Anthropology of an American Girl (37 page)

The next day Coach Peters sent a note saying that my grade on the paper had been changed to an A. Mom sent a note back.
Your lesson has proved invaluable. Let the B stand
.

Two bouncers sat slumped like vultures on the wooden ramp that led to the Talkhouse. I wondered if I would have a problem getting in—Kate was eighteen, but I had six months to go. Rob placed his hand on my lower back and escorted me up the ramp. Rourke came next, then Kate and Mark, lagging behind. “What are the damages?” Rob asked, spreading his wallet.

“Five bucks a head,” one guy said. The lump in his neck journeyed unevenly. The second bouncer leaned to get a better view of me. Rob threw a shoulder to block him.

“Relax, man,” the guy told Rob, and then he said, “Hey, Scorpio!”

I peered over Rob’s shoulder.

“It’s me.” He swatted his chest. “Biff.”

“Oh,” I said. The hitchhiker. “Hi.”

He seemed glad to see me, which was nice. No one ever seemed that glad to see me. Three other people squeezed past, paid the cover, and went in. Sounds of the bar swelled out in a dull ruff, then night silence again.

“I didn’t recognize you,” he said. “You know, with the legs.”

“How’s rugby?”

“I just got back from San Diego. I played all winter. Where’s your friend?”

I pointed behind me, calling Kate. “Oh, my God!” she said. “Biff! I can’t believe it.”

Rob returned to his wallet. Biff waved his hand, and the second guy opened the door to motion us through. Biff winked at me. “See you later.”

Inside was woodsy and damp with the moldy stench of saturated alcohol. We entered in single file, inching through a yeasty shaft of bodies wedged between the bar and a partition separating the tables. I kept moving in, my body caressing unfamiliar bodies, the curves of me conforming
to the curves of them. I waved to Mom’s friend Kevin Fitzgerald, who used to swing me in the yard when I was little. He waved back from behind the bar, blowing kisses, making a big deal over seeing me.

Rob muttered into the back of my ear, “Nice going, Countess.”

“Don’t thank me. Kate’s the friendly one.”

“She might be friendly,” he said, as we paused to let someone with drinks pass, “but she’d never get five through the door.”

I turned back to Rourke. He was behind Rob, just a body away. When my eyes found his, he looked away. I understood. I didn’t like getting in for free. It appeared as though the hitchhiker was repaying a favor. Probably he had not done so with foresight or malice, but by letting us in that way he had staked a piece of me, and the piece he’d staked already belonged to the men I’d come with—or so
they
thought. Biff had been to my house to visit my mother, obliging him to protect me—or so
he
thought. The free entry was not a favor but a signal, a warning, a message between men. It’s tiring, keeping track of them—the posturing and the egos, the private worlds of their private minds, the strengths so directly compensating for weaknesses. In public they feign leniency and affect simplicity, but in private they want you to know how very damaged they are.

My mood was lapsing. I’d lost the sensation of being connected to Rourke, and that loss dispossessed me of motive and prudence. I forgot who I was and what I was doing and what was the point of everything anyhow. I had the idea of walking through to the rear exit and then out. It would have been funny to go without telling him, except for the part about no car. I felt unhinged: if things couldn’t get better, I wanted to make them worse. I felt myself become acquainted with my capacity for extremes. I had the idea I could be completed by risk. I began to like the bodies touching mine.

Rob handed me a beer over my shoulder and gestured with his chin to a vacant booth on the far side of the partition. Together we cut around, and when I inched across the seat on my knees to the farthest end, he followed. Then came Kate, and last Rourke on the end opposite me. Mark swung a chair to the outside of the table and he straddled it. Rob arranged the clutter left by previous occupants, building a meticulous mountain of plastic, paper, and glass.

“So, Monday’s D-day,” I heard Mark say to Rourke.
“Departure
day.”

Rourke said, “Yeah, Monday’s the day.” I wondered if Rourke was happy when he talked or not. He didn’t seem happy.

“Too bad. We could have all been out here together this summer.”

“We still
can
be, Mark,” Rob said. “We’ll just stay at your parents’ house—for free.”

Mark laughed. “Anytime you need a place, you have one.”

I was peeling the foil from the neck of my beer bottle. Rob nudged me. “You know what they say about people who do that?”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“That they’re sexually frustrated.” He winked and took a swig of his own drink.

“I haven’t found that to be true,” I told him. “But I’ll take your word for it.”

“Ha!”
Mark said. “She got you!”

Kate whispered to Rourke. He inclined his head obligingly. A slender lock of hair fell by his face, skimming with caution the lashes of his right eye. With her he seemed easy, approachable—a boy, a brother, a son, a friend. It pained me to see him that way. I could not evoke that in him. I smiled despite my epic disgust, because it was impossible not to admire the handsome look of him. Kate said he was nice. Maybe that was true, maybe to her and to all the world he was.

Hips moved across the dance floor exactly at the height of my eyes. The hips belonged to normal people having normal fun. I wished I were one of those people. I wished I’d left the building when we’d first arrived, when I’d had the chance. I wished there was a way to leave but stay. That’s the appeal of drinking and drugs—leaving but staying. It was good that I didn’t have anything more than a beer. Sometimes you see some girl slooped up against a wall, half-unconscious. Basically she felt the way I did, only she’d gotten her hands on liquor and drugs. I looked around for Mick Jagger. He’d been to the Talkhouse several times. That would be good, to see Mick Jagger—you know, like, not a totally wasted night.

Mark stood. “I’m gonna take a walk,” he said. “Be right back.”

The table felt different without him, uneven, as if missing a critical
component. I didn’t know Mark well enough to name the missing part, but I suspected I’d lost an ally.

I stood, saying I was going to take a walk too.

Rob shifted. His instinct was to accompany me, but he had Rourke to consider. Rob would never disappear with me, especially if it meant leaving Kate and Rourke alone together. They could all get up, but Rob would never give up a good table.

Mark was at the jukebox. I walked toward him and looked down into the meadow of luminous tags.

“I knew you’d come,” he said.

I believed him, though I didn’t even know I’d come. Having exercised my freedom, my freedom felt good.

“Pick some songs,” he suggested.

My finger floated above the glass. “M-Five. A-Seven.”

He inserted the quarters, pushed the buttons, then faced out, watching the dancers, not really watching. “That’s quite a dress,” he said, his lips hardly moving.

“It cost three dollars,” I confided, still reading the tags.

“That works out to about a dollar an inch,” he said, looking at me for just as long as he thought I could bear. There was a slippery quality to him, like if you set down an object it would slide. “Next time I see you, I hope you’ll be wearing a two dollar dress.”

He was no more than a foot away, in the near darkness. I looked away.

“He can’t see,” Mark said, cutting straight through to the place I was. “Don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried.”

“Oh, you
want
him to see.”

Actually, I didn’t want that.

“If you’re uncomfortable,” Mark said, “let’s go back.”

I didn’t want to go back. I wanted to go farther into the crowd; I wanted to embed myself. There was a post between the jukebox and the bathrooms, and I moved to it. I leaned back and the wood pushed between my shoulder blades. Mark propped his arm on the post alongside my neck, facing me, making a barricade between me and all the rest. I liked the wall he made.

The jukebox finished a song, then whirred to a new start. It was the Four Tops.

“Do you know the lead singer’s name?”

“Levi Stubbs,” Mark said matter-of-factly.

I reached for his sleeve. “Listen,” I said, adding his name, “Mark. I love this part. The false ending. The way he screams her name.
Bern—a—dette.”

Mark nodded as we listened.

“I’ll never be loved like that.”

He shook his drink, looking into it. “I doubt that.”

I wondered why he was there. There must have been a reason. I asked, “Why are you here?”

“In East Hampton? My parents have a house here.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“You mean—tonight.”

“Yes, tonight.”

“To see you,” he said. “To find you.” That’s when I first saw the eyes. They were gunmetal gray and speckled like the underside of certain fish. His hair was straight and sand colored, long around his face. I eased the glass from his hands and swallowed some of what was inside, coughing up a little cranberry. “Would you like one?” he asked.

“No, thank you,” I told him. “I’ll just share yours.”

The song changed and he drew me to the center of the blackened floor. Before pulling me in, he said something, I wasn’t sure what, but I smiled and held him, laying my head on his shoulder, grateful that he had stepped up and given me shelter when I needed it. Being in a bar is somewhat like being homeless if you cannot be with your friends. You wander and linger and land wherever there’s room and heat, sometimes getting in trouble, sometimes not.

Mark was good, better than Denny. Maybe it just felt better to dance with Mark than with Denny. He wrapped one hand around my waist, bracing my back, and our hips affixed, bone to pelvic bone.

We oscillated, bending and rising in controlled, compact arcs, our torsos hanging slightly back. My left arm dangled loosely, my right arm held him. There was resistance in my abdomen and a tautness in my legs, and our shadows trespassed long against the tables, transfixing the crowd, restoring Rourke’s customarily heavy countenance. I was glad. It hadn’t been good to see him happy, knowing for certain he was not.

By the time we returned, Kate had moved into Rourke’s seat and Rob had slid into mine. Rourke had taken Mark’s chair and turned it away from the dance floor. Rob was bending over a plate, halfway finished with a burger. There was the broad smell of onions.

Mark gestured to the dance floor. “Kate?”

She waved her hand dismissively.
“Please
, no.”

“Thank God,” Mark said, pretending to collapse back against Kate, nudging her farther in.

“What’s wrong? Need a
bed
?” Rob said derisively, not meaning Mark, but me and Mark.

Mark ignored the comment. He reached across for Rob’s plate, lifted the bun, and said, “Brave man.” I could see that Mark was not the type of person who would waste time with innuendo and sarcasm or who would let anything work at cross-purposes to determination. I’d never thought of sarcasm as a waste of time, but it’s true—it is. And Mark was fast. He’d reached me quickly, quicker than anyone. I hadn’t even noticed him coming.

I set my left knee on the edge of the banquette, and my right thigh pressed into the rim of the table near where Rourke was seated. The waitress delivered a drink to Mark, which he pushed in my direction, and I
pulled out a few pieces of ice to eat. My stomach swelled in tandem with my chest. Rourke leaned back in his chair and stared into the middle distance. I thought I knew what he felt. He felt what I’d felt the day I’d seen him in the gym. The time his legs came on either side of me and the lip of his underwear was visible beneath his shorts. When he was wet and there was the smell of sweat. I’d wanted to leave, but I couldn’t move.

“You know,” Kate said in a sarcastic voice, “there’s a hole in your stockings.”

Everyone looked. I raised the hem to see—the dress didn’t have far to go. Kate was right, though I didn’t like the way she’d called attention to me. I took the stirrer from Mark’s glass and inserted it into the hole, jerking my wrist. The crossed edge of the stick scratched my leg, and the nylon shredded like a limited web.

Kate said, “Christ, Evie!” and Mark said, “Shit,” and Rob muttered something I couldn’t hear.

Rourke managed to express gross disinterest. I didn’t care what he thought or what anyone thought. If he wanted to leave me free, he could not exactly object to the applications of my freedom. I was no more than the shameless thing they’d made of me—a woman, a fiend, my own lowest form. There was a trippingness to it that I liked, a capability I’d been missing. Why remain polite but powerless, in love but a beggar?

“You take the front,” Rourke directed Mark over the roof of the car, then he propped the driver’s seat forward and took my arm, guiding me in behind him.

“Hey, no complaints from me,” Mark said. “It’s cramped as hell back there.”

He sped back through the fog. We were going so fast I wondered if we would crash and disintegrate into mist. Kate was on the other side of Rob, sleeping lightly. Rob remained serious and silent, staring ahead through the windshield from his place in the back as though he might have to grab the wheel and take over at any instant. Mark just kept chatting professionally with Rourke, who kept replying, professionally as well.

I wished it was winter. In winter you can scrape ice on the inside of
your window. I wanted to scrape ice. I wanted my window to be coated in that shattery type of window frost. I breathed onto the glass and with my finger spelled out my name—
Eveline
. Was I still me when I did not feel like me? Was I the girl my mother bore, my father adored, the one Jack loved?
Jack
. I thought an unthinkable thought, something about asking for mercy, about going back in time, back to him.