Anthropology of an American Girl (15 page)

My face met his shoulder. I wanted to remind him of something—but what? I knew only that at that moment, when he was there and I was there, I loved him more than I’d ever loved anyone.

T
he Pom-Pom Girls changed their name to the Cheerleaders, and the Cheerleaders were not to be confused with the Twirlers, who marched at the front of the band. “It’s about time!” declared Cathy Benjamin, who sat next to me in figure drawing. “Can you imagine? Having to call yourself a
Pom-Pom
Girl? I mean, it’s 1979!”

The first time I photographed them for the yearbook, they made a body pyramid. It took an hour to use a roll of film because it was raining outside, and there wasn’t enough room in the hall to achieve “proper launch.” Ultimately they settled on a
finishing pose
, a bewildering conglomerate
of kneeling, standing, half-kneeling, half-standing, and a little systematic reclining. The pose had to follow an actual cheer, otherwise it would not appear
natural
. This proved technically arduous since each time they tried it, they would land in a new place.

“Did you get it?” they would huff, cheerfully.

“I think so,” I would say. “Let’s do a few more just to be safe.”

I ended up using a wide-angle lens, which had the unfortunate effect of distorting the image and making the faces look fishy and squished, as if they’d been photographed off a doorknob. The cheerleaders didn’t complain when the book came out. In fact, they were good sports in general, always inviting me to join them at their lunch table, telling me how great my hair looked or what a nice sweater.

In the hallway they chanted through lips that were pink and glossy. With hands resting on the square of their hips, they took turns shouting a player’s name.
Two, four, six, eight, who do we ap-pre-ci-ate? Kevin! Eddie! Nico! Billy! Mike!

One rule, either official or good manners, was that each girl got to shout the name of her boyfriend or someone she had a crush on, which was the same as a boyfriend according to the code of girls. If you liked someone, you
called
him, the way you called the front seat of the car when you were a kid. When we were little, we loved the Monkees. Kate called Davy Jones, so I got stuck with Mike Nesmith. Boys have codes also, but the punishment for breaking them is severe. If you hit on someone’s girl, you could get beaten or killed. With girls, things are never quite so straightforward.

I once asked Kate why it’s considered betrayal on the part of an innocent girl if a boy someone else is interested in approaches
her
instead of the girl who “called” him. “Or take a steady couple,” I said, fortifying my point. “If the boyfriend goes after another girl, why does everyone blame the new girl rather than the boyfriend?”

“Because,”
Kate whined, “the new girl shouldn’t have done that.”

“Done what? The guy was the one who
did
it,” I said.

As each cheerleader called a name, she jumped into the air, making an
X
with her body while the others clapped twice for punctuation. There was something beautifully paradoxical about them. They dressed the way
girls are
supposed
to dress, in earrings and ruffles, with blue eye shadow and permanent waves. Yet they were not so ladylike, and the things they did with their bodies were insane. They were powerful and athletic, not like the tennis players whose bodies were of perfectly middling proportions. They were confident, loyal, and optimistic. You have to be that way to fly through air believing someone will catch you. The flying part depressed me. Just how far they would go for their team. How there are no teams in the real world for women like that.

I watched them through my camera lens. Annie Jordan and Elizabeth Hill had just joined the club. Having black girls in the group gave it a visual allure that formerly it had lacked. When the cheer was over, I whistled. They turned and waved,
Hey, Evie!
, and I snapped a picture, which was actually very nice, how they were all standing, modest and tasteful and caught by surprise, pretty and in girlish disarray. I waved too, then walked to the auditorium.

There was a sign on the door:
OCTOBER 22, 1979, 3:00–5:00 P.M. FINAL AUDITIONS—EHHS DRAMA CLUB.
I pushed the door open, and a round of cheers from the girls rushed in with me. Everyone turned, as Mr. McGintee, the drama adviser who was also the senior guidance counselor, made the announcement that auditions were officially closed.

“That is, unless Miss Auerbach has decided to sacrifice art for the stage. What do you say, Eveline?” Mr. McGintee called.

I drew the door closed and slipped quickly into a seat in the top row. “Oh, no, I’m just waiting for someone.” I didn’t have to say
Kate
, since everyone knew. Mr. McGintee knew also.

“Do you girls have a moment?” Mr. McGintee had inquired, as Kate and I passed the guidance office on the first day back from summer. “Just for a chat.” He had high wiry hair and wiry glasses, and he looked as dry as an old cattail. Like he could use a stiff drink.

While he spoke in private to Kate, I sat in the empty waiting room, trying not to touch anything. The guidance office always made me uncomfortable, maybe because it trafficked in the fate of children, sort of like a doctor’s office deals in the fates of the sick. Nothing much happens in either place except waiting of the most agonizing variety. The secretary’s
clock radio was playing “Sweet Home Alabama.” I noticed that it was tuned to WPLR, the local rock station, which must have been an after-hours thing. Usually it was kept tuned to
light favorites
.

The door to Mr. McGintee’s glass cube whooshed open, and he invited me to join them. Inside he perched on the edge of his desk and asked questions that were not exactly questions. “So, have you two had an opportunity to review the events of the summer?”

Kate said, “Yes. We have.”

And I said, “Yes. We review a lot.”

“Very good,” said Mr. McGintee, slapping his knee. “Ter-
rif
-ic.”

It’s not always a crime to lie. Sometimes it’s easier to give people the answer they expect than to explain what you really think or feel. No one likes to admit it, but conversation is never truly spontaneous. Everyone works toward a goal, and few people like to be surprised. You can prevent a lot of mutual embarrassment and tedious negotiation simply by pinpointing your partner’s aim at the outset.

Mr. McGintee had spent a lot of time and money earning his degree in educational psychology, and you couldn’t blame him for trying to get some use out of it. He didn’t want honest answers about how Kate was doing, just some key phrases that would allow him to classify her feelings as “normal” and call her case closed. It’s like asking someone, “How was your summer?” You don’t really want details.

But Kate could not speak of her suffering because words could never convey her specific feelings. I’d
seen
her sorrow. It came in the way she sat motionlessly in her room in our house watching the day skulk from orange to blue. It came in the way time passed twice as slow for her and also around her. We would sit for what felt like hours.

“What time is it?” I’d ask with a yawn.

She’d say, “Ten minutes past the last time you asked.”

Invariably she overdressed. And when she cooked or washed dishes, she leaned against the counter with her legs tightly wrapped, one around the other. Her grief expressed itself in trepidation. She was afraid to move, as though movement might draw her irrevocably from the sphere in which her mother had resided.

“Why did you drop French, Catherine?” Mr. McGintee asked the top
of her head. Kate’s hands played with the fabric of the upholstered guidance chair, which was beady like dehydrated oatmeal.

“She’s already fluent,” I said. “How much better is she supposed to speak it?”

He shushed me. “The point is, French Five would have raised your class rank, Kate,” he said, and his eyelids fluttered.
“The point is,”
he counseled, “we need to consider your future.”

He nodded meaningfully to me, asking for backup on that, as if I had any kind of secure future myself, or as if I’d had any experience with the luxury of family outside of what I’d known from Kate’s. There was nothing anyone could do, really. Kate had lost an entire way of being—red wine in her water glass, pounded veal for dinner, a platter of cheese and fruit for dessert, strolls around Town Pond with Maman’s perfectly pressed skirt crinkling stiffly like tissue paper. On Saturdays there was dancing, Yves Montand or Jacques Brel, and when the song ended, Maman would spin, clapping twice by your eyes like a joyful, brazen someone—
Ha! Ha!

How could he possibly help? Part of Kate passed when her parents passed. She no longer had proof of herself. She had become a nothing. Not a nothing, but a former something, which is infinitely more complicated.

In the auditorium, I sat on the upright edge of a seat, dropped my knapsack onto the floor, and squinted to find Kate. You could find her by her hair, which in mythology would have been called a
golden mane
. She was in the middle of the second row.

Mr. McGintee complimented the group on the turnout—in addition to the seventeen existing members of the club, there were twenty-six new students who had come to audition. He launched into a clichéd speech about how so few dramatic works can accommodate that many actors, and he ominously extracted a sheet of paper from his briefcase, telling everyone to write down their names and interests, in case they didn’t make the cast.

“It’s important to remember that the backstage volunteers, the costume designers, the lighting technicians, and the sales crew are just as important as the performers.” He shouted up the aisle, again to me. “Isn’t that right, Eveline?”

“Sure,” I said. I don’t know why he always had to rope me into things. He never seemed to listen to what I said. “I mean, I guess.” It wasn’t really right, not if you wanted to act. I happened to like doing the sets, but Kate would have died if they made her property mistress.

When Kate asked me whether she should join the Drama Club, I said no. She was pretty, and her hair was long, but that didn’t make her a stage actress. Carol Channing was a stage actress. Julie Andrews. Ethel Merman. Helen Hayes. Lynn Redgrave. Rita Moreno. I told her my opinion, just not in those words.

I just said, “I don’t think it would be good.”

Kate would have been fine on film, playing herself or a type of fairy—an equestrian fairy, one that lounged on horse foreheads and sent wandloads of sparkles into horse ears. One thing is that the plays they pick have to be vehicles for three talented kids and an incompetent mob. If I were in charge, I would have had them act out the newspaper.

“Let’s see,
Fiddler on the Roof
was last year,” I said as I ate a chicken leg and fell back on the couch. “And
Guys and Dolls
was the year before. It’ll probably be
South Pacific.”

“You’re so mean!”

“Five bucks,” I said.
“The Mikado
. I bet you.
Damn Yankees.”

Kate felt I was making fun of her hobby, which I was. She wanted to act because she was beautiful, and beautiful people always feel entitled to extra attention. It was the same thing with everyone saying Daryl Sackler should play basketball. It didn’t mean he had the necessary stamina or agility or dedication or wits, it just meant he was tall, that his figure would have made sense on the court. People like things at least
to appear to make sense
, even if that visual logic comes at the expense of factual excellence.

There were boys all over the auditorium, sitting against the edges of things. I was surprised to see Jack there. He was on the floor against the wall at the far right with Dan and Troy Resnick, and he was staring at me with a piercing curiosity, as though I were stuffed and encased behind glass. I’d seen him look at me that way before.

“Are the rumors true?” he’d asked.

Twigs were caught on his red plaid lumberjack coat. He’d just returned from boarding school for Thanksgiving. His duffel bag was sitting
out on the front step, where he’d left it. It was November 1978, five months after we’d met.

It was an uncharacteristic sentence for him to speak. I was confused not by the words but by the tone, the swiftness of delivery. It was as if there were a piece of me he’d lost in a strong wind, and he was frantic to retrieve it. He was staring at me furiously.

“It depends,” I said, “on what the rumors say.”

“That they slept with you,” he countered fearlessly. One thing—Jack could be fearless. He did not ever hesitate to ensure that we were both speaking of the same thing. We were sitting on the couch in the living room. His knees brushed the coffee table.

I looked at the ceiling. “Well, no one really slept.”

“You know what I mean.”

“It makes a difference, the words you use.”

“Did you have
sex
with them?”

“I wouldn’t say that either.”

Jack took a breath. “What
would
you say?”

“I would say it was the other way around.”

“That they had sex with you?”

“Right,” I said. “That’s right.”

Jack looked at his shoes. He looked at his shoes for a long time. He became so still I thought maybe he’d fallen asleep. I tried to think what it would be like to be him, hearing such news for the first time, but that was hard to do when I’d known already for a while. It was possible that he might like to do something about what had happened. Unfortunately, it had happened five weeks before. Though it’s not hard to get emotional about the past, it’s hard to apply those emotions effectively.

Did the rumors happen to mention the way the guys came into the upstairs bathroom of Mary Brierly’s summer house in Napeague while I was peeing, the way they hoisted me against the wall before I could pull my pants up, the way L. B. Strickland covered my mouth with his mouth while Nico twisted the faucet on the sink very hard. Water splattered up from the basin onto my belly in icy slivers. I did not like water to splash up, not ever.