Anthropology of an American Girl (6 page)

“It’s her own fault,” Jodie Palumbo exhaled.

“God, it’s
so
gross.” Annie McCabe shuddered.

Pip said something, which I couldn’t hear, and they laughed. They didn’t like Alice, though they didn’t know her. They were sorting, or classifying. It’s easy—anyone dressed funny is the enemy, especially if they reject your supremacy or do not acknowledge school as entertainment. If the enemy tries to look like you and act like you, only in more affordable clothes, that person is
still
the enemy, only of a more contemptible, less terrifying variety—the sort you can be seen with
if absolutely necessary
, for instance if you are soliciting float-making help for homecoming or votes for yourself in the class election.

I passed the girls, though it brought me to the rear of the boys. Actually, the rear of the boys was a nicer class of people than the front of the girls, which is a carryover fact for life. I mixed in with Roy Field, who rebuilt radios and ate seven bowls of Trix a day; Tommy Gardner, who had impetigo and a heart murmur; and Daryl Sackler, who was six-foot-four but refused to play basketball even though they offered to let him start, because he had a job mowing lawns after school. Daryl Sackler
buries cats and mows their heads off
, that’s what everybody said.

“Actually,” Jack said of Daryl, “I like him. Most freaks like that would kill for fucking basketball hero status. But he
chooses
to remain a loser. Either he’s a total retard or a complete man of honor. Besides, you know how I feel about cats.”

I ran hard, really hard. At the end I sprinted to finish and bent to catch my breath. Others finished after me, forming a docile line at the girls’ water fountain. Alice shifted miserably, as though protecting herself from us, like we might kick her or spit, but she didn’t shift too far, since her
predicament was legitimate; in fact, her predicament was
our
predicament. I felt I was with her, though my body stood apart and my voice was silent. In
Jules and Jim
, Jim blows Catherine a kiss when she jumps into the Seine River after Jules insults women, and Jim says,
I admired her. I was swimming with her in my mind
.

I twisted the knob and drank the water, which was icy cold by the time I got to the front of the line; I had this trick of letting everyone cut in front of me. I wiped my mouth on my shoulder and looked back to Alice. I didn’t know what she’d endured beyond the school walls, but her look was knowing. If my eyes met her eyes, I wondered what message mine should convey. Not pity, since I am a woman too, and therefore as pitiful as Alice. I considered sitting next to her, but then I would have gotten detention. It’s weird how teachers belong to a union and they teach about revolutions and labor strikes, but they discourage solidarity among students.

Kate and I saw her doctor’s note halfway unfolded on Coach’s desk when we were sent to return the relay cones to the equipment room behind the office. We could only make out parts.
Please excuse Alice Lee from physical activity due to severe menstrual
—the second paragraph fell into a crease. Something, something—
requiring medication
.

In the hallway Kate said, “How awful.”

By that she meant Alice. Kate thought Alice was a poor thing. I thought the awful part was the note. It was written by an expert, by someone who believed what he or she was writing; then it was dispatched into the world, only to be casually disregarded by some
other
expert. It’s hard to believe in anything anyone says when experts are constantly contradicting each other. Pip was as sure in gym as I was in art, but Alice was also sure about something, and so was Coach, and Alice’s doctor. It’s too bad that certain things matter so much when
you
are the one they matter to, but in the grand scheme, no one else cares, not really. I wondered who else besides Coach thought rope climbing mattered to girls but periods didn’t.

The barn had become dark. Though I could see very little, I could hear many things: the echo of my footsteps in the room I occupied, the sound
of night beyond those walls, my mother’s laughter, ascending the hill from the house, traveling on the platform of a breeze. I could almost smell the Chablis on her breath and the mint from the package of gum in her coat pocket—the smells were like fairies escaping. I could almost see her reenact the drama of her day for her friends—bodies wedged into couches and chairs, denim legs jutting across tabletops, drowsy hands passing a joint, passing a bottle, wrists exposed, voices going, “So what happened next, Rene?”
Reen
, short for Irene.

Her friends were always there. If ever it looked like they might leave, they wouldn’t. Someone might stand and stretch but then just use the toilet, or tuck in a loose shirt and ask if anyone felt like making a run for more beer. If I ever passed through, they would confer with me congenially, dipping close to my eyes with cigarettes, natted hair, and home-sewn clothes stinking of patchouli and musk.

If my upbringing made me sensitive to affectations of tolerance and to the irony of that particular hypocrisy, I could hardly be blamed. All I ever heard as a child was how
everything is cool
and
everyone should be cool
, and yet they were so very quick to judge new shoes or a clean car or to cogitate over the dementia behind matching furniture or monogrammed stationery. I couldn’t help but have developed an aversion to the epoxied stench of incense and the smut of overfilled ashtrays and the sticky liquor rings on tables that had to be cleaned on Sunday mornings. Hiding in my room at bedtime as a little girl, I would drink my dinner of chocolate milk and bury myself beneath hundreds of stuffed animals tied together in twos with rescued ribbon and bits of yarn, one neck fastened to another or belly to belly, buddied up in case of fire, in case they would have to be tossed from the window. I would rub my feet together to distract myself from the noise of the party, the singing, the laughter, the music—Joplin, Dylan, Hendrix.

“I love you,” she would say. My mother, popping her head in.

I was sitting on the barn floor, drawing rooftops. There were all these great rooftops by my dad’s place in Little Italy. My father was good about taking me up to the roof of his building whenever I wanted. He always waited while I drew, either reading or just looking around. It wasn’t necessary for him to wait, but between him and his
business partner, Tony Abbruscato, they had about a thousand rooftop horror stories.

Kneeling before my paper, I looked deep into the space Jack might have occupied, and imagining him, I smiled. I thought of him smiling also, a fair angel’s smile, his features transmitting a regard so strong as to defy the inconvenience of his factual absence. Had he been there actually, he would have persuaded me to join the party in the house. Jack hated to miss a party. Though I missed him, I was thankful to be beyond the influence of his flesh, the lips that could nudge me with an inflexible kiss through the door of my own home.

“Mom’s back, you know.” Not Jack, but Kate. She was leaning in the doorway, her head poking through. “Feel like coming up front?”

Yes, my mother, I knew. The laughter and the mint. The sweet wine and music. I wasn’t sure what I felt like, being alone or being with people. Neither seemed good. I wondered what was expected of me; if I had known what was expected, I might have done it. I tried to think, but at the same time there was something I needed to forget, something of which an answer to her question might have reminded me.

Kate waited for an answer, and when none came, she left. Her feet clocked down the wood steps outside. In a few seconds the screen door in the back of the house squeaked open and slapped shut. Then nothing. Not silence so much as the absence of sounds affiliated with me. There was the loose, careless clank of silverware, and cabinet doors smacking, and the thud of the plumbing every time the kitchen faucet was shut off. There was the distant muffle of voices—Kate rejoining the party, Mom asking if I was coming. Maybe not. Maybe she did not ask about me at all.

W
hen I came home from shopping at the A&P on Saturday, he was there, at my mother’s desk, swiveling in her chair, slumped and belligerent, the way you sit at ice cream counters, like at the Candy Kitchen in Bridgehampton. It was as if he’d always been there, all summer long, occupying that very chair.

A scratchy copper beard dusted his chin, making a wafery layer like penny-colored frost on a windowpane. His hair touched the base of his neck. It was the color of gleaming wheat. Jack might have looked healthy, except that beneath his crystalline blue eyes were velvety pouches, and his cheeks were raw and drawn very far in, like a pair of inside-out parentheses. It was possible he had not eaten or slept in days. It’s strange to realize you have sustained yourself on a memory of a person that has become untrue. The phantom face of my summer was not the face before me. And, yet, it was Jack.

“Your hair grew,” he said. His voice was the same, still so beautiful.

I stopped at the base of the stairs and lowered the groceries to the floor. “I hate it.”

“So cut it,” he said, moving toward me, lifting me, and we spun.

I tested his existence; my hands felt for the body beneath the shell of his clothes. I confirmed the feathery pressure of his hair on my cheeks. The solid wall of his slender chest, the subtle protrusion of his right shoulder blade. He was real, with a smell that was real and a slightly sticky gleam to his skin. I rested my head in the bony basin between his ear and his shoulder.

“Are you crying?” he asked. He tightened his grip. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s just, you kept coming, like a ghost, like, floating.” For a long while I couldn’t speak. “Sometimes I would feel that you were with me, and you seemed so real. Now you’re here, but I’m not sure. You seem less real than before.”

His eyes studied mine, scanning cautiously. He breathed deeply, heavily, as if taking some of me down with the air.

“Have I changed too?” I asked.

“You have.” He drew back my hair one side at a time, trailing with his gaze the path of his fingers. Adding gravely, “But it’s okay.”

Jack kissed me and his lips on mine were dry. He tasted like black licorice, like anise.

“My mother told me everything,” he said, “about Kate’s mom.” He touched my cheek over and over with a chapped finger. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here.”

My eyes opened wide, admitting light from my mother’s desk lamp. If you don’t want to cry, you can stop yourself by looking into light. It’s better to keep grief inside. Grief inside works like bees or ants, building curious and perfect structures, complicating you. Grief outside means you want something from someone, and chances are good you won’t get it.

Later we were sitting on opposite ends of the couch, drinking black coffee. Our legs were interlocking and I was rubbing my feet together beneath Jack’s tailbone. I used to rub my feet behind my dad’s back when he was reading or when he and Marilyn were watching that old detective show,
Mannix
, or the crazy Dean Martin program, the one with the spiral staircase. My father’s apartment was always freezing.

“They’re whirring like a little machine!” Jack said of my feet, and right then WPLR played “Maybe I’m Amazed.” The song had played the first time we met, and by coincidence we often heard it play, which sort of made it our song, even though everyone said it was queer to like Wings. Jack left my feet exposed when he stood to raise the volume.

“I want to cover this song with the band,” he said, plopping back down. He and Dan Lewis and Dan’s cousin Marvin, also known as Smokey Cologne, had a band—Atomic Tangerine. In a moderate shriek, Jack sang along with the radio.
“Der ner ne ner ner ner ne ne.”

When the song was over, we heard a sound behind us. We tilted our heads back over the couch arms. Kate was standing in the entry near the front door.

“Katie!” Jack called. He stood and started to step around the couch, probably to give her a hug or say sorry about her mother dying.

“Hey, Jack,” Kate said dismissively, avoiding eye contact.

There was a pause, which made it hard for him to know what to do. He darkened and returned to me. For a while we just sat. Kate craned her neck to regard herself in the mirror over the fireplace, then she removed her sweater and dropped it playfully on top of me.

“How did Drama Club go?” I asked.

“Fine,” she said, shaking her hair loose. “We did improvisations.”

“A school club on a Saturday?” Jack asked with derision. “Is it a
Communist
club?”

Kate approached the mantel and stepped on the hearth to regard herself more closely. “It’s
theater
, Jack,” she said. “You have to be committed.” She turned and smiled falsely. “Oh, well. I’ll leave you two lovebirds alone.” She stomped up the stairs, the door slammed, and her stereo switched on.
Her
stereo, not the house stereo. All of a sudden there were two. We soon heard the sounds of Joni Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morning” blasting through the ceiling.

“Did she flip her lid when her mother died, or what?” Jack looked to the stairs.
“Lovebirds? Theater?
She’s turning into fucking Blanche DuBois.” He plucked her sweater from my chest, pinching it and draping it across the coffee table. “How long has this been going on?”

I shook my head. I couldn’t remember the time before, or the way it used to be. There were the things we used to do, factual things, and those were easy to recall—playing, biking, singing. As for the things we’d conjured and believed, those were harder to recapture. I wondered if ideals existed only because there was so much to be learned in the loss of them.

Jack pulled me close, kissing my head. “I never thought I’d say this, but let’s get the fuck out of here and go to my house.”

It was almost seven. We had only a half hour to be alone at Jack’s house. His parents were finishing dinner at Gordon’s in Amagansett, where they’d had a six o’clock reservation. At seven-fifteen his mother would deliver his father to the Jitney, and by seven-thirty, she would be home.
Mr. Fleming would be back in Manhattan two and a half hours after that. They had an apartment on Madison Avenue and Eighty-seventh Street. He worked at Ogilvy & Mather, the advertising agency.