3
The 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.
I will follow you, will you follow me?
All the days and nights that we know will be.
“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.
“Oh, my God!”
“That is the cutest T-shirt!”
“You look, like, soooo unbelievably skinny!”
Coco Hale spotted us, and she started waving like crazy, calling Kate over as though it was a complete surprise to see her. “Kate! Kate Cassirer!” Something flashed between Kate and me, nothing you could name, not really.
“Do you mind if I go say hi?” Kate asked politely.
“Not at all,” I replied, politely also.
She leaned forward and peered at me. “You’re not just saying that, are you?”
I filled my cheeks and expelled the air slowly, who knows why. It’s just a thing people do. “No, I’m not just saying that.”
One time Jack made me explain why I disliked Coco.
I said, “She’s, like, witchy, or something.”
He was picking at his guitar. “Be specific.” We were sitting on the farm table in the barn out back, and his head was cast down over the strings.
“Okay,” I said. “Her teeth.” She had two rows of miniature teeth, undifferentiated, same-size squares that appeared glossy even in the dark. They were like those miniature corn cobs. “They’re witchy.”
Jack considered that. “Good one,” he agreed. “Next.”
“Her eyes.” Her eyes shuddered in their sockets when she was being insincere, as if resisting affiliation with her body. “Do you know those earthquake monitors, the rolling graphs with attached pens that measure tremors?”
He looked up with part of his face. “Seismographs.”
“She has eyes like that, only they measure her lies.”
“Seismographic eyes,” he said contemplatively. “That’s great.” He pulled a felt-tip from his pocket and wrote the phrase on the sole of his blue suede Puma. Suddenly the mirror near the door fell off the wall and into the center of the room, shattering. “Holy shit!” Jack lifted one of the curved triangular shards. “She is a witch.”
As Kate was about to break away to Coco, the bell rang. Bwoop! I made a hard right down the English hall and was drawn instantly into the belly of the crowd. I could hear Kate’s voice trailing me—“Evie! Eveline!” I didn’t turn, even though the way she called me was better than the way Coco had called her. My name from Kate’s lips sounded shy, pining and bare. I felt sad about that, but also I felt a mixture of relief and release just to be alone. My body lightened, and when people said hello to me, I answered, “Hello.”
Kate and Coco had gone into the music room probably; probably they were cleaning their flutes, sitting with mingling meringue hair, and all four hands polishing buttons and spitty levers. Perhaps they were discussing me, with Coco saying through rows of tiny teeth how I seemed envious, her eyes shaking.
It was not hard to envy Coco. Her family lived on David’s Lane, one of the nicest streets in the village, in a house with a corrugated roof like in picture books of Spain. She wore Lacoste shirts and cloth-covered headbands from Mark, Fore & Strike, the golf-lady clothing store on Main Street, and she rode a kiwi-colored Motobecane bicycle to the beach after private tennis lessons. She had a collection of those Pappagallo purses with the wood handles and the button-on fabric covers. According to Kate, Coco paid forty-five dollars for a style and a blow-dry at that special salon in town next to O’Malley’s pub. Mrs. Hale drove a new Mercedes with basketballs and bags of groceries in back, and unlike my mother, she never had beer breath or wore hip-huggers with peace sign patches or hung around with merchant marines and lab technicians. Mrs. Hale did not belong to Mensa.
Once, when my mom and I saw Mrs. Hale collecting tickets at the Ladies Village Improvement Society Fair, she was wearing a straw bonnet with big paper peonies; she’d made it herself.
“Who has time for such nonsense?” my mother asked. “Does that woman ever read?”
Despite the energy crisis, Mr. Hale would take his family on long summer trips on My Romeo II, their ultra-sleek cabin cruiser, to Block Island or Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard, where Coco and her boating friends would meet prep school boys. Every September, the photos would make the rounds—Coco and Breanne Engel or Pip Harriman, honey-brown and curly blond—hugging boys in Duke University sweatshirts, beige docksiders, and puka shell necklaces. Coco never had to go on trips to Gettysburg, West Point, Old Sturbridge Village, or those World War I air shows up in Rhinebeck like I always had to with Dad and Marilyn. All the family photographs are of me in blinding sunlight, dressed in plaid shorts and ribbed white knee socks and lace-up Earth shoes leaning on some cannon or posing before acres of headstones in Civil War cemeteries. And my mother had never once taken a vacation; she did not even own a camera.
Sometimes I couldn’t help but feel meager compared to Coco, and then to confuse meagerness with envy and envy with hate. Everyone always says you shouldn’t feel hate or even say the word.
“Bullshit!” Jack once barked. “Who told you that?”
“People.” I couldn’t think of anyone at the time.
“Words are constructs, like houses. Say whatever the fuck you want. Besides,” he added lovingly, “you are incapable of true hatred.”
Jack was right. Some feelings just occur, and giving them nicer names does not make them go away. If what I termed hate could be more accurately described as an aversion to the witchy way that Coco acted, it would have changed nothing inside of me.
Envy is awful. Unlike jealousy, which comes from the threat of losing what you cherish, envy is a dark desire for things over which you have no right or claim. Once I realized that she couldn’t possibly take what I loved, and I didn’t really want a life of privilege, especially when having such a life seemed to require flaunting it to those who had nothing, I was overtaken by an enormous boredom with Coco. A soaking rain type of boredom, liberating and complete, touching down everywhere in equal amounts. From that moment I was done. I realized it was a lot like doing math. She was quantifiable. I was not.
I entered the first class of my senior year early, which meant I was one step closer to getting out, for the day and for life. Sometimes it’s best to focus on practical matters, just to get through. After Maman died that summer, life became very mechanical. I would eat dinner right after lunch and get ready for bed before night. I marked time. I would consider the task at hand until it was completed, then I would consider the next, never giving my mind a minute to scramble in the circuits of its cage. There’s something to be said for automatic living. It makes looking forward to things seem unreasonable. When you stop looking forward to things, you get used to low expectations and you realize, What’s the big deal about success anyway? If we’re all to attain everything we’ve been conditioned to desire—wealth, fame, education, prestige, security—then those things will become so prevalent that they’ll be meaningless. And it’s a populated planet. Such uniform comfort would not come without a cost. Someone somewhere would have to pay for all that success.
According to Jack, the only way to maintain dignity is to give up wishes before they don’t come true. Maybe that’s too extreme. Maybe the best you can do is to refrain from wishing for wishes that are not your own, such as for ranch houses and nice cars, for capri pants and lamb chop dinners and husbands with good haircuts. Sometimes you have no choice; you inherit your parents’ wishes. Some parents work hard to guarantee their children’s progress. They don’t want any slipping back. That’s why every now and then you meet some poor kid whose life is controlled as if by committee.
My particular future was not so vigilantly guarded. I was to start from scratch. The best thing about my family’s indifference was that I had the freedom to fail miserably.
I stepped behind the teacher’s desk to reach the blackboard, and I pulled down the map of the Soviet Union. Kate always said that when she made a lot of money she was going to buy a wall map for me, the kind with lots of sheets. I took a seat in the corner of the room, alone by the window, wondering what Kate was going to do to earn all that money.
Annie McCabe, Breanne Engel, and Darlene Nappa slipped through the door kind of all at once and assembled in an L-shaped cluster in chairs near the teacher’s desk. Annie began to whisper, and their three heads probed forward rigidly like construction cranes. I looked at the clock—two minutes to eight. And they were all so done. Annie was wearing stockings and a long straight silk skirt. Base makeup covered her from forehead to chest. A stringy ring of mocha stained the collar of her blouse.
Wow, I thought, and on such a hot day! Girls are truly game as soldiers, with the brave things they do to their bodies and the harsh conditions they are able to tolerate.
Darlene looked jaundiced, like a past-due celery stalk, concave and green with bushy stuff on top, and Breanne was beige and emaciated with a kind of polymer quality to her complexion—she looked trapped beneath her skin, like food through Tupperware. Her frosted hair was dry and frazzled at the ends and tied in such a way as to be neither up nor down. Her eyes were wide and shaking. Kate said Breanne takes Dexatrim.
——
About a month or so after the funeral, Kate and I saw those girls at Main Beach. It must have been late August because there was litter and guys with cigars. Litter and guys with cigars usually appear in the Hamptons around late August. That’s when the group-house renters come. Breanne had gotten so thin her skin appeared to have been shucked off and reglued. She reminded me of this candy my father used to get for us in Chinatown, the kind with a translucent rice wrapper that’s like paper, only you eat it, and it melts in your mouth.
“She looks like one of those Chinese candies my dad gets,” I said to Kate.
Kate tilted her head furtively into the shady spot between our shoulders, going, Sshhh! We were on our stomachs facing the water. It was late afternoon, and the beach was changing, the way beaches do in the late afternoon—young people go and older ones come, and suddenly there are dogs. A yellow Lab was making wide, dripping circles around an abandoned sand castle, and a couple in hats sat near us, facing their chairs to the west.
“She makes herself throw up,” Kate whispered.
I didn’t understand. I said, “What do you mean?”
“After she eats, she throws up.”
“How do you do that?”
“You put your finger in your mouth. And it just comes out—I guess.”
“You’re kidding me.” I hated to throw up. I avoided it at all costs.
“I wouldn’t kid about a thing like that,” she said.
Breanne really must have despised her parents in order to deprive their baby girl of sustenance. It was impossible to know for sure, but her mom probably clapped at her first steps and dressed her in eyelet rompers when she was an infant and kissed her shampooed curls. I’d been to the Engels’ house. How pathetic Breanne must have looked, leaning over the turquoise toilet in their immaculate bathroom, feet and knees sinking into the plush of the matching turquoise carpet, breathing in the gladiola aroma of those gooey obelisk air fresheners, the kind where if you look inside the shaft, you can see the gel sinking into its own neon-green hip.
“It seems kind of extreme,” I said. I didn’t think Breanne had such a bad life. I thought of poor Dorothy Becker, who’d been abused at home. Dorothy had cragged seams on her wrists from what she’d tried to do.
Kate returned to Seventeen. “You’re so selfish.”
I wasn’t sure what Kate meant by selfish. If she meant concerned excessively with my own advantage, I didn’t feel very selfish. Of course, it was possible she didn’t think I was selfish at all, but simply called me that because she couldn’t think of anything else to say. I scooped up sand, wondering how many grains were in my hands, which is a cliché thing to wonder at the beach, but stupefying nonetheless. Kate kept licking the tip of her finger, then flipping the pages of her magazine—snap, snap, snap.
I don’t know how or why, but I suddenly suspected that she had made herself throw up before too. I felt myself stand.
“Where’re you going?” she asked nervously, leaning up.
I wasn’t sure. “To the water,” I said.
I walked along the rim of the shore. Though the day had almost passed, occidental light poured across the sky, making a pink and pious vault. I faced the ocean and remembered the way Maman had once described the water to me as a woman, a mother. La mer, et la mère. Eh? The sea is there when you need her, she’d said, though she herself could not be.
I turned back to see Kate sitting with those girls. It didn’t bother me that they’d waited until I was gone to extend an invitation to her, or that she’d accepted. But I did wonder what it was that she wanted from them and what it was that they wanted from her, and whether either party stood the remotest chance of satisfaction.
Be a friend to Catherine, Maman had also said to me. And although I was superstitious about things such as last wishes, Kate was beginning to require a type of friendship that I wasn’t sure I knew how to handle.
The bell rang again—8:00 A.M. and still no teacher.
Stephen Auchard stepped cautiously past the boys who punched and swatted at one another around the doorway. He chose the desk next to mine and nodded uncomfortably. Last time he’d seen me I’d been crying, which in high school is sort of like seeing someone naked.
At Maman’s funeral he’d worn pressed khakis and a blue jacket with anchor buttons. His mother had had glasses with gold rectangular frames, and her auburn hair had been drawn into a sublime twist. She’d conferred with her son in ethereal French, leaning close, calling him Etienne. Kate’s mother had been related to Stephen’s father, and that was how the Cassirer family had found East Hampton. Outside Williams Funeral Home, Mrs. Auchard had held my shoulders and kissed both of my cheeks, kisses like accidental butterflies. Her skin had been dewy and fragrant, cold as packed talc. “Claire did love you,” she’d said to me. Deed luff.
“What’s your locker number?” Stephen asked. Our last names were letters apart, Auchard and Auerbach; our lockers had been side by side every year.
“591,” I said. “What’s yours?”
“590,” he answered.
I nodded, and he nodded again, and we watched Nico Gerardi and Billy Martinson saunter in. I wasn’t surprised to see them in an Advanced Placement class, though they were awful students. Jocks were pretty much exempt from the standards that bound the rest of us. Teachers and administrators humor them because it’s in everyone’s interests to coax them through school and get them out of the building. Since it’s unethical to turn them loose on society, they get sent to college to be kept out of the mix until their frontal lobes develop more fully. As enticement they are given sports scholarships that will later amount to nothing, not even good health.
Stephen fingered the corner of his notebook. He was going to be valedictorian. I wondered if he was annoyed by Nico and Billy and others like them, by the way they occupied the classroom, establishing through body language a right of place that their brains could not. The contrast between their physical conceit and their intellectual timidity made me think of men in small clothes. They’d been given the basics—food, shelter, girls, trouble to cause—but deep down, they were on to the game. You could catch this tiny light in their eyes, this proto-consciousness of slipping supremacy.
Nico had changed over vacation. His football jersey hung closer to his waist than to his legs, his butt was more muscular, his crotch had thickened. I could not help but notice the way the denim of his Levi’s was rounded and slightly whiter there. I knew I should despise him as Jack did, the way he and his friends flirted with female teachers and played buddy with the male teachers, the way they gave congenial grabs to girls in hallways and relied on family ties to get them out of trouble. When Nico got caught stealing from summer houses, Judge Baby released him to his parents without so much as a meaningful reprimand. The boys called him Judge Baby because of the way he talked. Every day they played Judge Baby, cracking themselves up. “I cew-tin-weey hope you’ve gotten the boyish pwanks out of your system, wittle man. You have gweat pwomise.”
Billy had never been in trouble with the police, not that anyone knew of, except he did go through a bay window at his house once when he rode his mother’s spare wheelchair down the staircase, and at several parties he’d swallowed goldfish.
Boys will be boys, that’s what people say. No one ever mentions how girls have to be something other than themselves altogether. We are expected to stifle the same feelings that boys are encouraged to express. We are to use gossip as a means of policing ourselves. This way those who do succumb to the lure of sex but are not damaged by it are damaged instead by peer malice. We are to remain united in cruelty, ignorance, and aversion. We are to starve the flesh from our bones, penalizing the body for its nature, castigating ourselves for advances from men that we are powerless to prevent. We are to make false promises, then resist the attentions solicited. Basically we are to become expert liars.
Nico and Billy were talking to Annie McCabe. Her voice was inaudible except for the random coo and peep, and the edges of her fine brown hair came forward like crepe curtains to hide her face. I wondered if she had ever masturbated. Probably not. I couldn’t imagine her manicured hands reaching to touch such a damp and pulpy place. Did she have the urge but resist? Or could the situation be precisely as it appeared—that she longed for nothing?
Nico’s simian eyes scanned for a target and rested on me. He swaggered strategically into my aisle, and Billy Martinson followed. I curled over my notebook to draw.
“Hey, Steve,” Nico said in his weedy voice, “looks like you got the hot seat.”
“Guess so,” Stephen replied.
Nico sat sideways in the chair in front of mine with his knees poking into the aisle. He put his elbow on my desk and leaned close, his breath coming in humid strokes. “Hey, baby.”
I said hi and returned to my sketch. My pen moved boldly. It swirled to wobbly heights, making me think of “Irises” or “Starry Night.” Billy settled his lanky frame into the seat in front of Stephen, the four of us carving out a strange chunk in the back of the room.
Breanne said something to Darlene, probably about me.
“What’s that, Breanne?” Billy leaned diagonally to shake her seat.
Nico said, “No whispering. Speak up or forever hold your peace.”
“That’s right,” Billy growled. “Speak up or forever hold my piece.”
Everyone laughed except Breanne, who whined, “Stop it, Billy,” in a voice that vibrated because her chair was shaking.
“St-o-o-p i-it B-il-ly,” Billy imitated, and the late bell rang. Mr. Shepard finally drifted in, coffee mug in hand. He lingered by the door, talking about golf with the AV teacher.
Nico dug deep into his pocket and removed a fistful of stuff—coins, bills, gum, and erasers, those awful ones that fit on top of pencils. He laid the erasers on the desk. Most of the other boys did the same, except for Stephen, who didn’t budge, and Marcus Payne, who was facing back from his seat in the front row, observing.
“This is gonna be great,” Nico said.
Marcus stood, addressing everyone with a series of panoramic nods. Whenever I saw him, I felt bad for the way he was treated but also inspired by his stamina. I secretly admired the gentlemanly way he always managed to face off with his oppressors.
“Now, listen up, people.” His eyelids fluttered and his top teeth gnawed at the air. His head cocked to one side, and his arms came out from his shoulders at a preacherly incline. “Watch out for my head with those things.”
“Shut up, Marcus,” Bobby Tabor said. Bobby’s parents owned the liquor store and every night at dinner the whole family got drunk on good wine. Bobby got invited to all the parties. “Pouilly-Fuissé,” he would say to his teen host, rotating a bottle lovingly in his hands to feature the label. “1974.”
“Yeah, Carcus. If you don’t wanna get hit, move,” Mike Stern warned as he emptied a snack bag full of erasers onto his desktop.
“It doesn’t matter where you sit, Payne,” Billy said. “We’re gonna hit you anyway.”
Mr. Shepard closed the door behind him.
I asked Nico what was going on.
“Everyone’s supposed to toss erasers at Shep when he makes a bad joke,” Nico said.
“You can’t do that,” I said.
“It’s tradition,” Nico stated defensively. “I didn’t invent it.”
I looked around the room. All the boys were seated properly and staring ahead; the only signs of impudence were the piles of erasers on most desks. It was tradition; of course they wouldn’t be punished. It was a preliminary test of gender loyalty, a distinct part of the male experience—next came fraternities, bachelor parties, firefighters, the police, politics, war. It wasn’t girl tradition. Girls had no traditions—anyway, none that teachers and boys would participate in willingly.
“Relax, baby.” Nico leaned into my face. “We’re just gonna have a little fun.”