Anthropology of an American Girl (23 page)

“Katie,” Jack said, “who’d you kiss at midnight?”

“No one, Jack,” she replied. “Yet.”

Dan stood, combing back his hair. “What time is it?”

Kate draped her coat over the banister and checked her watch. “Twenty to twelve.”

Dan said, “Shit. I thought it was, like, two in the morning.”

“That’s because you’ve been drinking since breakfast,” Jack said.

“The roads are really bad,” Kate told us. “Coco is having people sleep over. Denny and Michelle are coming here. Did Mom call?”

“She did,” I said. “She’s staying at Lowie’s.”

Dan asked if Kate had seen the tracks I’d made in the snow by the A&P.

“Tracks?” she said dismissively. “I didn’t see any tracks.”

“Maybe they’re gone by now,” Dan speculated.

Jack peeked to see my face, to see if I was sad, then he held me. Jack was most virile near a hearth fire. If in public he used me—the look of me—to indicate his mannishness, by a fire he was truly invincible.

Kate went upstairs to get undressed, and I followed. From the corner of her bed, I watched her shadow on the floor beneath the partly opened bathroom door. She seemed quiet. I wondered what had happened. Maybe someone had hurt her feelings. Hopefully, it had just been overbright lighting or cheap cologne or music by Journey or Boston. Coco might have served pigs in a blanket, with blankets made of Bisquick. Or
possibly she’d had mismatching cocktail napkins. If the cocktail napkins were Halloween leftovers with pictures of grinning pumpkins and arched black cats, that could be depressing.

“How was the party?” I asked.

“Everyone was drunk. They were acting like complete assholes.”

I retied the string on my sweatpants. It embarrassed me when Kate cursed, not because I objected to profanity, but because she was not particularly good at it. Jack swore so effectively and so constantly that he would exercise restraint for emphasis. When Kate said “asshole,” she pronounced the
A
like in
aha
or like when you stick out your tongue at the doctor’s office.
AAAAhhhhh
.

She unpinned her hair. In the mirror her eyes were like plums. It was strange to reconvene there, in the same spot where earlier she’d been looking forward to the evening. Jack always said the trick to happiness is to expect things to be shitty, then you won’t be disappointed. “Just keep a low-level plane of dissatisfaction going,” he’d advise.

Dan called up the stairs. “Happy New Year!”

“Oh, gosh,” Kate said, shaking herself awake. She came halfway to me, and I came as far to her. Our cheeks met like praying hands. “Happy New Year,” we said in unison, sending the words out into the universe beyond the petite round of each other’s shoulder.

To commemorate the snow Jack put on Oscar Peterson’s version of Cole Porter’s “In the Still of the Night.” It was the snow song, the anthem to the snow.

We cuddled on the couch, the four of us, eight legs, eight knees and feet, all high and drinking tea, facing the fire, thinking but not believing that it would be our last New Year’s together. We had all just sent in our college applications. If everything went as planned, in one year, I would be in Manhattan at NYU and Kate in Montreal at McGill. Jack would probably be in Boston at Berklee for music, if he went anywhere at all, and Dan would either be at Tulane in New Orleans for jazz studies, or at Juilliard, where his dad was a teacher.

“I have some thoughts,” Dan said, “on the psychology of perception and the problems of consciousness. Does anyone mind?”

Kate and I did not, but Jack stipulated provisions.

“No talk of functional neuroses or maladjustments. No dream analyses.”

“Actually,” Dan said, “I was just thinking about qualities that are essentially incommunicable, like color. For instance, take
roses
. Kate and I can both call a rose red, though I might see coral and she might see pink.”

“Do you mean color blindness?” Kate asked.

“Not exactly,” he guided gently. Dan was always gentle with Kate. At parties he would dedicate songs to her, or he would write compositions called “Kate 9” or “Kate 16.”

“My point is that it’s impossible to know that what
I see
matches what
you see
when we both say
red
. Comparisons of redness aren’t possible. Redness is ineffable: it has to be experienced to be known.”

“Big deal,” Jack said. “Perception is variable. If you perceive a speeding car to be forty feet away when it’s really four feet away, and I perceive it to be four feet away, I’ll jump, and you’ll get hit. Relative perception doesn’t change the position of the car, and it doesn’t affect the color of a rose. The rose doesn’t care what color you think it is.”

“I’m not saying that physical absolutes don’t exist,” Dan said. “You’re right—the rose is the color it is. I’m saying
absolute perception
doesn’t exist. That no one interpretation is more valid than another. Like redness, or jazz, or—”

“Nationality,” I added. “Or race.”

“What’s your point, Daniel?” Jack wanted to know.

“Well, I’m just thinking about the candle again.”

“That’s it!” Jack swatted at Dan. “Get rid of that fucking thing!”

“I’m just saying,” Dan said, defending himself with crisscrossed hands, “Evie has a point: art doesn’t have to be held accountable to accuracy, and there’s no one right way to look at things. Clearly, the candle’s artist was not looking to ‘prove’ a bird.”

“In terms of the ‘ineffable,’ we’re not talking about the birth experience here,” Jack said. “We’re talking about a piece of shit candle. Maybe there is no bird, but, for all we know, there was no artist either.”

Kate wanted to know what happened to the rose.

Jack said, “Exactly, Kate.”

And for a long time we were silent. I felt bad for Dan. It was nice of him to try to defend me, but he should have known better than to argue with Jack.

By three-thirty in the morning a curtain had closed on the house. The snow fit like a second house on the house, or a skin, and inside was bright without lights, snow bright. Shortly before Jack and Dan went home, Denny and Michelle arrived. I gave them my room, which was biggest. Michelle took my bed, and Denny took the floor, as usual, just lying flat on his back with his long legs crossed and his hands behind his head. It was a funny way to sleep, as though staring up at the clouds on a summer’s day.

All things through the living room window were pale cinder. My palms and cheeks left cool dripping circles on the frost-covered glass as I measured the frailness of the membrane that shielded me from the universe. I wondered by what accident of chance I’d been blessed with shelter. There were creatures whose only sanctuary was the flat valentine heart of night. If I looked, I believed I could see them, with their nestling necks and heavily lidded eyes, huddling in clusters between twigs and rocks, sharing fur and feathers, breathing in shallow puffs to make heat.

“You’re seeking to control your world,” my mother speculated when I told her that I always wake up at night to look out the window.

I didn’t disagree, because my mother seldom fawns on me. When she does, she does so excessively and briefly, like a toddler mothering a baby doll. But, in fact, control is not a requirement of mine. It’s just that I’m in awe of the darkness, and reassured by it—its obstinacy, its unmovability—so many things happen there. Beyond the metropolis of any night is a new day—beyond that, a new night to follow. If you look, you can see them, stacked like panels one behind the other. If you listen, you can hear them move. And you can think about your part to play being so very small.

The phone rang. I lifted the receiver and walked with it from the desk to the front door, pulling until the cord could stretch no farther. I stepped out into the snow, my bare legs vanishing to the knee.

Was I clear from the sky? Was I a speck, a stain, a tiny spot to spoil the white—tiny, so tiny—the eye of a needle, the head of a pin, a nick in the void, aimed like a compass through the inaugural waste to the place I knew Rourke lay? Or did I not appear, was I incapable of being seen, was I nothing to no one? Was I wrong to feel manifest, wrong to feel seeable? Wrong to feel like a giant just to know he was alive?

“Evie,” Jack called. “You there?”

“Hey,” I said, barely audible.

“They’re still there,” he informed me, meaning the tracks.

I didn’t reply. He was reaching to me. I felt him reaching.

He said, “Do you know what you made? A fleur-de-lis,” he said. “It’s nearly perfect. One part at the top was fucked up, but I fixed it.”

I thanked him for calling. On prairies there are creatures like weasels who live in packs. One stands sentry while the others sleep. The one waits, scrawny and long, perched on hind legs, reading the landscape with coalified eyes, scouting for predators. Its generosity is not without incentive. It gets to run first.

T
he assignment in art class was to render one object from several vantages—the Object Project. I’d chosen an onion; Denny had picked a clock. Miss Lilias Starr from Baton Rouge was handing out a newly mimeographed list of considerations:

Denny lifted the damp purple sheet to his nose and sniffed deeply. “My clock looks cheerful, but it’s not. Its breadbasket is leaking.”

“That’s really gross,” Alicia Ross said. Alicia was doing a bird’s nest.

Denny shivered and pulled his denim jacket tighter. Two metal buttons on his breast pocket read
NO NUKES
and
THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW.
“It’s so cold in here, I should have picked a space heater.”

Miss Starr flitted like a fairy about us, materializing at our elbows in aromatic bursts. She smelled like eucalyptus. Her hair was dyed green, the color of Granny Smith apples. Everyone said I was lucky because I’d been to her studio, and she’d been to my barn, and she insisted I call her Lilias. Her studio was a potting shed behind a cottage off Springs Fireplace Road, near the house where Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner had lived. “It has no plumbing,” she explained when I visited, “so I pee in a bottle. But the light’s divine.”

She appeared at the bench where Denny and I were working, carrying a still life she’d painted—a bowl of flowers, very accomplished, velvety and Dutch. It reminded me of a painting Dad and I had seen at the Met. “I think the artist’s name was Brueghel,” I said.

Miss Starr flicked her hair back behind her neck. “Oh,” she cooed, “do you think so?”

When she left, Denny whispered, “Kiss ass.”

Mr. McGintee from the Drama Club sauntered in about halfway through the class. Directly behind him was Rourke. From the moment he came in, he was all that I saw and all that I could see; it was strange, as if the door had opened and water had flooded through. He was wearing a camel hair dress jacket with a crewneck sweater beneath; his hair was windswept, his skin olive-brown. I returned to my work, dipping my head. Why did his name sound Irish when he looked Mediterranean, like the type of person who vacationed on yachts? Sometimes my mother spoke of the “Black Irish”; maybe he was that kind. His eyes settled on my face; I could feel the way they settled. I bit at the top of my turtleneck, hiding my lips and chin.

I breathed a cleansing breath, telling myself,
God, Jack is so much better than Rourke is
. Earlier that week, I’d seen him three times in one day.
The first time there were people, so he ignored me and I ignored him. The second time we were alone and our bodies defied our minds: I felt myself come to a stretching stand in the yearbook office exactly as he loitered at my doorway, hunting through his pockets for elusive items, coins or keys. I didn’t say hi, though my body advanced. I stopped on my side of the door frame. He seemed surprised, and he froze, just looking up at me, smiling. Later that afternoon, I was in the main office delivering my letters of recommendation to the guidance office, and he passed by. He leaned on the door frame and smiled at the flank of thoroughly enamored secretaries, saying, “Any of you ladies plan on answering that phone?”

Mr. McGintee walked around and remarked on Miss Starr’s still life, saying, “It’s
nice.”

“Eveline says it looks Flemish, like a Brueghel. Would you agree?”

He smiled vaguely. “Absolutely!”

Rourke moved to greet Alicia Ross, who was fussing with her bird’s nest. Together they looked ravishing and dark, like Spaniards or Arabs conferring. He would speak and she would respond, brisk and sure, with the charismatic self-confidence of a well-bred someone. Alicia had attended Spence in Manhattan until tenth grade, but she transferred out when her dad came to their summerhouse to recuperate from heart surgery. Mrs. Ross didn’t want Alicia to graduate from East Hampton, but Alicia didn’t care. She adored her father; we all did. He would often take six or seven of us out to O’Malley’s for burgers and fried mozzarella sticks.

Alicia would imitate her mom.
“You’ll never get into an Ivy League! You’ll lose all fashion sense! You’ll marry a dentist!”

“What’s wrong with dentists?” Denny asked.

Alicia shrugged. “I guess she thinks they’re kind of, you know,
dentisty.”

I liked Alicia. She was overanimated and uncommonly direct, but within her resided a colossal humanity. She made hats and wore them with pious flair, like Southern church ladies. And she always remembered things I said.

“How’s your cousin?” she’d ask.

“Which one, the one who’s converting?”

“No, not the physicist, the potter.”

The only problem with Alicia was that she was always talking about her father’s famous clients; he was an entertainment lawyer. You had to steer your way through dialogue with her to avoid irrelevant references.