Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  Suddenly she was up again, moving—something big, something eloquent, some business with dash and rush. There was the sound of the phone dialing. She was calling the hospital, calling Kate, calling Kate’s brother. The dialing made a spinning sound like the sound of infinity, like the feel of drawing the number eight, your hand just going around and around.

  Kate would live with us through her senior year and graduate from East Hampton High School rather than go to Canada with Laurent and his wife. We often had people stay—Magnus Ove, the Swedish exchange student, known to us as the Great Egg, and Washington, the computer programmer from Seattle who slept on the love seat for six months. There was always some teenager “in transition” or visiting college student or wayworn navy sonarman in need of a bed for a week or two.

  “She’ll be safe and happy here with Eveline,” my mother consoled Laurent. “Your mother would have wanted this.”

  After the cemetery was lunch. Laurent invited us to join them, but Mom respectfully declined, saying she had to head over to her office at the college. As for me, I could not bear to think of food.

  Kate said, “See you,” and when she and her brother crossed the street, you couldn’t tell the difference between them. Both of their bodies were lean and black and their heads were hunched. They appeared headless, as if they could not bear to admit anything new.

  “You okay?” Mom asked as she stepped into her car. “Want me to drive you home?”

  I rested my arms on the roof and looked in the window, the casual way people do, except I was not so casual. “No, thanks. I’ll walk.”

  I moved as slowly as possible down Cooper Lane, then along Newtown, cutting across to Osborne, staring at the shingled houses, depressed in general by ongoingness—the sudden gusts of charcoal smoke emerging from behind garages, and the Big Wheels abandoned at the edges of driveways and the shy twinkling of televisions prematurely on. Everyone was oblivious to the untimely death of Claire Cassirer, leaving me to ponder such imponderable things as the stark brutality of the human condition. So much is made out of an individual life until a life is lost. Then it seems to be quickly forgotten.

  At home I undressed carefully, making little contact with the fabric, not wanting to look at what I had worn. I added the clothes to my mother’s dry cleaning sack. It would be months before she took the contents to the dry cleaner and months again before she had the money to pick them up.

  Mom always joked with Mrs. Burns, the dry cleaner, when we saw her in town. “I’d get my clothes, Rose, but your building might tip.”

  And when the garments eventually did come back, the funeral things would be on hangers mixed in with normal things, and Mom would just stick the whole plastic-wrapped bundle in her closet, forgetting about it until she needed to wear something nice, which could take another six months.

  In the barn I climbed to the loft and lay there, hands on my chest. I was a body lying, and Maman was a body lying, both on the same day, three streets apart. Above me was the roof. Above her, the coppery cold earth pressed sizably, like a sulfur quilt. She was still so close, as unaccustomed to death as newborns are to the breezy world beyond the womb. I wondered were there nursing hands to help her, and singsong voices to console her. I hoped that there were.

  I kicked off the covers because my legs itched from the stockings I’d worn. I was hot, so I switched on the fan and moved it close to me, but then I got cold, so I moved it back again. I rubbed my temples. I wished the lawn needed cutting. I wished we had a television. I wished a phone would ring, but there was no phone where I was. I didn’t feel well. When I thought of Kate, I felt worse. I had to get out.

  The sunlight struck the westerly wall of the barn at a sunken bevel. That was where I went, where the light was brightest and the heat the hottest. I lowered myself onto the bench, and soon Kate was there, walking over, sitting next to me.

  “Simone and Laurent are having a baby,” she said. “It comes sometime in March.”

  Kate would be an aunt. I wondered if the baby had hastened Maman to the grave, in the generational sense.

  “They asked me again to go with them to Canada,” Kate said. “They’re leaving tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow,” I said, “wow.” Tomorrow seemed sooner than usual.

  “I told them no,” she said.

  I felt relieved; I sighed and said, “I decided I’m going to be cremated.”

  “Me too,” Kate agreed. “I was thinking that all day.”

  I recalled the gutless thud and the pebbly, spreading sound the dirt made as it slipped and got trapped in the casket’s fittings. I said, “It’s tough. The whole thing is tough.”

  Kate’s eyes were fixed on the dampening flame of the sunset. It was the sunset of the last day in which her mother had been a participant. It was the last time she would have to be on time for her mom, get dressed up for her mom, be nice to her mom’s friends.

  “Things keep happening,” I went on. “Every day, new things, awful things. It’s hard to think about them, really think. But, then, they’re the only things. You know what I mean?”

  “It’s true,” Kate said. “After this, there’s nothing.”

  Just then we heard the driveway gravel popping, a car door, a gentle whistle. My mother was home, calling the cats. At the sound, Kate covered her face with her hands and crumpled to a heap. I patted her on the back, which was hard for me, comforting a person in that patting way.

  Mom brushed apart the hedges. “I thought I’d find you two back here. What a gorgeous sunset.”

  She squeezed in between us, and our sorrow gave way to hope. Despite her small stature and unconventional habits, my mother was a superhero—arriving infrequently, often late, but repairing chaos nonetheless with her colossal energy and charisma. I was glad to be relieved of the burden of consoling Kate. At least my mother had some idea of how to be. When you lose your parents as a child, you are indoctrinated into a club, you are taken into life’s severest confidence. You are undeceived.

  “Has everybody eaten?” she asked.

  Kate had. I had not. The idea still repulsed me.

  “I understand,” my mother said, and she patted my knee, “but you’re alive.”

  7

  It was the first yearbook meeting of the year, and the editor, Marty Koch was up front, slumped into one of those shiny beige desk-and-chair units. As Marty mumbled about objectives, a lock of unwashed hair drooped persistently over one of his eyes. I tried to follow what he was saying, but it was like looking into a pond and trying to trail a swimming frog.

  From my seat on the windowsill, I grabbed a chair with my legs. It squawked lamely as I dragged it over to use as a footrest. I stretched and looked through the half-open window behind me. Outside on the field, the football players were practicing tackles against those padded metal rows that are supposed to be the opposing team. If I squinted, the movement of the boys became almost balletic, like rows of rushing swans.

  Though my eyesight was fine, I often struggled with aspects of vision. At close range my mind had the habit of animating inanimate articles, such as coats on hangers and ceramic statuettes. Faraway things looked sad and small, destined for defeat. Either way, near or far, it helped me to squint. Periodically my parents would send me to the optometrist for an examination.

  Dr. Kessler would look askance as I rubbed my fists into my eye sockets. “Headache?” he would ask, one eyebrow raised. Behind him, all the machinery sat perched in the violet lizard-tank darkness, like stalled robots or expectant marionettes. It’s crazy, the way eyeballs require all that equipment—the rolling carts with boxes that blow gusts of air, the slide machines for alphabet projections, and those glass goggles suspended on metal arms that pivot to your face, and which, unlike the telescopes at the top of the Empire State Building, do not magnify the view, but, rather, your eyes.

  “No,” I would say, “not at all.”

  As I read the charts, Dr. Kessler would lean over my knees to flip various lenses aroun
d, adjusting magnification, checking for some tangible change—I couldn’t imagine what. The rim of each ring would inch past the twin windows, click, click, threatening to rip my lids off.

  “Twenty-twenty,” he would conclude, peering at me over the top of his own special glasses, which looked sort of like a View-Master. “Why, then, do you squint?”

  “I don’t know,” I’d say. “To see better.”

  “But there’s no physiological reason for you to have to see better!”

  I always felt sorry for him, as sorry as I felt for myself, the two of us stranded in that medieval torture den without hope of resolution. I supposed it was counterintuitive to regard squinting as a way to see better, especially when I had no apparent need to see better. But in fact, I did have that need, whether he could see it—that is, diagnose it—or not. Maybe he should have asked a better question. Maybe I should have used another word. Differently. I needed to see differently.

  “Well, that’s it for booster sales,” Marty was saying. Boosters are those cryptic mini-sentences in the backs of yearbooks—P.G. dontcha love 2Ramy!! or Berry Boy gotta get some tidy shirt? Marty ran his highlighter across the third line down of a completely filled-up legal pad. “Let’s move on to folio flow.”

  I scanned the bluish and inert faces of the yearbook staff. I was thinking that there was not one guy I would have slept with if we were trapped. When you’re bored you can pretend you’re trapped, like hostages. You ask yourself where would everyone go to the bathroom and who would hold hands in the dark? Who would you have sex with? And who would be the real heroes? Real heroes are the ones you don’t expect. That’s the lesson of Superman and Underdog, the lesson of being patient and maybe someday learning the truth. That’s also the lesson of soap operas. In soap operas a bad person will turn good, or a good one will turn bad, or actors will switch roles altogether, becoming neighbors or relatives of themselves. Jack and Dan loved to deride soap operas, with their fake hospital sets, yet they were somehow unfazed by the flimsy scenery of Star Trek. And they could argue for hours about whether Juggernaut first appeared in X-Men 12 or X-Men 13.

  The football field was warmed by the simmering light of the setting sun. A whistle blew, and the players broke apart, creating a long wall of staggered bodies. I would have liked to have been out there with my camera, capturing them as they cocked their heads and listened intently while Coach Peters paced in front of them. Athletes make the perfect subjects. They ignore the camera; they truly believe they are stars.

  Adults are always pushing jocks to become stars. For coaches, the incentive is job security. For parents, it’s the possibility of financial assistance. Colleges need to recruit away from other colleges and to sell stuff. Professional clubs need to ensure the ongoing chain of new talent and also to sell stuff, only slightly bigger stuff, like television rights.

  But few high school players meet with the success they dream of. Most just get teased out of a valid education. When Mrs. Oliphant, the calculus teacher, complains that the Chinese are beating us in science and math, you have to wonder whether average kids in China spend three or four hours a day on sports. No one mentions how a choice for sports is a choice away from everything else. And unlike with the Marching Band or the Spanish Language Club, nonparticipants are expected to support the teams or else be accused of lacking school spirit, of being un-American. Who knows how it happened, but somewhere along the way from Puritan times to modern ones, school spirit and sports spirit and American spirit got totally mixed up. No one even dares question the vapid sports rhetoric you’re forced to endure. It’s not whether you win or lose, just don’t lose! Sportsmanship and teamwork are hailed to taxpayers as critical life skills; yet, these lessons frequently escape the players, many of whom extract from their involvement little pertaining to honor or gracious conduct.

  My feet bounced against the radiator; my palms drummed my thighs. If it didn’t feel so good to be them, those boys might like to think about things. Maybe immunity lifts a weight; but maybe heaviness returns.

  In junior year our school was put on an “austerity” budget by the board of education, and team sports were cut. Student energies were diverted to politics and mutual interest societies—theater clubs, chess meets, charity leagues, beach clean-up patrols, and interfaith discussion groups, all of which were funded by flea markets, car washes, and bake sales. We were constantly at school working for causes—there was nothing better to do. People who had never previously spoken were thrust together because needs were great and entry policies liberal. Everyone joked that the school motto changed from “We are the Champions!” to “Beggars can’t be choosers!”

  That spring, we entered a statewide competition sponsored by Carefree sugarless gum in which the winning school was the one whose students had written the gum’s brand name on the most index cards. All four grades vied against one another, for no particular reason other than boredom and surplus vitality. We held writing vigils. The self-imposed rivalry allowed us to take the state by a titanic margin. As a prize, the rock group Hall and Oates gave a concert in the auditorium. Jack and his friends, irate over the pop music infiltration, took to the aisles during “Rich Girl” and protested by hopping up and down like pistons or gears, screaming, “Sid Vicious! Sid Vicious!”

  Surprising new heroes emerged that year. Cathy Benjamin, who’d made it through only three grades in four and a half years, organized the biggest moneymaker, a twenty-four-hour dance marathon, and Ginny Warwick, who once cried inconsolably during an argument with the biology teacher about creationism, won best costume design in the class play competition. And Denny got everyone to contribute to his old-fashioned Christmas for the holiday hall decorating contest. The home economics department sewed antique-style costumes for baby dolls he borrowed from cheerleaders; the shop department rigged Marcus Payne’s miniature mechanical railway to cut through the language lab; the mammoth Parson twins found and chopped down the perfect “pastoral” tree; the typing students created scrolled gift lists; and the art department pieced it all together.

  The night before the start of the contest, twenty-three kids gathered at my house, people like Pip Harriman and Kiki Hauser and Daryl Sackler and Sara Eden, people who’d never been there before, all of us wrapping empty boxes, painting ornaments, making soap-flake snow. Alicia Ross came over with platters of cookies made by her housekeeper, Consuela, and Powell ordered six pizzas with extra cheese. Coco Hale and I shared scissors.

  “Your snow country landscape collage is nice,” she said to me.

  I said, “I like your felt sleigh.”

  Jack and Dan came late, wearing gold paper crowns, and I was happy, the happiest I could remember being. Jack had just dropped out of boarding school in Kent, and his parents had agreed to let him finish junior year in East Hampton. He made his way over the hunched bodies, saying, “It’s like a fucking sweatshop in here!”

  He moved piles of fabric and Styrofoam globes from the stereo. As he leaned to insert the audiocassette he and Dan had produced for the contest, his key chain swung from his belt loop. It had a leather strap and a seamed bell, the type you find on cat collars and toddler shoes.

  “Hey Evie,” Dan said as he leaned against the banister and chewed on a slice of pizza. He had a matching set of bells tied to his wrist. “What would you think of us changing the name of the band to the Jesters?”

  When the tape began, everyone froze. First came Dan playing the piano solo from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons—Winter; next was Jack on acoustic guitar, singing “Let It Snow,” morosely, sounding like a young Leonard Cohen. If you had seen the faces, you would never forget them—normal faces of normal kids, stripped of rank and status. For one brief moment, I loved them. Later when I told that to Jack, he said he was glad the moment had been brief. Last on the tape was Kate and Coco doing a rendition of “Amazing Grace” on their flutes. The twin whistles wavered bashfully.

  Everyone clapped, and some of us cried, and my mother cheered, “Well, all
right!”

  “Man,” Rocky Santiago said, returning to sparkles and glue, “that tape is the clincher.”

  One week later at the holiday assembly, immediately after the choral concert, in the fevered final moments before the start of Christmas vacation, Principal Laughlin ventured to the microphone, awards in hand. After commending the entire student body for its unprecedented display of “esprit” despite the harsh reality of the austerity year, and after thanking Mrs. Quivers and her janitorial staff in advance for the task of dismantling the displays, he explained that the day’s winners would receive 250 Spirit Points to add to their Spirit Point account. Spirit Points would one day be transferred into dollars—one day, when there was money. So far the junior class, our class, held the distant lead—1,750 points as compared to 175 for the sophomores, 50 for the freshmen, and none for the seniors.

  Laughlin waited for complete silence, then he cleared his throat. “And now, according to a unanimous decision by our distinguished panel of judges composed of administrators, faculty, parents, and local business leaders, the junior class has won! Again!”

  We flew out of our seats and rushed the aisles, jumping and hugging and screaming so loudly that no one heard the dismissal bell. All the former sports stars joined in too. Mike Stern and L. B. Strickland and Peter Palumbo raised Denny onto their shoulders and carried him around in wild, tipping circles.

  But in May of the second term, a budget was approved for the following year. Sports programs were to be restored; austerity was over. Ironically, cuts for the humanities persisted—the board’s excuse was that the arts had done perfectly well without financial support. To some, the end of austerity meant the potential recovery of former glories and an opportunity to enhance college applications. To others, it meant a return to chronic disappointment and systemic inequity—no more oneness, no more euphoria, no more spirit.