Anthropology of an American Girl (21 page)

Don’t leave
, I said to Jack, dropping back.

Never
, he promised.

The floor near my legs creaked eerily. Jack was kneeling over my belly, making a bridge with his groin. His hunched body cast a huge shadow against the wall. When “Julia” came he did not sing. I tried to say this, but nothing came out. I kept moving my head all the way from one side to the other. I was not sure why, except to say that my head was my only mobile part.

What’s that, baby
, Jack asked, not really asking.

I couldn’t remember, though I knew it had been important. I did not like him to call me baby.

I thought I felt him undressing me. I thought I felt the rimy wind pass through the tunnel made by the small of my back arching off the filthy plank floor. I thought I felt his fingertips touch the recesses beneath my hip bones. He may have had sex with me. I thought he did; I wasn’t sure.

Winter & Spring 1980

I
am in a room, high up, near some sort of exposed beams. The back of my head smacks the ceiling, and hair that is not my hair hangs around my face, uncoiling stiffly like the tails of chameleons. There is no motion, and time has fallen off its continuum, like gears skipping intervals. I am kept up, pushed up, by what I do not know. On one beam there is writing, code writing, a wicked code, legible to me—legible, and so I am wicked, I think; yes, I must be wicked
.

My eyes opened from the nightmare, then immediately closed again, squeezing tight. The twilight seemed robust when I felt so very feeble, so I decided to lay in bed and wait for people to come home and switch on appliances. I wanted all the machines to be on. I did not like the way the appliances were sitting there, arrogant and fat and proving through muteness that everyone was elsewhere, involved with other things, things separate from me.

I switched on the lamp and retrieved the note from Jack that was beneath it. Yellow lamplight soaked the page. Faded gray letters were penciled between the blue rules, strung together and nearly indecipherable. There were words—
love
and
me
and
mystery
, also
key
and
sleep
. I fell back onto the mattress, dropping Jack’s note to the floor. My quilt felt soft around my neck, and I nestled into the pillow. Tiny shellfish burrow into the floor of the bay, hiding there. From the safety of their beds of sand they listen to the clamoring of the sea.

That morning I saw him at the record store, through the picture window of Long Island Sound. I was inside; he was walking past. There was no reason for me to turn from what I’d been doing, but when I did, Rourke was there. He stopped and stared incautiously, as though bewildered by
me, or provoked. He was wearing a navy-blue down jacket that yielded obediently to his body, and his right hand was crammed halfway inside his jeans pocket. Under his open coat was a pine-green shirt with several unfastened buttons, and the waist of his pants came low around his hips. His black hair was wavy, tousled.

I smiled. He did not smile back.

He reached for the front door. It whooshed open, then clattered to a positive close. I returned to the wall of albums, and experienced that futile feeling of waiting when there’s no avoiding the thing you’re waiting for. If I tried to leave, he would watch my body on the way out, the way I was bound tight in my jeans. The store was empty except for the two of us, so there was no chance of disappearing among others. I slipped behind a display rack.

He started talking to Eddie, the record store guy. As they spoke, Rourke kept taking pieces of something from his hand, nuts maybe, or candy, and eating them. His jaw moved in even claps, and the muscles at the base of his cheeks flexed into knots. He hadn’t shaved.

“It’s definitely inferior,” Eddie was saying.

“It really is crap,” Rourke agreed, and from his coat pocket he withdrew a bottle of lime-green Gatorade, raised it to his lips, and drank.

There was something especially sexy about the random way he was dressed, making it easy to imagine him in bed that morning, thinking thoughts just as I had, jerking off probably, then deciding to alleviate a morning’s boredom by going into town for a while. I flipped mechanically through the section of albums marked
S
and imagined that I’d been home with him, wherever it was that his home may have been. I had thoughts of being beneath him, and alongside him, my body to his body, his hands on me, holding me, and his mouth, and his smell. For a moment I felt dizzy. I’d never had such thoughts so vividly: it was like thinking of things we’d already done.

Eddie was much scrawnier next to Rourke than he was beside Jack, practically like a voodoo doll. His badly scarred skin and arched eyebrows were visible to me just above the albums in the wooden aisle dividers as he led Rourke down the row by mine. They drifted to a halt at the
Ps
, facing me. I lowered my head over the record well, pretending to read.

“Petty was influenced by Roger McGuinn of the Byrds,” Eddie said. “McGuinn’s the one who figured out how to get the long sustains by using a compressor with the Rickenbacker. That’s how he got Coltrane’s horn sound on ‘Eight Miles High.’”

Eddie had an encyclopedic knowledge of music. The store had an “Ask Eddie” lockbox for questions. Answers got posted on a chalkboard by the register. Everyone took the process seriously, especially Jack, who regarded the system as something along the lines of “Ask God.”

“Yeah,” Rourke said, his voice slipping away from Eddie, moving sinuously, calling to me. Our eyes met. “I know McGuinn,” he said softly. “He toured with Dylan.”

All the features of the place we inhabited vanished, leaving me alone, with him alone. My heart began to beat rapidly. I adjusted the underwire of my bra beneath my left breast because I did not like to feel my heart against it, the way the blurps felt so miniature, the way the organ strived but failed to be timely. Weeks had elapsed since I’d seen him last, and though I’d thought of him, those thoughts had not affected my mood or disposition. Yet having him before me now, I knew I’d been deprived. I recalled the way he looked at me through the store window. Despite his obvious interest and my real desire, we were impotent with respect to circumstance, and that made me angry, and my anger bound me to him. Rourke understood: he seemed angry as well. In those moments we stepped out equally, we confessed equally, we were rendered equally weak, and as weakened equals we met, victoriously, at some median of daring and possibility.

I was thinking,
I must, oh, you know, say something
.

Eddie pulled out Tom Petty’s
Damn the Torpedoes
, then they returned to the front. Rourke’s eyes passed over mine once more. I looked away.

Rourke paid, and while he waited for change, he took his wallet between his teeth and yanked his pants up by the belt loops. Eddie inquired about his New Year’s plans. I couldn’t hear the answer. Probably Rourke’s plans involved a girl. When he left, he just left, not looking back, with his head high and his eyes steady on their course, causing me to wonder if perhaps I was wrong. It was possible that he pitied my naïve infatuation.

——

Right after knocking, Kate burst into my room, her coat still on. “I’m sorry!” she said brightly. “Were you napping?”

“Can you go put the radio on for me?” I asked. “And the lights.”

“Sure,” she said. She hopped back out to the living room, and within seconds, the lights were on and the radio burst to life. It had been broadcasting all afternoon, transmitting to bodies in kitchens and cars. I had the sickening feeling I’d missed so much.

When Kate returned, she dropped down on the foot of the bed. “I was at the movies,” she said. “The matinee. With Harrison Rourke.”

I was surprised. I couldn’t help it. Sometimes Kate surprised me. I said, “What?”

“Actually,” she amended, “he was alone in the theater, so we asked if we could sit with him.”

“Who’s
we?”
I asked.

“Michelle Sui. Michelle was with me.” Kate played with the zipper on her parka. “He said he saw you in the record store. Did you see him?”

“It was pretty crowded in there.”

“He said you never say hello.”

“I don’t really know him.”

“Well, he knows you,” she said. “You should try to be nice.”

I tried to put him out of my mind, the effortless way he had been dressed, the lazy curl of his hair, the hidden influence of his chest beneath his shirt. Unfortunately, the memory proved too powerful to erase. The muscles between my legs squeezed to hold nothing. There was a shiver in my groin, this nagging need to push my hips, and an opposing pull inching up my back.

“Listen,” I said, going blank on her name for a second.
“Kate
. Let’s just drop it.”

“My God,” she replied, offended. “What did he ever do to you?”

For a long time we just sat there. I wondered if she was sweating beneath the bulk of her coat. I toyed with Jack’s letter, folding it into an origami swan. Kate said Rourke said he’d seen me; he told her I never say hello. Rourke did not exactly lie to her, but he did not exactly tell the
truth either. He spoke in code to reach me, or so I thought. I had no proof.

“You’re coming to Coco’s New Year’s party, right?” she asked. “You’re invited.”

“I feel a little sick,” I said, gesturing to my throat. “Thanks anyway.”

“Want to come upstairs with me while I get dressed? I don’t want to be alone.”

Between the twin closets in her room, there was an alcove and, squarely in its center, a window. I sat and propped my feet against the sill and looked into the snowy gray sky, which appeared to be hollow, like it had depth, like you could climb inside if only you could get close enough. I listened to the sounds of Kate dressing: the crinkle of paper-covered hangers, the slippery whisper of plastic bags, the oaky snap of dresser drawers, the clank of miniature buckles, the thin tap of pointed heels against the floor. It was strange to think that I would be home, safe in the ease of my solitude, but Kate would be out. When you set forth, things really do happen.

“What do you think?” she asked. She was wearing light black pants and a silk blouse, ivory and sleeveless. It’s weird that people like Kate who normally have strict rules about seasonal dressing, such as no rayon or short sleeves in winter, suspend those rules for New Year’s Eve, the one night they probably ought to dress practically.

“What about the blue sweater Lowie gave you?”

She extracted the sweater from the section of her closet devoted to blues, held it to her chest, and pirouetted before the mirror. “It’s not too juvenile?” she asked.

The streetlamps switched on; their light reflected up and hit the clouds, turning the front yard into an amphitheater. Flurries were falling faster, toppling like butterflies shot from the sky. In the distance they fell fast, but near the house they scrolled and slowly scrambled, acquiring alarming new dimension. I thought of the line I liked from
The Night Before Christmas
.

Jack hated that I liked that poem. He was always telling me to read Rilke’s
Sonnets to Orpheus
.

“You’re right,” Kate said in reference to the sweater. “This
is
better.”

The floorboards creaked outside Kate’s bedroom door, and Mom came in wearing a crushed velvet bodysuit. It was purplish, the color of pomegranates. She was on her way to a party in Bridgehampton.

“Kate, you look beautiful.”

Kate giggled in the self-effacing style of someone who knows she is beautiful, who is always told that she is beautiful, but who, deep down, does not feel very beautiful. She sat at her dressing table and brushed her hair. It was winning hair, populous and blond.

“And you,” my mother said to me, referring to my torn long johns and stained sweatshirt. “Miss Appalachia,” she joked, touching my cheek. “Remember, I used to call you that?” The pink polish of her thumbnail passed the edge of my eye—once, twice. “Not going out tonight?”

“She’s sick,” Kate informed her.

“Sick?” Mom asked, then she turned back to Kate. “By the way, your brother called earlier to say Happy New Year. Call him back before you leave, but keep it short.” When she reached the door, she said, “Be careful, Kate. Don’t get in any cars.”

Then the squeaking steps again, and the front door popping open, and outside blowing in. I heard my mother’s tread dimming and dulling into the snow-covered path to the driveway. The car engine coughed to a dubious start, and she was gone.

The snow looked nice so I decided to walk to Coco’s with Kate. While she waited in the yard for me to grab my coat, the phone rang. It was Jack calling from Dan’s house. “You coming?”