Anthropology of an American Girl (36 page)

My arm reached to the shelf where the medicine and spices were kept. The unopened spices had been a wedding present to my parents, which made the jars and the contents older than me. I did not like to touch them: it was as if they measured me or my life. I plucked the aspirin bottle from a field of caps, popped the lid, and shook out two pills, thinking how medicine and spices are similar since both are concentrates. Savory, cumin, marjoram, and mace are totally weird substances that probably even the greatest chefs don’t know how to use.

When I passed back through the living room, Mom was talking on the telephone to Lowie. “Yeah, but then,” Mom said, “I had to rewrite the entire curriculum.”

I drank some whiskey and listened. My mother is talented on the phone. She always sounds connected. I never even feel that connected in person. I wondered if the connectedness she finds there is real or imaginary.
There
. People say “there” as though it means something. Where is
There?
Maybe There is where
They
live. I swallowed the aspirin with a giant gulp of liquor. Aspirin or
aspirins
. I wasn’t sure.

In my closet I had just one dress. I’d bought it at a thrift shop in the city on Greenwich Avenue near Charles Street. I grabbed the dress, refilled my mug with whiskey, and went back upstairs to get showered, this time avoiding Kate. I did not want to be influenced by her monstrous good cheer. Not monstrous. What was the word my mother had used?
Infectious
.

I locked the bathroom door and turned the radio loud, because I kept hearing Kate through the door, bouncing around like a loose balloon.
Shuffle-shuffle-skid-shuffle
. I sat on the sink edge, taking several swigs. Pieces were repositioning inside, jockeying about, here and there. I figured I might as well finish the mug of whiskey because, well,
just because
. The liquor started to move down easily, going into my throat instead of through my sinuses. I wiped my chin with the back of my hand, and I hiccupped, once, then twice. I said, “Shit!” since
shit
is the thing to say when you get the hiccups. To get rid of them, I employed a method invented by my aunt.

“Close your eyes,” Lowie would coach, “point at your forehead, and gradually move in to touch a pretend spot. Breathe.” Because she was a midwife, Lowie was always coaching you as though you were in the middle of giving birth, whether you were backing out of the driveway or making an omelet. “You can do it. Just focus. Breathe.
Breathe.”

“The principle,” she would explain academically after she had rid you of the offending problem, “is to concentrate electrical energy above the neck, thereby depriving the diaphragm of the means required to spasm.”

I hiccupped again and closed my eyes. My finger journeyed to a hypothetical spot, which my mind made into a pinwheel, lightly spinning. My forehead sensed the erotic nearness of my finger.
Erotic
because there was fighting back. As soon as I thought to double-check, the hiccups were gone. Too bad Kate wasn’t with me. If Kate were there, she’d be sitting on the edge of the tub and she’d say something funny, and we’d laugh. When I tried to think of the funny thing Kate might say, my mind
drew a blank. When I tried to think of a funny thing Kate had ever said, my mind still drew a blank.

Alcohol crept through my veins, pooling in areas. It was hard to distinguish what I was feeling, something vague but clear, crooked but straight, like a beach blanket in the wind. I wondered why no one ever listed patience as characteristic of wild animals; I felt patient, the wild animal way. In the medicine cabinet mirror I looked for the woman Rourke saw. If I looked with his eyes, I could see her. It was good to trust his vision since I could not trust anyone else’s. He had no preconception of me, no idea at all beyond the fact that we fit. Rourke would never call me feral. I was a package in his eyes, the best and the worst I could be—a cowgirl, a jaguar, a soul to cleave.

I found a lipstick the color of brown shoes and applied some, then I leaned into the mirror, close and closer, observing my green eyes through half-closed lids. I didn’t like the oblong way I looked if you were kissing me. Jack had neglected ever to mention that.
Jack
, I thought, with an awful sorrow. This sorrow grieved me, and grief made me thirsty. I raised my mug. “To Jack,” I said, “my very special regret.”

“Here’s David Essex and ‘Rock On,’” the deejay said, and when the song started, it gushed from the radio onto the floor and over to my feet, boiling up my legs like liquid rubber. I began to move, dancing, peaceful, unburdened.

I inched a pair of stockings over my legs. Then I put on shoes, last the dress. The dress had cost three dollars. It was plain and tight and short—no longer than a skirted bathing suit. It had long sleeves and a crew collar and darts at the breasts. The fabric was a complicated green—not trees, not grass—turtles possibly. I reached back and tugged the zipper up in portions. The girl in the thrift shop had said that the dress was “a de la Renta, for a fact, circa ’66 or ’73, and for a fact it was worn to Studio 54 by Bianca Jagger.” I did not bother to ask the girl how she had managed to establish such facts, since, if the facts were not facts but fictions, they were affable fictions with the effect of contributing positively to my state of mind and undoubtedly to hers. When I tried it on, she
peeked into the bathroom. Her pumpkin hair formed a cone on her head, like one of those Halloween corn candies. I wondered if she could receive signals. “I’ll be your mirror,” she said, as there was none. Softly adding, “Oh, my, it’s celestial.”

From the top of the stairs I heard voices. I wondered how long they’d been waiting—I had no sense of public time. I walked down the stairs slowly. I wished I’d been born to a better staircase, to a sophisticated flight of marble with a wrought iron handrail and a quarter turn at the bottom. I wanted to step into a portrait-lined receiving hall with black and white square floor tile, a gilded mirror, a grandfather clock, and a table adorned by a single wax-sealed envelope.

As I turned the corner into the kitchen, I saw Rourke and he saw me. There was a change in his face. It did not liven or lift so much as it latched squarely on. By the rigor in his eyes, he tried to guide me. I labored to sustain my way.

Sitting at the table was Rourke’s friend from the parade, the one who looked like a bookie or a short-order cook, and another guy, and Kate, who was dressed all in yellow. The kitchen was crowded with those big bodies in it.

Kate said to me, “This is Rob and this is Mark. These guys all went to UCLA together.”

Mark was well-dressed and collegiate, and Rob was the same as the first time—shifty, like he was looking for a fight. Rob didn’t mention to Kate that we’d met before; neither did I.

“I’m sorry,” Mark said, and he stood. “I didn’t catch your name.”

“That’s because no one said it,” I replied. “I’m Eveline.”

Rourke was leaning on the counter, leaning massively, his waist hard and flat, like a safe place to encamp. I wanted to feel him. I
needed
to feel him. It was frustrating that his body belonged to him and what belonged to him was not mine. I set my cup on the peak of undone dishes, then turned away from the sink, facing out. The guys at the table looked away, flinching a little, like I was swinging a sharp object. My arm brushed Rourke’s sleeve, and I was mindful of the impact, of the way the spectacle of us reduced the room to silence.

I bit my tongue in a fine line between my front teeth. “So, are we
going?” I felt ready, loose in the limbs, tight in the trunk. If I were to play ball right then, I would not miss a catch.

“Impatient?” Rourke said, speaking quietly.

“Hardly,” I answered, thinking of big cats. “Just the opposite.”

“We were ripping down Bruckner Boulevard at four in the morning,” Rob said as I slid over to the place behind the driver’s seat. “We passed some cops, but they didn’t budge. Ten seconds later, Bobby G. cracks up. He was doing sixty-something when he hit. He flew up like a friggin’ rag doll.”

“Harrison told me his spine is destroyed,” Mark said.

“Legs too. One leg. Yeah, he got busted up pretty bad.”

“I’ll take the middle,” Mark offered as Rob began to climb in back.

Rob ignored him, continuing over, coming next to me. “Nah,” he said. “I like the hump.”

Behind us, Rourke paused on the driveway—I knew because my body was keeping his body in range, tracking it. “Better put that in here,” I heard him say to Kate. The car bounced as he opened the trunk, put her pocketbook in, then shut it again.

“Anything you need to put in the trunk, Countess?” Rob asked me.

“Yeah,” I said, “a corpse.”

“That’s funny,” he said, elbowing me. “A corpse.”

Mark squeezed in next to Rob, and Kate won by default the seat next to Rourke up front. There were sounds—a door, another door, a cassette, the men talking, the engine starting, the mincing snitch of leather against vinyl. Rourke hit the tape deck; Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” came on. In the rearview mirror, Rourke’s reflection consulted with mine. Our images floated like we were co-conspirators passing in a crowd, like we were acting on plan. I closed my eyes to preserve the image—it was like saving a fallen leaf.

On the way to Amagansett, Mark said he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a tetanus shot. “I practically get one a year,” Rob stated, adding something about a flooring nail that recently went through his fist.

“You’re an idiot,” Mark said. “You only need one like every ten years.”
He shifted, and Rob shifted in turn, moving closer to me. Mark leaned to see me. “Got enough room?”

I said I did. I felt bad about having so many people embroiled in the business of my destiny. I wondered if they felt bad too, or if they felt at all peculiar, like parts or materials.

Rob folded a piece of gum into his mouth, then flicked the pack in my direction. I took a stick. The oblique flare of the streetlights plunged rhythmically across his jaw. I could see him chewing, sucking his cheek to his molars. His eyes were obscured by the blind of the roof. “What’s up with that Porsche?” he asked Mark.

“Working on it,” Mark said with a sigh, plowing his fingers through his hair. “I should have it by the end of this month.” He was not necessarily being untruthful, he just seemed it. Some people are unfortunate that way.

“Good, because it’s been, like, three years already.”

Next came talk of Syd Barrett of the original Pink Floyd going crazy from too much LSD, Mark said, but Rob said no, it was from photoepilepsy brought on by stage light displays. Then they moved on to a ’68 Challenger being sold by a guy from Jersey named Pat, and also various engine options—a 426 hemi, a 440 with a six-pack, a 383 magnum. It’s strange that cars and guns and liquor share terminology. Somehow it’s indicative of something. According to Rob, the two biggest sports upsets were the Mets against Baltimore in the ’69 series and something to do with Sonny Liston. This was followed by a discussion of classic fights—Marciano KO’s Louis, Robinson beats Basilio, Jersey Joe gives bad count, Frazier wins Olympic Gold in ’64, Rumble in the Jungle, Thrilla in Manila—and some obscure questions Rob had for Rourke about Sam Langford’s blindness and Stanley Ketchel’s murder. I stared out the window, letting everything that was said turn otherworldly, like a foreign language. I leaned onto Rob’s shoulder, and he leaned back, giving me a little more. It was nice, him knowing I needed a little more.

The Stephen Talkhouse is a roadside bar named after a Montaukett Indian who walked all over Long Island. According to legend, Talkhouse could walk to Brooklyn and back in a day.

“I believe his name was Pharaoh,” Powell told us one time when we were fishing for fluke in Shinnecock Bay. Actually,
Powell
was fishing; Jack and Denny and I were tying knots and spearing sand eels, or just hanging quietly over the side, trying to spot the large fluke Powell called “doormats.” “Or maybe Faro, with an
F,”
he speculated as he cut the engine, and we drifted into the shallows. Powell liked
skinny water
. He said it gave fish the chance to ambush the bait.

“Not much was recorded back then, and what
was
recorded was not
carefully
recorded, seeing as how we were experts in the language of record but they weren’t. The only time we adopted native words and ways was when it came time to buy
their
land. A couple blankets and a dog for thousands of acres. We liked those terms fine.”

Powell cast out, hipping smoothly up into one shoulder, the hook touching down like the soft cluck of a tongue. In his wallet was an Indian Status card. Though he has Nanticoke blood on his mother’s side, on his father’s side he’s white. He’s the first to admit that the crimes of his paternal ancestors afforded him advantages for which many of his mother’s ancestors are ineligible. “Plumbing, for starters,” he’ll say.

The Nanticokes were tidewater people who believed all things possess a unique spirit. The Nanticokes
are
. They still exist. I wrote about the tribe for seventh-grade social studies. I’d interviewed Powell’s sister Esme on the phone from her home in Salamanca, New York. She’s married to Jim, an Iroquois. Coach Peters, who was teaching history that year, gave me a B for improper sourcing—which he spelled
sorecing
. When my mother saw the graded paper, she called a meeting.

“The purpose of the assignment,
Mrs
. Ruane,” said Mrs. Schmidt, the middle-school principal, “was to encourage encyclopedia use.”

“The purpose of an encyclopedia,
Ms
. Schmidt,” my mother said, “is to assist those who have limited access to reputable information. Encyclopedias are hugely reductive. Their scope is confined to the interests of the publisher and its constituents. They should be used as supplemental, not primary references, which is exactly how my daughter has used them—that is,
pursuant to point of view.”
In her most serious tone, my mother added, “I want it to be a matter of record that I consider that gym teacher to be as qualified to teach academics as he would consider
me
to teach football. If you intend to promote white supremacy, I suggest that you go out and find some whites who are, in fact, supreme.”