammi’s Beach before Donkey Basketball.”

Jodie Palumbo stirred in her chair, her chin glued to the palm of one hand, the other hand playing lethargically with her practice AP Bio exam. She selected a random multiple choice answer and began reading lamely. “B? To absorb light energy?”

Ms. Panetta shuffled the test papers and shot a glance at the clock. She seemed upset. Sometimes you could really get to feeling bad for the teachers. “I—think—we—should—call—it—a—day.”

My locker closed, and all down the hall they slammed shut in succession, clacking like dominoes. Inside I’d found three bundles of paper. The first was from Denny.

The second was from Kate.

The third was from Jack. The third I couldn’t open.

I skipped lunch to finish a lab report for Ms. Panetta, and while I was in the bio room, I heard a piano start to play Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You.” I knew it was Dan because no one else in school was good enough to play it except Jack, and Dan played differently from Jack. Jack steadied the keys and smoothed them, hunching fretfully as though they might bark or bite or turn on him. Dan played with exuberance.

I crossed the hall to the choral studio. Dan brightened when he saw me. He slid on the bench as his right hand tapped out melodies and his left tested rhythms, one song leading to another—“The Shadow of Your Smile” to “Rhapsody in Blue” to “Stormy Weather” to “Summertime.” I sat on the lowermost carpeted step of the choral risers, and then I lay down, still clutching my dirty scalpel. It had been submerged in formaldehyde; it had poked through bobbing corpses to locate the aurora pink tissue of a fetal pig, my very own pig. I knew which pig was mine because around the right eye was a gray wheel, cracked here and there at the outer edge like a pineapple ring. As Dan played, I was thinking that jazz works the way the mind does—something occurs to you and you think it, or, in the case of jazz, you play it.

People who passed peered in at me, as though I were kaleidoscopic, as though I were at the end of a long tube but could not materialize. I closed my eyes and started lapsing, receding like a discrete entity into its constitutional whole, like a gem to its mine, a drop to its sea. I wondered
if Dan had heard the news from Jack about our breakup. It was nice of him to play for me regardless. Would I miss Dan, I wondered, or just the time we’d shared, his connection to the original meaning of me? I would miss him, I thought. Definitely, I would miss him.

Gym was last. I considered skipping, but frankly I didn’t want to be anywhere else. Wherever I was depressed me, but wherever I was not depressed me also, sometimes even more. In the locker room girls laughed as they changed. Girls have a giggling way of bending forward when they laugh. When boys laugh they present their chests proudly to the city of God.

My lock would not open. I yanked the round base but nothing happened. I tried the combination again, concentrating on the spinning black dial. I started to black out so I pressed my forehead into the damp bones of my left hand and with the right, I covered my nose and mouth to block the stench of the metal locker. It smelled like blood. Why did blood smell like metal? I could hear the bending laughter of the girls and the squeaks of sneakers slapping the ground and the flatulent squirts from near-empty bottles of body lotion. Later there would be water—toilets retching, sinks spewing. I could feel myself weave back, and back, into a writhing meadow of sound, with all that I saw and all that I could not see vanishing equally, though that could not have been so. Probably things had remained in place.

Caroline Boylan was above me, offering her hand. She was standing in the center of a group of girls; I’d obviously fainted again. Caroline wasn’t wearing a shirt or bra, so I couldn’t help but notice that her breasts were strange, sort of like cabinet knobs. In eleventh grade, the television show
The $10,000 Pyramid
had chosen her to play in its national teen tournament, making her into a lesser sort of celebrity. As I lay there, the memory of her on television returned to me, her giving clues to her partner from Appleton, Wisconsin, for “Things That Have Sauce.” Biting her lower lip, nodding, leaning forward, like a hood ornament, saying,
Pizza, spaghetti, spaghetti, pizza, pizza, pizza
.

“Thanks,” I said, coming up to sit. “I’m all right.”

The crowd disbanded in the sulky way crowds disband, like they
haven’t quite gotten their money’s worth. I made my way onto the bench beneath the wall of lockers and lowered my head and squeezed the muscles in my thighs to send blood back up, because that was what Dr. Scott said to do whenever I felt faint. My parents kept sending me to him for tests, but everything kept being normal. He would just say that I was blessed with unusually low blood pressure, which should not be a problem “for anyone who actually eats and sleeps.”

“You okay?” Someone must have told Coach because it was her voice I heard, and when I lifted my head, it was the myriad surfaces of her body that came into complex focus through a mist of puckered stars. Her dimpled knees and distended belly were known to me and I was comforted by the sight of them. Perhaps there was nothing wrong with her; perhaps she was just straightforward about the inescapable fact of herself. “Need the nurse?” she asked.

The nurse would just give me a place to rest. But it’s impossible to rest when everything smells like the sweet of Band-Aids, and when the kidney pan she puts near your mouth is covered in those crazy black finger smudges, and there are depressing posters about alcohol abuse and car wrecks. You just sit and wait for an appropriate amount of time to pass before you can leave, hoping nobody you know comes in for some really gross and graphic problem. If they do, the nurse puts up a screen that you can totally see through. Before you leave, you have to thank her like she actually did something to heal you.

“Can I just stay with you?” I asked.

Coach gazed widely, blankly. She nodded once, and her oaky brown button eyes folded back into the confectionery flab of her face. “Let’s go out to the tennis courts.” She did not help me up, but she did get me a cup of cold water and a bag of salted cashews from her desk while I pulled on my shorts and sneakers. Together we crossed the deserted gymnasium, which was a queer sort of distinction.

The cyclone fence around the courts was cloaked in green tarps with cutout flaps—I sat and rested and waited for things to end, things such as the day and the tired way I felt. The sun beat against my lids, creating geometry underneath, wandering and upraised like swimming braille. The tennis balls smacked the rackets and hit the spongy ground to create a succession of hollow pops.

In the cavern of my room, after Rourke had left the night before, I was stricken with an incompetent longing, a clumsy physical loneliness. I was not clever with that lonely feeling, with its drift and wicked magnitude. I caressed my own body, seeking heat, seeking relief and restitution, seeking rewards withheld; and in the end I felt I had transgressed. It was not me I wanted but him, and that was a sorrowful offense, sorrowful because I was an animal and he was an animal, yet we lay separately in the gaping obscurity of one anonymous night on earth.

I did not change from my gym shorts or bother to go in to get my books. After the final bell rang, I just walked from the court, cutting through the side yard to the street. I was about to head home when I noticed the GTO parked in the front lot, and without even thinking I turned back to the building. I quickly navigated the crammed halls by minimizing myself—everyone else had grown so much bigger during the day that if you just stayed low and tight, you could cut through pretty easily.

In the crowded lobby, by the guidance office, Rourke was talking to Mr. McGintee. They shook hands amiably, saying “Good luck” and “Take care,” and when McGintee slipped into the auditorium where janitors were setting up for the spring concert, Rourke cut directly through the pack to meet me where I stood.

He said hi. I said hi. He seemed younger, or maybe just tired like me. There were lines beneath his eyes. “How are you?” he asked. I got the feeling he was referring to the previous night with Jack.

“I’m okay,” I said, and together we walked, him behind me. I was aware of my thighs in my shorts, the bareness of them, the way I knew he was looking.