Anthropology of an American Girl (18 page)

“It’s not so sudden,” Kate said, suddenly speaking of Rourke again. “It’s been weeks.”

I opened my eyes. In the bathroom mirror my eyes looked scared. Sometimes a thinking brain scared me. For the entire time I’d stopped thinking, she’d continued.

“Is that enough,” she asked, “or do you want to take off more?”

My hair came to my jaw in a short bob. “More.”

Her fingers kept capturing new sections, faster and faster. She would hold them with one hand and with the other she would snip, her head tilting affectedly. Her father had been a barber, and her aunt and uncle owned a salon in France, in a city called Grasse. I closed my eyes again. Kate said hair is dead, but I could feel the scissors cutting. Maybe I only felt the sound.

“Any shorter and you might as well shave it,” I heard her say. She tossed the scissors into the sink, and they bridged the drain catch. On the floor I saw my hair, a collection of pitiful commas. My hands moved to touch my head; no strand of hair was longer than two inches.

Kate sat on the toilet. She seemed shocked by what she had done. “I can’t believe it,” she kept saying
. “I can’t believe it.”

I looked in the mirror. I liked how I looked—eyes and bones, my skin so fair. I looked as if I had survived something catastrophic. For the first time in my life, I could see myself.

She was crying. “You look like a war prisoner.”

I was probably supposed to tell her not to cry, that it was not her fault. But I felt myself shrink back. I felt mildly insensate, as though the me to whom she addressed her regret was just a façade, and the essential me, the me I was becoming, was safely out of reach, already halfway to vanishing.

There was the roll of the garage door, then two quick raps at the back door to my room. It was late. I came out from deep beneath the safety of my quilt and unlocked the lock.

“The living room lights are out,” Jack said, brushing past. “I didn’t want to wake Irene.” He threw his jacket onto the floor, then he turned and saw me. “Holy shit!” He dropped on the high end of my bed near the pillow. I dropped beside him. Jack took the spoon from a teacup on the bedside table and he whacked it in his hand. Then he began to slap it on his forehead instead. He asked me, “Did it leave a mark?”

“I think you have to do it harder for that. With the other side.”

“Fuck it.” He tossed the spoon back into the cup and looked to the
floor. A long time passed, during which we mostly breathed. Finally, he said, “Your hair is pretty fucking short.”

“You said to cut it.”

“Cut, not
shave.”

“You said,
‘Cut it short.’”

“Yeah, well, I wasn’t counting on short being so incredibly short.”

“Let’s not say
short
anymore.” It sounded weird—
short
—the horsey way you have to drop your jaw. I crawled behind his back, drawing up the covers. I rubbed my legs together.

“Cold?” he asked.

I said that I was.

His eyes remained averted, though he moved closer. His hands reached for the collar of my sweater and he fussed with the top button, then he fastened it, fastening every next one all the way down, jerking me forward each time.

“I—don’t—like—people—looking—at—you.”

I didn’t argue. It only made things worse to argue with Jack. Furniture would break, or glass would shatter, or he would disappear. Once, he took off for days, and when he returned he had a gash on his left forearm. When my mother asked how it had happened, he said, “fishing.”

I didn’t ask what he meant because I knew what he meant. Rourke had been in the auditorium with us that afternoon and Jack had seen what I had not—Rourke noticing me. Kate had also seen—she’d spoken of Rourke while cutting my hair. It had been a strange day. None of us had been immune to the sweep of its effects, not me, not Kate, not Jack. I felt somewhat like a pet, a little bird, blinking dumbly at the just-opened door of my cage. There was no point in reassuring them, in promising to go nowhere. Evidently they believed otherwise. They seemed to feel it would be asking a lot of me to defy my nature.

“I’m sorry,” I said, kissing him. “Sorry for making you angry.”

He raised his head, saying, “Okay, so let’s see the new face.”

C
afeteria tables are laid in strategic rows like trenches. That’s in case they have to get
to
you fast, or get you
out
fast, or get
away
from you fast. Such are the grim inferences you learn to live with in high school. Madame Murat and Pat Egan, the one-armed shop teacher, circled the room, acting superior as prison guards. I wondered why they acted superior, since they were there just like we were there, only they’d been there longer and we were getting out first.

Jack and I were sitting by the windows in the corner. He was doing calculus, I was studying. Not exactly studying so much as staring at the patterns of text on the page, which were coming together and apart before my eyes like pieces at the bottom of a kaleidoscope. At the table to our left, Peter Palumbo and Daryl Sackler lunged emphatically, playing that football game boys play with the triangular folded paper. To our right, girls with tipped-in shoulders and nodding breasts huddled together over brown bag lunches.

Outside it was raining like crazy. Sheets of water pounded the roof, going straight over the gutters, past the windows, and onto the saturated ground. I could see past the parking lot, and into the sober queues of the potato fields on the opposite side of Long Lane.

The storm had started the night before at two in the morning. Twelve hours is a long time for a hard rain. I suspected it was a special rain, a monumental rain. I wanted to go into it with fanned-out arms, to bow and stomp and dance something similar to an Indian dance. I wanted to be touched by it and changed. It was rain to pray into, rain to save the world.

Jack and I had witnessed the very first drops the night before. The water tapped like rat teeth at my bedroom window. Jack said, “Listen.” His
head tilted curiously, like an animal’s head. The beads of rain stuck to the glass, beached and lonely. We stared in the manner of zombies.

“Time is it?” he asked.

I said, “About two.”

“I don’t even feel tired. You feel tired?”

My head hurt and my eyes burned. My throat was sore. “A little tired, I guess, yeah.” We’d been arguing for hours, though Jack refused to call it that.

“Disagreeing,”
he said, “is sufficient.” Adding, “Strenuously.”

“Are we
at odds
?”

“Yes.” Jack nodded once. “We are at odds.”

I did not like to be at odds with Jack. It was like being in a rowboat with only one person rowing. My oar would be raised, skimming the glassy lake, and Jack’s would flail—digging too deep, flying too high, ticking spastically. It would take us forever to go nowhere.

I had certain feelings, I’d told him. “Inside. They need relief.”

He peered through me as if to a minuscule spot on the wall.

I asked if he knew what I meant.

“Of course I know what you mean,” he snapped. Then he reminded me emphatically that I was not an animal. “You are separated from depravity by a conscience.”

Even if it was crazy to consider the activity of a few witless nerve endings as depraved, I did not disagree with him. Other girls hadn’t mentioned such feelings, so I knew that I was at the very least abnormal. It was common knowledge that if a girl was assertive in regard to sex, it was because she wanted to keep a boyfriend or steal a boyfriend or act out against her parents and society. Possibly she craved
togetherness
. I’d never heard of a girl who wished to alleviate the tingling sensations along the walls of her vagina, or at the posterior rim of its base, or in a third place, sort of an alcove where the seam of low underwear hits, only on the inside. No girls I knew ever spoke of seeing a boy or seeing a man and
thinking thoughts
.

“The job of the conscience,” Jack was saying, “is to marshal urges. Otherwise, any object in your field of vision is eligible for fucking.”

I thought he was missing the point.

“I’m
not
missing the point,” he said. “It’s not a particularly sophisticated point to miss.”

Jack stood and did something he never did, which was to tuck in his shirt. His scaly hands crammed the fabric down in bunches, and he began to pace. “Your problem is that you haven’t read enough. If you’d done more reading, you’d realize that desire that moves from origin to fulfillment but circumvents the intellect is corrupted by compulsion. It’s immoral and untrue—it’s
feral.” Feral
was his new favorite word; he used it cleverly, sometimes three or four times a day without sounding repetitive. “Understand me?”

I said, “Sort of.”

“Be specific. What
don’t
you understand?” He lifted a scallop shell from my desk and bit at its edge, gnawing at the corrugated reservoir of pink, dragging his lips across the veins that spread in a fan from the squared cap to the sheer, translucent edge. I felt a numb jerk between my legs, and I looked away.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I couldn’t remember what we’d been saying.

He cast the shell aside. It made a solitary clink when it hit the table, like a fork ringing out on glass. “You were saying you
sort of
understood.”

“Oh. Even if longings are immoral, why are they untrue?”

“Because one
arrives
at truth, one cultivates it. Truth doesn’t materialize instantaneously. Therefore, how can it be true to go around satisfying impulses?”

“Imagine you’re walking,” I said, “and you get the urge to run—”

“
Urge
is the operative word,” Jack interrupted.

“Okay, fine. It’s a
physical
urge or a
feral
urge—whatever. But instead of running, you think of all the things that running entails, like, whether you’re wearing the right shoes, and what the neighbors might say, and what if you trip, and so on. If after all that thinking, you decide
not
to run, that decision would be impure. It would have come from fear—fear of judgment or failure. And if, after thinking, you decide
to
run, that choice would also be impure, coming from a wish to defy convention or to take a personal risk. So, you could say that the
first
feeling, the
truest
feeling, the physical, feral urge, is contaminated by secondary things, things coming from thought.”

“Yeah,” he said.
“So?”

“I’m just saying, maybe urges start out okay, but it’s the thinking afterward that contorts everything.”

“Wrong,” Jack said.
“Circumstance
contorts everything. Urges are not needs; they are perversions of needs and are inseparable from circumstance. You can’t discuss the urge to drive fast without presupposing the circumstance of a car. Or jumping from a plane without presupposing being in air. Or overeating if there’s no food. An urge is like not being hungry but anyway you eat. It’s like eating cake because cake is there. What if, instead of cake, there’s celery sticks. Would your body manufacture the desire to eat celery sticks?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.” I happened to like celery.

“To the point that you would actually gorge on it?”

“Probably not.” I didn’t like celery
that
much.

“So is your urge to eat celery a
true
urge?”

I wasn’t sure anymore. It was weird to argue about celery.

“Of course not,” Jack answered for me. “An
urge
is relevant only in regard to
urge impetus
. Urges are ‘untrue’ because they change when circumstances change.”

I wasn’t sure what it all had to do with sex anyway.

“Simple,” he said. “You can’t go out fucking every time you get an urge.”

“Why do you keep saying ‘go out’? This is a conversation about you and me.”

“No, Evie. This is a conversation about
you.”

I picked at the carpet.

Jack joined me on the floor and began to gesture with somber hands. “Don’t you see? Orgasm is secondary to intimacy. True bliss comes from the union of soul to soul. If you are driven strictly by the will to copulate, you are no more than a beast—unrefined, spiritually bankrupt, devoid of the capacity for distinction. You are
feral
,” he concluded triumphantly.

I frowned and exhaled. I knew that the second he left, things would not be as clear as he insisted.

“Okay?” Jack asked, caressing my head. “Silly girl.”

——

The falling water formed a curtain on the outside of the cafeteria glass. Birds fluttered behind it, sheltered by the overhang created by the sloped roof.

“I’m gonna take a walk,” I said to Jack. “See you later.”

“Later,” Jack mumbled, going back to his books.

It’s always a risk to stand when other people are sitting. It makes you an object of gossip, especially if you are a gossip-worthy person, which I happened to be, and there was no sense trying to change the fact. Some people try to change the fact by being extra nice or helpful to others. Some people depress me.

I was fifteen when my dad’s partner, Tony, taught me how to ward off the evil eye. “See that?” he said one day when we were walking through Washington Square Park. “That bitch is giving you the evil eye. Quick, do this.” He took my hand and curled all the fingers except the pointer and the pinky. “She don’t have to see it,” Tony advised. “You don’t gotta draw her attention to it—unless of course you want to. Just let your arm hang down, nice and casual. This way you protect yourself.” As we passed the woman, he laughed in her face.
“Ha!”
he said. “Comin’ right back at cha, babe!”

I moved through a maze of cafeteria tables, with each group going silent as I approached, then snapping to action as I passed, like a baseball wave. I held my hand the way Tony had taught me. When I reached the table with Kiki, Pip, and Coco, there was an outburst of laughter, probably about my hair. When we got to school that morning, Denny said I looked like Mia Farrow in
Rosemary’s Baby
. “Big-eyed and sort of eerie.”