Anthropology of an American Girl (78 page)

As always when my mother leaves, the house is unbearably free of her presence. The living room is unusually still, as if it has been recently and rapidly evacuated. Darkness is broken by the weak mustard glint of a kerosene lamp. Glasses are half-full, pillows and sweaters lie about, the sound of Bob Dylan seeps through the cigarette smog. Three more albums are queued on the spindle; two are stacked on the turntable.

My feet stick as I walk. It must have been a good party.
Ha ha
, my father once said on a New Year’s visit.
I lost a shoe there in front of the stove
.

I tour the somnolent blue living room, feeling tranquil, feeling numb, in an elegiac sort of trance. The legion of her belongings forms an evidentiary matrix. These artifacts of the heart prove presence and endurance of presence—that is to say, her own. Like a vessel in marble she channels through the objects around the house, aberrant and sheet-like, frozen-in. I recall myself as a child waiting stubbornly among these very things for something vital and real to appear or to transpire that could move me, reach me, touch me. I come upon the archaeology of my need with delicacy. One must confront one’s innocence with caution when it has gotten you nowhere, when it has proven itself fallible, when no more remains, when you discover that you have outspent the purity of your heart.

It is not an easy memory—me, awaiting requital or redress, hoping for someone to take responsibility for me. Though I quickly remind myself that, as a child, I endured no more than mild disequilibrium, nothing perilous or vile, that I was loved in a sense, and cared for, and so on, and et cetera, just as instantly, I acknowledge that I am brushing off as usual the accountability of my parents, absolving them of inattentiveness because it was benign, assuming responsibility because I am capable. Capable is what they made me to be.

For the first time ever I recognize something dangerously polemical
about the point of view I have long maintained. When I remind myself that professed love cannot compare to something desperate and original, which part of me is speaking? The part at peace with my own competence, or the part that detests it, the part that longs to be swept away?

Have I been in pursuit of emotional detachment because personally I prefer it, or because it is all I have ever known? How curious to have found a defining love, the tenderness for which I believe I’ve longed, something reciprocal that moves the spirit and bears time, and to have lost it. How resourceful of me to turn a story of achievement into a more familiar one of loss. Such loss is a form of control. Have I been working all along to secure my own failure, to collapse the machine that was made of me?

I go back around, one final time. I do not touch the things my mother has chosen to keep; they are not mine. If it is evident that I am not present here, that there is no shrine to me, I feel close to her, uniquely. It is as though I have moved from behind to make her acquaintance, growing taller every step. I feel grave with an understanding of her that is new.

I move to the picture window. I remember when nights were starlit but black. I remember the clear air and the sharp strike of footsteps and the fever of Rourke’s voice. I loved him, I love him, from the very beginning I loved him. I cannot understand how it happened, how it turned to this, when the view is the same view, when the tree does not appear to have grown, when her face is the same face, when once I was a girl.

T
he clicking of the bike slows to a sharp staccato as I lean across Newtown Lane and cut toward the park. Herrick Park in East Hampton Village dangles as if by magic in the redolent air, like a tin marionette. It reminds me of the abandoned World’s Fair site off the Long Island Expressway
in Queens. My parents brought me to that fair in 1965. I remember running through the grass into my mother’s outstretched arms. And my father, behind her, our three figures pebble-like in the wake of the colossal, skeletal globe. The
Unisphere
. Besides a brief memory of walking with them beneath a movie marquee in winter, of me with my head against my father’s shoulder and the soft bounce of my mother’s head moving alongside us, that is all I have of the three of us together as a family.

The bike pops onto the curb, tumbling over mounds of grass like a billiard ball. On the bench near the bike rack is an elderly black man in a baseball cap. In his mouth is an unlit cigar. I wonder what he takes when he leaves the house, probably the cigar and the hat, maybe a five-dollar bill, some matches.

By the sun, it is nine. Six hours to go until the service.

A young couple in khakis, loafers, and Lacoste shirts with upturned collars reads the papers while their two children gyrate on the rubber tire swings. I wonder if they have all they ever wished for. It must be nice to have all you ever wished for, if that’s even possible. It might be that every time you get one thing that you want, another wish pops up automatically, like in that hand-stacking game. Not only do the mother and father have matching clothes and haircuts, but they share height. I don’t remember women and men matching so well previously. Somehow it’s a sign of the times—physical equivalency, emotional economy. It all refers to an eradication of risk. Rourke and I would not have been good at matching. That is why we failed. It’s shameful to have failed where lesser people have triumphed. On my womb is a reminder of my insufficiency, an imprint, forever impressed, like a cave painting, like a running horse etched ten thousand years ago.

Sometimes Mark says, “What’s wrong?”

I tell him that my uterus aches.

“Still?” he asks. “Is that possible?”

The swings are free. I take one, tucking the chains inside my elbows. My chest slumps down, my shirt bellows out, and my heels make quarter moons in the dirt. When I was little, I drew a field filled with swing sets on manila nursery paper—pairs and pairs of inverted
V’s
connected
at the top by horizontal lines, very big and very small—small implying distance. I must have been four. It is strange to think about why I would have been experimenting at such an early age with perspective.

“You felt friendless,” Jack once explained. “Friendless when you drew it and friendless into the future, as far into the future as your miniature mind could calculate. And it doesn’t just represent a fear of future friendlessness—look at the clarity of those lines—it represents determination.
Sensational!”

I gave the drawing to him. He and Dad framed it, then he hung it near the porthole window across from his bed so it would be the first thing he saw in the mornings. Mornings were hard for Jack. I wondered if the drawing was still there.

The slide is across from me. It swells and recedes as I swing. Slides are deceptive—all that climbing just for a shot back to no place. That was how Jack lived in the end—in a rut, working for the ride. But when you swing, there is no ground to gain, no peak, no low. You learn to linger, to be airborne; you are like a final chord suspended. If nothing comes next, nothing comes full, weighted, exquisite. I lean back, making my body straight, swinging and hanging upside down. I wish my hair could drag on the ground. Sometimes I dream it can.

A little boy chases a ball, and his father catches him, flipping him over his shoulder. The boy squeals. It has been a long time since I’ve heard a squeal. The old black man rolls the ball back to the child, a redhead in overalls. It is a striped beach ball so big that the boy can’t see beyond it when he holds it. I know what it is to hold that ball, to crane my neck but still not perceive my steps, to feel unreliably the path before me, to read the world in terms of hot and unabashed colors, to inhale the sweet ambrosia of melting plastic.

“Goodbye, sir,” I say as I collect my bike.

The man on the bench nods. “Good day, good day.”

I take my leave, slowly clicking away.

Last night I dreamt of the sea. I dreamt of water all around, tossing and rocking a house, my house. It was a dream of Jack. We were in the house, and the water was high, and he sang, and the house rocked. And we rolled, gently also, like babies in a cradle. I rolled, and he rolled especially, and his singing was beautiful.

A
girl stops at the end of the aisle. It’s really hard when you’re a girl to imagine yourself to be the way other girls are. They can look so soft. Not soft like how they feel when you touch them, but soft like they look when they hurt. She has burgundy hair pulled back at her shoulders and large breasts like she would be warm in winter. Her eyes are bright and small and blue, and her mascara is smeared. She wears a straight cotton skirt with multicolored stripes and a camisole beneath a fringed orange jacket that is fastened with a vintage white plastic belt. She looks like Dusty Springfield, except for the red hair and the tattoos.

“Eveline?”

“Yes,” I say. “Hi.”

She offers her hand. “I’m Jewel. You know my cousin. Dan.”

“Oh sure. I’ve never met you, have I?”

She shakes her head. “I was abroad for high school, in London.”

“Oh, okay.”

“You used to live by the train.”

“Yes, that’s right, by the train.”

I wonder what she’s saying. She seems to be saying something. I take up my sweater from the seat alongside mine, inviting her to sit. I was saving the place for Denny, but he’s late, as usual. Jewel folds into the chair as if the string that had been holding her got clipped, and she begins to cry. It’s funny, I can hardly make out her sobs; they’re getting mixed among the sobs of all the other people. It’s one of those kinds of funerals, the communal sobbing kind, where it comes together and makes a kind of music.

Despite the sounds of grieving, the warm marine after-light of day coming through the tents in the Flemings’ backyard is beautiful. I feel as though I am in a swimming pool. People have begun to creep up politely on the outer side of each aisle, brushing against the white hydrangeas, which means there are no chairs left and almost two hundred guests have
come. I know the exact count of chairs because I signed for them when they arrived this morning.

“One seventy-five, right?” the driver double-checked before letting his men unload. The driver was Billy Martinson from high school, from European history class. Nico Gerardi’s friend. Billy seemed happy to see me. He told me he’d dropped out of SUNY Oswego after one year, that he’d gotten out of the “party business,” so to speak, and into the party
rental
business,
the delivery aspect of it
. Billy had the dubious distinction of having clocked more deliveries than any other party trucker in the Hamptons, whatever that meant. Probably just that he was a menace on the local highways.

“The secret to success,” he informed me, “is the ability to be in two places at once.”

“One seventy-five, that’s right,” Mrs. Fleming confirmed, tying her robe tighter. She kept making her robe tighter and tighter all morning, though it wasn’t even slipping open.

One hundred seventy-five chairs sounded like a hell of a lot to Mr. Fleming, who appeared from the kitchen, Bloody Mary in hand, complete with celery stalk stirrer. When his wife reminded him that the service was scheduled for Friday afternoon and that colleges were out for summer, she sounded stretched and wilty, like she would not have been able to withstand an objection from him should he choose to make one. He ended up saying nothing, which had less to do with the fact that he agreed with her than that Billy and I were standing there, staring at him. As usual he seemed gigantic, though that was more in attitude than actuality. It was true that the service would most definitely be crowded, not only for the reasons Mrs. Fleming had mentioned. Though he may have had damaged relationships, Jack had had messages.

Mrs. Fleming shrugged and shook her head, quaking with her mouth agape as though she didn’t know what to say, or how to speak, or what it was that anyone even wanted. She drew a strand of white hair behind her right ear and tightened her robe again, trying to collect herself. It was the nearness of her husband that had thrown her. I did not surmise this; I knew it absolutely. Just Mr. Fleming standing there, with that Bloody Mary, looking, well, looking exactly like Mark.

Billy asked, “The chairs, Mrs. Fleming? Where do you want them?”

“This way,” I said, taking over, and the men followed me up the driveway around the west side of the house to the service area.

Billy examined the tautness of the tent ropes and the fixedness of stakes. “Who did these—Party Animals or Monumental Tental Rental?”

“Monumental, I think.”

He shook his head. “You should have called us.” He handed me a card. “Next time.”

I’d arrived at the Flemings’ at about nine-thirty that morning. I’d been thinking about going over all week, only I hadn’t. I just kept driving by the house, making sure things appeared normal, that lights came on at night and cars moved around in the day. When my mother found out what I was doing, she got mad and told me to knock on their damn door. She told me this was no time for
bullshit city manners
.

“I don’t want to impose,” I said.

“Kindness is not an imposition.”

“Maybe they need space.”

“They don’t need space,” my mother said. “They need someone to answer the fucking phone.”

I was pretty sure the Flemings didn’t like anyone using their phone. Jack always said how his mother would bleach it every time someone touched it.

“There’s no one better equipped than you to make sure the family is holding up—especially that woman—and to see to it that Jack is properly represented. You are a diplomat,” she said, and liking the sound of that, she added, “A diplomat of the dead.”

“Your mother’s right,” said Powell, who had flown home from Anchorage for the funeral. “Imagine you had died first. Jack would be sitting right there where you are, telling us what and what not to do—what music to play, what clothes to wear, what stories to tell.”

My mother looked at Powell quizzically. “Do you really think he’d be sitting?” she asked. “I imagine he’d be
lying
. You know, sprawled out on the couch.”