4
There was a line I always liked to walk, a single discolored plank that went from the east to the west wall of the barn behind my house. I called it a barn because it was shaped like one, but actually it was just a shed, twenty by twelve, with no plumbing, no heat, and no insulation. The light inside was gauzy, like light in a tent. I went there almost every day to paint or to study.
One warm night, in the spring of my junior year, I fell asleep on the floor. When Mom couldn’t find me in the house in the morning, she checked the barn and saw me curled up in the corner. That afternoon, Kate and I found Mom’s Plymouth Scamp parked in front of the high school. The car was old but anxious to please. It leaned forward like a pollen-yellow rhombus. We approached cautiously; we’d never seen my mom at school.
“Maybe she got fired,” Kate whispered as we exited the building.
“Maybe she has cancer too,” I said.
Mom waved. “Hop in, you two! We’re going to Sears!”
We headed toward Amagansett on Pantigo Road. At Sears, Mom ordered a piece of foam from a catalog. “A mattress,” she said. “Now you can crash in the barn whenever you’re working late. It’ll be your studio.” She tore a plain blue check from her wallet. On top was her name, Irene Ruane, and our post office box number, and East Hampton, New York, 11937. The amount was forty dollars.
“I wrote it on the bottom, Laura,” she told Kiki Hauser’s mom, who worked behind the counter. Mrs. Hauser had asked for our phone number even though she knew us. My mother refused to allow the insult to dampen her spirits. As we waited for processing, she brushed my cheek with her hand. “Isn’t this exciting? You can sleep there all summer if you want.”
Afterward we stopped at A&B Snowflake to celebrate with soft-serve ice cream, then we dropped Kate at her house on Mill Hill Lane. Maman was still alive then, though very sick. When we pulled away, we waved to Kate and I felt sad. It’s sad to leave a friend, especially at four-fifteen in the afternoon, especially when her mother is dying but yours is not—but, then again, everything is sad at four-fifteen in the afternoon.
In the barn I always walked that same line—pacing along the plank to the overpainted brown door in back that opened onto no place in particular, just a stall with a potting bench. When I reached the wooden ladder to the sleeping loft, I turned, keeping every inch of my body centered and upright. In some parts of the world, steadiness is a requirement. In some places, children carry baskets on their heads. In America, we don’t need balance, except maybe in school athletics.
Pip Harriman was perfectly balanced when she climbed the ropes for the presidential physical fitness exam in gym that morning. It wasn’t the actual presidential physical fitness test but a simulated version to determine our “health entry points,” from which we were expected to improve by the year’s end.
Pip’s hands went fast, fist over fist, with her legs crossed like wishful fingers, pinching to maintain counterbalance. Even in the gymnasium’s fluorescent light, her hair gleamed like a length of satin ribbon.
Coach Slater took advantage of Pip’s sterling example by making a speech. “Rope climbing is noncompetitive, okay ladies?” Coach shouted didactically in a stirring bit of showmanship. Her voice echoed from the freshly polyurethaned floors to the soaring metal rafters. “A climb is a personal challenge, okay? It’s an opportunity for you to top your own best performance.”
It seemed pretty competitive nonetheless, with Pip effortlessly mounting the one available rope while the rest of us sat slumped and cross-legged, averting our eyes and praying like mad for time to run out before Coach got around to calling our names. If they really wanted it to be noncompetitive, they should have divided us into groups, then added up the total number of inches climbed by each team. Then at least we’d all root for one another to go higher—every single inch gained by one would make a difference for all. I wasn’t sure what it had to do with fitness anyway, since the entire gym class was spent sitting and waiting. And obviously the ropes weren’t important enough to practice on a regular basis, since they only got dropped from the ceiling for tests. It’s not exactly a usable life skill, except maybe in the circus or the army.
“Can you imagine?” I whispered to Kate. “Pip under the Big Top?”
Kate shushed me. She didn’t want me to draw Coach’s attention to us. I would tell her later, at dinner, and we would laugh. My mother liked to laugh about Pip.
Once we were all standing in Kate’s parents’ driveway—it was probably freshman year.
“What is it with these children’s names?” Mom asked. “Claire, have you heard them?”
“Oui,” Maman replied in her turbid accent, “Pip.” Peep.
“What are the others?” Mom asked.
Kate made a list. “Coco and Kiki, Bobum, Winn.”
“Skip,” I added, “Colt, Duff, Leaf. Fick.”
“Fick!” my mother said, laughing so much she needed her asthma inhaler.
Maman didn’t think it was funny. “It is very sad, Irene,” she scolded, “this American custom of calling a child by the name of a dog.”
Pip hopped off the rope, triumphant and breathless, and Coach made a check mark on the fitness report form. Coach called, “Palmer, Ellie!”
The worst thing about the ropes was the panic you felt when you stood up, knowing everyone was staring. Though I sympathized with whomever was up there, I would stare too, since you were wise to feign interest. Ellie rose reluctantly, yanked her T-shirt down around her hips, went dutifully to the swinging rope, tilted her head as if wondering how to begin, then looked pathetically to Coach for some kind of break. But coaches never give breaks. They take their jobs seriously—you can tell by the way they wedge their clipboards into their bulging bellies, blow silver whistles up close and indoors, and wear neat-looking Adidas sweat suits, though they never break a sweat.
Coach Slater had to be forced to give Alice Lee a break. Before class started, Alice had handed Coach a doctor’s note saying to excuse her from the exam because it was that time of the month. Coach was especially irritated when Alice asked if she could stay there in the locker room or go to the nurse’s office for privacy because we were going to be sharing the gym with the boys.
“Are you enrolled in this class?” Coach shouted.
“What do you mean?” Alice asked suspiciously.
Coach shook her head like Alice was dumb. “I mean, are you enrolled in this class?”
“I guess.” Alice’s head sank meekly, but her eyes lit up with hatred.
“Then you’re my responsibility. You go where the class goes.”
Coach turned from Alice and blasted her whistle harshly, then pointed to the gymnasium and commanded the rest of us to “Get out there and do three laps.” The boys had already started, so we ran in place in the corner until they reached the far side of the room, then we moved ahead in a big group. Every time the boys passed Alice, who was sitting on the floor under the water fountains, hugging her knees to her chest, they would say mean things. The coaches did nothing to stop them—they seemed to be using Alice as an example. They seemed to say that the gym is a realm unburdened by sloughing wombs and engorged breasts. It was confusing, frankly, the way everyone stared at our bodies even as they tried to erase the ideas of our bodies from our minds. We were supposed to get over ourselves, but no one was supposed to get over us. The female body was our worst handicap and our best advantage—the surest means to success, the surest course to failure.
“It’s her own fault,” Jodie Palumbo exhaled.
“God, it’s so gross.” Annie McCabe shuddered.
Pip said something, which I couldn’t hear, and they laughed. They didn’t like Alice, though they didn’t know her. They were sorting, or classifying. It’s easy—anyone dressed funny is the enemy, especially if they reject your supremacy or do not acknowledge school as entertainment. If the enemy tries to look like you and act like you, only in more affordable clothes, that person is still the enemy, only of a more contemptible, less terrifying variety—the sort you can be seen with if absolutely necessary, for instance if you are soliciting float-making help for homecoming or votes for yourself in the class election.
I passed the girls, though it brought me to the rear of the boys. Actually, the rear of the boys was a nicer class of people than the front of the girls, which is a carryover fact for life. I mixed in with Roy Field, who rebuilt radios and ate seven bowls of Trix a day; Tommy Gardner, who had impetigo and a heart murmur; and Daryl Sackler, who was six-foot-four but refused to play basketball even though they offered to let him start, because he had a job mowing lawns after school. Daryl Sackler buries cats and mows their heads off, that’s what everybody said.
“Actually,” Jack said of Daryl, “I like him. Most freaks like that would kill for f*cking basketball hero status. But he chooses to remain a loser. Either he’s a total retard or a complete man of honor. Besides, you know how I feel about cats.”
I ran hard, really hard. At the end I sprinted to finish and bent to catch my breath. Others finished after me, forming a docile line at the girls’ water fountain. Alice shifted miserably, as though protecting herself from us, like we might kick her or spit, but she didn’t shift too far, since her predicament was legitimate; in fact, her predicament was our predicament. I felt I was with her, though my body stood apart and my voice was silent. In Jules and Jim, Jim blows Catherine a kiss when she jumps into the Seine River after Jules insults women, and Jim says, I admired her. I was swimming with her in my mind.
I twisted the knob and drank the water, which was icy cold by the time I got to the front of the line; I had this trick of letting everyone cut in front of me. I wiped my mouth on my shoulder and looked back to Alice. I didn’t know what she’d endured beyond the school walls, but her look was knowing. If my eyes met her eyes, I wondered what message mine should convey. Not pity, since I am a woman too, and therefore as pitiful as Alice. I considered sitting next to her, but then I would have gotten detention. It’s weird how teachers belong to a union and they teach about revolutions and labor strikes, but they discourage solidarity among students.
Kate and I saw her doctor’s note halfway unfolded on Coach’s desk when we were sent to return the relay cones to the equipment room behind the office. We could only make out parts. Please excuse Alice Lee from physical activity due to severe menstrual—the second paragraph fell into a crease. Something, something—requiring medication.
In the hallway Kate said, “How awful.”
By that she meant Alice. Kate thought Alice was a poor thing. I thought the awful part was the note. It was written by an expert, by someone who believed what he or she was writing; then it was dispatched into the world, only to be casually disregarded by some other expert. It’s hard to believe in anything anyone says when experts are constantly contradicting each other. Pip was as sure in gym as I was in art, but Alice was also sure about something, and so was Coach, and Alice’s doctor. It’s too bad that certain things matter so much when you are the one they matter to, but in the grand scheme, no one else cares, not really. I wondered who else besides Coach thought rope climbing mattered to girls but periods didn’t.
The barn had become dark. Though I could see very little, I could hear many things: the echo of my footsteps in the room I occupied, the sound of night beyond those walls, my mother’s laughter, ascending the hill from the house, traveling on the platform of a breeze. I could almost smell the Chablis on her breath and the mint from the package of gum in her coat pocket—the smells were like fairies escaping. I could almost see her reenact the drama of her day for her friends—bodies wedged into couches and chairs, denim legs jutting across tabletops, drowsy hands passing a joint, passing a bottle, wrists exposed, voices going, “So what happened next, Rene?” Reen, short for Irene.
Her friends were always there. If ever it looked like they might leave, they wouldn’t. Someone might stand and stretch but then just use the toilet, or tuck in a loose shirt and ask if anyone felt like making a run for more beer. If I ever passed through, they would confer with me congenially, dipping close to my eyes with cigarettes, natted hair, and home-sewn clothes stinking of patchouli and musk.
If my upbringing made me sensitive to affectations of tolerance and to the irony of that particular hypocrisy, I could hardly be blamed. All I ever heard as a child was how everything is cool and everyone should be cool, and yet they were so very quick to judge new shoes or a clean car or to cogitate over the dementia behind matching furniture or monogrammed stationery. I couldn’t help but have developed an aversion to the epoxied stench of incense and the smut of overfilled ashtrays and the sticky liquor rings on tables that had to be cleaned on Sunday mornings. Hiding in my room at bedtime as a little girl, I would drink my dinner of chocolate milk and bury myself beneath hundreds of stuffed animals tied together in twos with rescued ribbon and bits of yarn, one neck fastened to another or belly to belly, buddied up in case of fire, in case they would have to be tossed from the window. I would rub my feet together to distract myself from the noise of the party, the singing, the laughter, the music—Joplin, Dylan, Hendrix.
“I love you,” she would say. My mother, popping her head in.
I was sitting on the barn floor, drawing rooftops. There were all these great rooftops by my dad’s place in Little Italy. My father was good about taking me up to the roof of his building whenever I wanted. He always waited while I drew, either reading or just looking around. It wasn’t necessary for him to wait, but between him and his business partner, Tony Abbruscato, they had about a thousand rooftop horror stories.
Kneeling before my paper, I looked deep into the space Jack might have occupied, and imagining him, I smiled. I thought of him smiling also, a fair angel’s smile, his features transmitting a regard so strong as to defy the inconvenience of his factual absence. Had he been there actually, he would have persuaded me to join the party in the house. Jack hated to miss a party. Though I missed him, I was thankful to be beyond the influence of his flesh, the lips that could nudge me with an inflexible kiss through the door of my own home.
“Mom’s back, you know.” Not Jack, but Kate. She was leaning in the doorway, her head poking through. “Feel like coming up front?”
Yes, my mother, I knew. The laughter and the mint. The sweet wine and music. I wasn’t sure what I felt like, being alone or being with people. Neither seemed good. I wondered what was expected of me; if I had known what was expected, I might have done it. I tried to think, but at the same time there was something I needed to forget, something of which an answer to her question might have reminded me.
Kate waited for an answer, and when none came, she left. Her feet clocked down the wood steps outside. In a few seconds the screen door in the back of the house squeaked open and slapped shut. Then nothing. Not silence so much as the absence of sounds affiliated with me. There was the loose, careless clank of silverware, and cabinet doors smacking, and the thud of the plumbing every time the kitchen faucet was shut off. There was the distant muffle of voices—Kate rejoining the party, Mom asking if I was coming. Maybe not. Maybe she did not ask about me at all.