Anthropology of an American Girl Read online

  The painting I’d given to Kate’s mother was an oil of a white rose, overblown and beginning to withdraw. Maman had the same quality of a flower receding. There was something eloquent about her admission of resign, something august about the inalterability of her position. I squinted to make her young again. If she could no longer be called beautiful, she possessed something better—a knowledge of beauty, its inflated value, its inevitable loss.

  Maman spoke that day of the sea. In her velvety drone, she recalled sailing by ship to America. “The sea is generous,” she said. “She is there when you need her. Like a mother.” Her dying voice was a black sonata; it defied time. Though it was May, I could think only of the coming autumn, of a world without her in it. “Ecoutez,” she said. “La mer, et la mère. Eh?”

  I heard Kate say something. I looked across the kitchen, but she was not there, the kitchen was not there, not the food, not Maman. Everything had disappeared. The sweet castle of my hallucination had gone down, vanished. We were still sitting on the porch, Kate’s knee knocking against mine. Our eyes resisted communion; they scanned the new jet sky, contemplating the black, wondering whether heavens, whether angels.

  2

  “Big John’s coming over tonight,” my mother said. She was next to me, wiping the kitchen counter, her thin arms making sweeping circles on the blade- and burn-scarred Formica. “He’s Powell’s friend from the Merchant Marines. Did I mention that he’s an expert birder?”

  I was eating my usual dinner of spinach out of a can, and, as usual, green juice dripped onto my shirt. My mother rubbed the spots with her sponge. “Hold still,” she said, somewhat exasperated. Softly she added, “Be sure to ask John about his duck decoys.”

  Later that night, Big John’s voice cut past the opened windows and into the yard. I was outside, moving my things from the barn, where I’d stayed for the summer, back to the front house for the school year, and every time he let loose with another bird whistle I could almost see the breeze from his breath in the leaves. He kept going on about ducks this and ducks that—coots, broadbills, ringnecks, widgeons.

  I ventured into the kitchen at eleven o’clock. Mom perked up when she saw me. “Hi!”

  Big John waved. He was a beefy, black-bearded man. Everything he did was loud. He talked loud, he breathed loud, he even sat loud. His chair creaked and moaned as gross spurts of wind shot out of his nose before getting recalled through his teeth. People who amplify like that are scary, especially when they do so at the beach or on a public phone or in your kitchen late at night.

  “Big John’s telling me about—” My mother faltered elegantly. She turned back to him. “What is it that you’re telling me about?”

  “ATVs,” he said with a giant sniff.

  “All-terrain vehicles,” she said experimentally. “Fascinating.” She patted the seat next to hers. “Come. Join us.”

  I went to the sink for a glass of water. “No, thanks. School starts tomorrow.” My back was turned; I could hear a match burst to life.

  “Oh,” she said, drawing in on her cigarette. “Right. And when is Jack back from Oregon?”

  “What’s he doing up in Oregon?” Big John interrupted.

  “Eveline’s boyfriend does Outward Bound,” Mom said. “River rafting. Mountain climbing.”

  “I’m not sure when he’ll be back,” I said. “I haven’t heard from him.”

  She tilted her head and squinted, smoking, lost in thought.

  Big John cleared his throat, and my mother and I startled. “My brother runs a Harley dealership in Hauppauge,” he shouted to no one in particular. “He’s got ATVs, dirt bikes, mopeds, bicycles, skateboards—the whole gamut, basically.”

  “Let’s just say John’s brother is into wheels,” Mom joked lightly.

  “Basically.”

  “Well,” I said. “Kate told me she gets up at six. I’m going to turn off the stereo.”

  “Six?” Mom said. “We’re a ten-minute walk from the school!”

  “I guess she has to do stuff.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “I don’t know—hair, ironing.”

  “Ironing? I don’t know if we even have an iron.”

  “I think she brought her own,” I said.

  My mother seemed blue. Maybe she was upset about Kate’s not having a home anymore except for our ironless one. Maybe she was worried about where Jack had disappeared to and what trouble he might be in. Most likely she was dreading the prospect of hearing Big John’s voice without the muffling accompaniment of the stereo or without me as a distraction. I took the electric fan from the top of the refrigerator.

  “Hot?” John inquired.

  “No, not at all,” I said. “It’ll just cut down on noise.”

  “Okay, then, night,” he offered, waving again. His hand knocked the edge of the glass table. There was a nasty crack.

  Mom lurched across, examining the table. “Is it broken?”

  “Nah.” He looked at the glow-blue school ring throttling his pinky finger. “It’s fine.”

  “I meant the table,” she said.

  He inspected it. “Oh, that. Just a small scratch.”

  As I set the fan on my desk and plugged it in, the 11:07 passed, filling the bedroom with light. The Long Island Rail Road ran fifty feet from the side of my mother’s house. The windows rattled and the furnishings skidded and the pictures cocked sideways when trains passed, but it was a quaint intrusion, a topic of conversation, more amusing than threatening. The LIRR travels between the farmland of the East End of Long Island through the sprawling cemeteries and housing projects of Queens, into the center of Manhattan. In the middle of the ride there are identical houses with identical yards. Each lawn indicates nature. Each box indicates home.

  “It’s not dying that scares me,” Jack would say whenever we went to my father’s apartment in the city. “It’s Levittown.” He planned to live in the mountains with guns. “The Rockies probably. You coming?”

  “Yes,” I would lie. I could never live on the toothy tip of anything, but it wasn’t good to make Jack sad. When Jack felt sad, he hung his head and you couldn’t lift it if you tried. I preferred the apocalyptic terrain of cities—the melting asphalt, the artificial illumination. Unlike Jack, I looked forward to the future. At least when things are as bad as they can get, they can’t get worse. The future would be untouchable, hypervisual, and intuitive, a place where logic and progress have been played out to such absurd extremes that survival no longer requires the application of either.

  “Notice how all it takes is the Force to blow up the entire Death Star?” I would tell Jack. “The future won’t be jet packs and space stations; it’ll be aboriginal. The language of the physical will atrophy. Our minds will coil inward, and our eyes will grow large to see beyond the seeable. No one dies in the future. We’ll all preserve ourselves to be reconstituted.”

  “That’s the whole fucking problem,” Jack would say. “I don’t want to live forever. I’m having trouble with the idea of Tuesday.”

  I held my face close to the air from the fan and said “Ahhh,” with my voice going choppy. In the mirror on the desktop, I could see my hair blowing up. It wasn’t a lot of hair, but it felt like a lot in the wind. I was squinting, so my eyes looked like cat eyes.

  “They’re the color of absinthe,” my father likes to say, which is an odd compliment, since the definition of absinthe is a green drink of bitter wormwood oil—whatever that is.

  My eyes are pointed at the ends like cartoon flames or the acuminate tips of certain leaves. Beneath the green are smoldering circles. They mark the place my skin is thinnest, and so my soul the closest. Mom’s boyfriend, Powell, says that the soul is contained in the body. He says if instruments are made from your bones when you die, the music tells your story. Powell got his bachelor’s in anthropology from Stanford and his master’s in engineering from Columbia, then he joined the navy before moving on to oil rigs. He goes away for months at a time to places
like Alaska or the Gulf, where he reads meters and plays harmonica. Powell can play “This Land Is Your Land” on harmonica better than anyone.

  One disorienting fact about staring into a mirror is that the person you see is the opposite of what you truly look like. I tried to explain it once to Kate. She was playing with her hair, looking in a mirror, changing the part from left to right.

  She said, “It looks better on the left.”

  “Actually,” I said, “though your hair is parted on the left of your true head, it’s parted on the right of your mirror head. What you mean is, It looks better on the right.”

  “That’s not what I mean.” She probed her scalp. “It’s on the left of my head here,” she said, holding the spot, “and it doesn’t switch places there.” Kate tapped the mirror.

  “You have to inhabit the image,” I explained. “If you inhabit the image, the part is on the right. But, if we were in the world, looking at the girl in the mirror—”

  “We are in the world,” she interrupted flatly, and by her voice, I knew she was done. Kate could be reluctant to explore topics that require a detachment from vanity.

  “Anyway,” I sighed. “What you see is the opposite of what everyone else sees.”

  Kate brushed steadily. “No, Evie. What you see is the opposite of what everyone else sees.”

  Later, Kate tried her makeup on me—cover stick and frosted eye shadow and face powder and Bonne Bell lip gloss. She was applying all these layers, saying the job of cosmetics is not to conceal but to enhance. She turned me to face the mirror. “Ta da!”

  I looked rubbery, sort of embalmed. My cheekbones were gone and my lips glittered like one of those plastic bracelets with sparkly stuff inside. My eyes burned and my skin felt itchy. I smelled like cherry gum. I made my way to the sink, groping walls. As I rinsed, I watched myself—anyway, the opposite of myself—reappear in the mirror. Kate’s reflection buoyed and skulked next to my own. She seemed to think I was being difficult. I felt bad about her thinking that. Something felt different between us—I felt something coming, not obvious like a wave but sneaky like a drip, a subtle sort of rising.

  It’s true that I can be difficult, though that is no fault of my parents. They are extremely good-natured people. They remained friends even after they got divorced. My father always says he married the prettiest Irish girl in New York, and my mother says she married the one funny German. It’s true my father is funny, and true as well that my mother is pretty like her sister, Lowie, even if Lowie walks with a cane. Lowie had a fever when she was little. Maybe not a fever. Maybe fever is just what everyone says.

  As for me, I arrived dark and detached, and though everyone waited, I became nothing like anyone else in my family. Even my birth was hard for my mother. I was breech. She tore, she vomited, she got more stitches than there are states. When the nurse handed me over, my mom was terrified. “I’m supposed to take care of that?” she says whenever she tells the story. “She looked like an owl.”

  My aunt Lowie is a midwife, so I’ve seen three childbirth films. When babies come out, they wear a bewildered grimace as though they have arrived by train and are peeping about the platform for the friend who promised to pick them up. It’s not nice to think of myself as having been left at the station. I know my mother loves me; she frequently says she does. But it’s one thing for a child to be the recipient of an affection that is conscious of its lack, and it’s another to know fervent devotion, to be a blessing in the flush and the sweat of loving arms.

  You cannot recover from a bad birth. The stigma lingers for a lifetime the way bad luck really does last seven years after a mirror breaks. The special gravity of a mother’s first disappointed glance impresses itself on the infant’s waxy blue skin. On my forehead is just such a mark, slightly off-center, to the left—that is to say, to my left. You can’t actually see it, but you can sense that it’s there. There is a prohibitive aspect to my looks, just as some rivers run too wild for a person to cross.

  In the beginning of that summer, before Maman died, Dad and his girlfriend, Marilyn, took me to see an Italian movie, L’Avventura, which is about disillusionment and other sixties stuff. Afterward my dad asked what I thought of the film. I told him that I liked Monica Vitti, the film’s star. Monica Vitti has this mesmerizing way of leaning against walls and staring out to view nothing, as though the horizon is millimeters away, as though the great distance we all dream into is bearing pestilently upon her skin.

  “I think she’s my favorite actress,” I said.

  Marilyn tapped Dad’s arm. “See?”

  Dad nodded. “I’m impressed, Marilyn.”

  “During the film I told your dad that you remind me of her,” Marilyn said.

  Did I really seem so sad? Monica Vitti seemed sad to me. She gave the impression of having lived a better past, of having returned to the present to discover how pointless things have become. She is untouchable, unsaveable: she too has the mark.

  “You guys want to catch a cab?” Dad asked.

  It was drizzling on Second Avenue. The sidewalk was not completely wet, but there was already that dusty smell of rain on cement.

  “Mind if we walk?” I said.

  Later that night, while my father was reading in the living room, Marilyn and I went into their bedroom. The only light came from the street, so I could scarcely make out the furniture—the walnut armoire with its pewter-finish grill of bamboo shoots, or the matching bureau loaded with bargain books from the Strand and old jewels in tortoiseshell boxes and a terra-cotta bowl of photographs, mostly of me. Or the low bed that was neatly dressed in one of those grandmotherly white spreads with nubby protuberances.

  We knelt at the open window, reaching to feel the rain. Cars swished dreamily up Elizabeth Street. Tangerine strands of hair broke free from Marilyn’s braid and fluttered in the breeze like kite tails. Her skin was powdered. It’s always nice to kiss her cheek; it brings to mind the gentler things.

  “Do you think I’m pretty?” I asked.

  She turned to face me. “I do.”

  “But not like Kate.” Everyone always said how pretty Kate was.

  “No, not like Kate,” Marilyn said, adjusting her elbows on the slanted, overpainted sill. “You’re more beautiful than Kate.”

  I felt bad, like I’d forced a compliment from her; I hadn’t meant to. “My parents don’t think that.”

  She turned back to look out. “I think they’re afraid of the way you look.”

  I didn’t feel frightening, the way my parents found me to be, or difficult, the way others seemed to see me. I felt nothing, really, other than a sense that inside I was very small. Maybe all that anyone perceived was their inability to inspire my trust.

  Though Jack was not there, I needed him to be there, so I imagined him. I often did this, and often we would speak. I asked him if getting older means you can’t trust anyone. In the mirror, I focused until my burning eyes became his burning eyes, with the hue changing from bottle green to bright Wedgwood blue.

  “You never can trust anyone,” he seemed to answer. “But when you get old, you finally figure it out.”

  Possibly he was right. You’re old when you learn that needs are to be eclipsed by civility. You’re old when you join the sticky, stenchy morass of concealed neediness that is society. You’re old when you give up trying to change people because then they might want to change you too. When you’re young, needs are explicit, possibilities endless, formalities undiscovered, and proofs of allegiance direct. If only there were a way to keep the world new, where every day remains a wonder.

  “Jack,” I said. “Remember how easy it used to be? Remember when friends used to cut themselves and share blood?”

  3

  The sun was a mean wall behind us, shoving up against our backs, and the tar that coated the railroad ties was sticky. A resin smell filled the air. I could feel it creeping the way molasses drips, only upward, burning the inside of my nose. Kate didn’t like the tar to touc
h her shoes, so she stepped with perfect strides on the gravel between the ties. I took the rail.

  When we reached Newtown Lane I hesitated, teetering on the strip of steel. “I’m just gonna run across the street and grab a cup of coffee.”

  Her face screwed up into the sunlight. “We’re going to be late.”

  “I’ll go fast.” I jogged into the street, dodging minor morning traffic.

  Three bells on a crooked wire tinked and jangled against the store’s glass door. Bucket’s Deli was full of laborers in T-shirts, shorts, and Timberlands waiting patiently for egg sandwiches—patiently because the city people had gone back and there wasn’t much work for them to do. I made my way to the counter and ordered. Joe, the counter-guy, filled one of those jumbo Styrofoam cups with ice cubes and cold coffee from a plastic coffee storage container that was grossly discolored. The radio near the meat slicer played a song by Genesis that reminded me of summertime.

  I will follow you, will you follow me?

  All the days and nights that we know will be.

  “All set for school today, Evie?” Joe asked. “Senior year at last.”

  I shrugged. “I guess.”

  “C’mon now,” he said, throwing back his head slightly to one side with a smile. When he smiled, I noticed a gap between his teeth. I’d never noticed a gap there before.

  I turned away. Outside looked hot, hotter even than when I’d come in. It’s hard to start school when the weather is still like summer. Sometimes a time ends or a person dies and you have to move on, though reminders are everywhere. I paid for the coffee real slow, knocking the coins around with one finger.

  Joe started ringing up the guy behind me. “Forget about it, Ev.”

  “It’s okay. I’ve got it.” I funneled the change into one of his hands.