Anthropology of an American Girl (3 page)

One disorienting fact about staring into a mirror is that the person you see is the opposite of what you truly look like. I tried to explain it once to Kate. She was playing with her hair, looking in a mirror, changing the part from left to right.

She said, “It looks better on the left.”

“Actually,” I said, “though your hair is parted on the left of your true head, it’s parted on the
right
of your mirror head. What you mean is,
It looks better on the right.”

“That’s
not
what I mean.” She probed her scalp. “It’s on the left of my head
here,”
she said, holding the spot, “and it doesn’t switch places
there.”
Kate tapped the mirror.

“You have to
inhabit
the image,” I explained. “If you inhabit the image, the part is on the right. But, if we were in the world, looking at the girl in the mirror—”

“We
are
in the world,” she interrupted flatly, and by her voice, I knew she was done. Kate could be reluctant to explore topics that require a detachment from vanity.

“Anyway,” I sighed. “What you see is the opposite of what everyone else sees.”

Kate brushed steadily. “No, Evie. What
you
see is the opposite of what everyone else sees.”

Later, Kate tried her makeup on me—cover stick and frosted eye shadow and face powder and Bonne Bell lip gloss. She was applying all these layers, saying the job of cosmetics is not to conceal but
to enhance
. She turned me to face the mirror. “Ta da!”

I looked rubbery, sort of embalmed. My cheekbones were gone and my lips glittered like one of those plastic bracelets with sparkly stuff inside. My eyes burned and my skin felt itchy. I smelled like cherry gum. I made my way to the sink, groping walls. As I rinsed, I watched myself—anyway, the
opposite
of myself—reappear in the mirror. Kate’s reflection buoyed and skulked next to my own. She seemed to think I was being difficult. I felt bad about her thinking that. Something felt different between
us—I felt something coming, not obvious like a wave but sneaky like a drip, a subtle sort of rising.

It’s true that I can be difficult, though that is no fault of my parents. They are extremely good-natured people. They remained friends even after they got divorced. My father always says he married the prettiest Irish girl in New York, and my mother says she married the one funny German. It’s true my father is funny, and true as well that my mother is pretty like her sister, Lowie, even if Lowie walks with a cane. Lowie had a fever when she was little. Maybe not a fever. Maybe
fever
is just what everyone says.

As for me, I arrived dark and detached, and though everyone waited, I became nothing like anyone else in my family. Even my birth was hard for my mother. I was breech. She tore, she vomited, she got more stitches than there are states. When the nurse handed me over, my mom was terrified. “I’m supposed to take care of
that?”
she says whenever she tells the story. “She looked like an owl.”

My aunt Lowie is a midwife, so I’ve seen three childbirth films. When babies come out, they wear a bewildered grimace as though they have arrived by train and are peeping about the platform for the friend who promised to pick them up. It’s not nice to think of myself as having been left at the station. I know my mother loves me; she frequently says she does. But it’s one thing for a child to be the recipient of an affection that is conscious of its lack, and it’s another to know fervent devotion, to be a blessing in the flush and the sweat of loving arms.

You cannot recover from a bad birth. The stigma lingers for a lifetime the way bad luck really does last seven years after a mirror breaks. The special gravity of a mother’s first disappointed glance impresses itself on the infant’s waxy blue skin. On my forehead is just such a mark, slightly off-center, to the left—that is to say, to
my
left. You can’t actually see it, but you can sense that it’s there. There is a prohibitive aspect to my looks, just as some rivers run too wild for a person to cross.

In the beginning of that summer, before Maman died, Dad and his girlfriend, Marilyn, took me to see an Italian movie,
L’Avventura
, which is
about disillusionment and other sixties stuff. Afterward my dad asked what I thought of the film. I told him that I liked Monica Vitti, the film’s star. Monica Vitti has this mesmerizing way of leaning against walls and staring out to view nothing, as though the horizon is millimeters away, as though the great distance we all dream into is bearing pestilently upon her skin.

“I think she’s my favorite actress,” I said.

Marilyn tapped Dad’s arm. “See?”

Dad nodded. “I’m impressed, Marilyn.”

“During the film I told your dad that you remind me of her,” Marilyn said.

Did I really seem so sad? Monica Vitti seemed sad to me. She gave the impression of having lived a better past, of having returned to the present to discover how pointless things have become. She is untouchable, unsaveable: she too has
the mark
.

“You guys want to catch a cab?” Dad asked.

It was drizzling on Second Avenue. The sidewalk was not completely wet, but there was already that dusty smell of rain on cement.

“Mind if we walk?” I said.

Later that night, while my father was reading in the living room, Marilyn and I went into their bedroom. The only light came from the street, so I could scarcely make out the furniture—the walnut armoire with its pewter-finish grill of bamboo shoots, or the matching bureau loaded with bargain books from the Strand and old jewels in tortoiseshell boxes and a terra-cotta bowl of photographs, mostly of me. Or the low bed that was neatly dressed in one of those grandmotherly white spreads with nubby protuberances.

We knelt at the open window, reaching to feel the rain. Cars swished dreamily up Elizabeth Street. Tangerine strands of hair broke free from Marilyn’s braid and fluttered in the breeze like kite tails. Her skin was powdered. It’s always nice to kiss her cheek; it brings to mind the gentler things.

“Do you think I’m pretty?” I asked.

She turned to face me. “I do.”

“But not like Kate.” Everyone always said how pretty Kate was.

“No, not like Kate,” Marilyn said, adjusting her elbows on the slanted, overpainted sill. “You’re more beautiful than Kate.”

I felt bad, like I’d forced a compliment from her; I hadn’t meant to. “My parents don’t think that.”

She turned back to look out. “I think they’re afraid of the way you look.”

I didn’t feel frightening, the way my parents found me to be, or difficult, the way others seemed to see me. I felt nothing, really, other than a sense that inside I was very small. Maybe all that anyone perceived was their inability to inspire my trust.

Though Jack was not there, I needed him to be there, so I imagined him. I often did this, and often we would speak. I asked him if getting older means you can’t trust anyone. In the mirror, I focused until my burning eyes became his burning eyes, with the hue changing from bottle green to bright Wedgwood blue.

“You never
can
trust anyone,” he seemed to answer. “But when you get old, you finally figure it out.”

Possibly he was right. You’re old when you learn that needs are to be eclipsed by civility. You’re old when you join the sticky, stenchy morass of concealed neediness that is society. You’re old when you give up trying to change people because then they might want to change you too. When you’re young, needs are explicit, possibilities endless, formalities undiscovered, and proofs of allegiance direct. If only there were a way to keep the world new, where every day remains a wonder.

“Jack,” I said. “Remember how easy it used to be? Remember when friends used to cut themselves and share blood?”

T
he sun was a mean wall behind us, shoving up against our backs, and the tar that coated the railroad ties was sticky. A resin smell filled the air. I could feel it creeping the way molasses drips, only upward, burning the
inside of my nose. Kate didn’t like the tar to touch her shoes, so she stepped with perfect strides on the gravel between the ties. I took the rail.

When we reached Newtown Lane I hesitated, teetering on the strip of steel. “I’m just gonna run across the street and grab a cup of coffee.”

Her face screwed up into the sunlight. “We’re going to be late.”

“I’ll go fast.” I jogged into the street, dodging minor morning traffic.

Three bells on a crooked wire tinked and jangled against the store’s glass door. Bucket’s Deli was full of laborers in T-shirts, shorts, and Timberlands waiting patiently for egg sandwiches—
patiently
because the city people had gone back and there wasn’t much work for them to do. I made my way to the counter and ordered. Joe, the counter-guy, filled one of those jumbo Styrofoam cups with ice cubes and cold coffee from a plastic coffee storage container that was grossly discolored. The radio near the meat slicer played a song by Genesis that reminded me of summertime.

“All set for school today, Evie?” Joe asked. “Senior year at last.”

I shrugged. “I guess.”

“C’mon now,” he said, throwing back his head slightly to one side with a smile. When he smiled, I noticed a gap between his teeth. I’d never noticed a gap there before.

I turned away. Outside looked hot, hotter even than when I’d come in. It’s hard to start school when the weather is still like summer. Sometimes a time ends or a person dies and you have to move on, though reminders are everywhere. I paid for the coffee real slow, knocking the coins around with one finger.

Joe started ringing up the guy behind me. “Forget about it, Ev.”

“It’s okay. I’ve got it.” I funneled the change into one of his hands.

I stepped back out into the sluggish heat. It was tipping against the glass door of the deli like a chair you use for a lock. As I crossed the street and climbed the grass embankment onto the sidewalk, I pushed the damp paper off the straw. Kate extended her hand and took the paper from me, putting it into her pocketbook, and we started walking. I wondered
if straws were named after real straw, the kind animals eat. Maybe some farmer started chewing a piece and accidentally sucked through it.

I pulled at my shirt, blowing down. “It’s got to be ninety degrees out,” I said.

Kate did not reply; she just kept stepping eagerly. I thought I should feel eager too, but eagerness is impossible to simulate without seeming phony. I drew in the last mouthful of coffee. The straw probed the empty avenues between the cubes, hunting profitlessly for more liquid.

We turned onto the high school driveway. The building appeared exceptionally horizontal, lower and longer than usual, like a block of grass rising up off a flatland. The parking lot was full, though the main entrance was vacant because no one ever hangs out on school steps and sings, the way they do in movies. As soon as people arrive, they go inside, stop at their lockers, then just walk around the building until classes begin.

Jodie Palumbo and Dee Dee Barnes were smoking in an alcove at the side entrance, near the language and math wing. Jodie was hideously tanned. Her freckles looked three-dimensional, like popped boxes.

Kate paused and offered a bright hello. I edged past.

Dee Dee stretched her lips. “How ya doin’?”

Jodie flapped the tops of her fingers but said nothing since she had just inhaled. It must not have gone down right because she lurched forward and began to cough. It was the rolling, mucousy kind of cough that sounds totally contagious.

Through the double doors behind the girls the school corridor was packed with bodies. I took a breath and went in because nothing is worse than being on the verge of doing something, teetering like a jackass. It’d been a long time since I’d been around so many eyes. In schools eyes are everywhere, there are twice as many eyes as bodies, and in our school there were about a thousand bodies. High schools offer nothing compelling for all those eyes to regard, nothing other than the vista of teenaged bodies, which is sort of the entire fucking problem.

Madame Murat filled the doorway to her classroom, blocking the light from the windows at her back, forming a shadow lagoon in the hallway. She was not fat, just inexplicably large. In profile she seemed to be carrying a basket of laundry.

“Bonjour
, Mademoiselle Auerbach, Mademoiselle Cassirer.”

“Bonjour
, Madame Murat,” we recited in unison. Jack called her
Madman
Murat, which Mom said sounded like the name of a Turkish assassin.

“Je comprends que je ne vous verrai pas en classe cette année, Ca-trine. C’est vrai?”
Madame said to Kate.

“Oui, c’est vrai,”
Kate responded, and Madame nodded from top to bottom and over to the left, ushering us along. “Great,” Kate whispered. “Now she hates me.”

“Maybe,” I said. It was hard to know for sure. It could have been that Madame felt sorry for Kate’s loss, and understood that that was what had motivated Kate to drop the class. Though it was also possible that Madame felt offended. French people are funny that way.

Kate went onto her toes. “Denny’s there with Alicia Ross and Sara Eden. Want to run up?”

“No, thanks,” I said. Having to talk to people was one thing, but soliciting conversation was something else. If I acted squirmy or didn’t make eye contact, they would want to know what was wrong, and I would have to say,
Nothing
, since nothing really
was
wrong. Nothing is an easy thing to feel but a difficult thing to express.

By the time the bell was about to ring, we had made it three times around the loop of classrooms. You could tell when the bell was about to ring because suddenly everything accelerated. Personal time drew to a close, and people responded to the pressure by acting bigger. I prepared myself for the change. My shoulders drew inward. My face dipped down as though to dodge a blow. From the top of the science hall, we heard a group of girls shrieking at the other end.