Anthropology of an American Girl (56 page)

Evie
, I answered, carefully. I couldn’t tell if I was speaking very loud or very soft.

Evie, how sweet. Can you tell me how you feel, Evie?

I feel really good
.

He laughed, and everyone laughed.
You might feel a little pressure
. Another voice, Dr. Mitchell’s. I looked to see her. She was sitting on a stool or standing low at the base of the bed to my right and people were handing things to her from opposite sides.

Dr. Burstein patted my arm.
Good girl
, he said.
You’re doing fine
.

It was nice of him to call me
good girl
, nice of them all; they were all very kind. It had been a long time since anyone had been kind that way. And then I fell back, and I began to waltz through the wonder of my own sensation, daring to tour regions ordinarily avoided, hunting despite the promise of pain for the wound he’d made. I discovered a lesion of such fury that it was positively viral, like an envenomed entirety, like daylight showing inside a blown balloon.

“You okay to walk?”

Mark met me at the door they admit and release you through. He led me past the girls who had not yet gone in, and he took my bag.

“Here, let me get that for you.”

In his hand my pocketbook looked like all the other girls’ pocketbooks, lilting and suspicious and possibly filled with germy sanitary supplies and other female stuff. In my pocket was a tissue full of Oreos. You get cookies at the end, and Dixie cups of juice like in nursery school. At the end you lie in recliners and watch game shows on a television bolted to the ceiling.

Mark grabbed the tissue before I could throw it away. “What’s this?”
he inquired. “Are you supposed to eat these?” He placed them in his pocket. “You’ll eat them in the car.”

He protected me from an anemic flank of abortion protesters on the curb. They shuffled around rattling oak-tag posters with photos of mutilated babies, and they wore ankle-length down coats, though it wasn’t even cold out. The guard said they came every day.

When I was little, my mother and her friends took me with them on a trip to march on Washington, D.C. There was the dieselized rumble of the Greyhound engine and the stench of cheap beer and costly marijuana and the low glandular singing of Janis Joplin’s “Summertime.” Periodically, the driver would pull off the highway and release the passengers onto the shoulder, and everyone would urinate. When hungry they would descend into diners, plunging into booths, terrifying humorless customers, provoking beefy truckers, and confounding nest-headed waitresses by making substitutions, switching seats, paying with penny rolls, and tipping with love poems and pocket contents—jawbreakers and torn snapshots and half-used Chapsticks. If they believed it was the function of the American youth to topple the old guard, to acquaint it with its inequities, to demand that everyone be compassionate and accepting of differences, they neglected to set a good example.

My mother said the march was for women’s rights, for the rights she herself had not had. She’d had to have an abortion in an apartment on East 110th Street shortly after I was born. My parents were too poor for two children. I didn’t even have a crib, just a dresser drawer. When I first learned the story, it made me sad, not for my mother, who recounted it without any desire for sympathy, but for myself. It would have been good to have had a sibling.

That was all I’d been told. But there had been more. Prior to the legalization of abortion in 1973, there was no anesthesia. There were no medics in hygienic disguise, and the equipment that had been used to penetrate a woman’s cervix and pop her amniotic sac might well have been the same object employed to probe slits in car windows when you lock your keys inside. I once heard Aunt Lowie mention this substance they used to spray up there, like a lacquer or an ammonia. Did they use a flashlight to find their way? Did they give you aspirin, or was there
whiskey, like in movies about cowboys and soldiers who get limbs amputated? Everyone knows about cowboys and soldiers who’ve had their limbs amputated—these comparatively rare events are frequently memorialized in film and on television. But it’s distasteful to discuss abortions, safe or unsafe, though millions of women have had them, and continue to have them.

At Union Square, Park Avenue turns into Broadway. From the sky you would see not an
S
exactly, but the limber coil of a pried-apart paper clip. I felt weary. I felt I could not be alone anymore. I’d been staring at dogs lately, each time thinking,
A dog would be good
.

“Almost home,” Mark said, glancing over.

I had no home. My dorm was not home. There was no home now that I was grown. Being grown means living among strangers. I did not say this to Mark. When you are grown, you can’t speak foolishly. It is not profitable, not wise. You don’t want to offend. You never know who you might need. “Are you going to leave me there?”

“Of course not,” he said. “I took the day off.”

I looked out the window again. In the shelter of his presence, I dared to touch my belly.

O
n the streets of Greenwich Village juvenile trees shaped like lollipops sat spaced like in collectible railroad towns, and when the wind went through them, it did not blow but hiss. Through the casement windows of the dormitory, I could hear the sound like the sound of suffering.

In classrooms and lecture halls, in the gym and the cafeterias, people stared as though they could see on my skin the stain of disgrace. Whenever possible, I avoided interaction; I led a solitary life. Days would pass when I didn’t even speak. For meals, I went to eat alone at Loeb Student Center, the commuter café on Washington Square Park, instead of the
dorm cafeterias, where boys would invariably come to my table, saying, “Is this seat taken?” or “Aren’t you the girl from the gym?” At Loeb, everybody paid cash for lunch because they weren’t on the housing or meal plan. People there were grateful for college. They dressed nicely. They let you cut in line. They would sit for hours, Korean guys from Kew Gardens and Greek girls from Astoria, waiting safely between classes, ten or twelve at a table, reading the news.

I was obsessed with the news. I read papers everywhere, sometimes twice, snatching up any rag from counters, garbage pails, exercise bikes, asking strangers, “Is this your paper?” I was constantly thinking,
Rourke’s out there, somewhere
.

Just as he had been during the most difficult moments in high school, Jack was invisibly present during those months. Thoughts of him carried me. Having been loved by Jack I did not think that I could love Rourke better or more than Jack did me, or that my own heartbreak could surpass Jack’s. It was the single equivalency I could find; in fact, it was perfect. By my honest wish to make amends to Jack, I survived the loss of Rourke. I chose an ascetic life and dedicated my efforts to Jack and his well-being. I found contentment in conducting a private reconciliation with him. Sometimes I thought to try to find him, but I suspected there are some doors that are better off remaining closed, locked from both sides.

I had to pay Mark what I owed him.

Five hundred dollars for the private operation and the shot of Demerol, which was worth about four of the five. Lowie once said that a shot of Demerol is like a week in Bermuda.

“Forget about it,” Mark said. He preferred to erase the debt, to pick up after Rourke and own a piece of me, only he didn’t push because he was smart. He knew I would never allow anyone to lessen Rourke. If you ever saw Mark’s eyes, you would always see them figuring.

“I’ll pay you back anyway.”

“Take your time,” he said, fast. Mark spoke fast, giving the impression that nothing was new to him, putting you at a rhetorical disadvantage, giving his remarks the illusion of having been born of experience. “The longer it takes, the longer you stick around.”

——

On November 4th, 1980, the night of the Reagan-Carter presidential election, I got a job. I was out because Ellen had turned off the television.

“It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference to my life who wins,” she’d said. Her face was obscured by a layer of chamomile face cream, which made her mouth stand out, like the Joker’s mouth from
Batman
, or like Pagliacci’s. I was sitting on my bed in half darkness, fully dressed, and feeling weirdly ungoverned, kind of solo. “You can watch the results with the sound off if you want,” she offered.

I started out looking for a coffee shop or some place with a radio. I ended up downtown, on the vast and virtually deserted Varick Street below Houston, in the printing district, where the only bodies I encountered were three men in the blackened doorway of a nightclub. I knew it was a club by the way the music thrashed against the doors from the inside, pleading like a prisoner.

One guy looked south into lower Manhattan toward the Twin Towers. “Where you headed, doll?” He had white hair and a crew cut, which had the effect of making his head appear shiny and thick, like a nickel. “Hate to tell you, but there ain’t nothin’ down there.”

A second guy said, “Better watch out you don’t get chucked in the backa some van.”

The guy with the nickel-head asked where I lived.

I said, “The Village.”

“Aureole’s on MacDougal, right, Phil?” he confirmed. “She can cab up with Aureole.”

Phil was boss—he had a clipboard. Anytime you saw a bouncer with a clipboard, he was boss. He jerked his head. “C’mon inside.”

I stepped forward to the door and looked up to Phil. “Are they looking for help?”

“Ask for Arthur,” Phil advised. With one bloated, I.D.-braceleted wrist, he waved me past the cashier and the second set of bouncers.

Inside was purple, like a black-light basement or creepy fish tank. The main room was huge and hardly filled. The place must have been a cafeteria during the day, because breakfast special menus hung near the ceilings, and the deejay was set up on a grill. The decorations were vintage neon diner signs. Ten or twenty customers stood at the perimeter of the
cement dance floor, shuffling experimentally to Patti Smith’s “Because the Night.” Another fifteen or so hung off the ledge of a mammoth bar like there was nothing happening in the nation of greater consequence than vodka and cocaine.

“Where’s Arthur?” I asked a girl at the service bar.

She gestured over a tattooed collarbone. “Try the kitchen.” The tattoo looked like a banana and a dot. “Algerian flag,” she said, noticing my interest. “It didn’t come out right.”

“Are you Aureole?”

“Frankie,” she replied. “Aureole’s around somewhere.”

The enormous kitchen was spotless, as if it hadn’t been used for cooking in years, and vacant except for a guy leaning against one of several counters reading a folded newspaper. I could make out the granular sound of election results on his AM radio. The count was in: Reagan had won. I couldn’t help but think of Jack, where he was, what he was thinking. And my mother, and Powell, even Kate. I longed for the intellectual security of home. It felt wrong but somehow symbolic to find myself among strangers on such a night.

“Arthur?”

“Mike,” he said, swinging up, extending a hand. “Arthur’s the manager. I’m a bar-back.”

“I’m here for a job,” I said.

“Sure. I’ll get him.” Mike handed me his paper as he passed. It was the
New York Times’
crossword puzzle. “Do me a favor. Help me out here. I’m too freaked out to finish.”

I answered as many as I could in the time it took for him to return from the rear of the kitchen with a case of Heineken on one shoulder. In his back pocket was an application. “Fill it out while you’re waiting. Use my pen.”

I marked Thursday through Saturday as my available days and gave the application to the elusive Arthur, a towering, sour-looking man in black leather and tinted glasses who appeared from nowhere and gave the impression of being dead or guilty.

Arthur scanned it impassively. “References?”

“None I feel like listing.” Our eyes met over the sheet. I couldn’t imagine him calling the Lobster Roll, which anyway was closed for the
season. Besides, there is a trick to getting a job, which is not really needing it and only half-wanting it.

“Fine,” he said. “Start Thursday. Stick around and have a drink if you want. It’s been a rough night.” Without another word he left as he’d arrived, vanishing into concrete and neon.

I finished the crossword with Mike and had a Beck’s while we listened to Reagan’s acceptance speech. Reagan said he was “not frightened of what lies ahead.”

Mike chucked my empty bottle into a trash can, where it smacked the rim and broke. “Great. In a country of two hundred million, that makes one of us. He’ll reinstitute the draft. He’ll ban abortion. He’ll clear-cut forests. He’ll set us back thirty years. I mean, he’s
nostalgic
for the 1940s. We were at war in the 1940s! We were dropping atom bombs in the 1940s! I’m getting the hell out,” he confided, and he pulled out an accordion strip of wallet photos. “I’m taking my wife and kids to Australia.”

The club filled considerably after the results were in. I couldn’t imagine where all the people were coming from. Mike dropped me at the deejay booth while he restocked the bar.

A sign on the glass grill barrier said,
D.J. JEROME.
“Jim
Jerome,” he clarified, extending a hand. He sounded Midwestern and sincere, like Mr. Rogers. “The sign is supposed to say ‘D.J.
Jim
Jerome,’ but they printed it wrong. Now everybody calls me Jerry.”

I introduced myself, and he said my name twice. “Eveline, Eveline,” he mused thoughtfully, as if imagining a place, trying to recall if he’d ever been there.

Mike returned with Aureole. He’d found her locked in the basement bathroom drinking Dewar’s. “I’m sick,” she said, regarding the election. “I don’t know what to do except drink.” Aureole blew her nose hard. Her hair was a swervy bob the color of Darjeeling tea, situated wiggishly over a pair of violet doe eyes ringed red from tears. On her left cheek was a mole. She looked like a young Liz Taylor, only not such an absolute knockout. “Sure, I’ll share a cab with you. I’d leave now, but I don’t feel like being alone.”