Anthropology of an American Girl (12 page)

“Twenty-twenty,” he would conclude, peering at me over the top of his own special glasses, which looked sort of like a View-Master. “Why, then, do you squint?”

“I don’t know,” I’d say. “To see better.”

“But there’s no physiological reason for you to have to see better!”

I always felt sorry for him, as sorry as I felt for myself, the two of us stranded in that medieval torture den without hope of resolution. I supposed it was counterintuitive to regard squinting as a way to see better, especially when I had no apparent
need
to see better. But in fact, I did have that need, whether he could see it—that is,
diagnose it
—or not. Maybe he should have asked a better question. Maybe I should have used another word.
Differently
. I needed to see differently.

“Well, that’s it for booster sales,” Marty was saying. Boosters are those cryptic mini-sentences in the backs of yearbooks—
P.G. dontcha love 2Ramy!!
or
Berry Boy gotta get some tidy shirt?
Marty ran his highlighter across the third line down of a completely filled-up legal pad. “Let’s move on to
folio flow.”

I scanned the bluish and inert faces of the yearbook staff. I was thinking that there was not one guy I would have slept with if we were trapped. When you’re bored you can pretend you’re trapped, like hostages. You ask yourself where would everyone go to the bathroom and
who would hold hands in the dark? Who would you have sex with? And who would be the real heroes? Real heroes are the ones you don’t expect. That’s the lesson of
Superman
and
Underdog
, the lesson of being patient and maybe someday learning the truth. That’s also the lesson of soap operas. In soap operas a bad person will turn good, or a good one will turn bad, or actors will switch roles altogether, becoming neighbors or relatives of themselves. Jack and Dan loved to deride soap operas, with their fake hospital sets, yet they were somehow unfazed by the flimsy scenery of
Star Trek
. And they could argue for hours about whether Juggernaut first appeared in
X-Men 12
or
X-Men 13
.

The football field was warmed by the simmering light of the setting sun. A whistle blew, and the players broke apart, creating a long wall of staggered bodies. I would have liked to have been out there with my camera, capturing them as they cocked their heads and listened intently while Coach Peters paced in front of them. Athletes make the perfect subjects. They ignore the camera; they truly believe they are stars.

Adults are always pushing jocks to become stars. For coaches, the incentive is job security. For parents, it’s the possibility of financial assistance. Colleges need to recruit away from other colleges and to sell stuff. Professional clubs need to ensure the ongoing chain of new talent and also to sell stuff, only slightly bigger stuff, like television rights.

But few high school players meet with the success they dream of. Most just get teased out of a valid education. When Mrs. Oliphant, the calculus teacher, complains that the Chinese are beating us in science and math, you have to wonder whether average kids in China spend three or four hours a day on sports. No one mentions how a choice
for
sports is a choice
away
from everything else. And unlike with the Marching Band or the Spanish Language Club, nonparticipants are expected to support the teams or else be accused of lacking
school spirit
, of being
un-American
. Who knows how it happened, but somewhere along the way from Puritan times to modern ones, school spirit and sports spirit and American spirit got totally mixed up. No one even dares question the vapid sports rhetoric you’re forced to endure.
It’s not whether you win or lose, just don’t lose!
Sportsmanship and teamwork are hailed to taxpayers as critical life skills; yet, these lessons frequently escape the players, many of whom extract
from their involvement little pertaining to honor or gracious conduct.

My feet bounced against the radiator; my palms drummed my thighs. If it didn’t feel so good to be them, those boys might like to think about things. Maybe immunity lifts a weight; but maybe heaviness returns.

In junior year our school was put on an “austerity” budget by the board of education, and team sports were cut. Student energies were diverted to politics and mutual interest societies—theater clubs, chess meets, charity leagues, beach clean-up patrols, and interfaith discussion groups, all of which were funded by flea markets, car washes, and bake sales. We were constantly at school working for causes—there was nothing better to do. People who had never previously spoken were thrust together because needs were great and entry policies liberal. Everyone joked that the school motto changed from
“We are the Champions!”
to
“Beggars can’t be choosers!”

That spring, we entered a statewide competition sponsored by Carefree sugarless gum in which the winning school was the one whose students had written the gum’s brand name on the most index cards. All four grades vied against one another, for no particular reason other than boredom and surplus vitality. We held writing vigils. The self-imposed rivalry allowed us to take the state by a titanic margin. As a prize, the rock group Hall and Oates gave a concert in the auditorium. Jack and his friends, irate over the pop music infiltration, took to the aisles during “Rich Girl” and protested by hopping up and down like pistons or gears, screaming,
“Sid Vicious! Sid Vicious!”

Surprising new heroes emerged that year. Cathy Benjamin, who’d made it through only three grades in four and a half years, organized the biggest moneymaker, a twenty-four-hour dance marathon, and Ginny Warwick, who once cried inconsolably during an argument with the biology teacher about creationism, won best costume design in the class play competition. And Denny got
everyone
to contribute to his old-fashioned Christmas for the holiday hall decorating contest. The home economics department sewed antique-style costumes for baby dolls he borrowed from cheerleaders; the shop department rigged Marcus Payne’s
miniature mechanical railway to cut through the language lab; the mammoth Parson twins found and chopped down the perfect “pastoral” tree; the typing students created scrolled gift lists; and the art department pieced it all together.

The night before the start of the contest, twenty-three kids gathered at my house, people like Pip Harriman and Kiki Hauser and Daryl Sackler and Sara Eden, people who’d never been there before, all of us wrapping empty boxes, painting ornaments, making soap-flake snow. Alicia Ross came over with platters of cookies made by her housekeeper, Consuela, and Powell ordered six pizzas with extra cheese. Coco Hale and I shared scissors.

“Your snow country landscape collage is nice,” she said to me.

I said, “I like your felt sleigh.”

Jack and Dan came late, wearing gold paper crowns, and I was happy, the happiest I could remember being. Jack had just dropped out of boarding school in Kent, and his parents had agreed to let him finish junior year in East Hampton. He made his way over the hunched bodies, saying, “It’s like a fucking sweatshop in here!”

He moved piles of fabric and Styrofoam globes from the stereo. As he leaned to insert the audiocassette he and Dan had produced for the contest, his key chain swung from his belt loop. It had a leather strap and a seamed bell, the type you find on cat collars and toddler shoes.

“Hey Evie,” Dan said as he leaned against the banister and chewed on a slice of pizza. He had a matching set of bells tied to his wrist. “What would you think of us changing the name of the band to the Jesters?”

When the tape began, everyone froze. First came Dan playing the piano solo from Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons—Winter;
next was Jack on acoustic guitar, singing “Let It Snow,” morosely, sounding like a young Leonard Cohen. If you had seen the faces, you would never forget them—normal faces of normal kids, stripped of rank and status. For one brief moment, I loved them. Later when I told that to Jack, he said he was glad the moment had been brief. Last on the tape was Kate and Coco doing a rendition of “Amazing Grace” on their flutes. The twin whistles wavered bashfully.

Everyone clapped, and some of us cried, and my mother cheered, “Well, all right!”

“Man,” Rocky Santiago said, returning to sparkles and glue, “that tape is the
clincher.”

One week later at the holiday assembly, immediately after the choral concert, in the fevered final moments before the start of Christmas vacation, Principal Laughlin ventured to the microphone, awards in hand. After commending the entire student body for its unprecedented display of “esprit” despite the harsh reality of the austerity year, and after thanking Mrs. Quivers and her janitorial staff in advance for the task of dismantling the displays, he explained that the day’s winners would receive 250 Spirit Points to add to their Spirit Point account. Spirit Points would one day be transferred into dollars—one day, when there was money. So far the junior class, our class, held the distant lead—1,750 points as compared to 175 for the sophomores, 50 for the freshmen, and none for the seniors.

Laughlin waited for complete silence, then he cleared his throat. “And now, according to a unanimous decision by our distinguished panel of judges composed of administrators, faculty, parents, and local business leaders,
the junior class has won!
Again!”

We flew out of our seats and rushed the aisles, jumping and hugging and screaming so loudly that no one heard the dismissal bell. All the former sports stars joined in too. Mike Stern and L. B. Strickland and Peter Palumbo raised Denny onto their shoulders and carried him around in wild, tipping circles.

But in May of the second term, a budget was approved for the following year. Sports programs were to be restored; austerity was over. Ironically, cuts for the humanities persisted—the board’s excuse was that the arts had done
perfectly well without financial support
. To some, the end of austerity meant the potential recovery of former glories and an opportunity to enhance college applications. To others, it meant a return to chronic disappointment and systemic inequity—no more oneness, no more euphoria, no more spirit.

Marty was finishing his yearbook address. Hands clapped flatly, lightly, like damp fins. Marty was okay. Maybe he wouldn’t win baseball trophies or volunteer for the Air Force or anything, but he seemed very mannishly
determined about his ambivalence, and that counted for something. It takes courage to remain on the periphery, and you had to admire Marty for that, even if you couldn’t imagine having sex with him.

I’d joined the yearbook by accident in freshman year. I’d intended to go to a newspaper meeting, but I got lost. By the time I figured out I was in the wrong place, I’d been put in charge of Faculty Fun Facts. I was soon transferred into the photo department. At first I felt embarrassed, since everyone said the Yearbook Club was for losers, but when June arrived and a fragrant wind swept through the open school doors, and kids sat on the floors clutching one another’s books, flipping through the pages to see what had been written, I felt okay.

People would rap my arm. “Evie, I can’t believe you put that picture of me in there.”

When asked for my signature, I always chose the yearbook staff page because there was an unwritten rule that the place you selected had to have meaning, either factual or invented. You could sign the picture of someone you had a crush on, or you could sign near Mr. Schwab if you hated trigonometry. Every year Jack signed Troy’s book on the page with Miss Herbst, because once in freshman year Troy got food poisoning and busted out of typing class with a massive diarrhea attack.

Though I’d agreed to join the yearbook, I had not agreed to befriend the staff, yet that’s what ended up happening. Suddenly I belonged to a group, which was weird. You couldn’t help getting to know people when you worked with them under deadline, when you were stuck together all winter, pasting up copy and developing photos, listening to “Muskrat Love” and “Copacabana,” going
, Do you know how much we could be getting paid for this shit?
I would become cognizant of a staffer’s acne or excessive weight or hair oil or hand-me-downs only when I happened to be talking to them in the hallway and “popular” kids would pass and stare. This put me in a difficult predicament, because I was fourteen at the time. When you’re fourteen, pretty much everything puts you in a difficult predicament.

A worldview is a busy view, engrossed and industrious. To the world you are no more than you appear to be at the moment of appearance, which is frequently unjust. But in fact there are infinite subtleties to
identity—that is to say, there is the way that you are, which is the sum of the way you are
becoming
and the way you
have been
, and which does not take into account the way you secretly
wish to be
. Nargis Lata, my mother’s friend, calls herself a psychic, though she earns her living teaching accounting to college students. Is she an
accountant
because that’s how she spends her days, or a mystic because that’s what she feels inside?

“You have tremendous earning potential,” Nargis once told me, her eyes fluttering in a type of trance.

Perhaps it’s too easy and unofficial to go around stating what you are and expecting people to embrace strictly personal claims. However, it seems equally unfair to be categorized as something simply because you do it every day—ask any “housewife.” I like to think that whenever Nargis figures percentages or adds columns, she applies telepathic powers to divine the outcome of the calculations.

“I’m pleased to announce that Eveline will be my partner for the second year in a row as the book’s photo editor,” Marty said, and everyone clapped again. He gestured for me to join him. I moved to the front of the room, conscious of the fact that people were staring. I sat on the edge of his desk, making myself smaller. The body is supposed to be irrelevant, but frankly, it hardly ever is. “Those of you who are interested in photography can speak to Evie directly,” he said. “Just for the record, though austerity year is over, we have no intention of exhausting the entire film allotment on sports. Under Evie’s direction, last year’s ‘austerity budget’ book was the most pictorially inclusive in school history, and also the most profitable. Sales were up by more than a third.” He looked up to me. “Anything you’d like to add?”