Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  There was a sign on the door: OCTOBER 22, 1979, 3:00–5:00 P.M. FINAL AUDITIONS—EHHS DRAMA CLUB. I pushed the door open, and a round of cheers from the girls rushed in with me. Everyone turned, as Mr. McGintee, the drama adviser who was also the senior guidance counselor, made the announcement that auditions were officially closed.

  “That is, unless Miss Auerbach has decided to sacrifice art for the stage. What do you say, Eveline?” Mr. McGintee called.

  I drew the door closed and slipped quickly into a seat in the top row. “Oh, no, I’m just waiting for someone.” I didn’t have to say Kate, since everyone knew. Mr. McGintee knew also.

  “Do you girls have a moment?” Mr. McGintee had inquired, as Kate and I passed the guidance office on the first day back from summer. “Just for a chat.” He had high wiry hair and wiry glasses, and he looked as dry as an old cattail. Like he could use a stiff drink.

  While he spoke in private to Kate, I sat in the empty waiting room, trying not to touch anything. The guidance office always made me uncomfortable, maybe because it trafficked in the fate of children, sort of like a doctor’s office deals in the fates of the sick. Nothing much happens in either place except waiting of the most agonizing variety. The secretary’s clock radio was playing “Sweet Home Alabama.” I noticed that it was tuned to WPLR, the local rock station, which must have been an after-hours thing. Usually it was kept tuned to light favorites.

  The door to Mr. McGintee’s glass cube whooshed open, and he invited me to join them. Inside he perched on the edge of his desk and asked questions that were not exactly questions. “So, have you two had an opportunity to review the events of the summer?”

  Kate said, “Yes. We have.”

  And I said, “Yes. We review a lot.”

  “Very good,” said Mr. McGintee, slapping his knee. “Ter-rif-ic.”

  It’s not always a crime to lie. Sometimes it’s easier to give people the answer they expect than to explain what you really think or feel. No one likes to admit it, but conversation is never truly spontaneous. Everyone works toward a goal, and few people like to be surprised. You can prevent a lot of mutual embarrassment and tedious negotiation simply by pinpointing your partner’s aim at the outset.

  Mr. McGintee had spent a lot of time and money earning his degree in educational psychology, and you couldn’t blame him for trying to get some use out of it. He didn’t want honest answers about how Kate was doing, just some key phrases that would allow him to classify her feelings as “normal” and call her case closed. It’s like asking someone, “How was your summer?” You don’t really want details.

  But Kate could not speak of her suffering because words could never convey her specific feelings. I’d seen her sorrow. It came in the way she sat motionlessly in her room in our house watching the day skulk from orange to blue. It came in the way time passed twice as slow for her and also around her. We would sit for what felt like hours.

  “What time is it?” I’d ask with a yawn.

  She’d say, “Ten minutes past the last time you asked.”

  Invariably she overdressed. And when she cooked or washed dishes, she leaned against the counter with her legs tightly wrapped, one around the other. Her grief expressed itself in trepidation. She was afraid to move, as though movement might draw her irrevocably from the sphere in which her mother had resided.

  “Why did you drop French, Catherine?” Mr. McGintee asked the top of her head. Kate’s hands played with the fabric of the upholstered guidance chair, which was beady like dehydrated oatmeal.

  “She’s already fluent,” I said. “How much better is she supposed to speak it?”

  He shushed me. “The point is, French Five would have raised your class rank, Kate,” he said, and his eyelids fluttered. “The point is,” he counseled, “we need to consider your future.”

  He nodded meaningfully to me, asking for backup on that, as if I had any kind of secure future myself, or as if I’d had any experience with the luxury of family outside of what I’d known from Kate’s. There was nothing anyone could do, really. Kate had lost an entire way of being—red wine in her water glass, pounded veal for dinner, a platter of cheese and fruit for dessert, strolls around Town Pond with Maman’s perfectly pressed skirt crinkling stiffly like tissue paper. On Saturdays there was dancing, Yves Montand or Jacques Brel, and when the song ended, Maman would spin, clapping twice by your eyes like a joyful, brazen someone—Ha! Ha!

  How could he possibly help? Part of Kate passed when her parents passed. She no longer had proof of herself. She had become a nothing. Not a nothing, but a former something, which is infinitely more complicated.

  In the auditorium, I sat on the upright edge of a seat, dropped my knapsack onto the floor, and squinted to find Kate. You could find her by her hair, which in mythology would have been called a golden mane. She was in the middle of the second row.

  Mr. McGintee complimented the group on the turnout—in addition to the seventeen existing members of the club, there were twenty-six new students who had come to audition. He launched into a clichéd speech about how so few dramatic works can accommodate that many actors, and he ominously extracted a sheet of paper from his briefcase, telling everyone to write down their names and interests, in case they didn’t make the cast.

  “It’s important to remember that the backstage volunteers, the costume designers, the lighting technicians, and the sales crew are just as important as the performers.” He shouted up the aisle, again to me. “Isn’t that right, Eveline?”

  “Sure,” I said. I don’t know why he always had to rope me into things. He never seemed to listen to what I said. “I mean, I guess.” It wasn’t really right, not if you wanted to act. I happened to like doing the sets, but Kate would have died if they made her property mistress.

  When Kate asked me whether she should join the Drama Club, I said no. She was pretty, and her hair was long, but that didn’t make her a stage actress. Carol Channing was a stage actress. Julie Andrews. Ethel Merman. Helen Hayes. Lynn Redgrave. Rita Moreno. I told her my opinion, just not in those words.

  I just said, “I don’t think it would be good.”

  Kate would have been fine on film, playing herself or a type of fairy—an equestrian fairy, one that lounged on horse foreheads and sent wandloads of sparkles into horse ears. One thing is that the plays they pick have to be vehicles for three talented kids and an incompetent mob. If I were in charge, I would have had them act out the newspaper.

  “Let’s see, Fiddler on the Roof was last year,” I said as I ate a chicken leg and fell back on the couch. “And Guys and Dolls was the year before. It’ll probably be South Pacific.”

  “You’re so mean!”

  “Five bucks,” I said. “The Mikado. I bet you. Damn Yankees.”

  Kate felt I was making fun of her hobby, which I was. She wanted to act because she was beautiful, and beautiful people always feel entitled to extra attention. It was the same thing with everyone saying Daryl Sackler should play basketball. It didn’t mean he had the necessary stamina or agility or dedication or wits, it just meant he was tall, that his figure would have made sense on the court. People like things at least to appear to make sense, even if that visual logic comes at the expense of factual excellence.

  There were boys all over the auditorium, sitting against the edges of things. I was surprised to see Jack there. He was on the floor against the wall at the far right with Dan and Troy Resnick, and he was staring at me with a piercing curiosity, as though I were stuffed and encased behind glass. I’d seen him look at me that way before.

  “Are the rumors true?” he’d asked.

  Twigs were caught on his red plaid lumberjack coat. He’d just returned from boarding school for Thanksgiving. His duffel bag was sitting out on the front step, where he’d left it. It was November 1978, five months after we’d met.

  It was an uncharacteristic sentence for him to speak. I was confused not by the words but by the tone, the swiftness of delivery. It was as
if there were a piece of me he’d lost in a strong wind, and he was frantic to retrieve it. He was staring at me furiously.

  “It depends,” I said, “on what the rumors say.”

  “That they slept with you,” he countered fearlessly. One thing—Jack could be fearless. He did not ever hesitate to ensure that we were both speaking of the same thing. We were sitting on the couch in the living room. His knees brushed the coffee table.

  I looked at the ceiling. “Well, no one really slept.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “It makes a difference, the words you use.”

  “Did you have sex with them?”

  “I wouldn’t say that either.”

  Jack took a breath. “What would you say?”

  “I would say it was the other way around.”

  “That they had sex with you?”

  “Right,” I said. “That’s right.”

  Jack looked at his shoes. He looked at his shoes for a long time. He became so still I thought maybe he’d fallen asleep. I tried to think what it would be like to be him, hearing such news for the first time, but that was hard to do when I’d known already for a while. It was possible that he might like to do something about what had happened. Unfortunately, it had happened five weeks before. Though it’s not hard to get emotional about the past, it’s hard to apply those emotions effectively.

  Did the rumors happen to mention the way the guys came into the upstairs bathroom of Mary Brierly’s summer house in Napeague while I was peeing, the way they hoisted me against the wall before I could pull my pants up, the way L. B. Strickland covered my mouth with his mouth while Nico twisted the faucet on the sink very hard. Water splattered up from the basin onto my belly in icy slivers. I did not like water to splash up, not ever.

  Would Jack feel better or worse knowing that because the back of my neck was pressed against the wall, I could hear but not see Nico’s zipper coming undone with one sharp shot. And unwillingly, I memorized the feel of my two wrists fitting into someone’s one hand, and the feel of drunken gasps on my neck going in time with strokes that tore me open, and the feel of a stranger’s hair against my skin.

  “Rapture” by Blondie played. It seemed to play exponentially, with each next verse multiplying out. Surely no one had described that to Jack, or the part about Mary banging on the bathroom door and pushing it open onto the three of us, shrieking, “Get out of my house!” and “You tramp!” Did people include in the notes they passed a description of her nails going into my arms when she dragged me into the hallway with my pants around my ankles? How when I reached down to dress, there were streams of someone else’s fluid running down my inner thighs? How I stumbled down the stairs, how I ran out the front door, how I had hoped against hope that no one had noticed?

  The night was moonless but not entirely unkind. Three bodies appeared. Rocky Santiago and his younger brother, Manny, and some underclassman whose name I could not recall. Rocky eased me into the passenger seat of his dented Chevy. My bike fit into his trunk. He drove cautiously toward East Hampton from Amagansett, and Manny followed in his friend’s car, cautiously also.

  Rocky asked was I okay.

  I felt bad not to answer. I could not get past this feeling, this harrowing after-feeling, a feeling beyond grasp or intelligence. Beyond any obvious comparison to having been robbed or cheated, inside I felt robbed and cheated. Inside, I felt the physics of injustice, which, as it turns out, has little or nothing to do with the language of injustice. The indisputable wrongness of someone’s having taken something that did not belong to them, filthied something that I’d kept clean, made their mark on property that was mine, and contemptibly crossed over into my intimacy in defiance of my desire, was all distant conjecture compared to the pragmatics of my situation—the pulled muscle in my neck, the cut on my mouth possibly from a watch, the stinging scratches on my arms made by Mary, the dampness in my underwear not from me, the surface abrasions and internal hairline splits that I could not mention to Rocky despite his kind interest because it is hard for people to understand the inside of a girl, the way it is shaped like a conch with filigreed avenues that are spectacular and ornamental. People tend to think it’s just a hole.

  I asked him to pull over and when he did, I leaned out to vomit. Manny turned off the headlights on the second car to give me privacy.

  When we arrived at my house, Rocky shifted the arm of the car into park and asked was I all right to go in on my own. I said that I was. Maybe I was in shock, but I didn’t feel embarrassed with him. I had the feeling he’d seen enough of the world to understand the random brutality of instinct and to know I was not to blame for what had happened to me. He’d come from Colombia in 1976, from Pereira. His real name was Raúl. I would have liked to know about his home, about what had made his family leave it for East Hampton of all places, but I didn’t want to make him nervous with talk. We both knew that it would have made the story of my assault far more plausible if I’d blamed him for what the others had done. It would have made me a more credible victim. It was good of him to take a chance on me.

  “Thanks, Raúl,” I said, waving my hand weakly.

  He ran his fingers through his hair, scratching the back of his scalp. “No problem, Evie.”

  Rocky walked to the rear of the car, lifted the bike out of the trunk, and waited for me to join him. Then he stood watchfully as I moved down the driveway. The dimmed headlights of the two idling cars poured onto the ground. They were waiting headlights, fraternal and discreet. When I reached the garage door, I turned and waved again, not realizing then that the timing of Rocky’s benevolence, the gentlemanly readiness of his heart, had reversed in one elegant gesture the violence I’d experienced. In fact, it saved me. It was poetry, really—the random enmity, the random good.

  Jack was saying that I should have done something. That reporting it to the police would have been cathartic. “You know,” he said, “like, helpful.”

  It was a funny suggestion, the part about the police, coming from him. I was sorry for my involvement in an incident that would cause him to betray the basic tenets of his thinking.

  Even if he was right, it was easy to say in retrospect what would have been the sensible thing to do. At the time, I did not feel sensible. At the time I was too busy thinking. Should I slice off the top layer of my skin? Should I scrape the lip marks from my neck? Would I use a knife for that, and with that knife could I make a pocket in my belly wide enough for a hand to reach in and remove the contaminated organs? I had the compulsive desire to scrub each fleshy gelatin piece of myself in acid. Periodically throughout the night I would tell myself to get over it, to act practically, to take a shower. Instantly after, I would drop back to the floor of my room, made sick by the thought of my own body, afraid to glimpse even the smallest portion of my undressed self. It didn’t seem possible that they’d had ink on their fingers, but somehow I was sure that underneath I looked splotchy like a zebra. Not a zebra, but one of the spotted kinds of animals. I just thought of zebras because of the sorrowful way they hang their heads.

  “Have you seen those cops?” I asked Jack, trying to bolster his mood with complaints. My hands made circle motions around my eyes. “Those mirrored aviator glasses they wear?”

  “Yeah,” Jack muttered. “Fucking assholes.”

  Maybe the image of me talking to my own bloated reflection in gleaming Ray-Bans would make him understand how pointless it would’ve been to file a report. Still, if I could have guessed that telling the police would have profited Jack, I might have done it. He seemed to need to know that some manner of justice had occurred. It was like sticking a pin into a bruise, to hear him wish so naïvely for equity.

  Jack’s body had not yet moved. He was like a jetty rock, obstinate and motionless against the savage force of the sea. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do or say so I waited, passing time by thinking of things I knew. I knew that he loved me desperately, never more so than at that moment. I knew tha
t he was ready, aroused for once by the honorableness of his emotions, and yet the anger that moved him had no means of expression. How betrayed he must have felt by his belligerent pacifism, by the ambivalence he’d constantly displayed. He was thinking that the attack had not been arbitrary, that it had happened to me for a reason. He was thinking the reason was him.

  “Don’t you see,” I said. “It’s like trying to catch a flying bird.”

  Nothing could have changed what happened. No cop or court would have had the jurisdiction to do what was fair—to vacuum the grizzling glue from my insides and cram it back into the pinhole openings of their penises.

  A bleak shaft of carrot-colored light grazed his left eye and a round patch beneath it, making Jack seem one-eyed and invincible like a Cyclops. I wondered if it was three o’clock. Usually things get carroty and bleak and Homeric at three.

  “Say the rest,” he demanded.

  He wanted to hear the part about him—that he should have been different than he was, that he should have been a falsely obedient son who would not have taken a knife to his father and would not have been shipped to boarding school, that he should have been a typical male who walked with his arm around my waist and his hand crammed in my back pocket, who bragged about fucking me to guys he despised, who played a sport and not an instrument. He wanted me to connect it to him.

  I shrugged. “There is no rest.”

  I accepted that things had to happen as they did when I walked back in that night after Rocky left me and I found the kitchen still smelling like food from dinner. The dishes in the drain board were not yet dry, and the radio by the stove that I had turned on earlier was still playing. The time was one-thirty in the morning, on Sunday, October 22nd, 1978. Hours before, it had been the 21st, Powell’s thirty-eighth birthday. On Saturday at six, Kate had called to say she couldn’t make it to the birthday dinner or to Mary’s party, that her mother was too sick to be left alone. They were leaving Sunday at noon for Manhattan. They would stay for two days of tests at Sloan-Kettering. At that time the cancer was just a suspicious lump.