FACT:
Margo is from one of the oldest and most well-established families in Melva, the Werthers. Her ancestors made their fortune in textiles and then rose to a position of enormous political influence throughout both the state and the entire South — although more recently, things had changed for the Werthers. They still had the prestige of their name, but that was about it. They were Melva’s threadbare aristocracy — not poor exactly, but definitely not rich. Money aside, Margo has always worn awful clothes on purpose because she just doesn’t care. Or, rather, she cares a lot about demonstrating that she does not care.
ANTHROPOLOGIST’S NOTE:
In the art of primitive cultures, breasts and hips were interpreted as signs of fertility. Example: the Woman of Willendorf, a figurine made 24,000 years ago. Margo had the hips, the lips, the butt, and the breasts to be a true fertility goddess, but at Melva High School, these things were interpreted merely as Bad Girl Potential. Either Margo was unaware of this supposed aura of Bad Girl Potential around her, or, as she did with most dumb assumptions, she chose to ignore it.
“Where were you all lunch period?” I asked. “The craziest thing happened! You won’t believe who I ended up talking to.”
“Oh, crap. Sorry. Chorus. I met Jen to practice for a minute and then we ended up going through lunch. Sorry about that,” Margo said, stretching her legs out lazily from the curbside where she sat and fishing around in her purse for a cigarette. She claimed that she tended to smoke only when she was anxious, but I’d noticed that it was mainly just when she was bored. “Who’d you talk to?”
I looked around to see if other people were in listening distance. They weren’t, but I still felt nervous speaking Jimmy’s name, as if uttering it would conjure him to appear suddenly behind me. “I’ll tell you later,” I said. “When we’re not at school.”
“Okay. Still wanna go to the Cellar?” Margo asked. I nodded. The Cellar was the Mocha Cellar, the only hangout that existed in Melva.
ANTHROPOLOGIST’S NOTE:
As I detail in my most recent essay, “Margaret Mead, Melva, and Me: An Anthropologist Comes of Age in the Land of Livermush” (currently seeking publication), a town like Melva will often have one establishment that attempts to add a touch of cool, a touch of urbanity. And by this, I mean a pseudo-Starbucks (since Melva doesn’t have the economic base to support the prepackaged “cool” of an actual Starbucks) — a weak, watery version of the chain. Teenagers will take over this establishment as their own hangout, driving the adult customers away, and spend long hours but very little money. Said establishment will thus last only one to four years before becoming financially insolvent.
The Mocha Cellar was currently that establishment, and by my watch, it’d be extinct within the next year. As it existed now, it was a dim, grungy basement beneath a sandwich shop that hosted local bands and apparently sold coffee. I’d never actually seen someone drinking coffee there, but everyone in high school went there all the same — to loiter long hours and occasionally gulp down cookies as big as your face and giant, bewhipped milk-shake-type beverages, and of course to escape our parents.
When we got to the Mocha Cellar, I could hear the little cluster of Beautiful Rich Girls, or BRGs, whispering and giggling as soon as we walked in the door. Theresa Rose, Tabitha, and Casey wore ridiculously oversized young-Hollywood sunglasses perched on their heads like headbands. They were all three beautiful in their varied hues — TR was the blonde, Tabitha the dark, high-cheekboned one, Casey the classically pretty brunette. Being near these girls was like basking in a golden light. Old people looked on and smiled. Happily married Baptist preachers stuttered uncomfortably. Even wobbling toddlers became smitten and clung to them. That was the kind of black magic TR and her crew wielded.
ANTHROPOLOGIST’S NOTE:
Yes, these girls were of a classic type, or stereotype: the beautiful girl bullies, the clique of popular girls, the mean girls. It was like they’d walked right out of a movie — living, breathing caricatures. At least as far as I could tell. In their presence, I felt all my worst physical flaws sharpening into stark focus: My shoulder blades stuck out like a stegosaurus’s spines; I had eyebrows like two woolly caterpillars trying to mate; skinny arms; hair the color of paper grocery bags; and the long legs and feet of a frog….
I’d been bursting to tell Margo about my encounter with Jimmy, but now I wanted to wait until the BRGs weren’t so close. I’d permanently move to a remote Polynesian village if they ever heard me gushing about Jimmy.
“Who’d you talk to? What was it you were so excited to tell me?” Margo asked.
“Oh, you know,” I said quickly, thinking of Jimmy’s face and voice while trying to avoid the gaze of the BRGs. “Just things. Always things.”
We got glasses of sweet iced tea and took our usual table, but even as we were pulling out our chairs, I felt something — the cold realization that the popular girls’ gaze had shifted to us. We’d somehow managed to attract their idling, carnivorous attention.
Theresa Rose called out to us. “Hey, Margo,” she said in her syrupy voice, “love the shirt! Very edgy, very fashion-forward!”
ANTHROPOLOGIST’S NOTE:
The leader of the rival tribe offers a challenge. In this setting, that challenge comes in the form of sarcasm: direct address with a wicked mock-compliment.
The BRGs looked at us expectantly, waiting for Margo to respond to TR’s comment. Instead, Margo glared at the wall, not answering. There was a rustle, and then three pairs of well-shaved legs, all fragrant with spray tanner, were coming toward us. TR giggled, more than she needed to, playing up her double-edged friendliness. She was the de facto leader of the BRGs, alpha bitch, legend among Melva girls and guys alike ever since she’d supposedly shaved her crotch as an eighth-grader and flashed it for five high school guys during a game of truth or dare behind the Girl Scout hut in the city park. She and her pack surrounded us, looming above the table where we sat. Margo shivered beside me.
ANTHROPOLOGIST’S NOTE:
By remaining standing, thus maximizing their physical presence, the BRGs exert dominance over the weaker, lesser tribe.
“Hey, Margo, I don’t think you heard me. Oh, hi, Janice,” TR said, nodding at each of us. “I’m thinking of joining Science Club. Is it too late in the year?” She smirked at me.
“And you’re entering Miss Livermush, right, Janice? Or will you have scientific obligations — excuse me, anthropological ones — that you need to attend to?” Tabitha added.
I hunched my shoulders in an awkward, nonresponsive shrug. Margo elbowed me, hissing, “We have to say something back! TR can’t just do this!”
I shook my head. I was an anthropologist. An observer. Indeed, it was because of TR that I became an anthropologist in the first place. In seventh grade, I’d been stricken with the self-destructive urge to try out for middle school cheerleading. Yes, Janice Wills, Gangly McGangles, had wanted to be a cheerleader. Don’t ask me from where this impulse had come, but with true monomaniacal madness, I’d been consumed with the desire to dance around and do splits and smile my face off. (I could not and cannot dance. I could not and cannot do splits. And I don’t smile excessively. I am, generally speaking, not a performative person.) I blame this whole episode on temporary insanity.
Anyway, I’d sheepishly, eagerly shown up at tryouts. TR, the team captain, quickly nicknamed me “Stilts the Clown” and “Wobbles” after I fell (more than once) during the routines. Needless to say, Stilts the Clown had not made the middle school cheerleading squad. When I’d found out and gone home crying (at my lapse in judgment and subsequent humiliation more than anything), my mom had said to me, “Oh, darling. Sometimes to make it through these years, you just have to step back. Become an anthropologist when you need to, you know? Observe the behaviors around you without taking it too personally. It’s just adolescence, after all….”
My mom had made what she thought was merely an offhand comment, but I clung to her ad
vice. Thinking like this seemed to be the only way to make myself feel better. And so I’d gone to the library and checked out every book on anthropology I could find, and what I couldn’t find, I ordered off the Internet: Ethnography Through Thick and Thin, Coming of Age in Samoa, Local Knowledge, From Lucy to Language, Critical Anthropology Now … Not all of it had made complete sense to me, but I loved feeling like an explorer somehow, even if it was in my own town. I felt safe that way. Intellectual. And it was completely interesting! That was the best part — I actually liked this stuff. Cheerleading, blech, be gone! I was better suited to being an anthropologist anyway.
Back in the present moment, TR smiled her acid smile. In response, my own mouth arranged itself into a jigsaw of doubt.
“So, Margo,” TR continued. “We like your shirt sooooo much. Just wondering, where did you get it?”
Tabitha and Casey were laughing silently at us, swallowing little snickers. TR gave a careless toss of her shimmery blond hair and then leaned toward Casey and Tabitha, whispering. I heard Tabitha mutter “drug dealer” and “baby.” Anyone who’d been in Melva longer than forty-eight hours would have known that these words related to various threads of gossip about Margo’s family currently in circulation. I wasn’t sure how the drug dealer rumor had started, but Margo’s older sister, Becca, had just had a baby during the past year. Margo’s sister wasn’t married. This had caused a small stir.
“So are y’all comin’ to the party this Friday?” Tabitha asked.
Margo didn’t answer, recrossing her legs.
ANTHROPOLOGIST’S NOTE:
In warding off the attacking tribe, members of the weaker tribe must avoid direct confrontation — even the direct gaze will be taken as a challenge. Members of a weaker tribe must play dead and wait for the aggressors’ interest to wane. Thus we kept silent.
“I heard that last Friday night someone saw you with a guy,” Casey said, directing her attention toward Margo.
TR made a coughing noise that sounded like “slut.” Margo flicked her raised foot dangerously close to TR’s ankles.
“Hey,” Casey said to TR. “We should get that stuff from my house for the junior class party. And then go check and see if they got that dress for Miss Livermush in a small enough size for you.”
They had lost interest in us. I thought we were in the clear at that point, but no — too late. Margo cleared her throat and hawked up an enormous wad of phlegm. It landed, glistening, on the grungy floor, only millimeters from TR’s pretty foot in its wedge sandal.
ANTHROPOLOGIST’S NOTE:
In the solitary act of retaliatory aggression, a lone member of the weaker tribe has, in popular parlance, “gone maverick.” Such an act could trigger an all-out battle or a more indirect attack, but either way, the repercussions will likely affect the entire weaker tribe, not just the lone aggressor. In other words, Margo’s actions made me very, very nervous.
TR coughed, smoothed her new jean skirt, and sidestepped the glob with her long legs. “Ohmygod! Wait!” she said, in the same fake, drawling voice she used to charm the First Baptist Church ladies and sell yearbook ads. “I can’t believe how forgetful I am!”
“What? What did you forget?” Casey asked, now looking puzzled.
TR nodded and cast her long, purpley lashes downward, then looked sorrowfully over toward Margo.
“I was thinking,” TR said. “With Miss Livermush coming up, and your family having a new baby in the house, you might be a little tight on money. And I believe in competition, so I want you in the pageant. I might have a dress you can borrow.” She smiled sweetly, as if bestowing a generous gift. But then she frowned. “But, oh! Oh, no, it would definitely be too small for you, I guess…. Maybe Trisha Young has one you could borrow? Just to help you financially?”
FACT:
Trisha Young was approximately the size of a baby elephant. TR also managed to make the word “financially” sound like something chronic and contagious.
“I’m only trying to help,” TR added, very softly. “Because left to your own devices, Margo, you dress like a schizophrenic homeless woman.”
TR’s phrase zinged past us like an arrow. No one spoke.
“Come on, girls. Let’s get out of here. It’s slirting time!” TR sang. The others cheered. They stepped past our table and left, leaving a cloud of tuberoses and honey-vanilla where they’d stood.
ANTHROPOLOGIST’S NOTE:
“Slirting,” an activity popular with the BRGs, is a neologism derived from “slumming” and “flirting.” Participants go after socially undesirable males for sport, flirting with them, teasing them, leading them on, and potentially even obtaining free drinks or other items from them, only to humiliate them ultimately. TR and her pals enjoyed targeting a hangout popular among guys from the county, because they felt that “slirting with rednecks” was a particularly thrilling way to reinforce their sneering superiority. (As an anthropologist, I try to record behaviors without moral commentary, but let it be known that I find “slirting” to be reprehensible and disgusting.)
“Well,” I said when the door had closed behind them.
Margo released a pent-up growl. “I can’t stand them!” Her fists were squeezed so tight they’d turned white, and I could see a pulse bound in her throat.
How much easier it was to be at an anthropologic remove, I insisted to myself. Distance, I thought. Safe distance.
“Margo,” I said. “You’ve got to get a little more anthropological about this stuff. Step back, disengage from the enemy tribe. It’s much safer.”
Margo glared at me. She was still clenching her fists when I noticed a handsome college-aged guy walk in. He looked like he’d just stepped out of a college brochure in which everyone is reading contemplatively on grassy lawns or in the midst of an Ultimate Frisbee game. I turned my head down to avoid his glance.
Why avoid the gaze of handsome guys? His gaze was a trick, and I knew it. The guy was a FreshLife leader from the local Baptist college. FreshLife is a fellowship group for high school students that tries to make God seem like your cousin’s friend’s hip, young Hollywood uncle and Jesus like some spring breaker gone wild — gone wild with praise, that is. If you were cool with Jesus, you were a VIP at the hottest spot in town. FreshLife seduced you with the handsome college-aged leaders and free beach trips. Then on Monday nights, you were expected to gather and sing songs to acoustic guitars and play weird, embarrassing games involving Cool Whip or egg tossing. I know because I’d gone before, at my mom’s request, of course. They usually only threw in two minutes or so of God talk — it was just the manic games and singing I couldn’t stand. And the retreats. The retreats were always to places like Myrtle Beach or Gatlinburg, and I’d heard they involved much candle holding and tearful soliloquies from otherwise viperish girls — BRGs included. Given the choice, I would rather read long genealogies out of the Bible for hours at a time. Forced friendliness freaked me out.
The college guy — Colin, I think his name was — looked at Margo and me. Colin was scruffy and, yes, really good-looking. For this reason, he was an extremely effective evangelical tool. The FreshLife attendance (at least the female portion) had surged this year, or so I’d heard. But rather than trying to recruit us, he turned quickly away and headed, scone in hand, out the door of the Mocha Cellar.
Margo gulped her iced tea.
“Hey, that was weird,” I said. “That FreshLife guy totally saw us and pretended he didn’t. FreshLife Leaders never avoid possible targets.”
Margo shrugged. “Weird,” she said.
“No, totally weird,” I said. “I fully explored the aggressively friendly nature of the FreshLife Leader in ‘Margaret Mead, Melva, and Me,’ and my scientific conclusion was that they never miss an opportunity to proselytize.”
Margo shrugged again. “Come on,” she said. “I’m too restless to sit here. Let’s walk around outside.”
We walked to Melva’s uptown, which features the old court square — our one,
sad point of pride. The outskirts of Melva, the part of town along the highway, can be depressing — the fractured stoplights, the Kmart, an ugly hunk of mall, too many all-you-can-eat restaurants, and the ever-crowded Alston-Henry Barbecue. Of course, then you drive uptown, and things get a bit snobbier, or classier — depending on your view. There’s the old banker’s house, the M. Scott Werther mansion — one of the big, restored Victorian relics of the days when Margo’s recent ancestors dominated state politics. Manicured women power walk their fluffy dogs by those graceful old porches and cupolas. The shops surrounding the court square sell handcrafted beaded jewelry from Charleston, sleek silver pens, and monogrammed linens from an Atlanta boutique. Two upscale restaurants with fresh flowers on every table serve sweet tea in cool blue glasses and herbed sweet potatoes. In this part of Melva, an old name is worth more than any amount of money — which is good, because recently, money has been in short supply.
For the majority of Melva, the two things that hold the most importance are 1) biscuits and 2) Wednesday night church supper. Trucks might be number three. Wrestling and high school football four and five. In other words, Melva is a town of biscuit-eating sports enthusiasts who smile, pray, and sing the national anthem while the town seems to be crumbling under everyone’s feet.
“This court square’s gotten to be so cheesy,” I said, pointing to Kassie’s Kozy Korner: A Kidz Shop! This is what passed for cuteness in Melva: alliterative misspellings.
“As opposed to?” Margo asked.
“I dunno,” I said. “As opposed to nothing. I’m just sick of how nobody cares about anything outside of this place. No one has any interest in the world outside Melva. Everyone thinks Melva is the world.” I gestured to the Confederate War Memorial plaque in the square. “That,” I said. “That’s the world. That’s the extent of what anyone knows here. It’s the court square and Miss Livermush and that’s it. The end.”
The Rites and Wrongs of Janice Wills Page 3
