Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  “Good night, Katie,” I heard him say, then he followed.

  Our house was shielded from the railroad by a massive barrier of gnarled vines on the south side of the driveway. When the train went past, the beacons of light would flood the property before fading away. At the end of the driveway on the other side of Osborne Lane, there is a streetlamp; its light made a spacious pool at the base. Jack had already reached the outer rim of that light and was turning onto the tracks. I wondered was he moving very fast, or was I going very slow. One of us was out of time.

  I kept my eye on him as I walked the length of rail between us. When I sat, he sat with me. My hands stroked the rail. It was blistered from the load of the train, and yet improved by the blisters, by the inference of endurance. I asked Jack where the rails run to and why.

  He reached to tie his shoelace. His jaw was lightly bearded and red, and it drew his concave cheeks down. His hair spilled forward. “They run the train’s distance. They go where the train needs them.”

  His voice was near, so near that it seemed to originate in my own head, and it reminded me—mostly that I had to be reminded. And me, did I remind him, or anyone, of anything? I felt sad. “No,” I said, “they run their own distance. Separate from the train. It’s the thing they do. They have their own purpose.”

  He poked at the tar with a stick, his chest low by his feet.

  “Jack,” I said, regretting the sound of my voice. Its sheerness, its vicinity. He did not lift his head but rotated it obligingly, leaning to rest his chin on the back of my hand. His face came into the ring of lamplight. His eyes were there—a very conspicuous blue.

  There was a flicker. Jack did not move exactly, but his figure conveyed new poise. He turned stable as he shut down against me, and the self-protection completed him, leaving me to wonder if I’d ever really seen him, known him. I was made mindful of my sacrifice. I imagined the places he would go, the people he would meet. I thought of his music, of me listening anonymously and in vain for my residence in his songs, of his offering to others the words that had once passed from his lips to my ears. I thought back on the dreams we’d shared, and on how our lives had not been actual—we’d never once felt entitled or precious about the fact of ourselves. We’d never once taken for granted the smallness of our place, or the magnitude of our liberty. Though it could be a consolation to no one, I would regret the loss of him for the rest of my life. Almost as painful as the loss would be the inevitable public impression that I’d loved him less than I’d been loved by him. This was not so; I’d loved him truly.

  “Sometimes I feel myself falling,” I confessed, “then I see it, as if the falling thing is not me anymore. When I reach to grab myself, my hands catch nothing.”

  He frowned. “You’ll never have to worry about being caught, Eveline,” he said. “It’s all there for you, the whole world, waiting.”

  I looked past his eyes, to the stars. The millions of stars, joined into one avenue that draped over his head like a cowl. A terrible premonition seized me; I began to cry.

  “Did you ever think how pointless it is to cherish the stars,” he said, taking up the object of my focus, “when they’ve all extinguished by the time the light reaches us?”

  “Jack,” I said. “Don’t.”

  He continued anyway. “Love is exactly like starlight. Just a signal, a flare, diminishing in brilliance from the point of origin, dead by the time you receive it.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. I fucked up,” he said lifelessly. “It was my fault, not yours.”

  I lowered my head between my knees, and for a long time we sat. We did not hurry, in case it was to be one of the last times sitting. When he stood, I stood as well, and at the street we parted. He walked to the corner, his figure bouncing down and away like a ball shooting out of reach.

  I stumbled down the driveway as if drugged, kicking gravel, wasting time. I lifted my ear to the sky and listened for the wail of the train. Sometimes you can hear it, even if it’s not there—sonorous and low, riveting and heroic, dejected and alone.

  I began to spin, rolling along the row of privet that divided the front and side lawns from the driveway. At the farthest end, I spun off, singing the words to a song I’d never heard, something about trees, trees, trees, and lights out. When I came to a stop, there was the sound of the train—mournful and clear. I wished I knew enough about music to name the note. In it I heard a calling, a cry to life.

  Rourke was there, standing and waiting. He said, “Hi.”

  I swayed slightly, saying hi. “I didn’t see your car.” I glanced back. It was definitely there—on the street near the top of the driveway. I could see the white body in pieces through the leaves. It looked like a horse, waiting knowingly, chewing grass. Twigs were on my sweatshirt—Jack’s sweatshirt. I brushed them off. It was funny, I hadn’t thought of Rourke all night. Actually, that wasn’t true; I’d thought of him constantly. I wondered if he was still angry. He didn’t seem to be. He was just leaning against the side of the barn near the forsythia. Forsythia is first to bloom, first to vanish. Every year it flowers without my noticing. Every year I vow to catch it next time. I moved closer and pulled at some petals.

  “I just got back from Jersey,” he said. “I was driving by.”

  If there was something to say, I could not think of it. I might have asked about driving past my house when it wasn’t on his way, or how long he’d been in Jersey and when he was going back, or how much older was he than I, and did he love me too.

  “Forsythia,” I said, opening my hands to show the yellow. “It always blooms without me.” I nudged the torn flowers in my hand. I was sorry for what I’d done. I could not refasten the petals to the stem, I could only cast them off, and I did, watching them spin down like lemony propellers. It was true that I was still a little high. You know that leaning kind of reasoning, like a glass on one side and all the contents tipped against an edge.

  I was walking, he was also walking, and sometimes our hands would touch. We stopped near the back door to my bedroom. His face was close to mine, and his eyes. To stand before him was to stand before a body of natural consequence, an orchid, a stallion, something maverick and elemental, something too exquisite to be sustainable and so you feel strange pain. I tore a splinter of cedar from a shingle. I wondered if he knew about Jack and me breaking up. Probably—he seemed to know everything. If he were normal and I were normal, I might have solicited his sympathetic regard and allowed myself to be persuaded by it. But it was not tenderness I wanted, and it was not tenderness he would have expressed, only self-interest. Maybe all tenderness is self-interest anyway.

  He looked at me like he was comparing me to surrounding things, to the trees, to the dark, like he was seeing me as he would have had me seen, as he would have had me see myself, and then he smiled, coldly, professionally, expressing himself in his heat and his prime, making my grief over losing Jack into the nothing it surely was.

  I twisted the doorknob and entered my room, half-hoping he would follow. Half-hoping because no matter what I wanted for me, I wanted more for him. I wanted him to be superior to my need. We stood on opposing sides of the threshold. Behind my back, my little room, velvety and moonlit, a jewel box—at the end of the driveway, his car, grazing.

  I closed my door. I rested my forehead against it. A long time passed before I heard his footsteps and the muffled thump of his car door and the churn of the engine, and, when finally he had gone, I spent the remainder of my night in cardinal desolation, comforted only by the knowledge that his was spent in the same way.

  25

  When I entered the classroom, Mr. Shepard was discussing the upcoming Advanced Placement exam, explaining what was the lowest possible score we could get and still earn college credit for the course, which didn’t say much for his teaching. I was late, but I cut past him, not even caring. Nico cleared his throat and Stephen Auchard raised one eyebrow.

  I turne
d myself to face the window. Past the cinder-block walls was the courtyard garden. No one ever used it. Denny once tried to organize a garden club. He had the idea to grow produce for the cafeteria and flowers for the art class to draw. Science students could study mulching, he said, and shop students could make benches. Denny hoped it would be a model for public schools across America.

  “They refused to look at the blueprints,” he told Mom and me after his presentation to the school board. “They said there’s no money in the budget for maintenance. And I said, ‘Well, that’s the whole point of a club—free maintenance.’” He shrugged. “I didn’t even get to mention the poetry teas.”

  It seemed the most the garden would ever be was some kind of teenage mind control thing, some remedy for the psychosis of confinement, like a mural or an indoor waterfall. If necessary, it would distract us from the fact that we were not being trained or inspired, we were being held in custody until it could be proven to at least 65 percent of some dubious national standard that our ingenuity had been assimilated into the tastes of our comatose generation. Then you’re ready for college. People say, You have to go to college. This is America. In Russia, they don’t even have tampons. And yet, how often had I heard my mother complain, “I’m not teaching Shakespeare. I’m teaching phonics.”

  The real truth behind college for every American is that high school graduates would cripple the job market and drain social services if their dependency was not extended.

  We’d just found out that Nico had been accepted to the University of Vermont.

  “Cool,” Jack said when he heard the news. “Is he going to major in Physical Molestation?”

  “Actually, he’s on the payroll,” Denny said. “They’re going to study him in bio lab.”

  In America, college is not simply a privilege, it is an industry. It begins early in high school, where there are people on staff whose job it is to feed the machine. Sexless, pink-faced men like Mr. McGintee help students evaluate qualities and calculate options. Ladies with long dry hair and “degrees-in-progress,” like Lydia Kilty, let you know whether or not you have the right stuff.

  At seminars in creepy, carpeted guidance rooms, cultish recruitment officers draw looping arrows on glossy easels with bizarre-smelling Vis-à-Vis markers, while you sit in a cataleptic stupor, tracing dust pyramids in the air and making planes out of pamphlets until the sales pitch slithers to a suspicious semi-halt. You are roused in the midst of a damp handshake with some guy named Stu from Ithaca, and you wonder, “Good God, have I just been initiated?”

  If you take time off after high school, you are thought to be a pariah. Former friends ignore you on the streets, and their parents freak out like you are a dope addict. Parents cannot really be blamed for their paranoia, when all they ever hear about from the time their kids are in kindergarten are tests and essays, scores and tours, deadlines and fees. At money management assemblies, they are reassured that what they cannot provide through savings and second mortgages, the government will generously supplement with low-interest loans.

  “What a racket,” my father would say while sorting through the brochures that flooded the mailbox. “Jimmy the Onion never had it so good.”

  One thing they make sure to teach in high school is how to drive. Well-meaning people, such as Mr. O’Donnell, the librarian, believe that driver’s education contributes to public safety. What they fail to see is that in order to accommodate additional drivers, families need more automobiles and more insurance. Teaching and insuring teens is not a social service, it’s good business—otherwise companies wouldn’t bother to do it, no matter how many lives might be saved. The problem is, when you give cars to people with no responsibilities, no destinations, and no privacy, they will most likely use them for things other than driving. Two weeks after Troy had won the school’s coveted Driving Ace Award, he and Jack got so stoned off homegrown pot in their shampoo bottle bong that Troy drove his Vista Cruiser home from Indian Wells beach in reverse.

  Lots of programs make sense in theory but go awry in practice. It’s similar to when town planners bring in one species to lower the population of another, and then the town is overrun by the predator. Sometimes you interfere with nature, and its ferocity emerges in new ways, in perverse extremes of attitude or number. Sometimes it happens quickly; other times, you can’t see the effects until it’s too late. Sometimes you can’t help but feel you are part of a giant out-of-control science experiment.

  Dad said that when they introduced rabbits to Australia, the rabbits had no natural predators, so they evolved into a crazy kind of super-rabbit. They decided to poison the rabbits, only the poison was the wrong poison, and all the rabbits died an exceptionally cruel death. “I can’t even think about it,” he said, and he shuddered.

  If you ask, “Who are they?” he’ll say, “They. Those college bastards.” According to my mom, “They are the ones who killed Kennedy.” Jack would say, “They are the pharmaceutical companies.”

  Mr. Shepard finished the lesson. I heard notebooks flapping shut. Too bad about the courtyard. The grass looked nice. I would have liked to spend some time outside.

  ——

  Miss Panetta sighed hard. “This is basic science, Miss Palumbo.” She repeated the question, enunciating peevishly. “The function of water in photosynthesis is—what?”

  Arms shot up, sleeves lightly whipping.

  “Thank you, everyone, but Miss Palumbo is going to impress us with the truth.”

  Mike Stern took advantage of the delay to talk to Billy Martinson. “We went to Tick Pete’s last night.” Tick Pete sold beer from the back of a shut-up diner in Amagansett. He slept behind the counter on a cot and watched TV, living off Slim Jims and Trix, Jack claimed, though Dan swore he once saw Pete eating Chinese takeout. “We still have half a case left,” Mike told Billy. “Meet us at Sammi’s Beach before Donkey Basketball.”

  Jodie Palumbo stirred in her chair, her chin glued to the palm of one hand, the other hand playing lethargically with her practice AP Bio exam. She selected a random multiple choice answer and began reading lamely. “B? To absorb light energy?”

  Ms. Panetta shuffled the test papers and shot a glance at the clock. She seemed upset. Sometimes you could really get to feeling bad for the teachers. “I—think—we—should—call—it—a—day.”

  My locker closed, and all down the hall they slammed shut in succession, clacking like dominoes. Inside I’d found three bundles of paper. The first was from Denny.

  Guess what. This is so unbelievably stupid you will die. Today in chemistry The Walrus was substitute and Dave Meese and Nico took one of Stephen Auchard’s chess pieces, a horse, and they hand-drilled a hole in its face and attached the bottom of the horse onto a gas hose and lit its mouth and fire shot out and burned Marty Koch’s legal pad with all his yearbook notes. Marty threatened to sue and Principal Laughlin had to come down. All I kept thinking was, I am so glad Evie is not here to see this. You would have been disgusted. Here’s a drawing—

  The second was from Kate.

  Do not show this to anyone under penalty of death. I thought essay was spelled S.A. I kept thinking what is an S.A.? Do you still refuse to come to Donkey Basketball? Michelle and Tim are going so I can go with them if it’s okay. I think it’s funny to see teachers on donkeys. Mr. Myers keeps scratching his back against the edge of the door. So gross. Don’t forget the spring concert Saturday. C.C. P.S. News bulletin: Kip and Paul Z.?!? P.P.S. Check out Lisa T.’s elephant ankles!!!!

  The third was from Jack. The third I couldn’t open.

  I skipped lunch to finish a lab report for Ms. Panetta, and while I was in the bio room, I heard a piano start to play Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You.” I knew it was Dan because no one else in school was good enough to play it except Jack, and Dan played differently from Jack. Jack steadied the keys and smoothed them, hunching fretfully as though they might bark or bite or turn on him. Dan played with exuberance.

  I crosse
d the hall to the choral studio. Dan brightened when he saw me. He slid on the bench as his right hand tapped out melodies and his left tested rhythms, one song leading to another—“The Shadow of Your Smile” to “Rhapsody in Blue” to “Stormy Weather” to “Summertime.” I sat on the lowermost carpeted step of the choral risers, and then I lay down, still clutching my dirty scalpel. It had been submerged in formaldehyde; it had poked through bobbing corpses to locate the aurora pink tissue of a fetal pig, my very own pig. I knew which pig was mine because around the right eye was a gray wheel, cracked here and there at the outer edge like a pineapple ring. As Dan played, I was thinking that jazz works the way the mind does—something occurs to you and you think it, or, in the case of jazz, you play it.

  People who passed peered in at me, as though I were kaleidoscopic, as though I were at the end of a long tube but could not materialize. I closed my eyes and started lapsing, receding like a discrete entity into its constitutional whole, like a gem to its mine, a drop to its sea. I wondered if Dan had heard the news from Jack about our breakup. It was nice of him to play for me regardless. Would I miss Dan, I wondered, or just the time we’d shared, his connection to the original meaning of me? I would miss him, I thought. Definitely, I would miss him.

  Gym was last. I considered skipping, but frankly I didn’t want to be anywhere else. Wherever I was depressed me, but wherever I was not depressed me also, sometimes even more. In the locker room girls laughed as they changed. Girls have a giggling way of bending forward when they laugh. When boys laugh they present their chests proudly to the city of God.

  My lock would not open. I yanked the round base but nothing happened. I tried the combination again, concentrating on the spinning black dial. I started to black out so I pressed my forehead into the damp bones of my left hand and with the right, I covered my nose and mouth to block the stench of the metal locker. It smelled like blood. Why did blood smell like metal? I could hear the bending laughter of the girls and the squeaks of sneakers slapping the ground and the flatulent squirts from near-empty bottles of body lotion. Later there would be water—toilets retching, sinks spewing. I could feel myself weave back, and back, into a writhing meadow of sound, with all that I saw and all that I could not see vanishing equally, though that could not have been so. Probably things had remained in place.