Anthropology of an American Girl (4 page)

“Oh, my God!”

“That is the cutest T-shirt!”

“You look, like, soooo unbelievably skinny!”

Coco Hale spotted us, and she started waving like crazy, calling Kate over as though it was a complete surprise to see her. “Kate! Kate Cassirer!” Something flashed between Kate and me, nothing you could name, not really.

“Do you mind if I go say hi?” Kate asked politely.

“Not at all,” I replied, politely also.

She leaned forward and peered at me. “You’re not just saying that, are you?”

I filled my cheeks and expelled the air slowly, who knows why. It’s just a thing people do. “No, I’m not just saying that.”

One time Jack made me explain why I disliked Coco.

I said, “She’s, like, witchy, or something.”

He was picking at his guitar. “Be specific.” We were sitting on the farm table in the barn out back, and his head was cast down over the strings.

“Okay,” I said. “Her teeth.” She had two rows of miniature teeth, undifferentiated, same-size squares that appeared glossy even in the dark. They were like those miniature corn cobs. “They’re witchy.”

Jack considered that. “Good one,” he agreed. “Next.”

“Her eyes.” Her eyes shuddered in their sockets when she was being insincere, as if resisting affiliation with her body. “Do you know those earthquake monitors, the rolling graphs with attached pens that measure tremors?”

He looked up with part of his face. “Seismographs.”

“She has eyes like that, only they measure her lies.”

“Seismographic eyes,” he said contemplatively. “That’s great.” He pulled a felt-tip from his pocket and wrote the phrase on the sole of his blue suede Puma. Suddenly the mirror near the door fell off the wall and into the center of the room, shattering. “Holy shit!” Jack lifted one of the curved triangular shards. “She
is
a witch.”

As Kate was about to break away to Coco, the bell rang.
Bwoop!
I made a hard right down the English hall and was drawn instantly into the belly of the crowd. I could hear Kate’s voice trailing me—“Evie! Eveline!” I didn’t turn, even though the way she called me was better than the way Coco had called her. My name from Kate’s lips sounded shy, pining and bare. I felt sad about that, but also I felt a mixture of relief and release just to be alone. My body lightened, and when people said hello to me, I answered, “Hello.”

Kate and Coco had gone into the music room probably; probably they were cleaning their flutes, sitting with mingling meringue hair, and all four hands polishing buttons and spitty levers. Perhaps they were discussing
me, with Coco saying through rows of tiny teeth how I seemed envious, her eyes shaking.

It was not hard to envy Coco. Her family lived on David’s Lane, one of the nicest streets in the village, in a house with a corrugated roof like in picture books of Spain. She wore Lacoste shirts and cloth-covered headbands from Mark, Fore & Strike, the golf-lady clothing store on Main Street, and she rode a kiwi-colored Motobecane bicycle to the beach after private tennis lessons. She had a collection of those Pappagallo purses with the wood handles and the button-on fabric covers. According to Kate, Coco paid forty-five dollars for a style and a blow-dry at that special salon in town next to O’Malley’s pub. Mrs. Hale drove a new Mercedes with basketballs and bags of groceries in back, and unlike my mother, she never had beer breath or wore hip-huggers with peace sign patches or hung around with merchant marines and lab technicians. Mrs. Hale did not belong to Mensa.

Once, when my mom and I saw Mrs. Hale collecting tickets at the Ladies Village Improvement Society Fair, she was wearing a straw bonnet with big paper peonies; she’d made it herself.

“Who has time for such nonsense?” my mother asked. “Does that woman ever
read?”

Despite the energy crisis, Mr. Hale would take his family on long summer trips on
My Romeo II
, their ultra-sleek cabin cruiser, to Block Island or Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard, where Coco and her boating friends would meet prep school boys. Every September, the photos would make the rounds—Coco and Breanne Engel or Pip Harriman, honey-brown and curly blond—hugging boys in Duke University sweatshirts, beige docksiders, and puka shell necklaces. Coco never had to go on trips to Gettysburg, West Point, Old Sturbridge Village, or those World War I air shows up in Rhinebeck like I always had to with Dad and Marilyn. All the family photographs are of me in blinding sunlight, dressed in plaid shorts and ribbed white knee socks and lace-up Earth shoes leaning on some cannon or posing before acres of headstones in Civil War cemeteries. And my mother had never once taken a vacation; she did not even own a camera.

Sometimes I couldn’t help but feel meager compared to Coco, and
then to confuse meagerness with envy and envy with hate. Everyone always says you shouldn’t feel hate or even say the word.

“Bullshit!” Jack once barked. “Who told you that?”

“People.” I couldn’t think of anyone at the time.

“Words are constructs, like houses. Say whatever the fuck you want. Besides,” he added lovingly, “you are incapable of true hatred.”

Jack was right. Some feelings just occur, and giving them nicer names does not make them go away. If what I termed
hate
could be more accurately described as
an aversion to the witchy way that Coco acted
, it would have changed nothing inside of me.

Envy is awful. Unlike jealousy, which comes from the threat of losing what you cherish, envy is a dark desire for things over which you have no right or claim. Once I realized that she couldn’t possibly take what I loved, and I didn’t really want a life of privilege, especially when having such a life seemed to require flaunting it to those who had nothing, I was overtaken by an enormous boredom with Coco. A soaking rain type of boredom, liberating and complete, touching down everywhere in equal amounts. From that moment I was done. I realized it was a lot like doing math. She was
quantifiable
. I was not.

I entered the first class of my senior year early, which meant I was one step closer to getting out, for the day and for life. Sometimes it’s best to focus on practical matters, just to
get through
. After Maman died that summer, life became very mechanical. I would eat dinner right after lunch and get ready for bed before night. I marked time. I would consider the task at hand until it was completed, then I would consider the next, never giving my mind a minute to scramble in the circuits of its cage. There’s something to be said for automatic living. It makes looking forward to things seem unreasonable. When you stop looking forward to things, you get used to low expectations and you realize,
What’s the big deal about success anyway?
If we’re all to attain everything we’ve been conditioned to desire—wealth, fame, education, prestige, security—then those things will become so prevalent that they’ll be meaningless. And it’s a populated planet. Such uniform comfort would not come without a cost. Someone somewhere would have to pay for all that success.

According to Jack, the only way to maintain dignity is to give up wishes before they don’t come true. Maybe that’s too extreme. Maybe the best you can do is to refrain from wishing for wishes that are not your own, such as for ranch houses and nice cars, for capri pants and lamb chop dinners and husbands with good haircuts. Sometimes you have no choice; you inherit your parents’ wishes. Some parents work hard to guarantee their children’s progress. They don’t want any slipping back. That’s why every now and then you meet some poor kid whose life is controlled as if by committee.

My particular future was not so vigilantly guarded. I was to start from scratch. The best thing about my family’s indifference was that I had the freedom to fail miserably.

I stepped behind the teacher’s desk to reach the blackboard, and I pulled down the map of the Soviet Union. Kate always said that when she made a lot of money she was going to buy a wall map for me, the kind with lots of sheets. I took a seat in the corner of the room, alone by the window, wondering what Kate was going to do to earn all that money.

Annie McCabe, Breanne Engel, and Darlene Nappa slipped through the door kind of all at once and assembled in an L-shaped cluster in chairs near the teacher’s desk. Annie began to whisper, and their three heads probed forward rigidly like construction cranes. I looked at the clock—two minutes to eight. And they were all so
done
. Annie was wearing stockings and a long straight silk skirt. Base makeup covered her from forehead to chest. A stringy ring of mocha stained the collar of her blouse.

Wow
, I thought, and on such a hot day! Girls are truly game as soldiers, with the brave things they do to their bodies and the harsh conditions they are able to tolerate.

Darlene looked jaundiced, like a past-due celery stalk, concave and green with bushy stuff on top, and Breanne was beige and emaciated with a kind of polymer quality to her complexion—she looked trapped beneath her skin, like food through Tupperware. Her frosted hair was dry and frazzled at the ends and tied in such a way as to be neither up nor down. Her eyes were wide and shaking. Kate said Breanne takes Dexatrim.

——

About a month or so after the funeral, Kate and I saw those girls at Main Beach. It must have been late August because there was litter and guys with cigars. Litter and guys with cigars usually appear in the Hamptons around late August. That’s when the group-house renters come. Breanne had gotten so thin her skin appeared to have been shucked off and reglued. She reminded me of this candy my father used to get for us in Chinatown, the kind with a translucent rice wrapper that’s like paper, only you eat it, and it melts in your mouth.

“She looks like one of those Chinese candies my dad gets,” I said to Kate.

Kate tilted her head furtively into the shady spot between our shoulders, going,
Sshhh!
We were on our stomachs facing the water. It was late afternoon, and the beach was changing, the way beaches do in the late afternoon—young people go and older ones come, and suddenly there are dogs. A yellow Lab was making wide, dripping circles around an abandoned sand castle, and a couple in hats sat near us, facing their chairs to the west.

“She makes herself throw up,” Kate whispered.

I didn’t understand. I said, “What do you mean?”

“After she eats, she throws up.”

“How do you do that?”

“You put your finger in your mouth. And it just comes out—
I guess.”

“You’re kidding me.” I hated to throw up. I avoided it at all costs.

“I wouldn’t kid about a thing like that,” she said.

Breanne really must have despised her parents in order to deprive their baby girl of sustenance. It was impossible to know for sure, but her mom probably clapped at her first steps and dressed her in eyelet rompers when she was an infant and kissed her shampooed curls. I’d been to the Engels’ house. How pathetic Breanne must have looked, leaning over the turquoise toilet in their immaculate bathroom, feet and knees sinking into the plush of the matching turquoise carpet, breathing in the gladiola aroma of those gooey obelisk air fresheners, the kind where if you look inside the shaft, you can see the gel sinking into its own neon-green hip.

“It seems kind of extreme,” I said. I didn’t think Breanne had such a bad life. I thought of poor Dorothy Becker, who’d been abused at home. Dorothy had cragged seams on her wrists from what she’d tried to do.

Kate returned to
Seventeen
. “You’re
so
selfish.”

I wasn’t sure what Kate meant by
selfish
. If she meant concerned excessively with my own advantage, I didn’t feel very selfish. Of course, it was possible she didn’t think I was selfish at all, but simply called me that because she couldn’t think of anything else to say. I scooped up sand, wondering how many grains were in my hands, which is a cliché thing to wonder at the beach, but stupefying nonetheless. Kate kept licking the tip of her finger, then flipping the pages of her magazine—
snap, snap, snap
.

I don’t know how or why, but I suddenly suspected that she had made herself throw up before too. I felt myself stand.

“Where’re you going?” she asked nervously, leaning up.

I wasn’t sure. “To the water,” I said.

I walked along the rim of the shore. Though the day had almost passed, occidental light poured across the sky, making a pink and pious vault. I faced the ocean and remembered the way Maman had once described the water to me as a woman, a mother.
La mer, et la mère. Eh? The sea is there when you need her
, she’d said, though she herself could not be.

I turned back to see Kate sitting with those girls. It didn’t bother me that they’d waited until I was gone to extend an invitation to her, or that she’d accepted. But I did wonder what it was that she wanted from them and what it was that they wanted from her, and whether either party stood the remotest chance of satisfaction.

Be a friend to Catherine
, Maman had also said to me. And although I was superstitious about things such as last wishes, Kate was beginning to require a type of friendship that I wasn’t sure I knew how to handle.

The bell rang again—8:00
A.M.
and still no teacher.

Stephen Auchard stepped cautiously past the boys who punched and swatted at one another around the doorway. He chose the desk next to mine and nodded uncomfortably. Last time he’d seen me I’d been crying, which in high school is sort of like seeing someone naked.

At Maman’s funeral he’d worn pressed khakis and a blue jacket with anchor buttons. His mother had had glasses with gold rectangular frames, and her auburn hair had been drawn into a sublime twist. She’d
conferred with her son in ethereal French, leaning close, calling him
Etienne
. Kate’s mother had been related to Stephen’s father, and that was how the Cassirer family had found East Hampton. Outside Williams Funeral Home, Mrs. Auchard had held my shoulders and kissed both of my cheeks, kisses like accidental butterflies. Her skin had been dewy and fragrant, cold as packed talc. “Claire did love you,” she’d said to me.
Deed luff
.