Anthropology of an American Girl (7 page)

“Nothing creative,” Jack would say; he was always quick to set people straight before they tried to connect Jack to his dad. “He’s senior account manager for Schweppes. You know, the carbonated sodas.
Schweppervescence.”

“How come your father’s going back on a Saturday?” I asked.

“Because I came home today,” Jack said. “He can’t get away fast enough.”

At the Fleming house, Jack’s sister’s dog Mariah barked, so he gave it a kick. Not really a kick, just a kind of dragging push to one side with the top of his foot. Inside, the air was heavy with the scent of cologne. It spooked me to think of Mr. Fleming’s barrel-chested shadow appearing suddenly to block a doorway.

“What perfume does he wear?” I wrinkled my nose. “Lagerfeld?”

“Cat Piss,” Jack said. He yanked open the refrigerator door. It smacked the counter and glass bottles clanked. “He must think he’s gonna get laid on the bus.” Jack grabbed a yogurt, tore off the lid, and flung it into the sink like a Frisbee. He tilted his head back and drank from the cup. Halfway through he paused. “Want some?”

“What flavor is it?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t hit fruit yet.” He swallowed a little more. “Not the kind you like. It tastes purple.”

“Blueberry,” I said. “Forget it.”

Mariah skulked past our ankles as we moved to the hallway. “Keep away from that beast,” Jack warned. “It’s an operative.”

I asked what an operative was. He said like a spy.

He started up the stairs, his filthy sneakers knocking into the shallow depths. There was something wretched about the sight. “I’ll wait here,” I said. Mr. and Mrs. Fleming didn’t like us to go upstairs when they were out.

Jack reached for my hand. “C’mon, Evie. I swear, we’ll just be a minute.”

On the southwest side of the attic, Jack had constructed a retreat for himself. He liked to say it was the only room in the house uncontaminated
by damask and deodorizer. The windows were shuttered, the paint on the walls was charcoal gray, and the floors were bare wood because three months after we’d met, Jack had torn out the rug. It was the day before he was supposed to leave for boarding school—Labor Day Sunday, 1978. He’d intended to destroy the whole room and after that, the whole house, including the carport.

“Especially the carport,” he’d declared. I had no doubt that he meant it. Unlike most people who say they hate their parents, Jack really did.

He’d tried in all sincerity to talk to them, to apologize for certain things, to reason with them about his feelings, to ask them to please let him spend his junior and senior years in East Hampton, to not send him away. I’d gone with him for moral support—only not all the way. I waited at the end of the street, on the porch of the Presbyterian Church. I brought a book, figuring it might take a while. But Jack reappeared in ten minutes.

“That was fast,” I said. “What happened?”

“What happened,” Jack repeated.
“Hmmm
, let’s see.” He took my book from me and began to slap it against his thigh. “I try to reconcile. I swear to conform. I sit there, totally fucking humiliating myself. I tell them that I don’t want to lose you.”

“And,” I prodded softly.

“My mother’s sure we’ll
stay friends
. She says, ‘You can write.’”

I hated to hear his voice sound desperate and alone when it did not have to be, not when I was right there.

“Then,” Jack said, “the fat bastard goes to the barbecue grill, totally ignoring me, and says, ‘C’mon, Susan. I don’t want those ribs to char.’”

“Char,”
I said, “Wow. Who uses a word like
char?”

“Fat bastards,” Jack stated. “Ad agency homos. Neocons. That’s who.”

At dawn the following morning, he took a knife to his room. After cutting the curtains and shredding the carpet, he’d intended to start on the walls, but beneath the rug in the center of the room, he’d discovered a very old Christmas card with stained edges that looked like it could have been from around the early 1900s. Inside, in childish handwriting, it said,
Eveline
.

He jammed the open card into my hands. I was in my underwear and
a T-shirt, and we were standing in the driveway by the garage because it was early and that was the back way to my bedroom if you didn’t want to wake up other people. He was winded from running and covered in the fine white matter of demolition. He yanked me into the sunlight, handed over the card, set his hands on his thighs, and bent to catch his breath.

I looked from the card to his face. “I don’t understand.”

“I found it! In my room. I was pulling out the carpet.”

I asked was he sure.

“Of course I’m sure!”

“Maybe someone put it there,” I said. “Like, planted it.”

“That rug’s been there for years,” he said. “Besides, no one we know is that interesting. What would be the point?”

He dropped to the dew-soaked grass. I dropped too.

“Listen,” he instructed. “I’m cutting and tearing out the rug, I’m throwing the pieces down the stairs, and I’m raising all kinds of dust and shit to really piss them off, and just when I’m about to bust the windows or pry off the molding, I see this paper on the floor.” Jack gestured with his hands as he spoke, which he almost never did. “I go to the paper, I lift it. It’s a Christmas card. There are angels on front. Did you see the angels?” he asked.

“I saw them,” I said.

“Look at the fucking angels,”
he insisted, pushing the card back at me.

“Yes,” I swore. “I see.”

“And this, did you see this?” Jack opened it again and tapped at my name. It was scrawled in loopy script that dipped to the right, in old-fashioned penmanship—
Eveline
. “I might have killed him,” he said. “I might have done it this time, if he came up those stairs.” He looked at the ground, numb. “You had to see me. I had a knife in one hand, and in the other hand I had the card.”

He left for boarding school in Kent, Connecticut, later that day without a fight. He took the card with him, and in the Flemings’ driveway, where we said goodbye, he vowed to me privately, but before God and whomever the fuck else, to take it with him everywhere he went for the rest of his sorry fucking life, as a mystic but tangible reminder that no
matter how far apart he and I might grow, at the core we were one, that we were meant to be one, that things would work out as nature intended, and that no one could prevent destiny’s unfolding, not even us, because we were connected—
spiritually
. “Understand?” he said, as his sister, Elizabeth, leaned on the horn of the family’s New Yorker.

“I understand,” I said, because truly I did, and to seal the vow we kissed. He popped the passenger door. Before getting in, he gave a final wave of the middle finger to his parents, who were largely concealed behind the living room drapes. Then he left, and he stayed away at Kent until he dropped out at Thanksgiving. He was gone just three months, though it had felt more like a thousand years.

Jack was emptying his knapsack from summer. It smelled like heath and wax and mold, and it was covered in President Carter campaign buttons from 1976:
JERSEY LOVES CARTER-MONDALE, UAW FOR CARTER-MONDALE, END THE NIXON LEGACY—VOTE JIMMY CARTER,
and Jack’s particular favorite,
CARTER É BRAVISSIMO.
The smell was probably from camping in the mountains, but with Jack you never knew. He pulled the card from deep inside his bag and laid it on the desktop. I touched it, the inside part with my name, for luck, then I sat on the bed. Jack’s bed was built into the room, wedged square and high into the corner. When you sat, your feet did not touch ground. Attached to the long wall above it was a shelf for shells, fossils, field guides, and bottled things such as butterflies, and also bones and books.
A World of Fungi, The Stranger, Demian
. In
Demian
, Jack had found Abraxas.

“Like on the Santana album—
Abraxas
. There’s a quote from Hermann Hesse on the cover,” he’d said. “How cool is it that Santana reads Hesse?”

Across from the bed, his Technics stereo system was set carefully on milk crates from Schwenk’s, the local dairy farm, twelve of them stacked four wide, three tall, and all filled with albums—some rock, some punk, but mostly jazz and blues. Above that were five guitars, including a 1968 Martin D-28 with a Brazilian rosewood bridge, and a Gibson Les Paul Standard with sunburst finish and humbucking pickups. Near his pillow was a stuffed mouse I’d made in seventh-grade home economics, the only thing I’d ever sewn.

“I can’t believe you still have this mouse,” I said. I was terrible at sewing. “Do you really like it, or do you just feel sorry for me?”

“I really like it. Though I also happen to feel sorry for you.” He kissed my eyelids and lowered himself on top of me.

“Jack,” I whispered uncomfortably, pushing him. “Let’s get out of here.”

We stopped to see the trees on Main Street. The giant elms in East Hampton were dying from Dutch elm disease and many had been marked for removal.

“I went straight to your house,” Jack explained. “I didn’t get a chance to check the trees.”

Jack lay in the grass across from the Hunnting Inn, his head hanging off the curb into the gutter. I watched the car tires whizzing past his extended neck, wondering if he would be decapitated. His untucked Jethro Tull T-shirt crept up his chest, and his jeans slid to reveal the waistband of a pair of boxer shorts. The design on them was of red go-go dancers. The shorts were mine, anyway my father’s, from the fifties. Jack’s apricot belly was marked by a V of muscle low in the center and a narrow ladder of hair that mounted the middle. I crawled through the grass and got next to him, facing up also. “This one’s awesome,” he said. “The branch over Main Street is like an arm bent at the elbow. Pretty soon it will be gone.”

The streets of the village were full of fog. Along the way to the pizza place, I kept putting up my hands as if to part curtains. Jack was saying how in Wyoming juniper trees have round blue cones like grapes and how Rick Ruddle said that inhaling labdanum tranquilizes the mind. Rick Ruddle was Jack’s hike leader and a sound engineer from Portland.

Brothers Four Pizzeria was crowded. Troy Resnick was there with Min Kessler, the eye doctor’s daughter. Jack and Troy slapped loose hands. “How was the trip, man?” Troy asked.

Jack said, “Outrageous, man.”

Troy examined the watermelon-colored Kryps on Jack’s skateboard, and Jack informed Troy that his haircut was
butt ugly
. I lifted a copy of
Dan’s Papers
from a stack on the floor and took the front table. Through the ribbon of mist that divided Newtown Lane, the red neon sign from
Sam’s Restaurant seemed milky red and noirish, making me think of detective novels—single-bullet shootings. A pop, a body, some footsteps, a detective.

“Catch you later, man,” I heard Jack say.

Troy slurped back cheese. “Meet us at the beach.”

“Which one, Wiborg’s?” Jack asked.

“Indian Wells.”

“Too far,” Jack said. “I don’t have a car, and I’m not driving with you. You suck.”

Other kids starting calling out to Jack. He transmitted a series of apathetic hellos, then declared with annoyance, “Listen, people, I gotta get some fucking food.”

At the counter he ordered two slices and stared down Dino and Vinny while he waited. They irritated Jack, the way they thought they were masculine. He liked to say that they must have had some very big hairy dicks beneath those oil-stained pizza aprons. For his part, Jack astounded them, the way he was puny and unkempt but had a girl like me. He seemed to personify for them the trouble with America. Dino would just shake his head when he saw us, which pleased Jack infinitely. Jack liked to take me there; we went about three times a week.

Jack deposited two paper plates on the table, each with its own overhanging slice, and the plates swirled a bit from grease coming through. Jack lowered his chin to the plane of the table and bit his folded slice. “Mooks,” he said through his food. He didn’t know what a Mook was, he’d just heard it once in a movie called
Mean Streets
, which my dad had taken us to see. Ever since then, everybody who pissed him off was a Mook. I tore the crust from my slice and chewed. Jack wanted to know if the pizza guys had given me a hard time while he was gone.

“This is the first time I’ve been here since you left,” I said.

He knocked his head back to suck the soda from his can. His hair fanned out against his shoulders, and I could see his Adam’s apple dip and rise. I don’t like to see them, not ever, Adam’s apples. I turned away; Dino was staring.

“Let’s go, Jack,” I said, standing and pulling my sweater around my shoulders, buttoning one button at the neck. “The movie starts in five minutes. We’re going to miss the oil globs.” Before the beginning of
every film, the theater would project wafting oil globs on the screen, kind of like a giant lava lamp.

“Right,” he said, jumping up to grab his skateboard. When I tossed the remainder of my pizza into the garbage, he caught it before it hit the can and crammed it into his mouth.

As we started for the theater, he jumped onto his skateboard and whizzed by me in the street. Jack was handsome, in a seedy and purposeful way, the way a barn in disrepair looks so good in the middle of a lush green field. It was true he had changed over the summer, or maybe it was me who had changed. I said, “I can’t believe we’re finally seniors.”

“I was just thinking that,” he said as he rode up the curb, then popped back off in front of Tony’s Sporting Goods. “Troy’s doing whippets tonight. That’s why he wants to meet later.”

“Isn’t it like breathing into a paper bag?”

“Yeah. It’s so stupid. That’s what makes it fun.” He approached Newtown and Main, and at the corner he twirled smoothly on the rear wheels. His arms were bent at the elbows, his right leg extended, his left leg flexed. His hair windmilled lightly. Then he leapt off, flipping the front end of his board into his ready hand, waiting for me to catch up. We met at the light.

“Your leg ever bother you?” I asked.

“Nah,” he said. “Sometimes.”