Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  “You can take it,” I said. It was just a thing. What he actually took away was more precious, infinitely so.

  16

  He came through the door of the darkroom as I was laying out my prints to dry. Betsy Callaghan and Annie Jordan were developing in the back. My drawing was in his hand.

  “Okay,” Rourke said as he returned it to me.

  “Okay,” I repeated, taking it from him.

  We were face-to-face, almost but not quite, since I hardly came as high as his shoulders. If I were to lie against him, my hand would just reach the recess between his arm and chest.

  I did not raise my head, just my eyes. “Is that it?”

  He nodded. “That’s it.”

  Reverend Olcott exited the rectory, his belly jiggling ever so slightly as he crossed the driveway. He was dressed as usual in casual black, no silk, no sash.

  “Hello there, Eveline,” he said. “Long time no see.”

  I’d been leaning on a tree, regarding the church spire through the rolled-up tube of my sketch. “I’m sorry. I’ve been, you know—”

  He raised a comforting hand. “Any word on college yet?”

  “NYU, probably.”

  The reverend came from Wisconsin. I couldn’t recall the name of the town, but it must have been nice if the people in it were like him. He was a man of restless intelligence and limitless energy. Powell always said that the reverend had so much bounce as to make you think privately of fleas. If Kate and I happened to be feeding the ducks in the morning, we’d see him jogging past, or, if you stopped by the church to use the bathroom, you might find him painting the wheelchair ramp. Everyone said he was the best Cajun cook on the East End.

  I gestured with my sketch. “I’m designing a chapel. For the Drama Club.”

  He jerked his neck toward the church. “Let’s have a look.”

  The mammoth white door closed behind him with a tidy click, and the room we entered was stark and still. It made me think of the inside of an egg. We moved in the direction of the front pew. We sat, and Reverend Olcott examined my sketch.

  “Yes,” he said, and he nodded. “I see.”

  With a low stroke of one hand, he referred to the body of the church, which was nothing compared to the steeple. “The congregation is minimized,” he said. “The architecture is part of the landscape. It has a proportionate relationship to nature.”

  My eyes ventured to his face. His glasses bridged the base of his nose, and his head was tucked into his neck, adjusting to the near distance of the sheet of paper.

  “But the steeple, the reaching to God—to godliness—is immense. Symbolic, muscular, like a fist thrust into the air.” He tapped the drawing twice and returned it to me. “Very nice.”

  I considered his remarks. It was strange to have communicated something that I supposed I believed, but didn’t think I knew how to relate.

  “It’s the striving that intrigues you, the theoretical endeavor,” he proposed. “Abstraction.” The reverend cleared his throat. “Do you know it’s been nearly thirty years since I joined the church? January 1951. In that time, I’ve encountered as many devoted worshippers who lack true compassion as”—he paused to search for a word—“individualists like you who possess a pious reverence for life.”

  He pointed to the paper, now in my hands. “I especially like the easy lines, the quickness of hand, the conservation of voice. Spontaneity is too frequently mistaken for immaturity. But we are spontaneous when we are at our genuine best—childlike as opposed to childish. Standards of goodness and propriety are necessary, of course. They’re guideposts for those who stray. But ideally, decency resides in the heart, undiminished from birth.” He continued, “One sometimes wonders, though, whether purity of heart is sufficient.”

  “It does confuse me,” I ventured, “the whole idea of God as a man.” Reverend Olcott looked toward the altar. I hoped he was not offended. “You know, the beard and the robes. Six days to create the earth.”

  For a while we sat in silence. I gathered he was thinking what to say. Probably he wanted to choose his words carefully. It did seem like a risky and unofficial way to discuss God, sitting in the first pew with our legs stretched out.

  “Some prefer to draw inspiration from the story of Jesus rather than from belief in God.” His tone was circumspect. “We can be certain that a man named Jesus existed and that he preached—at great personal sacrifice and without material compensation—the virtues of faith and forgiveness. And from that ancient narrative, we continue to extract messages pertaining to the sacredness of devotion, and we follow its prescriptions for living peaceably. In fact,” he added as he gestured to the steeple in my drawing, “such a proposal is in keeping with your notion of ideological enterprise, the expenditure of spiritual energy in working toward actual understanding. That’s the reaching part,” he said. “Do you see?”

  I thought I did. I thought he was saying it was okay to be confused. I thought he was alluding to how he himself had come to terms with confusion.

  “It’s like, heaven is not an actual destination,” I said, “but a conceptual place of peace.”

  He said nothing, which was okay. I understood that he couldn’t. It seemed like the right time for the conversation to end, so I stood. He encouraged me to sit and think.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “It’s hard for me to sit and think.” I had to move and think, or sit and do. It was just one of those things. I held up my sketch. “But thank you very much.”

  As Reverend Olcott and I parted, I thought again of light glowing through an eggshell. I thought of mosaic, geometry, overlap. Maybe I could use texture instead of color and line. Maybe I could use pieces of vanilla canvas to make a collage. If I shined stage lights through the back of a scenery flat, it would make the muslin glow like an incubated egg. I thought of that candle in my house, of light coming through a wall.

  17

  Nico’s book landed on his desk with a whumpf, and he straddled his seat, peeling my hands from my face, prying them apart like shutters.

  “Happy Valentine’s Day,” he said. His hands smelled like metal.

  I blinked and shook my head. “Is that today?”

  “Is that today?” he said, dropping my hands in mock disgust.

  I sat up tall and stretched. “I’m just a little—”

  “Out of it.” Nico gave Mike Stern a wave. He spoke to me, but his eyes darted professionally. Professionally because to some people popularity is a business. “You gonna get a rose in homeroom today? Or is your boyfriend anti-flowers?”

  I lowered my head. “He’s anti-flowers.”

  Somebody smacked Nico as he passed. His desk knocked into mine and my teeth jolted. “Watch it! Evie’s napping.” He tousled my hair. “Poor kid.”

  Mr. Shepard entered, and I propped myself on one arm. I set my pen on my open notebook, and as he began to talk, the pen began to move, transcribing everything.

  Louis-Napoleon, son of Louis Bonaparte, king of Holland—in the hall a locker slams, a voice says Hey, Farrell, wait up—and nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, is elected emperor. In 1853 he marries Eugenie de Montijo. By the way, Montijo is not the name of a new Oldsmobile—moans, yawns, desks scraping, erasers whizzing—The Second Empire becomes one of the most productive monarchies in France—whooping howls from English 10 next door—

  I was drifting, so I wrote my name, over and over. Eveline Aster Auerbach. I didn’t know what it was supposed to mean, my name, how it promised to define me. Jack loved the way Maman used to say E-vleen, but he would never copy it because she was French and we were not. Nothing is more annoying than when people randomly insert exotic pronunciations into everyday talk. One thing Americans do best is mispronounce words they know nothing about. It’s a confession of sorts. It’s like saying, We may be stupid, but we’re not pretentious.

  I wrote the letter A, several letter A’s, one leading to the next, charging forth like a locomotive, stark and emphatic, the way screams are discharged—
AAAAAAAAAA. Just as the row neared the margin, my wrist dropped sharply to produce a single vertical line; then it retraced that line to the top, unfolding in a curve to the right, making a bubble and collapsing at last in a bar to the finish: R. I finished it off—o-u-r-k-e. It was true that I was tired, because when I looked at his name, at the way I’d written it, jittery and uncertain, I began to cry.

  Stephen gestured to me, shaking one corner of a test paper. The class was going over the exam. I pulled mine from beneath my notebook. Stephen got a hundred. I got an eighty-nine, which was depressing since I hadn’t even studied. Being slightly better than average at schoolwork is like being a good soldier or a talented receptionist. Three minutes remained. I tore a corner from a page in my notebook.

  J—I think I am shrinking. Someone told me that today is Valentine’s Day. I am sad because I have no gift for you. I’m sorry. I’m so tired. I love you, promise. E.

  Mr. O’Donnell was at the library counter, performing the sort of grim rituals librarians perform with index cards and stumpy pencils and those rubber stamps with columns of rotating numbers. “Ms. Auerbach! What will it be today? Camus, Cervantes?”

  “Actually, I’m looking for a book of poetry by Emily Dickinson.”

  He paused somberly, toying with the tightly twirled tip of his mustache. No matter how seriously librarians are engaged in their work, they are always glad to be interrupted when the theme is books. It makes no difference to them how simple the search is or how behind on time either of you might be running—they consider all queries scrupulously. They love to have their knowledge tested. They lie in wait; they will not be rushed.

  “Let’s see,” he said as he puttered out, taking to the aisles with a trifling waddle, inching to a halt at the stack near the windows, “poetry. D, D. Well, here’s Baudelaire, Byron, Davies, Drayton. No, no, that’s misfiled. You see what happens when one sorts poetry helter-skelter? Let’s pull that out and replace it as so, and here we are, Dickinson, Emily.”

  Next I stopped in the art studio for colored paper and scissors—later in study hall I would make cutout hearts to stuff inside the envelope. By the time I got to homeroom, I had just enough time to copy half of a poem on the bottom of my note to Jack.

  It’s all I have to bring to-day.

  This, and my heart beside,

  This, and my heart, and all the fields,

  And all the meadows wide.

  E. DICKINSON, C. 1858

  After the homeroom announcements, Mrs. Kennedy passed out roses wrapped in paper, like shiny green wands, strained shut and dirt-red. They looked like living headaches. Karen Drapier got one, and Missy Burke, and so did Warren Baxter.

  “Mind if I keep it?” Mrs. Kennedy asked when Warren told her just to trash his.

  Jack was not waiting as usual at the door of my English class, so I went to his locker and crammed the poetry and hearts I’d made through one of the slots. When he still had not materialized by lunch, I wondered if he had taken off. I vaguely recalled him saying something about fifty dollars and a homeopathic dentist in Connecticut. In sixth-period calculus, I observed the advance of the clock hands—three, four, seven minutes, and still no sign of him.

  “All right, people,” Mrs. Oliphant called, “let’s go.”

  She launched the door from its propped station in sync with the articulate prong of the late bell. The door whooshed, and just as it was about to click shut, an arm caught it—Jack’s. He was wearing a new sweater and jeans that were clean. Dan was behind him, looking handsome as well in a blue blazer, despite unwashed hair shaped in a flat jaunty spray on the left from the pressure of his pillow.

  “Glad you could make it, fellows,” the teacher said.

  “Glad to be here,” Jack said sarcastically, and everyone laughed.

  He deposited an overstuffed envelope on my desk and sat behind me, his feet punching squeakily into the gap between the base of my seat and the attached book rack. I played with the little package, making lazy orbits with one finger. Sometimes it confused me to see him in school. It’s confusing to greet your privacy when access to it is prohibited. It’s like going home for lunch when you have to leave again. Mrs. Oliphant made a slanting series of numbers on the board, which joined together into the shape of a torpedo. I pulled the flap of the envelope from Jack, and it eased its way open. Nestled within imperfectly plied sheets of crepe paper was a dried flower, a kind I’d never seen, with elegant petals that faded in hue from tip to base—violet, lavender, white. Mustard anthers had fallen into the folds of paper, staining its crevices. On a second sheet was a meticulous drawing of the same blossom, shivery and crisp. And alongside it there were words.

  For the girl. It’s called a camas. I slept in a meadow full of them on a mountain in Wyoming. The flower thrives when closest to the clouds, just like you.—J.

  A shred of paper landed on my desk—a scrawled response to my Valentine’s note:

  You’re small because you don’t eat. You’re too obsessed with your space needle set design. Dan and I are cutting out early so we can finish the music for that asinine play. How about something red for dinner?—J. P.S. Your eyes look bruised.

  My head fell back through the air. My shoulders also flew, moving in reverse. I watched in despair as the halls of my mind blackened and grew cavernous, with rooms and vaults and doorways multiplying exponentially. I labored to stem the epidemic nothingness, to hold my focus, to return to some port or place of safety, but I could not find my beginning.

  I awoke in pitch dark. The air was murky and cold. Denny was there, holding me. Behind his shoulders, I recognized the bare yellow bulb of the darkroom. I wondered who had moved the ceiling fixture to the wall.

  “I’m going to lift you honey, okay? Ready, here we go.” I felt his arms slide under my back, and as he straightened his knees to raise my body, the bulb disappeared upward in a fluid arc.

  He eased me onto the stool and asked what had happened.

  I said I didn’t know. It was not good to sit. My head throbbed. I reached to touch the place that hurt, and it hurt worse. Denny moved my hand away and measured the knot. It seemed to be about the size of a lime.

  “I can’t tell if it’s bleeding. I think it’s bleeding,” he said.

  “It’s like a lime,” I asked, “isn’t it?”

  “Okay,” he said, searching nervously around the unoccupied darkroom for someone to consult, someone other than me. “I’ve got to get you out of here.” He wagged his hand in front of his nose. “This air is poison. How many times have I told you—Solvents kill.”

  Denny ducked beneath one of my armpits, and he lifted me. Denny was strong. When he hugged you, it was like entering a whole new room. Once he heaved Nico into the air and smashed his head three times against the lockers—boom, boom, boom—saying, “You filthy runt. You’re lucky I don’t toss you under a fucking car.” I didn’t see it, I just heard about it, not from Denny but from basically everyone else in school. Denny didn’t mention it because he was a gentleman, and it had to do with me. On the same day, L. B. Strickland got two broken fingers and a dislocated shoulder.

  We stopped at the main office. Denny leaned me against the door frame while he ran in.

  “How can I help you, Mr. Marshall?” one of the secretaries asked as he hustled past her to the nurse’s office.

  “Just getting an ice pack, Mrs. Miller.” He went through the side door of the unattended infirmary and came out right away, blue plastic bag in hand. “No need to exert yourself on behalf of an injured student. Here,” he said to me, handing off the pack, sweeping up my body, glancing back over his shoulder and shooting a last look at the women inside. “God forbid they should burn a few calories.”

  In the car I placed my head on his leg. During the drive home, he talked incessantly but lovingly, the way some dogs bark.

  “You shouldn’t have been there alone. What if I hadn’t come? What if you tried to get up then fell again? You’re lucky you don’t have a concussion.
And the chemicals! Don’t you know that every egg you’ll ever have is in your ovaries already? That room has no oxygen supply. Tack on your history of low blood pressure and sleep deprivation, and you’ve got the recipe for disaster!”

  Denny was good in science, particularly in regard to the body and how it worked, but you had to be careful not to act impressed or say, You ought to be a doctor! Though all his test scores had been nearly perfect, he refused to consider a career in medicine. “I just spent eighteen years pretending to be straight,” he said the day we drove to the post office and mailed his application to Fashion Institute of Technology. “Medical school would kill me.” He acted like he was happy that day, but I knew he was not.

  When he pulled into my driveway, he was explaining the phrase “mad as a hatter.” Something, something, he was saying, and, licking mercury.

  “Okay. Time to get up.”

  “But we just got here,” I said, looking up from his leg.

  “I know, but now I’m late. I didn’t expect to have to stage a rescue this afternoon.”

  “Late for what?” I asked. “Do you have a date?”

  “I do,” he said with a nod.

  “A Valentine’s date?”

  “Yes,” he said, “a Valentine’s date. And you are not invited. Let’s go.”

  I stirred, and the upholstery squeaked. He slipped carefully out, then bounded around to the passenger side to help me out. I tried to recall the last time I’d had as much energy. It seemed like such a long time ago that it must have been never.

  “There, there,” he said, hugging then releasing me in one motion. He pointed me toward the house and gave me a tiny shove. I hit the hedges, missing the path entirely. “You’re breaking my heart,” he moaned as I stumbled along to the front porch. “Sneak in back. In back,” he directed, throwing a loud whisper over the top of the car. He waved his arm in frustration when I reached the steps, and in his normal voice said, “Too late. You’ll never sleep now.”