Anthropology of an American Girl (39 page)

“Have you ever seen something normal magnified that ends up looking like tubes?” I asked.

“Yes,” Denny said right away. “Bark.”

“Once I saw something,” I said, “possibly bark. It was a gnarled mass of tunnels. Maybe there’s similar architecture to society, only more fragile, like a nest of twisted glass that gives us shape but that can shatter at any instant from the slightest stress.” Jack’s absence was conspicuous; I felt the trauma of not having him to complete me, to interpret for me. I added, “I imagine they look like glass canals.”

“Neat,” Denny said, encouragingly, obviously relieved that I was talking. “Like an ant colony, only positive space, not negative.”

Denny seemed to understand, so I continued. “It’s like, we work and work to construct these systems for the good—civil rights, the environment, mind expansion—then they all shatter, like fragile avenues, like they were too delicate to sustain weight. Maybe there’s a limit to human tolerance for idealism.”

“It’s true. For a while we were doing well,” Denny said. “But no change is ever secure so long as someone else has the incentive to blow it off. Look at reconstruction in the South. You get the tragedy of the Civil War, the beauty of the Gettysburg Address, the death of Lincoln, and racists
still
figure out how to segregate the South—through legislation!” Denny adjusted his chair. “Then again, difference is essential to freedom. And to adaptation. No one wants a fascist state.”

“Maybe everything that gets built
has
to fall apart,” I said.

“Maybe. The process shakes us from complacency, and inspires us to build new avenues. In fact, it might not even be
mechanically
possible to have acts of liberalism without conservatism, or heroism without cowardice, or revolution without tyranny—”

“Or love without loss,” I said, and I don’t know, with Denny there, I just started to cry.

He reached to hold me. “Don’t worry, honey. He’ll be back.”

——

“Eveline is going to NYU,” my mother was telling Coco’s parents, “to study art history.”

I stood a little behind them. Coco was there too, with shiny coral lips and newly frosted hair, sipping cola from a clear plastic glass.

My father looked confused. He turned to Powell. “What happened to art?”

Powell just shrugged. “Or photography?”

I did not wish my parents any harm; however, I didn’t know why I should have wished them well either, beyond the obvious fact that they were nice people. I didn’t even think I had anything good to inherit. The dictionary says a parent is any animal, organism, or plant in relation to its offspring, and so of course, in that explicit regard, I was their child. Yet they’d set my soul adrift, tending to themselves with the urgency due me, believing me capable because they needed me to be capable, never guessing that their faith in my strength would not make it fact, or that I might grow dangerously weary of sufficiency. Maman had seen through my mask of adequacy. She’d loved without hope for profit the girl she’d found, but Maman was dead. Rourke had not insisted upon my competence either. He had not even seemed to notice it. There was something else in me he wanted, something small and discrete—the frailty in me, and my frailty adored him.

My father tugged his jacket cuffs. His hands were beautifully proportioned. My hands were the same, and it depressed me somewhat to be faced with my DNA like that. Maybe everything was hopelessly predetermined, them to me, me to the next.

“Thanks for coming,” I said to the four of them, and they said that I was very welcome.

Sometimes a day is a symbolic day, and you behave symbolically. Sometimes you search inside for a feeling, and, finding none, you remember that no feeling is frequently the most possible feeling.

At Spring Close House for graduation lunch, it was me; Mom; Dad; Marilyn; Powell; Kate and her brother, Laurent, and sister-in-law, Simone, with their baby, Jean-Claude. Jean-Claude was cute except for the
way his head came together at the temples like he’d been plucked out with cob tongs. Laurent also had a head shaped that way, sort of like a guitar. Looking out the window, I felt mostly lonely. It was the kind of loneliness that cannot see past itself, a skulking suspicion that the world was not mine to inherit. I listened as they spoke, laughed when they laughed, raised my glass as such moments presented themselves, all the while marking time. I was sorry for the way everyone imagined my life to be my own, for the way they really did seem to like me, asking did my fish still have bones, and how pretty I looked. I wished I could give something back. But yet, I knew that all that they wanted from me was all that they
needed
from me, and that is a treacherous path to consent to travel, in the sense of suppressing things sought for the self. That is to say, you being solely what others want you to be.

After appetizers, Dad neatened the table, scraping crumbs with the flat of a knife, and Jean-Claude gnawed his mother’s necklace. When the strand snapped, everyone dove and hunted on their knees for scattered pearls, which was a strange and spirited sort of family happening.

Marilyn brushed her skirt and sat again. “When do you leave for Montreal?”

Laurent deposited a handful of beads into the ashtray. “In an hour or two. We’re hoping the baby will sleep before we stop for dinner.”

“Have you finished packing, Catherine?” Simone asked.

Kate shrugged. “Except for what I’ll pick up in August.”

“And what about you, Powell,” Marilyn asked. “Your next job’s in South America?”

“Brazil,” he said, putting his arm around my mother. “I actually leave this evening.”

My lips paused over the rim of my drinking glass, which smelled the dusty way water smells if you stop to let it. A smell like a long thin tedium, listless like an elderly neighbor’s kitchen with cracked linoleum and spilled prescriptions and overpainted cabinets that do not sufficiently shut. Like the knowledge of passing things.

“What was that man saying to you?” my mother whispered audibly to my father when he returned from paying the check.

“Which man was that?” Dad wanted to know.

“The tall one with the fish tie.”

“Fish tie,” he pondered, looking around. “I think I would have remembered a fish tie.”

Back at home, Kate flitted in loose circles, gathering up the last of her things. I sat on a wicker hamper stuffed with all her fabric scraps and sewing notions and waited while she zipped and tied the last of her luggage. Beneath me the basket bent and squeaked with that slightly bending wicker sound. I wondered how Kate would do. I wondered whether a femininity so refined is not ominously reliant upon the beneficence of circumstance. I guessed she would do fine. Lots of women are out there, doing fine.

“Isn’t this pretty?” she said of her dress. “It’s chambray.”

When she finished packing, we took Mom’s car for a drive down Three Mile Harbor Road to the bay. Darts of sun pierced the trees, breaking up the retiring darkness with pools of apricot. We listened to “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” by The Beatles, hitting rewind on the tape deck whenever it ended. First I did it once, then twice, then she did it. And when she did it, it was different. It was like pouring bronze over a bird’s nest, casting the moment in metal. There was this understanding that of all the songs we’d heard together, that one would be the last. The beach was empty, despite the early June heat. She parked near the fishing station, by the channel, where the strip of sand was curved and rocky.

“Careful,” she said to me. “There’s a broken bottle.”

We lay on the stony sand and watched the boats return to harbor. The water was twinkling and distinguished. In the theater you can make water by waving bolts of silk from one end of the stage to the other, and sometimes real water looks that way.

Kate began to cry; I thought about the song. But instead she said, “I keep thinking about Harrison.” Her tears congealed in her eyes like pudding. I was thinking what a simple creature she was—we were. Maybe I would take her hand and lay it on my neck, make her say his name again, have her feel my throat convulse. Feel the acid echo, the disease in me.

“Here,” I said, stretching my shirt to wipe her eyes. Above us the birds soared triumphantly, arcing, diving, chasing each last swoop.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized, “for ruining our last afternoon.”

I rested my head on her middle. Her babies would come from there. How sad, not to know them. “Don’t be sorry. Don’t ever be sorry.”

Sara asked if I was okay. She was driving. I said I was fine. If I said it uncertainly, it was because the armrest was pressing into my spine. I was facing her, not the street—I could not bear to face the street. The street was like a plank shooting off into nothing. There’s this cartoon where the main character drops black vinyl circles onto the ground behind him for his pursuer to fall into. It’s a scary concept—circles being holes, and strange to explain, but in fact that was exactly how I was doing.

“I’m sorry I missed Kate,” she said. “Was it hard to say goodbye?”

“Not really. The baby was crying.”

There were no more places to park by Alicia’s, so we drove to Apaquogue Road and walked back. The Ross house was shaped like a sideways barn, only it was a mansion. On the right was a screened terrace room, and on the left was the driveway, which, like the walkway, was lined with paper bags filled with sand and burning candles.

“Look at this tree,” I said, pointing up as we passed it. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

“Is it a maple?”

“No,” I said, “it’s a copper beech.”

Though we could see that guests were gathered on the lawn behind the house, we went through the main entrance. The porch was gracious and white with pink geraniums. Sara put her pocketbook in the front hall closet, and she handed a graduation gift for Alicia to a uniformed woman. I offered a bunch of wildflowers I’d picked from the garden near the barn.

The woman said,
“Sí, sí, gracias.”

“Gracias
, Consuela,” Sara said, introducing me in Spanish.

Consuela replied in English, “Yes, hello. Yes, hello. Yes, this way.”

We were escorted through an impeccable hallway and down two stone steps into a living room with an ivory carpet and furniture that was snowy and low as if it had settled in a frost. Wooden stairs without risers went up to our right, and, on the far wall, single-pane glass doors faced the eastern end of a crowded brick terrace. Consuela led us through the
formal dining room, which was attached to an enormous kitchen by a skylighted butler’s pantry. Here, the doors to the patio were open: a reggae band was playing on the other side. Consuela set my flowers on the kitchen table and looked for a vase. She made a fuss over how beautiful they were, but I couldn’t help feeling the gift was not right, that it was primitive, and me too, that I was also primitive.

Her eyes twinkled at me; I remember that, her eyes twinkling.

Sara and I made our way out, pausing for hellos and introductions. People we knew from school were in ties and skirts and freshly ironed clothes. Past the terrace, there was an open lawn that was decorated with giant paper ball lanterns suspended from bamboo poles, and in the center of the expanse was a fountain, with a bronze sculpture of a cube standing on one corner, and a stone bench wrapping around. A pool the gray-blue color of goslings sat alongside a gardener’s cottage and connected garage that ran perpendicular to the main house. The structure was at least three times the size of my mother’s house.

“Do you mind if I go out to see the sculpture?” I asked Sara.

“Not at all,” she said. “I’ll find Alicia and let her know we’re here.”

I took a seat on the concrete ring of the fountain. I raised my head and breathed deeply, giving in to the celestial gardens and lurking servers, the smells of grilled meat and freshly baked goods, the chinks of genuine glass. My back straightened; my head found center. Feeling heartened, feeling sure, feeling finally more than meek, I took my place in that robust utopia. I imitated the want of humility of my hosts, and in my mind I became a
guest
—someone special, chosen.

At the edge of the packed terrace I spotted Mark, Rourke’s friend from the Talkhouse. He was moving toward me as though swimming with necessity. The graphic reminder of Rourke filled me with a barbarian sort of hope.

He crossed the lawn, calling, “Eveline!” Then he gestured to himself, saying, Mark, as though I’d forgotten. He was actually very handsome. By the dark of the night we’d met, with Rourke there, I hadn’t noticed.

“Hi,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“This is my house,” he said, and he smiled. “Alicia’s my sister.”

I instantly recalled the day in art class last winter when Rourke came
in to talk about the sets for the play. The way Alicia was laughing and touching his jacket.
That’s how they knew each other—through Mark
.

“Mind if I sit?” Mark asked. The fountain surged brightly as he came down next to me. “Alicia and Sara told me you haven’t been going out. I was worried you might not make it.”

I looked at the house. It was strange that my name had been mentioned there. Was it in the hallway or on the stairs or in the butler’s pantry? I considered asking. I had the feeling I could ask him anything.

“Is it true that you haven’t left your room?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “My
mother’s
room.”

“Oh, your
mother’s
room,” he repeated with a nod.

And then Mark began to speak; he spoke for a long time. He’d attended UCLA, then he’d gone to Harvard for his MBA. Crew was his sport. He’d biked across Nova Scotia and golfed in Scotland. He’d been hired by a Wall Street firm named Drexel Burnham to work on mergers and acquisitions, something about asset valuation, vertical integration, four in the morning, activity in Japan. He would be moving into his own apartment on West Sixtieth Street, twenty-five stories up, with a terrace overlooking the river.

“The trick to marinating bluefish,” he said, “is milk. It kills the fishy flavor.”

The tone of his voice was artificial and intensely sure, pungent and dry as the inside of flowers. It was as if he spoke without allowing his vocal cords to vibrate excessively. The sound was controlled and hypnotic, and I felt subdued by it. I felt a faraway feeling, a night and a dead feeling. Through the sliverish gap formed by our bodies, I trailed the crystal swirl of water. When I looked up, Mark was staring. I perceived the ignition of his desire. I wasn’t sure what to do about that. Probably it was too late to do anything. My own desire for Rourke, for all things indirectly related to him, including Mark, surely only made matters worse.