Anthropology of an American Girl (32 page)

How mysterious to see him, mysterious and gothic—with the wind and the water, the bluff and the bagpipes. The space between us was precarious, like a ropeway between two landforms. Sixteen days had passed since I’d seen him last, since I’d begun to avoid him. And yet, by his eyes I could see that nothing had changed.

There was a car behind him, cherry-red; the paint looked new. A guy appeared from the periphery, wiry with a handsome haggard face. He looked like maybe he was from Brooklyn originally. He wore a green baseball shirt that read Katie O’T—O’Toole’s, maybe. The last letters fell beneath his unzipped sweatshirt. He placed a bottle of Beck’s in Rourke’s left hand.

“Better watch out,” he warned me. “Your boyfriend’s gettin’ nervous.”

I thought he might have meant Ray. I wasn’t sure. I said, “My name’s Eveline.”

He leaned back onto the hood of the car. “Yeah, I know who you are,” he said. His accent was concentrated and compressed, and somehow familiar to me; I liked him instantly. He took a pull off his beer and minimized his eyes. He extended the bottle in my direction. I stepped forward, taking a mouthful and handing the bottle back.

“This is Rob,” Rourke said unceremoniously, as though stating the obvious, the way a wildlife guide might say,
This is a lion
. He kicked at the sandy ground. “Cirillo.”

“Hi,” I said. “Where are you from? Brooklyn?”

“Brooklyn,”
he said with a grimace. “Jersey.” He flipped his chewing gum between his teeth. “I came out to see Harrison. He lives across the street.” Rob turned to Rourke. “She doesn’t know that?”

“Guess not,” Rourke said.

“Oh,” Rob said, “and I figured you were a smart girl.”

“Guess you figured wrong,” I said.

Rourke moved to the passenger side of the car, and he paused chillingly before stepping in. The door slammed shut.

“Guess I did,” Rob said, with a pause. “Figure wrong.”

Rourke’s anger was new to me. It was not slow and corrosive like Jack’s, but fast and volatile. I didn’t know Rob well, but it was clear he understood Rourke’s state of mind. I looked to him for an explanation, and he looked to me, withholding one. I was glad Rourke had him as a friend. I would’ve given anything for a friend like that.

Rob slipped from the hood, popping the latch of the driver’s door. On the red fender was the chrome head of a running cougar. Rob rolled down his window before getting in, and he looked at me. “See you,” he proposed with a cautious wink.

“See you,” I said, walking off before they pulled out. It was nice of Rob to let me go first.

By the time we got to the Tattler, I’d lost the spirit of the day. “I’m sorry,” I told Ray. “I think I’d better go home.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Ray hollered over the noise of the bar. “I’m glad you came.”

“Can you give me a ride to the train?”

“I’ll drive you home,” he insisted. “I’m totally sober.”

“It’s okay. The train goes right to my house.”

In order to make the train, I had to say goodbye quickly. Everyone was disappointed to see me go, though no one seemed surprised. I wondered if I seemed like the type who would just head out.

“Don’t be a stranger to Montauk,” Mike said as I kissed his cheek.

Will patted my shoulder. “Take it easy there, Evie.”

“Don’t worry, Will,” Ray said, “she’ll take it easy
everywhere.”

Jane gave me a hug and whispered, “I saw you with your beau.”

“Oh,” I said, “not the skinny guy.”

“I know, I’m not blind,” she snapped amiably. “Remember—find out where he lives.”

The Montauk train station is like a toy train depot. Alongside the station house and platform, there is a fanning spray of track lines where overflow cars get emptied, repaired, or cleaned. It was nearly dark. I wondered if Montauk got dark first in all of America because it’s so far east.

“Almost,” Ray said, checking his watch. “The New England coastline is farther east than we are. The most eastern spot is in Maine.”

“Still,” I said, “coming almost first in nightfall. And in dawn.”

“That’s right,” he said. “You’ll have to come back sometime when it’s less chaotic.”

By chaotic, I knew Ray was referring to Rourke, not to the parade. Though they hadn’t spoken, it would have been impossible for him not
to have noticed Rourke appearing out of no place. If he had been a drawing, he would have been a scribbled hive or an inky twister approaching at a treacherous incline from the corner of an otherwise unpopulated page.

The doors of the waiting train opened all down the line. A uniformed man emerged and toddled unsteadily toward us. He looked like Oz—not the Magnificent Oz at the end of the movie, but the roadside fortune-teller at the beginning.

“And what can I do for you young revelers?”

Ray put his hand on my shoulder. “How much for one passenger, to East Hampton?”

The little man peered at me. “Well, now, that depends on whether or not you’re Irish.”

Ray said, “Everyone’s Irish on St. Patrick’s Day!”

The conductor mounted a set of steps to the last car. “You’ve a fine head, son. No charge!” He scanned the empty platform and cried out, “All aboard!” Silence filled the wake. “Looks like you’re the only passenger,” the man said. “Either you’re a rebel or you know something no one else does.”

“A rebel,” Ray said admiringly.

The trainman told Ray to check again. “This one has a secret.”

Ray gave me a kiss. “See you tomorrow in calculus,” he said.

“Okay,” I said, climbing up. “Bye.”

The train rocked back, readying itself, then it jolted westward. It was strange that I’d never said goodbye to Rourke, and yet, despite the odds against seeing him again, there was always another time. It was risky, like gambling. One day I would miscalculate, and there would be no next time. I looked through the scraped window at America’s nearly first night sky, thinking,
Once, Jane boarded a plane bound for the States
.

Cars were parked askew all down my street, like porcupine needles, and from the head of the driveway, I could hear strains of “Danny Boy.” Through the front window there was a sea of heads lit by candlelight, filtered by the gauze of smoke. I slipped past into the kitchen.

Lowie and her boyfriend, David Hill, were at the table, and Mom was
getting a refill from a pitcher of beer for Lewis, her disabled friend. Lewis referred to himself as a crippled dwarf or a twisted midget. “Anything but a
small man,”
he’d say. “Small is relative.”

When they saw me, they all shouted,
“Evie!”

Lowie was first to kiss me. “Kate just called.” Kate was in Montreal; her brother’s baby had arrived—a boy named Jean-Claude. For months the plan was that I would fly up with her, but when the time came, I couldn’t leave. I don’t know, just, Rourke, the nearness of him. “I didn’t realize the baby was a C-section,” Lowie said. “Isn’t that a shame?”

“You can’t deliver every baby yourself, Low,” Mom said.

“It was just seven pounds, Irene. It’s abuse of women by the medical establishment.”

“And the insurance providers,” Lewis added as he climbed up the chair onto the seat.

“Let me get you the phone book, Lewis,” Mom suggested.

“The chair’s fine, Irene. Thank you.”

There was food on the counter, edible food. “Let me fix something for you, Eveline,” David said. He was a cook at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor. Occasionally, on a night off, he and Lowie would stop by with the sort of food I never saw, not even on holidays—roasted lamb with rosemary sauce and Yukon gold potatoes au gratin and brussels sprouts sautéed in fresh ginger. “I’d cook for you here, Evie,” he would say, as we’d unload pans and trays from his car, “but your mother’s got no knives, no pots, no silverware, and no ingredients. The few plates she has that aren’t chipped are covered in cigarette ash, and half the time she’s surrounded by a starving multitude. I’m not a rich man!”

David handed me a paper plate, and I sat. Lowie asked how the parade was.

“Montauk was okay,” I said. “I went on a motorcycle ride.”

“Who with?” my mother wanted to know.

“A girl I met. Jane.”

“Jane
what?
What was her last name?”

I shrugged. “I didn’t ask.”

“That wasn’t smart,” Lewis said sternly. “What if you got into an accident?”

Lowie said, “Who would’ve given the hospital your blood type?”

“
I
don’t even know her blood type,” my mother admitted.

“How can you not know her blood type?” Lowie reprimanded. “You’re her
mother.”

In the sanctity of my room, I lay in bed, and the fluid in my horizontal body compressed. I felt half-full, like the tide in me was lowering. I found a sheet of good paper and I drew a tornado. The hard part of drawing a tornado is the frenzy of contradictory motion—lightness and leadenness, a thing there and not there, heaving and still, cruel and oscillating.

There was music coming from the living room—slow clapping, a harmonica, a guitar. I opened my door. Through the crowd, I saw my mother on the Eskimo dogsled chair she’d gotten at the dump. She was low to the ground, elbows on knees, harmonica in her hands. Jack was next to her on the enamel blue hearth, playing guitar. The room was silent except for her humming and the squeak of Jack’s fingers moving along the strings. He began to sing “Jesus Met the Woman at the Well,” which, according to Jack, had been recorded by Canadian folksingers Ian and Sylvia, and also by Peter, Paul and Mary.

Soon Mom joined in—

At the end came applause, and my mother hugged Jack, and he smiled. He loved her, everyone did, and she loved him with a special love she reserved for things so flawed. Jack especially admired the way she played harmonica. “The only thing my mother can play,” he’d say, “is bridge.” Right before his Outward Bound trip that summer, my mother loaned him her best harmonica, the kind with a button on the side so you can change keys.

Jack revolved it reverently in his hands. “I can’t take this, Rene.”

“Sure you can,” she said. “I insist.”

Jack thanked her and inquired as to whether she knew that Ben Franklin had invented an instrument called an
armonica
, an upright glass harmonica. Jack adored Ben Franklin.

“Yes, Jack,” my mother said, “Franklin was a wizard.”

Jack climbed in bed next to me, both of us facing the wall. He reached back to take my hand and place it over his waist. I was happy he was back from Boston. I’d missed him. Just the uncomplicated way things could be.

“I want to take off with you,” he suggested. “I want to go where they’ll never find us. Italy, maybe. We’ll hang out in olive groves and drink Chianti.”

It would not be good with Jack in Italy. I said, “How about someplace north?”

He lifted his head. “North? Where?”

“Someplace with ghosts. Someplace white and cold. Norway.”

“Norway has no ghosts,” he said dejectedly, going back down.

“Yes, it does. They’re silvery and tall. They have capes with shredded edges like icicles.”

We stayed that way for hours, drawing off love and affection from one to the other, my face nuzzling into his baby fine hair, his back pressing into my chest. If I am left with the regret of having been so blinded by the new fierceness of life in me that I neglected to see him—substantially lighter, wasted and debased following a weekend with his father at a college, I am grateful that I have in my heart that solitary piece of nearness, the warmth of his body, his clean, firm hands holding mine, calming me, comforting me, passing off his remaining shreds of courage. Passing off generously, like he knew what lay ahead for me. I moved on in my mind that night; I received the imprint of his release.

D
ebris from Sunday night was still all over the house when I got back from school—leprechaun hats and empty whiskey bottles, and on the kitchen counter the remainder of David’s ham was covered in flies. I didn’t think flies came in the cold. I thought they were warmish bugs. One by one I killed them, then I cleaned the kitchen, as quietly as possible. Typically I longed for noise to drown out my thoughts, but for once I wanted quiet. I was trying to
listen
. The unusual thing about quiet is that when you seek it, it’s difficult to attain. With each next sound extinguished, another rises up, finer and more entrapping, until you arrive right back in the infinite attitude of your own riotous mind.

I turned down the lights and slipped into the living room, where I swept the cold hearth, taking up the silent ash that had once been wood, but before that trees, and before that other things, living things, moss and leaves and hares. My eyes stared into the soot, the way eyes sometimes do, numb when you are nothing to no one. The room was so silent I could hear the falling snow.

After cleaning, I showered—slowly, mindfully, and with gratitude. When I turned the knobs to stop the sound of the water, the sound stopped, and I remember feeling grateful for the simplicity of that enterprise.

There was sound from downstairs, though no one was around but me—not Kate, not my mother, not Powell or Jack. I stepped out of the tub and moved to the top of the landing, where I could hear the throaty crack of a new fire. I leaned against the door and grabbed my jeans, wrenching them up around my wet hips. I pulled on a T-shirt and started down the stairs. As I walked, I went slow, then slower, because, just because. It was as if I’d never felt the plush of the carpet, the pocked plaster walls, the wormy surface of the banister.

Rourke was at the hearth, his hand against the mantel, his head hanging. He seemed quiet also. The fire jumped irritably, carping and stuttering before hurling itself into an empire of nothingness—if ever you have dreamt of flying at night, that is what you have dreamt. When he turned his eyes assessed me, as if by accident, as if he had not expected me, though of course he had. I shoved my shirt into my jeans and zipped them. He stepped right. I went left, taking his spot at the hearth. I shook the water from my hair. I noticed that his mouth appeared swollen, as if stung by bees. I longed to kiss it, to be kissed by it.