Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  “Like on the Santana album—Abraxas. There’s a quote from Hermann Hesse on the cover,” he’d said. “How cool is it that Santana reads Hesse?”

  Across from the bed, his Technics stereo system was set carefully on milk crates from Schwenk’s, the local dairy farm, twelve of them stacked four wide, three tall, and all filled with albums—some rock, some punk, but mostly jazz and blues. Above that were five guitars, including a 1968 Martin D-28 with a Brazilian rosewood bridge, and a Gibson Les Paul Standard with sunburst finish and humbucking pickups. Near his pillow was a stuffed mouse I’d made in seventh-grade home economics, the only thing I’d ever sewn.

  “I can’t believe you still have this mouse,” I said. I was terrible at sewing. “Do you really like it, or do you just feel sorry for me?”

  “I really like it. Though I also happen to feel sorry for you.” He kissed my eyelids and lowered himself on top of me.

  “Jack,” I whispered uncomfortably, pushing him. “Let’s get out of here.”

  We stopped to see the trees on Main Street. The giant elms in East Hampton were dying from Dutch elm disease and many had been marked for removal.

  “I went straight to your house,” Jack explained. “I didn’t get a chance to check the trees.”

  Jack lay in the grass across from the Hunnting Inn, his head hanging off the curb into the gutter. I watched the car tires whizzing past his extended neck, wondering if he would be decapitated. His untucked Jethro Tull T-shirt crept up his chest, and his jeans slid to reveal the waistband of a pair of boxer shorts. The design on them was of red go-go dancers. The shorts were mine, anyway my father’s, from the fifties. Jack’s apricot belly was marked by a V of muscle low in the center and a narrow ladder of hair that mounted the middle. I crawled through the grass and got next to him, facing up also. “This one’s awesome,” he said. “The branch over Main Street is like an arm bent at the elbow. Pretty soon it will be gone.”

  The streets of the village were full of fog. Along the way to the pizza place, I kept putting up my hands as if to part curtains. Jack was saying how in Wyoming juniper trees have round blue cones like grapes and how Rick Ruddle said that inhaling labdanum tranquilizes the mind. Rick Ruddle was Jack’s hike leader and a sound engineer from Portland.

  Brothers Four Pizzeria was crowded. Troy Resnick was there with Min Kessler, the eye doctor’s daughter. Jack and Troy slapped loose hands. “How was the trip, man?” Troy asked.

  Jack said, “Outrageous, man.”

  Troy examined the watermelon-colored Kryps on Jack’s skateboard, and Jack informed Troy that his haircut was butt ugly. I lifted a copy of Dan’s Papers from a stack on the floor and took the front table. Through the ribbon of mist that divided Newtown Lane, the red neon sign from Sam’s Restaurant seemed milky red and noirish, making me think of detective novels—single-bullet shootings. A pop, a body, some footsteps, a detective.

  “Catch you later, man,” I heard Jack say.

  Troy slurped back cheese. “Meet us at the beach.”

  “Which one, Wiborg’s?” Jack asked.

  “Indian Wells.”

  “Too far,” Jack said. “I don’t have a car, and I’m not driving with you. You suck.”

  Other kids starting calling out to Jack. He transmitted a series of apathetic hellos, then declared with annoyance, “Listen, people, I gotta get some fucking food.”

  At the counter he ordered two slices and stared down Dino and Vinny while he waited. They irritated Jack, the way they thought they were masculine. He liked to say that they must have had some very big hairy dicks beneath those oil-stained pizza aprons. For his part, Jack astounded them, the way he was puny and unkempt but had a girl like me. He seemed to personify for them the trouble with America. Dino would just shake his head when he saw us, which pleased Jack infinitely. Jack liked to take me there; we went about three times a week.

  Jack deposited two paper plates on the table, each with its own overhanging slice, and the plates swirled a bit from grease coming through. Jack lowered his chin to the plane of the table and bit his folded slice. “Mooks,” he said through his food. He didn’t know what a Mook was, he’d just heard it once in a movie called Mean Streets, which my dad had taken us to see. Ever since then, everybody who pissed him off was a Mook. I tore the crust from my slice and chewed. Jack wanted to know if the pizza guys had given me a hard time while he was gone.

  “This is the first time I’ve been here since you left,” I said.

  He knocked his head back to suck the soda from his can. His hair fanned out against his shoulders, and I could see his Adam’s apple dip and rise. I don’t like to see them, not ever, Adam’s apples. I turned away; Dino was staring.

  “Let’s go, Jack,” I said, standing and pulling my sweater around my shoulders, buttoning one button at the neck. “The movie starts in five minutes. We’re going to miss the oil globs.” Before the beginning of every film, the theater would project wafting oil globs on the screen, kind of like a giant lava lamp.

  “Right,” he said, jumping up to grab his skateboard. When I tossed the remainder of my pizza into the garbage, he caught it before it hit the can and crammed it into his mouth.

  As we started for the theater, he jumped onto his skateboard and whizzed by me in the street. Jack was handsome, in a seedy and purposeful way, the way a barn in disrepair looks so good in the middle of a lush green field. It was true he had changed over the summer, or maybe it was me who had changed. I said, “I can’t believe we’re finally seniors.”

  “I was just thinking that,” he said as he rode up the curb, then popped back off in front of Tony’s Sporting Goods. “Troy’s doing whippets tonight. That’s why he wants to meet later.”

  “Isn’t it like breathing into a paper bag?”

  “Yeah. It’s so stupid. That’s what makes it fun.” He approached Newtown and Main, and at the corner he twirled smoothly on the rear wheels. His arms were bent at the elbows, his right leg extended, his left leg flexed. His hair windmilled lightly. Then he leapt off, flipping the front end of his board into his ready hand, waiting for me to catch up. We met at the light.

  “Your leg ever bother you?” I asked.

  “Nah,” he said. “Sometimes.”

  Jack was wearing a cast when we met. “The summer of 1978 is a study in bitter irony,” he liked to say. “In the midst of the worst period of a particularly shitty life, I met you.”

  Because of his broken leg Jack had had to cancel his annual Outward Bound trip, which meant he was stuck at home with his family. For weeks he wasn’t even able to climb the three flights to his room, so he had to sleep in the den, or, as he said, in the transverse colon of the house, where all the shit sits and ferments before moving through. Jack was forced to endure the petty mechanics of family life—every dinner and phone conversation, every key jingle and cabinet slam.

  Once, he and his dad fought so bad that Mr. Fleming called the police.

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “I threatened him with a weapon.”

  “A gun?”

  “No,” he confided, “I couldn’t reach the gun. A knife.”

  “A knife? Your leg was broken! He couldn’t possibly have been scared.”

  Jack shrugged. “What can I say? I have excellent aim.”

  I knew Jack from school; everyone did because of Atomic Tangerine. Prior to that he and Kate had had the same piano teacher, Laura Lipton, a songwriter from Sag Harbor whose dog, Max, was a television actor—Ken-L Ration, Chuck Wagon, and so on. Occasionally Kate’s lesson would encroach upon Jack’s, and she would play with the dog just in order to stick around and listen. She would call me after to say how well Jack Fleming played.

  We never actually spoke until the day in early summer when he came with his parents to the Lobster Roll, where his older sister, Elizabeth, was a waitress and I was a busgirl. I watched him from across the room. I’d never seen anyone so uncomfortable in my life. As his father talked without pause, Jack
stared through the window out onto Napeague Highway, clanking his spoon against his cast, keeping a secret rhythm. He would lower his face to the table to sip his water. His broken leg was propped onto a second chair.

  Elizabeth asked me to carry over the drinks. “Please. I can’t deal with them.”

  The cocktail tray rested on the flat of my left forearm, and I bent to deposit each drink carefully. I couldn’t help but notice the way the afternoon sun encountered Jack’s face, the glassine glow to his eyes. When I looked into them, I could not look away. They became a beautiful horizon, dominions of clouds and winds of ice and insinuations of birds. I considered sadly the world he saw through those eyes. Probably nothing in real life could match the purity of vision they beheld.

  Mr. Fleming asked my name.

  I set down his plastic cup of chardonnay. I said, “Eveline.”

  “Eveline? Fan-tas-tic!” He began to sing. Eveline, Evangeline.

  I delivered Jack’s Coke, and my breast accidentally grazed his right arm, a little beneath his shoulder. We both kind of froze.

  “Which of your parents reads Longfellow?” Mr. Fleming demanded. Jack shifted protectively as though to block me.

  “My mother,” I replied, “teaches poetry. Short stories and Shakespeare too. But I think my name is from Dubliners.”

  “Joyce—bah. Overrated,” Mr. Fleming barked dismissively. “Let’s see, let’s see now, Longfellow. It’s been quite some time.”

  “Where does she teach, dear?” Mrs. Fleming interrupted.

  “Southampton College,” I said. Mr. Fleming cleared his throat and begin to recite. “Gentle Evangeline—et cetera, et cetera, something, something, something—When she had passed it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music.”

  Jack glowered at him and clapped three times very, very slowly.

  “Well, now, Eveline-Evangeline,” Mr. Fleming said. “What do you intend to do with the great fortune you will have amassed by the end of summer?”

  “Oh. I’m not sure. Probably just buy paints and stuff. You know, art stuff,” I said.

  He was silent—they all were—stunned no doubt by the humorless sincerity of my reply. As I delivered straws and cleared away soiled appetizer plates, I felt for the first of many times the intensity of Jack’s gaze and the blood that pooled darkly in my cheeks.

  At the waitress station, Elizabeth garnished glasses of iced tea with lemon wheels, and she spoke of Jack. I listened from the far side of the lattice divider. It was funny to see her face after seeing his—his was so much prettier. Her parents had tried everything, she said. She said that Jack had seen psychiatrists since he was seven, that he was a noncompliant patient, that he had been on more medications than there are states, that he was talented in music, and that he had just been enrolled in boarding school near their grandparents’ house in Connecticut. He was leaving in September. “He tried to kill my father a few weeks ago, you know,” Elizabeth whispered to Sue and Renata.

  Renata admitted she’d read about it in The East Hampton Star.

  “He should be grateful that he’s going to school instead of prison.” Elizabeth hoisted a tray onto her arm and walked away.

  Since I’d never spoken to Jack, I could not really rise to his defense. But I figured that at least I ought to tell him how I felt about what I’d heard. You sort of have an obligation to tell someone that he can trust you more than he can trust his own sister.

  No one offered Jack a hand as they prepared to leave. I held his chair for him as he stood, and I followed him to hold open the door.

  “Good luck, Lady Evangeline,” Mr. Fleming thundered above his wife’s head as she crossed the vestibule to join him. “Though I don’t expect you’ll need it.”

  Jack swung past with his body hanging far over his crutches. “Thanks,” he mumbled, and I went with him into the corridor, which seemed to confuse everyone, including me.

  Mr. Fleming winked knowingly. “Meet you outside, son.”

  “Sorry about that,” Jack said when they left. “He’s a dick.”

  “It’s okay,” I assured him, feeling shy to be the object of his eyes. Inside the enamel blue rings were specks, little stars twinkling. “So when do you get your cast off?”

  “Thursday,” he said caustically, dragging the word out. He looked to the ground. Without lifting his head, his eyes returned to mine. To say he was handsome was not quite right, not quite enough: the look in his eyes was transcendent. On the restaurant radio was that Wings song “Maybe I’m Amazed.”

  We watched the cars race down Napeague stretch.

  “You should come over sometime,” I said.

  “What time do you get off?”

  I said at five.

  “All right,” he said, moving off, “see you at six.”

  “Wait,” I called. “You don’t know where I live.”

  He paused at the door. “By the tracks,” he said. Then he left, his compact frame ticking gracefully between shiny pale crutches.

  People always asked why I went out with him. I just liked him better than anyone else. He didn’t have that ballooned chest or stiff-shouldered look other boys had. Jack was skinny, but fluid, loose in the legs, and, though he was careful with me, the chances he took with himself were real. One night when he, Dan, and Smokey Cologne were out of pot, they smoked oregano leaves and drank codeine cough syrup. On a dare, Smokey did a shot of Downy fabric softener and had to get his stomach pumped. After the hospital, they came to my house and dove kamikaze-style off the back of the couch until Dan broke his nose and they had to go back to the hospital. Jack had tried peyote in New Mexico and LSD at the Roxy during a George Thorogood concert—a rockabilly nightmare, he’d said. He’d snorted speed and done cocaine. He hated coke. “I end up smiling all fucking night,” Jack complained.

  It didn’t really bother me if he got high. His was like a body without skin, and he had to desensitize himself. I didn’t mind the way he predicted his own disappointment, calling everything pointless and existence senseless. I just figured it was a way to protect himself. The only truly threatening thing I ever noticed about Jack was his surplus of confidence—a tremendous ego is a dangerous thing in someone so gloomy. He could not be persuaded away from his blackest convictions, and anyone who disagreed with him was part of the whole fucking problem to begin with. Though I would never ever have told him so, Jack was very much the son of his father.

  “We were sleeping in an open field,” Jack said as we stepped forward with the movie line. “In Montana. After dawn we heard a weird whooshing sound.”

  “A UFO!” I said. Jack and I had seen one at Albert’s Landing once. It looked like twin pods, like a salt circle pinched at the center.

  “No, almost. A hot air balloon,” he said. “Hovering. Like a rubber rainbow. We jumped out of our sleeping bags and ran after it, all of us naked.” Jack would’ve made a good Indian. He could make fire with a magnifying glass and sleep naked on mountains in the cold. He could tie knots you could not escape from.

  “Girls too?” I asked.

  “Two for Amityville Horror,” Jack told LizBeth Bennett, who was working in the box office. She tore two pink tickets off a spool. “Yeah,” he said, “Girls too.”

  It didn’t bother me that he had seen the girls naked and maybe had sex with them. I was only envious of all the places he’d visited. I’d been to only eight states—mostly with my father. Jack had been to twenty-six—always alone.

  He shoved a messy wad of change into his pocket. “I wrote a song about it.”

  “About the balloon?” I asked.

  “About how you weren’t there to see it,” he said.

  We sat in the third row and followed the wafting oil globs on the movie screen. Jack removed his black journal from his coat to show me the stuff he’d collected and recorded and all the songs he’d written for me during his trip. His drawings were compact and obsessively detailed, mathematical almost, like da Vinci’s. Most pages had variations of the same landscape
—upside down and tilted. Like a vortex, like water down a bathtub drain.

  “That’s in the Tetons,” he explained solemnly. His group had to cross a ridge with tremendous drops on each side, and there was this yellow plastic tag nailed to the point where some guy had fallen off. “It would have been so easy, Evie.” Jack used my name for emphasis, and I listened with care. We were low in our seats, so low that people behind probably couldn’t see our heads, only our knees propped on the chairs in front of us. I held his bicep with two hands wrapped around his red windbreaker. “The free fall. I would have shattered and spread.” His hands pushed out in two opposing directions, “Like, distributed.”

  “Re-distributed,” I said. “Like back to raw matter.”

  “Re-distributed,” he said, “Exactly, yeah.”

  I liked the idea of marking the place where a life ends as opposed to the place a corpse is buried. And also the idea of leaving remains uncollected. It’s bad enough being dead, but it’s worse to have people see you dead, to have living hands feel a dead you, jostle and dress you, push your stiffening arms into clean sleeves and cry over your blood-drained body. At a wake or funeral, people say a dead body is “at rest,” but actually, it is working. The corpse assists the living, it stops time. It helps to postpone the reality of loss. It’s hard to know which is worse, never seeing a loved one again or seeing them again packed with fixative and formaldehyde, with plastic and whey and alkalis and binders, and hearing people mutter, She looks so peaceful, when what they really mean is, She’s stuffed like a glycerol scarecrow. Probably that mountain climber’s spirit was drifting motionlessly like an eagle soaring in place. Flags flap that way, blowing grandly to nowhere.

  “I missed you,” Jack said.

  I’d missed him too. I took a handful of popcorn, then brought my fist to his mouth, pushing some kernels gently in. He ate until he reached my hand, which he bit lightly. The projector jolted on, and his face flashed to blue snow.