Anthropology of an American Girl (17 page)

In the end, Nico said nothing of the remotest relevance to me. I really wanted to know if it had had to be me, or could it have been anyone? And did his tendency to commit acts of violence have to do with genetics or environment? The only thing I learned, I learned by supposition—the event had not transformed him or L.B. They were clean. They had no bruises or torn flesh. They had no remorse. There was no larger lesson for them. To them, it was just a night, a
lucky
night. As for me, I’d been critically altered.

Jack examined every inch of my face as if it were unfamiliar to him and yet also very familiar. “You were wrong to keep it to yourself. You let your shame silence you. It’s exactly what they were counting on. You protected them.”

It was an interesting point, that shame can take your voice away. Maybe it was so. Maybe I thought that if I kept my humiliation to myself, it would go away faster. And if I shared it, then I would have to wait for everyone else to forget also, and them plus me could take a very long time. I tried to recall the half-life of uranium-238. Whatever it was, that seemed about right.

The living room had turned dark. A shroud seemed to cover Jack’s head; he seemed to be in mourning. His anger had been replaced by his customary self-analytical brooding, and that was, in fact, progress for the worse. I knew I had to speak to keep him from venturing to a bad place, but I could think of nothing to say. I wanted to lean on his shoulder; instead I lowered my head to my own lap.

Once I had a long conversation with a deaf woman, one of Mom’s
students named Monica. Afterward I needed to sleep for a while. I knew only the ASL alphabet and very few signs—
dead
and
hungry
and
uncle
—which were not sufficient to convey with any specificity the content of my thoughts. Jack and I were having similar problems. I possessed all this information, but, for whatever reason—survival or shame—my vocabulary was limited. Jack was handicapped as well; he had more space inside than things to fill it. He could only reach forth with his considerable cerebral might to capture and claim my reluctant impressions.

Jack suggested we take a walk up to Georgica Beach, so we did. Though I saw him every waking hour for the remainder of Thanksgiving week, and he even sat alongside me as I slept, those were the last words he spoke to me until the Sunday night his mother took him back to boarding school in Connecticut.

We received a collect phone call that evening. The operator said, “From Jack, for anyone.”

My mother said, “Yes, of course, we’ll accept,” and she handed the receiver to me.

“Where are you?” I asked him. Car horns and a PA system were blaring in the background.

“Port Authority,” he said. “I just got off a Greyhound.”

“What? What about boarding school?” I asked.

“I’m quitting,” he said. “Fuck it.”

The next day Jack was back at East Hampton High School, where he remained until we graduated. Once he returned, life became bearable again, though I did not dare tell him. To say things were better would have been to imply that at some point they had been worse. Where would he have gone with his malice if I had confessed how much more painful the public humiliation had been than the private? How might he have treated himself upon learning that people preferred to think poorly of me rather than think of two football players as rapists? I did not tell Jack that after the rape I’d gone to Denny’s car at lunchtime every day. That I’d carried all my books all the time so I wouldn’t have to stop at my locker. That boys in the hall would cram their hands in the pockets of their jeans and laugh or sigh overloudly, blocking my way if I wanted to pass. That girls jumped on the opportunity to denigrate me, as though
they’d been waiting. Not everyone was cruel. Not Denny or Marty Koch or Dan Lewis. Not the yearbook people. Only the popular ones, which is a confounding fact of social science—that is to say, the most-liked people behaving the least likeably.

The only good thing about Maman’s illness was that Kate ended up having to stay in New York for the week after the incident. When she returned, she was too despondent over the diagnosis to have been included in any gossip. Possibly I was incorrect; people can be quite heartless.

But once Jack returned to school, and we were together as a couple again, it dawned on people that I had
not
agreed to sex with Nico and L.B., or tried to trap them into dating me, as some girls had suggested. And that actually, I had no interest in them. Suddenly, not only did I possess the practical knowledge of their astounding sexual ineptitude, but my situation showed that they had to steal sex because no one was giving it to them voluntarily.

From then on, all the boys treated me with deference and civility. Possibly they felt bad for me. Possibly they were awed by the fact that I hadn’t told on Nico and L.B. By having the boys as allies, daily life became easier than ever. I wasn’t proud of this, but I wasn’t ashamed either. Things just happened to unfold this way, so I followed the rules of survival—snatching every minor advantage, immodestly seizing help wherever you can find it. The part that bothered me was the girls. Nothing was forgotten or forgiven with them—that is to say, them forgiving
me
.

Jack also never recovered. Periodically he would go on a tirade about how the sacredness of sex had been ruined. He would sink into a penetrating wretchedness marked by a prolonged and seething silence. I never asked what went on in the sulfurous corridors of his mind; I did not care to know. God knows we all have fantasies of retribution.

“You don’t understand,” he would say once he was able to speak of it again. “I just can’t clear it from my mind.”

I moved on because I
had
to, because pain gets heavy when you carry it far from its source, like a bucket of water hauled miles from a stream—it acquires a whole new value, which is the sum of
its
primary essence and
your
secondary investment. If I thought about it too much, I would start
to forget things, important things, such as meals and homework. Once I found blood on my leg; perhaps I’d been scratching. Another time I was walking; who knows to where. I kept telling myself that it was enough to pity Nico’s and L.B.’s criminal lack of kindness, and to feel sorry for all the lies they’d been told—about women and themselves—and for the way they went very fast, like midget dogs, when they had sex. Maybe the cruelest revenge was to say nothing, to inform no one, to satisfy myself with the fact that they’d already hit the limits of their dubious potential, that for them, only stinking crisis lay ahead.

I wasn’t sure about the right way to think. I just tried to do my best with the little I had.

“Whom you all know by now,” Mr. McGintee was saying, and everyone clapped as a dark figure leaning against the lower left wall of the auditorium gave an abbreviated wave.

I squinted to find Jack, on the opposite side of the room. He was right there, squinting back at me.

Mr. McGintee shouted a few closing remarks as everyone rose. “Roles will be posted. Rehearsals start next Wednesday. Don’t forget to sign the paper going around.”

Kate lingered near the edge of the stage, and Jack idly ascended the aisle to my left. The lanky muscles of his thighs expressed themselves beneath the paper-thin denim of his jeans. He was wearing a white Oxford shirt over a faded blue Columbia University T-shirt that was the color of his eyes.

“Nice entrance,” he said, straddling the arm of the seat by mine, gnawing at his cuticle and kicking at a loose piece of carpet strip.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him.

“I’m like you,” he said. “Just waiting for someone.”

The group at the base of the auditorium began to thin, passing by us on the way out. Billy Martinson charged up after Troy, saying, “Give it to me, you little shit.”

Kate arrived right after. “Hey! You owe me five dollars, Evie.”

“Don’t tell me—
Oklahoma.”
I’d totally forgotten
Oklahoma
.

“Our Town.”

“Our Town?”
I repeated. “That’s strange. I’d been figuring musicals.”

Jack grabbed my knapsack and followed Kate out. I followed also. As I moved to the door, I glanced over my shoulder. A handful of people were at the bottom. No one I knew, though I felt—I don’t know—as if I’d left something behind.

“We had a bet,” Kate explained to Jack as she held the auditorium door for us. “About the play. She wasn’t very nice.”

“She’s not a nice girl, Kate,” Jack said as we spilled into the lobby. “You ought to know that.” He tossed my knapsack to me, thrusting it like a medicine ball. “I’m going to Dan’s. See you.”

“What’s wrong with
him?”
Kate asked.

I wan’t sure. Lots of things probably. I just shrugged.

Kate was combing her hair when we got to her locker, so I opened it for her. I’ll never forget the combination, 10–24–8, or the way she looked as she started to collect her stuff. She was smiling to herself. I leaned onto the locker alongside hers and rubbed my eyes with the heels of my palms. I remember feeling sort of tired, sort of electric and free. Like I just didn’t care. Like there was nothing in the world that could possibly bind me. Like I belonged nowhere and everywhere.

We headed toward the side exit, our shoulders grazing as we walked. It was five o’clock. One long, low ribbon of sunlight slipped through the parted doors at the far end of the hall, creating a visible channel of dust in the air, and I could smell the rich, ripe aroma of just-cut grass. The school was uninhabited, but there was influence to its stillness. To this day, I believe I can render it, the
feel
of it—the shining, the glowing, the empty. I remember thinking,
Something’s coming
. I could feel it coming.

She breathed in. She said, “I think I’m in love.”

Then she blushed, and the hollows of her cheeks flushed with pink, like light warming rubies, coming up through them. Her eyes were pleading, as if calling on me to join her somehow. I remember turning. I remember exactly what it was to turn.

I saw a figure, a man. He was several paces behind us along the wall. His presence seemed to consume the entire width of the corridor, cleaving the air like an angry black slash. Never in my life had I seen anything so profoundly extrinsic, so exotic, so mystifying. His eyes were not on
Kate, they were on me. He seemed to know me as I knew him; instantly we entered into confidence. He smiled, one swift and contemptuous smile, as if he’d caught me committing some crime that rendered me eligible for his coercion. And though I could not name what I had done, I felt the accuracy of his instinct. Nothing could conceal the perversion in me that was manifest to his eyes. I turned back. Whoever he was, he was inside—like a bullet, lodged.

The clock on Kate’s dresser said 9:05. She came over in a towel and sat next to me on the edge of her bed. The mattress rocked like a motorless boat. I grabbed a
Seventeen
magazine from her table and started flipping through it. She always had all these magazines.

“So, what do you think?” she asked.

I was looking at this article in which Mariel Hemingway was demonstrating her favorite exercises. You had to hang over crossed legs and lay both palms on the floor while straightening your knees.

“Think of what?”

“Of Harrison.”

Outside, the railroad crossing bells began to clank, and beyond the window the night blinked red. Within seconds, the whistle blew and the house began to shake, buoyantly, then furiously, then less and less as the train moved west. After a brief buzzing silence, the second set of chimes rang and the gates lifted.

“Is that his name? Harrison?”

“Harrison Rourke,” she replied.

Rourke
, I thought, not Harrison. Rourke sounded more accurate. “I don’t know. He’s kind of old.” Old wasn’t right. Old was the only thing I could think of. That and him filling the hall behind us, a terrifying miracle of engineering, like a jet plowing through an alley.

“He’s not
old,”
she said.

I had the feeling I should mention the way he looked at me. If I didn’t mention it then, I never could, because Kate would want to know why I hadn’t said anything from the start. But often what feels implicitly true seems less true when you put it into words. I didn’t want to sound crazy.

“Is he a regular teacher?” I asked. “Or an outside guy coming in?”

Kate got up to put on a record. “An outside guy. The people who donated the money this year for the drama program hired him. They visited one day with Alicia Ross’s parents. They had a driver for their car.” After the spongy opening lull of the album came the crisp pops of music, and magically, a guitar. It was “Can’t Find My Way Home” by Blind Faith.

She sang along in her confectionery soprano and stood at the doors of her closet before a wall of meticulously folded garments coordinated in blocks of evolving color—cobalt to turquoise, coral to red, mocha to black. Kate could hunt for clothes with a transfixing resolve, making you think of Hollywood starlets. The bath towel slipped down the slope of her chest, scraping her nipples before dropping to the floor. I observed her talcum-coated body—I tried but could not imagine it in his arms. Had she said that she was
in love
or that she
thought
she was? Somehow it made a difference.

“Kate, can you do this?” The magazine had a picture of a model with a short haircut.

She returned to the bed. She was buttoning a big shirt with one of those Mandarin collars like the Beatles wore. She frowned. “It’s totally layered, you know.”

My eyes were closed and she was cutting. When she drew a combful of hair toward her, the rest of me went swayingly with it, which was hypnotic. It took me to the place in the mind where dreams are manufactured, which I pictured to be a hollow shaped like a tiny sea horse.